Oops I meant to say "...core principles governing its foreign relationships/entanglements." Bottom line, I'm looking for the constitutions of stable democracies to define their relationships with the world, making their actions moral, predictable and somewhat certain. A democracy's "hurdle" authority to engage in military adventures or destabilize sovereign powers should come from the clear violation of core values.
Good point and food for thought. Thanks. Most democracies have a constitution addressing internal relationships and do NOT have a stable, difficult-to-change document addressing a few core principles. I've always thought of that was a weakness and a source of our foreign policy confusion and inconsistencies. The existing moral confusion leads to easy manipulation by small but powerful interests.
Given the track record of leaders that would take office by violent seizure, I think the financial cost to protect elected leaders is well worth it. Democracies generally result in less atrocious evil than other forms of government. Having a few elected leaders easily taken out, undermines democracy and incentivizes change via coup by a handful of violent people.
To me, it's not about protecting against policy change. It's about protecting preserving people's choices for their leaders and protecting those leaders from duress. Most have loved ones.
The key is ensuring such protective services are loyal to the office, preserving electoral results, rule of law, orderly succession by protecting the "leader-elect" from violent threats NOT political threats. I'd screen personnel for their absolute loyalty to our system and regularly-tested competency at protecting people.
I'm bothered that Kennedy and Reagan were taken out by (probably) a single person, but am somewhat assured by your observation that it didn't change our system.
I use both Libra and Microsoft. There's a big difference in my ability to interact with the world. I want to use LibreOffice whole hog because the interface is relatively stable from one version to the next, but I've concluded my government actively works to shut down open software and open documents, as it races towards "e-gov."
I loved the pre-ribbon MS-Office interface. (e.g. Office 2003) It had a semi-understandable philosophy of organization, toolbars were stable, easily customized and it took very few clicks to get anything done. However, each interface "improvement" seemed to thumb its nose at fans and anyone "invested" in Microsoft. It meant more clicks and time to do the same thing, in addition to nullification of my muscle-memory caused by the hunting around, it also destroyed any time investment I made in setting up reasonable defaults, like single line spacing between lines and investments in menu customization and pre-programmed footer standardization, such as "server\pathname" and "page y of x" in every footer. With the introduction of the ribbon system in 2007, I tried switching to OpenOffice/Libre Office and liked the more conservative menu system, but am concerned that it, too will try emulate MS look and feel.
With the introduction of a blindingly white, thin texted menu visualization system in Office 2013, I just want to say F.U. and go open-source whole hog, since Microsoft regularly says F.U. to people, like me, that pay them money.
The issue that prevents me from going whole-hog is that various agencies of my government send out mandatory regulatory response documents to businesses using the latest versions of Excel, using Excel's proprietary features (macros) and I must fill in the blanks and respond by a certain date. When I try to raise issue with this, the attitude verges on "How cheap of you to ask for something in a different format. Smart businessmen invest in new software and try not to be a pain to their regulators." Consequently many businesses work downstream with their vendors (often small business) the same way. If my government was truly serious about breaking up a monopolies, it would stop mandating use of specific brands by putting out e-forms that didn't require a particular brand of software. If it insisted it needs to use Excel internally, at least, export to another generally usable format that doesn't require a specific purchase.
We're actively contemplating cyber-security laws requiring that citizens have only secure computers or be subject to fines and/or disconnection. I expect us to make a proprietary mess of that, too.
I actually don't mind monopolies when earned by consumer choice. I just mind monopolistic behavior towards customers who have no reasonable choice, reinforced by government action.
You presume all problems have a neat solution? I don't. I also avoid "solutions" that are more dangerous than the original problem. This law favors the popular powerful press and hurts smaller independent news organizations. Usually, that's a bad idea.
Therefore, making any critical blogger subject to extortion on a grand scale, whether they actually did anything wrong or not. Gee, how could that possibly have a chilling effect on freedom of speech? Just like any other "crime/punishment model?" A healthy democracy requires the ability to speak freely. That's why free speech was enshrined as a right in what most consider to be the free world.
I was born in a communist country. My family took *dire* risks to move to western society. I hear that Iran and North Korea have a *very* affable and orderly press that makes *absolutely* sure they have done nothing wrong. Who knows? You just might enjoy consuming their media and being subject to leadership that highly values an orderly society.
Otherwise, please re-consider your position. Please don't contribute to the world's erosion of freedom in the name of order.
You can take water on the plane. But, the water needs to be obtained from a vendor or faucet after passing through security. My routine is to buy a bottle (or fill one) right after locating the gate.
I mis-read and interpreted "exceed the dimensions of a carryon" as "exceed the dimensions of a crayon." I guess it's because I associate the experience of commercial flight with "small, cramped and barely tolerable stupidity." "Crayon" seemed credible, because I had also just read that the head of the Justice Department said the Executive had legal authority to use drones to kill citizens on U.S. soil without trial. When confronting a ridiculous society, I'm learning to suspend my disbelief.
Bottom line, I have loved-ones to feed and projects I need to get done. I can't stop flying due to thugs...whether the thugs wear a head-scarf or a uniform. In my mind, TSA actually make planes more secure, because their antics make the observant realize they cannot rely on a bureaucracy for protection... Ultimately, it's up to us to defend ourselves and our fellow travelers.
I understand the principles of mass, density, force and concentration. I've too easily broken the bones of fellow humans. I know what common airplane objects I can use as weapons. No one is going to hijack *my* plane because I will risk much to defend it, knowing the alternative is much worse.
YELL and POINT. Make me aware. That's all I ask of my fellow travelers. Any additional help will earn you much gratitude.
Cost drives everything. I think DEC ruined DEC and that the MBAs didn't push change hard enough.
DEC was a market leader and VMS was a fantastic OS in standardization and features. That said, maintaining a VAX/VMS environment was much too costly in talent and space. DataGeneral was scrappy class-competition. The MBA's did what they could reasonably do for DEC which was once a great company but was culturally already well on its way to becoming a dinosaur, because the techs/managers/strategists at DEC were just too much in love with their own architecture to effectively compete for a new type of business customer coming on-line in major numbers.
A personal microcomputer, with a standardized S-100 bus, 3rd-party S-100 accessories and a couple of 8" single-sided floppy disks, running CP/M or MP/M and utilities like "ZCPR3" with a Japanese dot-matrix printer offered a whole lot more flexibility and "bang for the buck" to small and medium-sized businesses.
On top of that, microcomputers were "almost" a consumer hobbyist product and VAX/VMS wasn't. The microcomputer took almost no care and feeding by expensive computer programmers or operators.
Pre-compiled, ready-to-use CP/M software could be purchased, literally off-the-shelf, at prices that were "almost free" from an amazing variety of vendors. Long before "Apple stores" I remember walking into a Heath/Zenith retail store and paying around $100 for business software, including 8.5 x 11-inch, 3-ring bound user manuals. The manuals would easily lay flat, had numbered, step-by-step instructions and a nifty protected-pocket in a richly-textured and padded 3-ring binders that held the 8-inch single-sided floppy disk media, allowing you to keep everything in one place. It sounds funny today, but managers thought nothing of using the spare disk space on the software distribution media to conveniently store data files, all in one place, stored safely in the same 8.5" x 11" 3-ring binder on their bookshelf.
A business could afford to buy several microcomputers and distribute them throughout the enterprise to non-computer professionals, such as accountants, managers and engineers, with just a bit of training, personal curious interest and they'd do wonderfully productive things with their computers. (Wonderful...unless you were one of the paid file clerks or report-processing clerks they realized they no longer needed and never enjoyed managing.)
In my humble opinion, the low-cost, CP/M and MP/M floppy-based computers for business and quick-booting Atari/Apple/Commodores for homes, foreshadowed DEC's death in the mid-range sysems.
The move by businesses to CP/M personal computers for key administrative users and the the move to bigger, denser mainframes for serious I/O intensive SQL databases, large memory array processing and intensive calculation for things like modeling fluid-dynamics were a big deal in the tech-race of the late 70's through the late 80's. The market was clearly demanding extremes of big and small while beginning to get wise about the labor component of total cost of ownership. Amdahl made clones of IBM's big iron. Everyone made clones of IBM's desktop micro-computers. Cray became a house-hold name. DEC, Prime Computer, Data General, were stuck in the economically-awkward "middle" of proprietary multi-user mini-computers that required the IT talent of mainframes and manufacturer's annual service contracts to operate effectively and semi-reliably.
Capturing what remained of the mid-market with Unix/Xenix was natural and easy for IBM/Fujitsu/Amdahl who were familiar with the service and operating models and offered no-brainer expansion paths, including connecting PC's to big-iron with RS-232 serial ports, smart-terminal emulation software, Token-Ring Network Cards for standard-bus microcomputers set the stage for client/server computing. As client-server computing become important, IBM rushed to get Linux offered on their biggest iron. While companies like IBM changed and adapted, mid-market computer
I help small businesses entrepreneurs and can offer a different perspective. I've never had to train a janitor, barber, dispatcher, tow-truck operator or politician how to use a phone book. (or how to use one safely, or how to properly-configure or update their telephone to connect to a particular phone number)
The economics of yellow pages still work. About a quarter of the volume for a couple IT support business I'm familiar with...comes from phone book ads. Which, per customer, provide an incredibly cheap "fire and forget" low-maintenance form of advertising for blue and pink-collar businesses that don't involve owners sitting at computers. I'm a geek and have a browser running on me (or near me) close to 100% of the time, but noticed that some small businesses just don't exist online...and probably for good reason.
There are inherently local industries of which most high paid digital technorati seem blissfully unaware. For example, try looking for a cheap tow-truck (emphasis on cheap) when you're in the grocery parking lot and your car won't start.
I did, less than a year ago, and noted only the highest priced scum of the earth operators with local govt contracts, gaudy chromed trucks, complicated fees STARTING at $85 minimum hook-up fee had web sites. The patient and polite owner/operators that answered their own phone and charged $40-$50, fixed price per tow, were accessible to me only via the phone-book.
Janitorial services can have an effective print ad with just a few minutes of specification and a phone call. The immigrant with a mop and bucket that can't achieve the same cost-time efficiency with a local web designer or Go-Daddy rep that they can achieve with the Yellow Pages sales girl. Advertising "to the whole world" when you want local customers for a local activity creates its own problems, such as making you an easy target for international spammers/scammers/web-site defacers. It probably means that to monitor the presentation of your web-ad, you'd have to go get a computer in addition to purchasing the mop & bucket. You'd have to learn how to use that computer, then pay guys like me to de-louse it, join the forced-march of software licensing, pay local lawyers to defend against scanning patent infringement law-suits because they "probably infringe" if they have a small business with a computer. etc, responding to bank notices they need to type in their old PIN at the following link, etc., when she just wants to start a business mopping floors to feed her kids because she doesn't want her kids to grow up seeing welfare as a solution.
I travel a lot for business. My favorite barber shops (that's right, *real* barber shops...not styling salons) could only be found in the hotel room's phone book, not the guest services directory or the web. The barber shops I like are staffed with neatly dressed old gentlemen that will keep you keep you up to date on sports, local politicians, zoning laws and economic scuttlebutt while giving you a perfect trim & shave. They don't do web-sites and don't do appointments. On the other hand, you may be waiting next to the zoning commissioner, because he's made to wait for his turn too.
Barber shops and tow-trucks remind me that for some activities, phone books are the "on ramp" to getting "plugged in" to "effective knowledge networks" of people and personalities for getting things done.
That said, I see sites like Yelp! and Google Places increasingly performing the same function at zero cost and with "little or no effort" on the business owner's part.
I'm not sure, but I *think* some states (such as Alaska) already do this as standard practice. (Self-expiring legislation that requires votes to extend)
Maybe. I've seen it in business Power Point presentations...and hated it *every* time. If I'm going to waste time, let me do it on Slashdot.
To an impatient, time-pressed captive audience, a lengthy mandatory canned video is "almost malicious." Just give me five bullet points, ask for my decision and get out of my hair.
Typical: Putting a lengthy flash animation such as "All Your Base Are Belong to Me" at the beginning of a power point presentation to sell me on centralized systems management. I'm already irritated before the core of the presentation is given.
While I'm complaining, let me throw in another crazed rant. Creating a 2 sentence message in Microsoft Word or.PDF then emailing it as an attachment, is *just* as annoying as the mandatory flash animations.
I wonder how robustly Microsoft plans to address security at a wireless data center. In many data centers, wireless devices, even encrypted ones, were simply forbidden and twisted pair was inside physically locked metal conduit. Most security schemes for wireless transmission will involve more overhead on CPU, memory, transmission and therefore, energy, air conditioning, floor space, etc., not to mention a staff division related to spectrum monitoring & analysis.
On the other hand, if the data center is merely for storing consumer's account information...[ rimshot ]
Making billing and payment systems electronic reduces processing costs.
Wow. I don't know where to begin. This is a lot more variable than you'd think.
I think the following statement is much more accurate.
Making billing and payment systems electronic has the potential to reduce processing costs.
Keep in mind that the adoption of E-mail did not eliminate mail fraud or reduce the labor involved in processing mail.
I'd argue I spend more time processing my mail than I did in the 80's. It might have reduced the costs of sending an individual letter using a stamp. Your actual results may vary. Do did you buy Microsoft Exchange server, Outlook? Oh wait...it's not a purchase...its a temporary license. Did you have to renew the license? At what cost? Did you send 90 letters out last year? 200 letters? How about when measured as "cost per correspondence" that year? When you renewed software licenses under the new version, could you continue to use your orginally purchased hardware?...or did you have to upgrade your hardware as well? Was your labor cost free? If you used a "free" provider, such as Yahoo, how much time did you spend fiddling around, following animated Yahoo links. Does your time have value?
Medical billing system goals and project architectures vary. There's a lot more to this than coding medical procedures or reducing the human clerical involvement in working with Medicaid. I analyze and track the success of various medical IT projects and there are too many failures sold as successes and the costs shifted around, but ultimately paid by citizens, self-insured customers, quality of care, quality of non-medical service. Definitions of "success" vary from person to person and many are not based on objective, measurable criteria.
Keep in the mind the labor for regulatory compliance, developing and managing electronic systems runs $35-$230/hr. Accounting clerk and medical-coding labor runs $16-$40/hr and "maintenance" involves periodic training. The labor cost ranges can actually be wider depending on the economy of that region. Think New York City vs. Podunkville, WV. Keep in mind that there are often unplanned and improperly budgeted costs such as security and maintenance. The medical coding and accounting clerk labor typically is not eliminated, but retrained to use the new system and often given a raise to retain them after the training, because they are in more demand. The transaction labor time is often increased in the new system and the transaction errors harder to detect and diagnose because of the increased specialization and fragmentation of knowledge about the system.
Some of the billing labor requires maintaining industry certifications. As standards become more internationalized, there's potential for labor savings by exporting the jobs and broader sharing of expertise. Sometimes these savings are offset by increased coordination and communication costs (not long-distance fees, we're talking subtle mis-communication with big impacts resolution of business outcomes) caused by the shift from localized clerical work to exported clerical work.
I've seen many implementations where total operating costs, per unit of the same function, dramatically increased AND it created new costs, hidden by being created in other departments, such as, Legal, Customer Service and Communications.
(Did lawsuits increase? Was there more confusion about work-products? Was resolution of the confusion easier or harder? Did we have to "educate" our customer on our system with PR campaigns? What did that cost? Was it effective?)
If we ignore all the issues that come with new implementation projects and switch our focus to the new power of having more (and better?) data to sift...that's easier to analyze, there are two sides to that coin.
1. Automated algorithms make it easier to detect some types of fraud. (in email analogy, spam)
Determining how much spectrum anyone needs should be nearly as easy as figuring out how many Kilobytes of RAM anyone could possibly ever need in a personal computer. I'm confident the government should be trusted to make these kinds of decisions instead of doing something so unseemly and commercial as auctioning limited term-licenses.
Google likes polished releases. Google doesn't want their beta products to behave as if they're beta products. Microsoft is perfectly fine with rushing beta products to market.
Yikes! Most human beings are no different from us, and just want to pursue happiness. Problem is..."most human beings" are not those ones in charge. --Even in democracies. There's usually a ruthless dictator, a popularly-elected puppet, or an elite-installed symbolic leader and their agenda is most definitely NOT the same as "most people's." My family risked life and limb to escape to the USA from a communist country and I wish you knew more about how the world works.
I've seen many different developer cultures. Keep in mind people are not clones. What works for one set of people may not work for another. In an attempt to be trendy and hip, some groups seriously backfired. Ultimately, get to know your team and adopt whatever works for keeping your team productive, happy and constantly improving. This will vary from team to team. There is no substitute for getting to know your team and practicing decent project management.
Dear Valued Customer,
On-Star telemetry shows you rarely use your turn signals when changing lanes and we're striving to "do something about it." We've also noticed you use your audio system menu controls frequently. Because of the audio controls' popularity in our usage statistics from participating customers, future models will eliminate the turn signal stalk in favor of a user-configurable option, allowing you to scroll a tiny screen and search through audio options while making lane changes. Note that you can now change the audio feedback from the traditional clicking relay sound of a turn signal to one of several pre-loaded "ringtones" just like your cell phone. Furthermore, for an additional fee, Microsoft now offers a "plus" package with many more audio themes for your turn-signal.
Thank you for participating in our telemetry feedback programs as we strive to constantly improve our products!
I'd like to think the surfaces of my TV remotes and games controllers builds up my immunity to germs, but in a way that is more calorie-efficient that the wasteful-motion methods.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops I meant to say "...core principles governing its foreign relationships/entanglements." Bottom line, I'm looking for the constitutions of stable democracies to define their relationships with the world, making their actions moral, predictable and somewhat certain. A democracy's "hurdle" authority to engage in military adventures or destabilize sovereign powers should come from the clear violation of core values.
Good point and food for thought. Thanks. Most democracies have a constitution addressing internal relationships and do NOT have a stable, difficult-to-change document addressing a few core principles. I've always thought of that was a weakness and a source of our foreign policy confusion and inconsistencies. The existing moral confusion leads to easy manipulation by small but powerful interests.
Given the track record of leaders that would take office by violent seizure, I think the financial cost to protect elected leaders is well worth it. Democracies generally result in less atrocious evil than other forms of government. Having a few elected leaders easily taken out, undermines democracy and incentivizes change via coup by a handful of violent people.
To me, it's not about protecting against policy change. It's about protecting preserving people's choices for their leaders and protecting those leaders from duress. Most have loved ones.
The key is ensuring such protective services are loyal to the office, preserving electoral results, rule of law, orderly succession by protecting the "leader-elect" from violent threats NOT political threats. I'd screen personnel for their absolute loyalty to our system and regularly-tested competency at protecting people.
I'm bothered that Kennedy and Reagan were taken out by (probably) a single person, but am somewhat assured by your observation that it didn't change our system.
I use both Libra and Microsoft. There's a big difference in my ability to interact with the world. I want to use LibreOffice whole hog because the interface is relatively stable from one version to the next, but I've concluded my government actively works to shut down open software and open documents, as it races towards "e-gov."
I loved the pre-ribbon MS-Office interface. (e.g. Office 2003) It had a semi-understandable philosophy of organization, toolbars were stable, easily customized and it took very few clicks to get anything done. However, each interface "improvement" seemed to thumb its nose at fans and anyone "invested" in Microsoft. It meant more clicks and time to do the same thing, in addition to nullification of my muscle-memory caused by the hunting around, it also destroyed any time investment I made in setting up reasonable defaults, like single line spacing between lines and investments in menu customization and pre-programmed footer standardization, such as "server\pathname" and "page y of x" in every footer. With the introduction of the ribbon system in 2007, I tried switching to OpenOffice/Libre Office and liked the more conservative menu system, but am concerned that it, too will try emulate MS look and feel.
With the introduction of a blindingly white, thin texted menu visualization system in Office 2013, I just want to say F.U. and go open-source whole hog, since Microsoft regularly says F.U. to people, like me, that pay them money.
The issue that prevents me from going whole-hog is that various agencies of my government send out mandatory regulatory response documents to businesses using the latest versions of Excel, using Excel's proprietary features (macros) and I must fill in the blanks and respond by a certain date. When I try to raise issue with this, the attitude verges on "How cheap of you to ask for something in a different format. Smart businessmen invest in new software and try not to be a pain to their regulators." Consequently many businesses work downstream with their vendors (often small business) the same way. If my government was truly serious about breaking up a monopolies, it would stop mandating use of specific brands by putting out e-forms that didn't require a particular brand of software. If it insisted it needs to use Excel internally, at least, export to another generally usable format that doesn't require a specific purchase.
We're actively contemplating cyber-security laws requiring that citizens have only secure computers or be subject to fines and/or disconnection. I expect us to make a proprietary mess of that, too.
I actually don't mind monopolies when earned by consumer choice. I just mind monopolistic behavior towards customers who have no reasonable choice, reinforced by government action.
You presume all problems have a neat solution? I don't. I also avoid "solutions" that are more dangerous than the original problem. This law favors the popular powerful press and hurts smaller independent news organizations. Usually, that's a bad idea.
It's rather harder to bribe 50 million people than 500. One word. Welfare. That said, I *do* get your point.
Therefore, making any critical blogger subject to extortion on a grand scale, whether they actually did anything wrong or not. Gee, how could that possibly have a chilling effect on freedom of speech? Just like any other "crime/punishment model?" A healthy democracy requires the ability to speak freely. That's why free speech was enshrined as a right in what most consider to be the free world.
I was born in a communist country. My family took *dire* risks to move to western society. I hear that Iran and North Korea have a *very* affable and orderly press that makes *absolutely* sure they have done nothing wrong. Who knows? You just might enjoy consuming their media and being subject to leadership that highly values an orderly society.
Otherwise, please re-consider your position. Please don't contribute to the world's erosion of freedom in the name of order.
You can take water on the plane. But, the water needs to be obtained from a vendor or faucet after passing through security. My routine is to buy a bottle (or fill one) right after locating the gate.
I mis-read and interpreted "exceed the dimensions of a carryon" as "exceed the dimensions of a crayon." I guess it's because I associate the experience of commercial flight with "small, cramped and barely tolerable stupidity." "Crayon" seemed credible, because I had also just read that the head of the Justice Department said the Executive had legal authority to use drones to kill citizens on U.S. soil without trial. When confronting a ridiculous society, I'm learning to suspend my disbelief.
Bottom line, I have loved-ones to feed and projects I need to get done. I can't stop flying due to thugs...whether the thugs wear a head-scarf or a uniform. In my mind, TSA actually make planes more secure, because their antics make the observant realize they cannot rely on a bureaucracy for protection... Ultimately, it's up to us to defend ourselves and our fellow travelers.
I understand the principles of mass, density, force and concentration. I've too easily broken the bones of fellow humans. I know what common airplane objects I can use as weapons. No one is going to hijack *my* plane because I will risk much to defend it, knowing the alternative is much worse.
YELL and POINT. Make me aware. That's all I ask of my fellow travelers. Any additional help will earn you much gratitude.
Cost drives everything. I think DEC ruined DEC and that the MBAs didn't push change hard enough.
DEC was a market leader and VMS was a fantastic OS in standardization and features. That said, maintaining a VAX/VMS environment was much too costly in talent and space. DataGeneral was scrappy class-competition. The MBA's did what they could reasonably do for DEC which was once a great company but was culturally already well on its way to becoming a dinosaur, because the techs/managers/strategists at DEC were just too much in love with their own architecture to effectively compete for a new type of business customer coming on-line in major numbers.
A personal microcomputer, with a standardized S-100 bus, 3rd-party S-100 accessories and a couple of 8" single-sided floppy disks, running CP/M or MP/M and utilities like "ZCPR3" with a Japanese dot-matrix printer offered a whole lot more flexibility and "bang for the buck" to small and medium-sized businesses.
On top of that, microcomputers were "almost" a consumer hobbyist product and VAX/VMS wasn't. The microcomputer took almost no care and feeding by expensive computer programmers or operators.
Pre-compiled, ready-to-use CP/M software could be purchased, literally off-the-shelf, at prices that were "almost free" from an amazing variety of vendors. Long before "Apple stores" I remember walking into a Heath/Zenith retail store and paying around $100 for business software, including 8.5 x 11-inch, 3-ring bound user manuals. The manuals would easily lay flat, had numbered, step-by-step instructions and a nifty protected-pocket in a richly-textured and padded 3-ring binders that held the 8-inch single-sided floppy disk media, allowing you to keep everything in one place. It sounds funny today, but managers thought nothing of using the spare disk space on the software distribution media to conveniently store data files, all in one place, stored safely in the same 8.5" x 11" 3-ring binder on their bookshelf.
A business could afford to buy several microcomputers and distribute them throughout the enterprise to non-computer professionals, such as accountants, managers and engineers, with just a bit of training, personal curious interest and they'd do wonderfully productive things with their computers. (Wonderful...unless you were one of the paid file clerks or report-processing clerks they realized they no longer needed and never enjoyed managing.)
In my humble opinion, the low-cost, CP/M and MP/M floppy-based computers for business and quick-booting Atari/Apple/Commodores for homes, foreshadowed DEC's death in the mid-range sysems.
The move by businesses to CP/M personal computers for key administrative users and the the move to bigger, denser mainframes for serious I/O intensive SQL databases, large memory array processing and intensive calculation for things like modeling fluid-dynamics were a big deal in the tech-race of the late 70's through the late 80's. The market was clearly demanding extremes of big and small while beginning to get wise about the labor component of total cost of ownership. Amdahl made clones of IBM's big iron. Everyone made clones of IBM's desktop micro-computers. Cray became a house-hold name. DEC, Prime Computer, Data General, were stuck in the economically-awkward "middle" of proprietary multi-user mini-computers that required the IT talent of mainframes and manufacturer's annual service contracts to operate effectively and semi-reliably.
Capturing what remained of the mid-market with Unix/Xenix was natural and easy for IBM/Fujitsu/Amdahl who were familiar with the service and operating models and offered no-brainer expansion paths, including connecting PC's to big-iron with RS-232 serial ports, smart-terminal emulation software, Token-Ring Network Cards for standard-bus microcomputers set the stage for client/server computing. As client-server computing become important, IBM rushed to get Linux offered on their biggest iron. While companies like IBM changed and adapted, mid-market computer
I help small businesses entrepreneurs and can offer a different perspective. I've never had to train a janitor, barber, dispatcher, tow-truck operator or politician how to use a phone book. (or how to use one safely, or how to properly-configure or update their telephone to connect to a particular phone number)
The economics of yellow pages still work. About a quarter of the volume for a couple IT support business I'm familiar with...comes from phone book ads. Which, per customer, provide an incredibly cheap "fire and forget" low-maintenance form of advertising for blue and pink-collar businesses that don't involve owners sitting at computers. I'm a geek and have a browser running on me (or near me) close to 100% of the time, but noticed that some small businesses just don't exist online...and probably for good reason.
There are inherently local industries of which most high paid digital technorati seem blissfully unaware. For example, try looking for a cheap tow-truck (emphasis on cheap) when you're in the grocery parking lot and your car won't start.
I did, less than a year ago, and noted only the highest priced scum of the earth operators with local govt contracts, gaudy chromed trucks, complicated fees STARTING at $85 minimum hook-up fee had web sites. The patient and polite owner/operators that answered their own phone and charged $40-$50, fixed price per tow, were accessible to me only via the phone-book.
Janitorial services can have an effective print ad with just a few minutes of specification and a phone call. The immigrant with a mop and bucket that can't achieve the same cost-time efficiency with a local web designer or Go-Daddy rep that they can achieve with the Yellow Pages sales girl. Advertising "to the whole world" when you want local customers for a local activity creates its own problems, such as making you an easy target for international spammers/scammers/web-site defacers. It probably means that to monitor the presentation of your web-ad, you'd have to go get a computer in addition to purchasing the mop & bucket. You'd have to learn how to use that computer, then pay guys like me to de-louse it, join the forced-march of software licensing, pay local lawyers to defend against scanning patent infringement law-suits because they "probably infringe" if they have a small business with a computer. etc, responding to bank notices they need to type in their old PIN at the following link, etc., when she just wants to start a business mopping floors to feed her kids because she doesn't want her kids to grow up seeing welfare as a solution.
I travel a lot for business. My favorite barber shops (that's right, *real* barber shops...not styling salons) could only be found in the hotel room's phone book, not the guest services directory or the web. The barber shops I like are staffed with neatly dressed old gentlemen that will keep you keep you up to date on sports, local politicians, zoning laws and economic scuttlebutt while giving you a perfect trim & shave. They don't do web-sites and don't do appointments. On the other hand, you may be waiting next to the zoning commissioner, because he's made to wait for his turn too.
Barber shops and tow-trucks remind me that for some activities, phone books are the "on ramp" to getting "plugged in" to "effective knowledge networks" of people and personalities for getting things done.
That said, I see sites like Yelp! and Google Places increasingly performing the same function at zero cost and with "little or no effort" on the business owner's part.
I'm not sure, but I *think* some states (such as Alaska) already do this as standard practice. (Self-expiring legislation that requires votes to extend)
Maybe. I've seen it in business Power Point presentations...and hated it *every* time. If I'm going to waste time, let me do it on Slashdot.
To an impatient, time-pressed captive audience, a lengthy mandatory canned video is "almost malicious." Just give me five bullet points, ask for my decision and get out of my hair.
Typical: Putting a lengthy flash animation such as "All Your Base Are Belong to Me" at the beginning of a power point presentation to sell me on centralized systems management. I'm already irritated before the core of the presentation is given.
While I'm complaining, let me throw in another crazed rant. Creating a 2 sentence message in Microsoft Word or .PDF then emailing it as an attachment, is *just* as annoying as the mandatory flash animations.
I wonder how robustly Microsoft plans to address security at a wireless data center. In many data centers, wireless devices, even encrypted ones, were simply forbidden and twisted pair was inside physically locked metal conduit. Most security schemes for wireless transmission will involve more overhead on CPU, memory, transmission and therefore, energy, air conditioning, floor space, etc., not to mention a staff division related to spectrum monitoring & analysis.
On the other hand, if the data center is merely for storing consumer's account information...[ rimshot ]
Making billing and payment systems electronic reduces processing costs.
Wow. I don't know where to begin. This is a lot more variable than you'd think.
I think the following statement is much more accurate.
Making billing and payment systems electronic has the potential to reduce processing costs.
Keep in mind that the adoption of E-mail did not eliminate mail fraud or reduce the labor involved in processing mail.
I'd argue I spend more time processing my mail than I did in the 80's. It might have reduced the costs of sending an individual letter using a stamp. Your actual results may vary. Do did you buy Microsoft Exchange server, Outlook? Oh wait...it's not a purchase...its a temporary license. Did you have to renew the license? At what cost? Did you send 90 letters out last year? 200 letters? How about when measured as "cost per correspondence" that year? When you renewed software licenses under the new version, could you continue to use your orginally purchased hardware? ...or did you have to upgrade your hardware as well? Was your labor cost free? If you used a "free" provider, such as Yahoo, how much time did you spend fiddling around, following animated Yahoo links. Does your time have value?
Medical billing system goals and project architectures vary. There's a lot more to this than coding medical procedures or reducing the human clerical involvement in working with Medicaid. I analyze and track the success of various medical IT projects and there are too many failures sold as successes and the costs shifted around, but ultimately paid by citizens, self-insured customers, quality of care, quality of non-medical service. Definitions of "success" vary from person to person and many are not based on objective, measurable criteria.
Keep in the mind the labor for regulatory compliance, developing and managing electronic systems runs $35-$230/hr. Accounting clerk and medical-coding labor runs $16-$40/hr and "maintenance" involves periodic training. The labor cost ranges can actually be wider depending on the economy of that region. Think New York City vs. Podunkville, WV. Keep in mind that there are often unplanned and improperly budgeted costs such as security and maintenance. The medical coding and accounting clerk labor typically is not eliminated, but retrained to use the new system and often given a raise to retain them after the training, because they are in more demand. The transaction labor time is often increased in the new system and the transaction errors harder to detect and diagnose because of the increased specialization and fragmentation of knowledge about the system.
Some of the billing labor requires maintaining industry certifications. As standards become more internationalized, there's potential for labor savings by exporting the jobs and broader sharing of expertise. Sometimes these savings are offset by increased coordination and communication costs (not long-distance fees, we're talking subtle mis-communication with big impacts resolution of business outcomes) caused by the shift from localized clerical work to exported clerical work.
I've seen many implementations where total operating costs, per unit of the same function, dramatically increased AND it created new costs, hidden by being created in other departments, such as, Legal, Customer Service and Communications.
(Did lawsuits increase? Was there more confusion about work-products? Was resolution of the confusion easier or harder? Did we have to "educate" our customer on our system with PR campaigns? What did that cost? Was it effective?)
If we ignore all the issues that come with new implementation projects and switch our focus to the new power of having more (and better?) data to sift...that's easier to analyze, there are two sides to that coin.
1. Automated algorithms make it easier to detect some types of fraud. (in email analogy, spam)
in order to vote with more influence...oh wait...Diebold already sells those.
Determining how much spectrum anyone needs should be nearly as easy as figuring out how many Kilobytes of RAM anyone could possibly ever need in a personal computer. I'm confident the government should be trusted to make these kinds of decisions instead of doing something so unseemly and commercial as auctioning limited term-licenses.
Google likes polished releases. Google doesn't want their beta products to behave as if they're beta products. Microsoft is perfectly fine with rushing beta products to market.
Yes. (Less labor hours collecting billing data, Less labor hours compiling billing data)
Yikes! Most human beings are no different from us, and just want to pursue happiness. Problem is..."most human beings" are not those ones in charge. --Even in democracies. There's usually a ruthless dictator, a popularly-elected puppet, or an elite-installed symbolic leader and their agenda is most definitely NOT the same as "most people's." My family risked life and limb to escape to the USA from a communist country and I wish you knew more about how the world works.
I've seen many different developer cultures. Keep in mind people are not clones. What works for one set of people may not work for another. In an attempt to be trendy and hip, some groups seriously backfired. Ultimately, get to know your team and adopt whatever works for keeping your team productive, happy and constantly improving. This will vary from team to team. There is no substitute for getting to know your team and practicing decent project management.
Dear Valued Customer,
On-Star telemetry shows you rarely use your turn signals when changing lanes and we're striving to "do something about it." We've also noticed you use your audio system menu controls frequently. Because of the audio controls' popularity in our usage statistics from participating customers, future models will eliminate the turn signal stalk in favor of a user-configurable option, allowing you to scroll a tiny screen and search through audio options while making lane changes. Note that you can now change the audio feedback from the traditional clicking relay sound of a turn signal to one of several pre-loaded "ringtones" just like your cell phone. Furthermore, for an additional fee, Microsoft now offers a "plus" package with many more audio themes for your turn-signal.
Thank you for participating in our telemetry feedback programs as we strive to constantly improve our products!
That's why I buy virus-proof Macbooks.
Not if they had learned about teamwork.
I'd like to think the surfaces of my TV remotes and games controllers builds up my immunity to germs, but in a way that is more calorie-efficient that the wasteful-motion methods.