I don't see anything new here. They mention variable valve timing, which is already here, and exhaust gas recirculation, but they're giving it another name, and something like the Miller-cycle engine.
Some of these tweaks are better suited to locomotive engines or other constant RPM power plants. But, overall, they're just combining some well known techniques.
I hope something comes of the VVT stuff. That's where some real gains can be made, especially to help implement a better Miller-cycle engine.
They could also implement Honda's CVCC techniques or the stratified combustion chamber technique to burn low grade fuels. That would help a lot.
Offshoring is a new fact of life for tech workers. Layoffs of older workers and sending the work overseas, and/or rehiring the former workers as "managed service" workers. I think that eventually the laws will be enforced and changed to stop this. But in the brave new world of the neocons, the American middle class has no standing. We're expendable.
Lou Dobbs has been trying to raise visibility around this new fact of life, but I don't think he's getting much traction. But it sounds like there's going to be 150,000 new believers.
I'd be very curious to see when they create some Folding-at-Home (FAH) clients. The PS3 clients are kicking butt, and I'll bet that hasn't escaped the attention of IBM. Distributed computing is an unappreciated upcoming technology.
In fact, I have to wonder if IBM's work on the WCG isn't part if its effort to develop this sort of technology and to create some high visibility track record.
re-using something that already exists for another use is not an invention.
Was this your quote? I don't think you're right. I'm pretty sure the patent office will issue a patent for a new use of an existing invention. That would imply that a new use is an 'invention'.
"I'm 26, but I am saving like hell because I know that age discrimination is rife in this industry, and the more I save for retirement right now, the less I have to worry about such things."
That's so smart and I'm impressed. Age discrimination is a fact of life. Although many people realize the value of experience, there are some who, as the original poster described, treat older programmers who haven't moved into management as less worthy. At a previous place of employment, I volunteered as part of an interview team screening possible programmer/engineers. I saw this team's recommendation to hire and not hire get overrulled by a younger first line manager. That FLM passed over two older men with degrees and experience, that were recommended by the team, to hire a younger person who was not recommended by the team. That younger person was much less fit for the job, not because of age, but he was less able. I quit doing interviews for that FLM after seeing that happen. The irony is that the younger person hired is still with that company, still doing menial work, not the kind of programming that was needed.
As an aside, I also saw that same FLM hire a really tall programmer, a guy who was 6'8". He wanted a forward on his lunchtime basketball team. The tall guy was a decent programmer, so that worked out ok, but it was strange to see someone in authority make such strangely self-serving decisions.
Save your money, buy a house. Be prepared to lose your job. I'd suggest cross-training as an IT person. Hospitals and such don't seem to have the kind of anti-agism that I've seen in the tech sector. Certifications such as CNE and MSCE, despite their lack of true measure of competence, are still valued as check-point qualifiers.
I've seen Microsoft advertisements and white papers that assert that there are many hidden costs of using FOSS. You and I know that it's FUD or at least naieve, but people like Gartner Group lap that kind of 'research' up and repeat it.
More interesting would be to do the research on the hidden costs of using Microsoft OS and applications. I, for one, waste plenty of time dealing with updates, reboots after updates, etc. with the various Microsoft OS's that I have to use.
You miss the point entirely. Microsoft has been writing software for 30 years. 30 YEARS! It has generated BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF PROFIT. At what point do they take security seriously enough so that NSA can devote its time to help the small guy? That Mircosoft, after thirty years, still doesn't know how to make an operating system that's secure is the issue. Afther 30 years and Billions of dollars, Microsoft should be writing the book on security. Security should be second nature.
Go ahead and make lame excuses about why one of the world's biggest software companies still needs others to do its work for it. Microsoft should be embarrassed, ashamed of itself. But this might actually be a way of monopolizing the resources of the NSA so that the NSA doesn't have the bandwidth to help others such as Apple and Linux from benefiting from the resources of the NSA.
Thankfully, both MacOS and Linux are better operating systems and don't require as much help.
I'm not surprised that yet another Republican is violating moral and legal standards to improve his/her position. I'm glad that someone outed this prick. I don't necessarily see this as an attack on Republicans on a partisan basis, but if you have a group that has a long and varied history of this sort of behavior, and you bring it up yet again, it can look partisan. I vote for honorable Republicans, so I'm not some kind of rabid partisan. I'm not impressed with the way Democrats conduct campaigns; it's half-assed, but I tend to prefer voting for Democrats.
We see Democratic boobs do all sorts of stupid, venal stuff. But when it comes to craven, cynical behavior, you have to hand it to the Republican for the no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty politicking.
It might not be optimal for gamers, but then again, it might actually be optimal for gamers. Imagine changing your CPU/GPU but keeping your original motherboard and getting a big jump in performance.
Putting your petty concerns aside, I think that this CPU/GPU combo will revolutionize certain computing tasks. Currently grid computing is used to try to complete tasks that are computationally intensive. But the general purpose CPU is not as effective at much of this computation as is the GPU. GPUs are more than an order of magnitude faster than CPUs at certain iterative calculations. If the grid were populated with CPU/GPU multi-core systems, we'd be slamming research so fast it would produce an explosion of medical discoveries and development. With Alzheimers, cancer, and other age-related diseases looming, this sort of research will have a huge impact on both our physical as well as economic well being.
I, for one, welcome our new AMD CPU/GPU overlords. Let's hope ASUS is on the job and has a mobo ready when the time comes.
The books from the early days of the written word were hand copied and translated. This was done to preserve them because the books wore out from use. Often, especially in the case of books of gospels, they were edited in an effort to keep them in the current idiom. Today, we struggle to find the earliest works so that we can know more about the original author's intent.
I suspect we are facing a similar situation with archival of the mass amounts of information/data that we are now making; the very first bits of source code, even the first copies of compiled code, are scarce. And some of it is getting corrupted. Early UseNet stuff is getting harder to dig up.
For many reasons, I hope this early work is preserved.
I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere? Am I confused? Should we be thinking about how to warm up the core a la 'Total Recall'?
I didn't get to see the documentary. I don't have HBO.
I, for one, have lost faith in the election process. It doesn't bode well for our governmental processes when people don't think that the election process works. For the first time, I understand why other groups who had been disenfranchised by the system feel the way they do; it's rigged. The bad guys (the current leaders of the Republican party) don't care about democracy or the constitution. The just care about power. They'll game elections every which way they can and nothing is off limits.
They'll start wars just before mid-term elections to get popular support for the President and the congressional candidates will ride those coattails into office. They'll manipulate gas prices. They'll manipulate the employment numbers. They'll find loopholes in campaign finance laws that enable them to run ads, and they'll disavow knowledge of the ads. They'll disrupt election processes protected by the constitution (Article 17 and the 2000 Florida recount).
They'll pander to single-cause voting blocks such as the Christian fundamentalists and then string them along. Nothing is off limits. I fully expect to find out that past elections were tainted, corrupted buy this electronic voting machine mess. Hopefully, they won't be able to throw this mid-term election and we'll get a congress who'll address the issue.
Or maybe it's better just to let the system collapse and start over.
The camel's nose is now in the tent. Expect Microsoft to poach Novell customers.
Ask IBM and HP about 'partnering' with EMC. The EMC sales reps used the 'partnership' to get sales contacts for their direct sales force. You can't prove that they did this deliberately, but the result is the same; sales lost by one of the partners to the other 'partner'.
I, too, am surprised these days when I hear about an government agency doing something that in the public's interest. For the last six years I had become accustomed to learning that another administration agency was overturning years of defending the public's interest in things like roadless areas, endangered species, air quality, consumer protection, and so much more. My faith in our governmental/political system is at an all time low, but it's so good to hear news like this.
The lazy, lying bastards should be shut down, made an example of. At the least, they're now liable because someone showed it could be done, and because they were too lazy to do it themselves, they now have a liability exposure for any child that was preyed upon through their web site.
Disk drive suck power at a terrific rate. Reducing the power consumption of mass storage is one of the opportunities in saving electricity. Between reducing CPU power consumption, replacement of CRTs with LED displays, and reducing rotating mass of disk drives, there's a lot that can be done to improve the power profile of a PC. When you've reduced the PCs requirements for power, you can downsize the power supply to add even more power savings.
Right, because look how well that worked for gasoline...
Ok, you're trying to be sarcastic. Ask GM and Ford about this. They're both on the ropes because they tooled up for SUVs and then the price of gas went ballistic. Sales of hybrid and other higher efficiency cars have spiked and they're not going to come back down. Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
Improving the efficiency of a PC with a low-loss power supply has knock-on benefits. Where I work, they have to cool the place even in the wintertime (in Boise, Idaho!). Imaging if they could reduce the waste heat enough to stop having to cool the place even when it's below zero outside. The knock-on benefits would be year-round, of course.
Another poster pointed out that incandescent bulbs are a horrible waste. Gummint could help by switching out traffic light, street lighting, etc. to more efficient LED power.
And this subject came up in a discussion of data-center power, heating and cooling. The typical data center has servers, each with its own power supply. Heck, in the next cube over from me (not a data center), there's about 10 servers, each with its own supply. And just over the partition are two racks, each with about 10 blade servers in them, each with their own PS. Take the PS out of the blade, put it into the bottom of the rack and distribute the power. Huge electricity and cooling savings.
Initially, I was a user of the A9 web site. Then they changed their methods to include archiving my searches, so I changed my default search back to Google. I used the A9 site enough to get the rewards discount, but I used Google the rest of the time.
I know that anything that goes out on the 'net is public, regardless of whatever security measures you attempt, but I would like to discourage the sort of thinking that allows and encourages this intrusion into my privacy.
I predict that this new client that runs on ATI hardware will cause a spike in sales of their products. I, for one, will be trying to get this card for my computer so that I can improve the rate that folding@home runs on my system. And I'm certain that others have the same intention.
If you think about that, it says something about us that I think is important; people want to help and they're willing to spend their money to be helpful.
The concept of voluntary grid computing is a curious one. Why do people do this? Surely one more little CPU grinding away at a huge problem won't make a difference. Yet even though we all know this, we do it anyway. The result of this collective hopefulness and helpfulness is tangible. But what else is strange is that so little notice is given to grid computing. I don't recall hearing about it on CNN or any other news television program. SETI gets air time because it's so, well, 'out there', but the folding, aids, cancer/find-a-drug stuff is operating in obscurity.
BTW, kudos to Slashdot for helping get the word out. I first heard about grid computing here.
Dude. I buy the Chinese junk when quality doesn't matter. But the real quality tools, cars, computers are American made and have American engineering in it. For my birthday I asked for a shovel. No, really. Forged steel, made in America, try to break this f^(k3r, shovel. Honda cars are more American than Japanese. Craftsman and Stanley tools. Yeah, I buy Harbor Freight when I need a little used specialy tool like a roto-hammer, but my drills are American. My radial arm saw, American (and old). Crappy foreign air compressor to be replaced by a Quincy.
The outsourcing of engineering jobs is done by losers. I see the difference in the quality of results between our 'guest' workers and the locals. Even when the locals are abused by taking away benefits, job security, and pay, they still do better work. Some of the foreign born engineers here are quite good, but as a work force, they operate at a lower level of quality.
Does anybody know if Apple is outsourcing? I suspect that the foreign engineering content at Apple is lower than at their competitors.
No, really. I worry about the junk that comes out of Gartner. Like the outsourcing binge. Where I work, they have tried several ways to outsource (overseas) our work. Gartner was flogging this heavily and it seemed to become 'cause celeb'. The word we got from our managers was that it wasn't going to be allowed to fail. I'm pretty sure some people's careers would be damaged if it did, so they're going to continue to push it regardless of the results. This sort of 'tell us what to think' mentality is not going to help corporate amerika.
Please, someone tell Gartner Group to be a little less certain about their predictions. The mass of middle managers are afraid to do think anything that isn't supported by someone like Gartner.
I was visiting my sister. She's living in a 'McMansion' complete with copper roof flashing, gutters and down spouts. As you can guess, there's almost no cell phone signal in the house. On the back porch I get 5 bars.
Another factor might be the wiring; they've got Cat 5, cable and phone lines throughout the house along with the usual house wiring. Seems like a pretty good Faraday cage.
I like one poster's idea of a Bluetooth repeater lash-up from the point with the strongest signal.
Ok, now you have my interest. Are you saying that pre-paid phones aren't locked into any particular band/provider? That's interesting news. I've been in situations where I'm looking at a cell tower and can't get service. I thought that AT&T would switch my Nokia phone to another provider's tower if they weren't covering me with their service. I dropped AT&T because of that incident.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything new here. They mention variable valve timing, which is already here, and exhaust gas recirculation, but they're giving it another name, and something like the Miller-cycle engine.
Some of these tweaks are better suited to locomotive engines or other constant RPM power plants. But, overall, they're just combining some well known techniques.
I hope something comes of the VVT stuff. That's where some real gains can be made, especially to help implement a better Miller-cycle engine.
They could also implement Honda's CVCC techniques or the stratified combustion chamber technique to burn low grade fuels. That would help a lot.
Offshoring is a new fact of life for tech workers. Layoffs of older workers and sending the work overseas, and/or rehiring the former workers as "managed service" workers. I think that eventually the laws will be enforced and changed to stop this. But in the brave new world of the neocons, the American middle class has no standing. We're expendable.
Lou Dobbs has been trying to raise visibility around this new fact of life, but I don't think he's getting much traction. But it sounds like there's going to be 150,000 new believers.
Nice post.
I'd be very curious to see when they create some Folding-at-Home (FAH) clients. The PS3 clients are kicking butt, and I'll bet that hasn't escaped the attention of IBM. Distributed computing is an unappreciated upcoming technology.
In fact, I have to wonder if IBM's work on the WCG isn't part if its effort to develop this sort of technology and to create some high visibility track record.
Maybe it only seems like 100 million years. Either way, I can sympathize. I, too, tell myself that I have evolved.
re-using something that already exists for another use is not an invention.
Was this your quote? I don't think you're right. I'm pretty sure the patent office will issue a patent for a new use of an existing invention. That would imply that a new use is an 'invention'.
"I'm 26, but I am saving like hell because I know that age discrimination is rife in this industry, and the more I save for retirement right now, the less I have to worry about such things."
That's so smart and I'm impressed. Age discrimination is a fact of life. Although many people realize the value of experience, there are some who, as the original poster described, treat older programmers who haven't moved into management as less worthy. At a previous place of employment, I volunteered as part of an interview team screening possible programmer/engineers. I saw this team's recommendation to hire and not hire get overrulled by a younger first line manager. That FLM passed over two older men with degrees and experience, that were recommended by the team, to hire a younger person who was not recommended by the team. That younger person was much less fit for the job, not because of age, but he was less able. I quit doing interviews for that FLM after seeing that happen. The irony is that the younger person hired is still with that company, still doing menial work, not the kind of programming that was needed.
As an aside, I also saw that same FLM hire a really tall programmer, a guy who was 6'8". He wanted a forward on his lunchtime basketball team. The tall guy was a decent programmer, so that worked out ok, but it was strange to see someone in authority make such strangely self-serving decisions.
Save your money, buy a house. Be prepared to lose your job. I'd suggest cross-training as an IT person. Hospitals and such don't seem to have the kind of anti-agism that I've seen in the tech sector. Certifications such as CNE and MSCE, despite their lack of true measure of competence, are still valued as check-point qualifiers.
Good luck to programmers.
I've seen Microsoft advertisements and white papers that assert that there are many hidden costs of using FOSS. You and I know that it's FUD or at least naieve, but people like Gartner Group lap that kind of 'research' up and repeat it.
More interesting would be to do the research on the hidden costs of using Microsoft OS and applications. I, for one, waste plenty of time dealing with updates, reboots after updates, etc. with the various Microsoft OS's that I have to use.
You miss the point entirely. Microsoft has been writing software for 30 years. 30 YEARS! It has generated BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF PROFIT. At what point do they take security seriously enough so that NSA can devote its time to help the small guy? That Mircosoft, after thirty years, still doesn't know how to make an operating system that's secure is the issue. Afther 30 years and Billions of dollars, Microsoft should be writing the book on security. Security should be second nature.
Go ahead and make lame excuses about why one of the world's biggest software companies still needs others to do its work for it. Microsoft should be embarrassed, ashamed of itself. But this might actually be a way of monopolizing the resources of the NSA so that the NSA doesn't have the bandwidth to help others such as Apple and Linux from benefiting from the resources of the NSA.
Thankfully, both MacOS and Linux are better operating systems and don't require as much help.
I'm not surprised that yet another Republican is violating moral and legal standards to improve his/her position. I'm glad that someone outed this prick. I don't necessarily see this as an attack on Republicans on a partisan basis, but if you have a group that has a long and varied history of this sort of behavior, and you bring it up yet again, it can look partisan. I vote for honorable Republicans, so I'm not some kind of rabid partisan. I'm not impressed with the way Democrats conduct campaigns; it's half-assed, but I tend to prefer voting for Democrats.
We see Democratic boobs do all sorts of stupid, venal stuff. But when it comes to craven, cynical behavior, you have to hand it to the Republican for the no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty politicking.
Keep up the pressure on the bad guys.
It might not be optimal for gamers, but then again, it might actually be optimal for gamers. Imagine changing your CPU/GPU but keeping your original motherboard and getting a big jump in performance.
Putting your petty concerns aside, I think that this CPU/GPU combo will revolutionize certain computing tasks. Currently grid computing is used to try to complete tasks that are computationally intensive. But the general purpose CPU is not as effective at much of this computation as is the GPU. GPUs are more than an order of magnitude faster than CPUs at certain iterative calculations. If the grid were populated with CPU/GPU multi-core systems, we'd be slamming research so fast it would produce an explosion of medical discoveries and development. With Alzheimers, cancer, and other age-related diseases looming, this sort of research will have a huge impact on both our physical as well as economic well being.
I, for one, welcome our new AMD CPU/GPU overlords. Let's hope ASUS is on the job and has a mobo ready when the time comes.
The books from the early days of the written word were hand copied and translated. This was done to preserve them because the books wore out from use. Often, especially in the case of books of gospels, they were edited in an effort to keep them in the current idiom. Today, we struggle to find the earliest works so that we can know more about the original author's intent.
I suspect we are facing a similar situation with archival of the mass amounts of information/data that we are now making; the very first bits of source code, even the first copies of compiled code, are scarce. And some of it is getting corrupted. Early UseNet stuff is getting harder to dig up.
For many reasons, I hope this early work is preserved.
I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere? Am I confused? Should we be thinking about how to warm up the core a la 'Total Recall'?
I didn't get to see the documentary. I don't have HBO.
I, for one, have lost faith in the election process. It doesn't bode well for our governmental processes when people don't think that the election process works. For the first time, I understand why other groups who had been disenfranchised by the system feel the way they do; it's rigged. The bad guys (the current leaders of the Republican party) don't care about democracy or the constitution. The just care about power. They'll game elections every which way they can and nothing is off limits.
They'll start wars just before mid-term elections to get popular support for the President and the congressional candidates will ride those coattails into office. They'll manipulate gas prices. They'll manipulate the employment numbers. They'll find loopholes in campaign finance laws that enable them to run ads, and they'll disavow knowledge of the ads. They'll disrupt election processes protected by the constitution (Article 17 and the 2000 Florida recount).
They'll pander to single-cause voting blocks such as the Christian fundamentalists and then string them along. Nothing is off limits. I fully expect to find out that past elections were tainted, corrupted buy this electronic voting machine mess. Hopefully, they won't be able to throw this mid-term election and we'll get a congress who'll address the issue.
Or maybe it's better just to let the system collapse and start over.
The camel's nose is now in the tent. Expect Microsoft to poach Novell customers.
Ask IBM and HP about 'partnering' with EMC. The EMC sales reps used the 'partnership' to get sales contacts for their direct sales force. You can't prove that they did this deliberately, but the result is the same; sales lost by one of the partners to the other 'partner'.
Microsoft has always played hardball. Batter up!
I, too, am surprised these days when I hear about an government agency doing something that in the public's interest. For the last six years I had become accustomed to learning that another administration agency was overturning years of defending the public's interest in things like roadless areas, endangered species, air quality, consumer protection, and so much more. My faith in our governmental/political system is at an all time low, but it's so good to hear news like this.
Kudos to the FCC.
MySpace needs to be whacked, hard. Harder.
The lazy, lying bastards should be shut down, made an example of. At the least, they're now liable because someone showed it could be done, and because they were too lazy to do it themselves, they now have a liability exposure for any child that was preyed upon through their web site.
Disk drive suck power at a terrific rate. Reducing the power consumption of mass storage is one of the opportunities in saving electricity. Between reducing CPU power consumption, replacement of CRTs with LED displays, and reducing rotating mass of disk drives, there's a lot that can be done to improve the power profile of a PC. When you've reduced the PCs requirements for power, you can downsize the power supply to add even more power savings.
Right, because look how well that worked for gasoline...
Ok, you're trying to be sarcastic. Ask GM and Ford about this. They're both on the ropes because they tooled up for SUVs and then the price of gas went ballistic. Sales of hybrid and other higher efficiency cars have spiked and they're not going to come back down. Toyota is about to pass GM as the world's biggest, and they sell SMALL CARS. They have a sellers market. I know because I was at the dealer two days ago. The salesman was polite, but uninterested in talking. All his Camry's were gone.
So the point is valid; jack the price of electricity and we have new incentives to save power.
Improving the efficiency of a PC with a low-loss power supply has knock-on benefits. Where I work, they have to cool the place even in the wintertime (in Boise, Idaho!). Imaging if they could reduce the waste heat enough to stop having to cool the place even when it's below zero outside. The knock-on benefits would be year-round, of course.
Another poster pointed out that incandescent bulbs are a horrible waste. Gummint could help by switching out traffic light, street lighting, etc. to more efficient LED power.
And this subject came up in a discussion of data-center power, heating and cooling. The typical data center has servers, each with its own power supply. Heck, in the next cube over from me (not a data center), there's about 10 servers, each with its own supply. And just over the partition are two racks, each with about 10 blade servers in them, each with their own PS. Take the PS out of the blade, put it into the bottom of the rack and distribute the power. Huge electricity and cooling savings.
We could be doing better, and we should.
Initially, I was a user of the A9 web site. Then they changed their methods to include archiving my searches, so I changed my default search back to Google. I used the A9 site enough to get the rewards discount, but I used Google the rest of the time.
I know that anything that goes out on the 'net is public, regardless of whatever security measures you attempt, but I would like to discourage the sort of thinking that allows and encourages this intrusion into my privacy.
I predict that this new client that runs on ATI hardware will cause a spike in sales of their products. I, for one, will be trying to get this card for my computer so that I can improve the rate that folding@home runs on my system. And I'm certain that others have the same intention.
If you think about that, it says something about us that I think is important; people want to help and they're willing to spend their money to be helpful.
The concept of voluntary grid computing is a curious one. Why do people do this? Surely one more little CPU grinding away at a huge problem won't make a difference. Yet even though we all know this, we do it anyway. The result of this collective hopefulness and helpfulness is tangible. But what else is strange is that so little notice is given to grid computing. I don't recall hearing about it on CNN or any other news television program. SETI gets air time because it's so, well, 'out there', but the folding, aids, cancer/find-a-drug stuff is operating in obscurity.
BTW, kudos to Slashdot for helping get the word out. I first heard about grid computing here.
Dude. I buy the Chinese junk when quality doesn't matter. But the real quality tools, cars, computers are American made and have American engineering in it. For my birthday I asked for a shovel. No, really. Forged steel, made in America, try to break this f^(k3r, shovel. Honda cars are more American than Japanese. Craftsman and Stanley tools. Yeah, I buy Harbor Freight when I need a little used specialy tool like a roto-hammer, but my drills are American. My radial arm saw, American (and old). Crappy foreign air compressor to be replaced by a Quincy.
The outsourcing of engineering jobs is done by losers. I see the difference in the quality of results between our 'guest' workers and the locals. Even when the locals are abused by taking away benefits, job security, and pay, they still do better work. Some of the foreign born engineers here are quite good, but as a work force, they operate at a lower level of quality.
Does anybody know if Apple is outsourcing? I suspect that the foreign engineering content at Apple is lower than at their competitors.
Oh, well. Touchy subject for me. Can you tell?
No, really. I worry about the junk that comes out of Gartner. Like the outsourcing binge. Where I work, they have tried several ways to outsource (overseas) our work. Gartner was flogging this heavily and it seemed to become 'cause celeb'. The word we got from our managers was that it wasn't going to be allowed to fail. I'm pretty sure some people's careers would be damaged if it did, so they're going to continue to push it regardless of the results. This sort of 'tell us what to think' mentality is not going to help corporate amerika.
Please, someone tell Gartner Group to be a little less certain about their predictions. The mass of middle managers are afraid to do think anything that isn't supported by someone like Gartner.
I was visiting my sister. She's living in a 'McMansion' complete with copper roof flashing, gutters and down spouts. As you can guess, there's almost no cell phone signal in the house. On the back porch I get 5 bars.
Another factor might be the wiring; they've got Cat 5, cable and phone lines throughout the house along with the usual house wiring. Seems like a pretty good Faraday cage.
I like one poster's idea of a Bluetooth repeater lash-up from the point with the strongest signal.
Ok, now you have my interest. Are you saying that pre-paid phones aren't locked into any particular band/provider? That's interesting news. I've been in situations where I'm looking at a cell tower and can't get service. I thought that AT&T would switch my Nokia phone to another provider's tower if they weren't covering me with their service. I dropped AT&T because of that incident.