Fair enough.... But I'm not sure anyone's ready to utilize this processor power for something else (like curing cancer or getting us to colonize another planet)? Projects like Folding@Home created a lot of buzz and sounded amazing on paper, until you talk to researchers about it and find out there are very few computational problems they need to solve which could best be handled in a distributed computing nature.
I think some of this goes back to the old sayings like, "You can't bake a cake any faster by adding more chefs in the kitchen.", and "You can't birth a baby in 1 month instead of 9 by putting 9 pregnant women on the task."
I don't really see how the computing power focused on bitcoin "stole it away" from some other more worthy project? Everyone I know doing mining purchased brand new hardware for the purpose, or simply re-used existing machines for the task (deciding they'd rather make some money with high end video cards than doing nothing with them except playing video games occasionally with them).
No, I don't think it's "sad" at all. You've got to remember a few key things here:
1. This is more than just "wasting an amazing amount of computing power on transaction handling". This is the start of a revolution in payments and currency. I don't think it's really fathomable that you could create a universal, decentralized yet reliable digital payment system like this via a commercial entity (such as PayPal) trying to market it. You need something much bigger to make it viable; something on this scale of adoption.
2. Over half of the total number of bitcoins allowed to exist have been mined already. By the time they're all mined, where will we be with everything? I suspect the big "arms race" to mine as much as possible up to that point will serve to advance the computing technology as far and as rapidly as possible. So by the time mining is done for the sake of generating new coins -- we'll have far more energy efficient machines, at lower up-front costs, able to do the job. The amount of hardware that remains online to process the transactions will likely drop back off too, as the only profit to be found in doing it at that point is whatever you can charge as transaction fees for helping the existing coins get moved around.
Not saying you're wrong... but simply saying it's complicated enough that I sure wouldn't write it off yet.
Bitcoin may have a fixed limit, but there are literally dozens of other cryptocoins out there vying for attention and viability. Some appear to be little more than bad ripoffs of existing code used for an earlier coin, and likely pre-mined by the author in the hopes of making a quick buck off of them. Others (like litecoin) seem to be following in lock-step with the rises and falls of bitcoin in the marketplace, although at a much lower value per coin.
I think it's very short-sighted to believe bitcoin would ever be used by itself as a form of digital currency. It's worth a high enough value already (and continues to trend upwards) that it's very inconvenient to use to pay for smaller items or more inexpensive services. (Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.) The litecoin proponents often use the analogy of it being "silver to bitcoin's gold". Who knows... but it's certain that when using U.S. currency, simply having $100 bills to pay for smaller items is impractical. (Many shops caution you with signs in the window that they don't make change for bills larger than $20.)
I'm not sure if bitcoin would run into the perceived "volume required exceeds coins in existence" issues, causing deflation, if it wound up only used for very large transactions, alongside multiple other altcoin options? As long as coin exchanges exist and other cryptocoins are in active use, there would be ways to convert bitcoin into other coins anyway -- further eliminating the concerns of it becoming a deflationary currency.
Heck, there's really nothing saying bitcoin will be around in the long haul either! It's essentially a version 1.0 attempt at all of this stuff.... I could easily see bitcoin deprecated in the marketplace, with people instructed to convert it to some newer, better cryptocoin alternative before a certain "drop dead" date when it would become worthless.
I live in a small, rural community myself... yet we have both the local cable provider AND Verizon FiOS available to most homes and farms in the area.
If you *really* have your heart set on living literally in the middle of nowhere, that's one thing (and at that point, I'm not sure one can even expect DSL service?). But we've got clean country air and plenty of peace and quiet in our town of 5,000 or so people -- while still having enough customers to apparently make broadband offerings viable. (A number of people complained that we can't get a Redbox video rental kiosk in town because our population is too low to meet the corporate requirements though.)
I think you're absolutely right. Govt. mandated safety rules aren't what made the auto-makers sell vastly more reliable cars that the American public wanted to buy. And for the record? Most cars STILL lose "almost half their value the moment you drive them off the lot". As much as anything, that's just due to the public's desire to own a new car with the new car smell and everything. As soon as someone takes ownership, it's impossible to resell it as "new" -- so the perceived value drops sharply. (There's also a somewhat baseless fear of what the previous owner might have done to the vehicle before reselling it, or what he/she might have discovered and not wanted to deal with.)
And sure, it's not good for consumers when several big companies get together and agree not to improve what they sell. So what? A free marketplace cures that every time -- because it's called a "huge window of opportunity" for the next small business to pop up with something better and take over. Personally, I think we're seeing it now with cellular carriers, and would see it more clearly if they didn't have so much govt. regulation and assistance behind them to start with. (EG. T-Mobile comes in with all sorts of plans that NONE of the other 1st. tier carriers were ever going to offer people otherwise, since they all colluded to sell contract phones under the same business model they've always used. Now you see carriers like AT&T following suit with $45 for unlimited talk/text plans bundled with a little bit of monthly data.)
I can't remember who it was now, but I just read an article about a black stand-up comedian who is making millions off of a business he created where he produces low-budget TV shows. The key to his success? He realized there are many time slots out there on TV stations that need to be filled with content, but especially for the early morning (1AM to 5AM) -- the low number of viewers means they can't justify paying the prices usually demanded for the right to air existing programming. (That's why you see so many ridiculous 30 minute to 1 hour long infomercials in those time slots.)
So what he does is he cranks out material on an accelerated time-table (shooting a whole episode of a comedy show in a day, where it would normally be done over the span of several days to a week), and using non-union labor. Half of the actors/actresses are friends of his from the stand-up comedy scene and others are "fresh out of college" people who want to catch a break in the business. Then he gives the shows away FREE to the TV stations to air, with the stipulation that they split ad revenue earned while it's airing with his company, 50/50.
His latest tactic is creating multiple Court TV type shows, except none of it is real. (He said he was able to buy a complete courtroom set for only a $1 when a real courtroom wanted to remodel and get rid of all of the old furniture and decor.) He saves a bunch of money on production since there are no real litigants who need to be flown in, put up in a hotel while filming is taking place, etc. And the real win for him? These types of shows draw in a lucrative advertising crowd of people offering legal services!
Sure, this guy might just be creating a bunch of garbage quality television... but I think he's on to something. It speaks to the "big picture" changes, where studios need to come down to earth on the costs of producing programming. Today's actors are where yesterday's rock stars were before the music industry was turned on its head by digital distribution. People, now, are starting to say, "Hey.... I like the entertainment you make, but enough's enough! I'm not going to keep giving you this much of my paycheck for the right to enjoy it! Make me a better deal....."
Actually, I purchased a few of the claimed "instant on" CFL bulbs that General Electric started selling.
They're, IMO, even more annoying than the regular CFL bulbs! It seems the way they achieve "instant on at full brightness" is by sending more than the usual amount of current through it for the first few seconds, resulting in the bulb coming on extremely brightly when you first turn the switch, followed by it dropping back to normal brightness. I found it really distracting.
For the record, I don't see what's not to be impressed about with the libertarian arguments? They hit the nail on the head, IMO, as to why forcing a technology change via govt. regulation yields poor results. I voluntarily switched quite a few of my incandescent bulbs out with alternatives, long before these bans began. Obviously, I'd voluntarily switch out the remaining traditional bulbs if there weren't VALID reasons not to in certain cases. Cost is a big one.... For example, I have some enclosed fixtures where the CFL bulbs just fail from cooking themselves inside the glass domes covering them up. They last maybe 3-6 months, followed by intermittently flickering on and off. Removing them to examine them reveals burn marks around the white plastic base, where the circuity is contained. It's not cost effective to replace entire light fixtures to resolve this!
Nope.... The frustrating thing is, eBay has gotten away with it this long because frankly, they're "best in class" at what they do -- enabling online auction sales.
I don't know that eBay felt any real need to innovate when they're just the digital equivalent of the traditional auction house, which has remained essentially the same for hundreds of years?
Unfortunately for the users, eBay (especially with the PayPal merger) has really built an "all your base belong to us" model where they charge you to list an item, charge you a (ever increasing) percentage of any final sale prices, and profit AGAIN when the buyer pays using PayPal, which they conveniently made the ONLY allowable online payment mechanism.
This winds up screwing the users in another way... lack of options to seek recourse when a transaction goes wrong. With a traditional credit card purchase, I know my credit card issuer offers me certain assurances I won't get ripped off (ability to do a chargeback, and to request an investigation into a fraudulent sale). With the monolithic eBay/PayPal model, it's all about what the company decides to do.
Cryptocoins (bitcoin, etc.) could turn out to force some change over at eBay/PayPal though, IMO. Right now, the auction site AND the payment service both have policies against allowing the sale of any cryptocoins. However, a lot of people are interested in the ability to purchase them directly from an owner, vs. getting on an exchange and placing buy orders like they were purchasing stock shares. The current system doesn't allow eBay/PayPal to conduct one of these transactions safely though (which may be why they disallow it). The REAL fix for them would involve upgrading PayPal to accept cryptocoins as a form of deposit. Will be interesting to see if it's willing to innovate in that manner or not.
I think people "like the impression of ownership" not simply because it's some sort of quirk of human nature, but because it equals control of what's owned. If you think about it though, when it comes to most things of large value - we don't really own what we say we own. A lender does.
I don't know very many people in the U.S. who own their homes, free and clear. Most people I know with relatively nice cars have a loan on them, too.
So why would we be so eager to make those arrangements? Well, there's still the promise that at the end, when all the payments are complete, it truly becomes yours. And just as importantly, as long as you pay on time, nobody ELSE out there has any say so or ability to borrow/use what you're paying for.
That's my problem with a lot of these cloud based services. They offer a number of benefits, but you give up some control in order to use them. I think some people are so used to payment arrangements as part of a purchase, they feel like they're still in control of what they put in the cloud. "I get my very own unique username and password, and I can log in and do whatever I like with the service at any time as long as I keep making my payments on time!" Problem is, there's no end to those payments when the service becomes "yours". You're just a renter of the service, and the law isn't even very clear as to what the "landlord" is obligated to do with your data if you're evicted from the system.
Society wouldn't be so obsessed with telling other people what to do if obesity wasn't something that caused a visible change to a person's body. The bottom line? An awful lot of the feigned "concern" about weight loss is driven by people's own selfish desires for people around them to fit a personal preference of what they deem physically attractive.
IMO, so much of this comes down to individuals making personal decisions about lifestyle. Since I know myself better than anyone else, I'll use myself as an example. I think I eat "somewhat healthy". I grew up with a parent who worked in the medical profession and imposed a lot of rules on my eating, growing up. Never had a snack between meals under my parent's roof, for example, and got into the habit of never eating any of those sugary cereals for breakfast... only the healthy ones like Special K, Product 19, Grape Nuts or Kellogg's "Nutri Grain" products. We always had well balanced meals, even if some of my mom's decisions and beliefs are currently considered wrong. (EG. I remember she avoided avocados, believing they were "too fatty" and therefore bad for you.) But here's the thing. I *also* decided long ago that computers and I.T. was what made me happy and was my career path. That's not very compatible with an "active lifestyle" since you're usually just sitting in front of a screen for 8+ hours a day. I could do what some people do, and go to the gym early in the morning or at night every day or two. But I don't, because it bores me to death and I have so many other things I'd rather do with those hours of my life.
So here I am in my 40's now and surely I could be in better health if that was my primary focus... but I'm "good enough" to suit me, and IMO, that's ALL that should matter. I'm not the "ideal weight" but I'm not obese either. Last doctor's visit, everything checked out just fine, such as blood pressure. Could stand to have lower HDL levels, I was told, but they weren't horrible. I don't smoke and I don't even drink very often anymore, so I figure I have those things in my favor at least.
It disturbs me when I see other people in a very similar situation to myself, yet they're actually paying doctors to inform them they "need to lose 15 or 20lbs." and they're trying to make all these extra efforts towards that goal. If you didn't already decide for YOURSELF you want to do that, you shouldn't let someone else scare you into doing it now. Nobody ever "got out of life alive" anyway. Live a fulfilling life and live it the way YOU like. It belongs to nobody else but you, and only you can say if making a bunch of changes or compromises in an effort to add a few years onto it is worth it or not. (In my case, it's really not.)
I think you're probably right, if you're talking about random applicants. I wound up relocating for my current job position, but I was already friends with a couple of people working for the same company when I found out an opening was available. I think they realized I was going to be more serious about actually accepting the position because I already knew people there.
(I did find out later that they'd been interviewing local candidates for months, and didn't really find anyone they thought was a good fit. So that worked in my favor too, obviously.)
I will say this much: Don't pay TOO much attention to general hype about how many tech jobs exist in a certain area. If you want to relocate, do it for other reasons besides a generic idea that "it has a lot of work for people who do what I do". The area I moved to was recently voted among the top 10 (or even top 5) in tech jobs, but the truth is -- the vast majority of openings are government and military related, so often requiring active security clearances, and are just as often unstable jobs (govt. agency loses funding for reason X and all of a sudden your job gets terminated indefinitely). It's not the "techtopia" the magazines portrayed it to be, especially with the high cost of living. Many of the private sector tech jobs that remain are available/unfilled because the salary is too low to attract anyone any good at tech, vs. the price to rent or buy housing out here.
And when I lived in the midwest before this, I'd also read the occasional article promising how successful one could be there in I.T. But those figures were always heavily slanted. For example, we had one large financial firm in town who constantly ran pages of want-ads for all manner of tech positions. The catch? Those positions were almost always already filled. They just liked to collect up resumes to keep on file in H.R. Good bargaining chips if an employee started demanding a raise.... "I've got X number of people right HERE (waves stack of resumes around) who want to do your job right now!" In general, we really only had a hand-full of other firms doing much I.T. hiring, but they were all big corporate HQ's that employed a lot of people. So collectively, they could really push up the statistics and make things look promising -- but many good I.T. workers would never land a job at any of them, if their previous experience was only working in smaller to mid-size companies. "What? You have no experience dealing with Asian character sets on an Exchange server?! Well, our sister company over in China needs support from here so that's a MUST." (Yep, I actually heard that once in an interview with one of them.)
I believe the entire R9 series of cards are little more than rebranded versions of older cards AMD just discontinued. The R9 280X for example? It's just a 7970 card. Sure, it may have a few BIOS tweaks and such, but you can even peel the label off the circuit board of many of them and find 7970 etched on the board underneath the R9 280X label.
Personally, I think AMD should have waited until it had legitimate improvements to offer before releasing anything, rather than trying to fool people with the R9 series.
Private enterprise can absolutely screw things up, just like governments can. But claiming otherwise is no more absurd than the claims in the original story that currency is inherently a "tool of the State" and therefore doomed to fail if handled privately.
The thing about cryptocoins like Bitcoin is, it's far more difficult to "print the money" than firing up a printing press loaded with the appropriate ink and paper types. It's mined by the whole community, based on a set of mathematical limitations that ensure there's a significant and growing cost involved in minting the stuff. Irresponsible money printing is essentially out of the question with a properly implemented cryptocoin.
At least, this shouldn't concern you any more than using US dollars would.
With the current state of the US dollar, if you just "put it under your mattress" for a while and then pull it out to spend it? You've lost a considerable chunk of its buying power. All the government has really done is mask the reality of things. The fact is, your US dollar is backed by an exponentially increasing amount of debt and an arguably misguided faith in the long term viability of the currency.
I'm not going to link to all sorts of studies or graphs to make my point here. I'm sure you're capable of using Google yourself. But suffice it to say there's plenty of information out there showing you how most salaries haven't really gone up in decades for equivalent job positions/titles, yet inflation has. The recent outcries to raise the minimum wage (Maryland just voted to raise it to $11.50 in stages over the next couple years) are really a symptom of this problem, although not a solution -- since raising the minimum just means raising the entire pay scale across the board by an equal amount (if not immediately, inevitably over a short span of time - to fix the suddenly narrowed gap between doing basic labor and doing something far more advanced or demanding).
While yes, Bitxcoin values are wildly fluctuating at the moment, it's bound to settle down as it gets more established as a viable currency. When you don't have a whole lot of retailers willing to accept it for transactions, it's going to get treated more like a stock or investment property than a currency. But not a day goes by that I don't hear about at least one new merchant accepting it. There's a Jeep dealer in Kansas City, MO who lets you buy a new car with Bitcoin, and an antique shop in the French Quarter in New Orleans has the "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in its window. I don't think this is just going to fade away.
I was referring to the number of women I've known who were actively working full-time doing software development/coding for a living -- without regard to how long they held the position.
I don't know where you work, and for that matter -- I never worked for a company primarily focused on software development, so maybe my personal experiences don't include a lot of situations? But I have worked in I.T. for companies who had software development teams on staff -- and I haven't run into any women writing the actual code any of those teams yet. (We had a female manager in charge of one of the teams, but she technically had a background in database administration - not coding. That was a good fit, tthough, since the custom app they supported was linked to a back end database.)
A buddy of mine used to do QC for a software development firm and I remember him telling me about a couple of female software devs over there. The rest of the employees were male. (As I recall, one of the females was pretty well known for not really being very bright or good at coding either. Unfortunate in such a lopsided industry to further reinforce a flawed concept that "women can't code"... but it was what it was.)
Scarcer than "we" thought? Who is the "we"? In close to 30 years of working with computers, I can count on one hand the number of females I've run into who actually code for a living.
I think more wind up in some sort of project management position over a group of developers... but even that's not quite commonplace.
I don't think this has much of anything to do with equality of pay between men and women, nor is it the fault of sexist hiring practices. It's simply fact that very few women get too excited about the prospects of working in a job where you have to sit in front of a computer screen all day, entering lines of code and trying to figure out small syntax or logic errors causing your code not to work properly.
By and large, I find the women I've known to be more interested in creative pursuits (like photography, art or music), or there's an interest in being a little more people oriented (everything from Human Resources jobs to middle management to marketing or sales). Those who really embrace the idea of having a quiet desk job in a comfortable office and would rather solve problems than shake hands and talk to people tend to lean towards accounting/payroll positions.
In fact, I'd say you find a few more women interested in software coding when the task is more creative (Roberta Williams, for example, who co-founded Sierra Entertainment and wrote the King's Quest adventure game series). But the kind of development most companies are hiring for is far from creative, except at a very micro level where few people even appreciate a novel, efficient line or two of code to accomplish some small portion of the overall task.
Our company would LOVE to migrate everyone away from Outlook and Exchange for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it encourages the use of the email system as an all purpose filing system, yet turns around and imposes severe limits on the number of objects it can handle before performance degrades and functions simply quit working properly. (I believe the speed and memory capacity of the client have some bearing on what the limit is for a particular user, but I've often heard recommendations to keep it under 1,000 or so objects per folder. That may sound like a lot until you realize people often have more than that in their Outlook calendar alone, if they've worked for the company for 4 or 5 years and never thought to try to delete any scheduled appointments or entries that happened in the past. Not only that, but recurring entries, such as "schedule my staff meeting every Wednesday at 1PM through the end of 2015" create separate entries for EACH occurrence!)
Regardless, there's really not much of anything out there that's provably better. Zimbra looks interesting as a possible web-based alternative? But mostly, people really like all of this data stored (or at least cached) locally on the computer running the client, for fast access and ability to work with everything even when offline. Combine that with the functionality Outlook/Exchange provides -- and it's a tall order to match or beat it with another product.
Not defending the "net surfing while driving" thing in any way, shape or form.... but the "just pull over to the side" thing is almost too impractical to consider in most real-world situations.
For starters, no, there's really NOT always a shoulder to pull off to the side. The rural community I live in, for example, has only a couple of 2 lane roads as the primary paths in or out of the town. On one of them, it's really more like 1 1/2 lanes and there's absolutely NO extra room to pull over. On the other, it's a little bit better but areas to pull off to the side only appear randomly.
Other times you have the opposite problem.... If you're on a 6 or 7 lane interstate full of traffic, it's no easy task getting all the way over and safely pulling off the highway. And once you do? Motorists assume you're having some sort of vehicle problem, so it's only a matter of minutes before people come up behind you asking if you need assistance, and/or the cops pull up behind you to ask what's going on. The shoulders are really treated as places your car or truck doesn't belong unless it's disabled.
I think the "its expensive" excuse might be the one with some validity to it. For starters, it's not always sunny and many homes sit in the shade (often by design). Then, you've got the issue that those big solar panels on the roof need to be kept clean or else they'll lose efficiency. Not everyone is comfortable climbing up on a ladder and running around on their roof, getting all the dust and debris off the solar panels on a regular basis -- so that means another expense hiring someone to do it for them. And then, because storing all the power in batteries really wasn't practical or cost-effective (batteries wear out after a while - especially if we're talking about the types made a couple decades ago, and they create disposal issues when someone wants to discard them) -- most solar installs relied on receiving energy credits from the power company for putting the power back onto the grid.
When you get too many people doing that, the power companies start losing interest in paying you back for it. (A big challenge for the electric company lies in the power distribution. A given line can only handle so much power going over it. At some point, it starts becoming a problem instead of a help if you've got a bunch of electricity suddenly pouring down your lines from homes with solar power on a bright, sunny day.)
I get where you're coming from on this. The townhouse I'm renting now winds up costing me a small fortune in utilities when it gets cold and the family wants it to remain comfortably warm, or to keep it tolerably cool in July and August.
I was promised "because it has a heat pump", my bills were going to be really reasonable. Well, maybe that's better than not having one at all... but I'm sure the landlord used the cheapest one he could get his hands on when it was new, and it's been repaired and patched up to keep it going for many years now. So it's not giving anywhere near the savings one would see with a good, updated model.
I'm not a big fan of legislation forcing people to make changes like this though. What would probably be smart is if some landlords got a clue and voluntarily made properties very energy efficient, and then used that as a selling point when advertising the property for rent. I don't think I've ever seen this done yet, which strikes me as a little bit odd.
I currently live in a small town (population 5,000 or so) where they used to have a small video rental store called Jerry's before I moved here. It went under, because the cost of rent and employee wages + utilities and buying new product was just more than the store could bring in.
A number of people in town keep talking about missing the store though. Turns out some people simply don't have cable or satellite, and don't necessarily want to watch programming from a home computer, even if they've got broadband internet. Especially if you have those combo DVD player/TV sets - sometimes you simply want the physical DVDs to watch movies.
I think it's a dying niche, but one that's there still some interest in -- especially if a rental store offers good advise/recommendations. I don't know if Blockbuster leaving will be enough to justify independents re-opening though? Personally, I think the answer might be a hybrid situation. EG. Offer physical DVD rentals out of an existing establishment that's already successful on its own - like a gas station, bar or grocery store.
Yes, I believe Redbox basically built itself a monopoly on the rental kiosks, for that matter. There were several independent firms selling vending kiosks (such as "DVDNow" systems) but everything I've read from people maintaining them says it's little more than a break-even proposition at best.
The companies offering the independent kiosks try to profit off monthly fees charged for such things as fresh artwork designed to put on the kiosks to advertise the current offerings for rent, and for the bar-coded labels required on each DVD so the machine can catalog it properly. But the big profit killer has always been the credit card processing fees. Especially when each transaction tends to be for as little as $1 or so each, card processors want a large cut to handle those. And don't forget the internet connection to the kiosk so it can do the card transactions.... If you install your kiosk at a location where the owner says you can just use his/her existing internet connection, you're at their mercy if the connection goes down, so that can eat into any savings obtained by not paying for a dedicated line.
As an independent, you're also stuck running out to stores like WalMart regularly to buy new DVDs to load in the machines, not to mention keeping on top of replacing scratched or damaged discs. Imagine how much work is involved in maintaining a vending machine route, and multiply it by all the complexities involved in renting (vs. just selling product) and a more complicated and expensive vending machine (more costly repairs when it breaks down).
It stands to reason that once a "big player" like Redbox (initially backed financially by McDonalds -- who also conveniently served as an ideal high-traffic location for thousands of the kiosks) got into the game, everyone else was squeezed out.
Could tech be at the end of another bubble? Sure, I suppose. But it seems to me the college tuition situation is more clearly ripe to burst? And how about govt. treasury bonds?
At least with tech, I think quite a few of the highly valued companies are truly successful. (Apple, as a prime example.) For every one of these questionable Tumblr type purchases of some web-based service, therre are dozens of others who nobody seems to be interested in buying at all. I'd say most investors are being fairly selective, even if they do gamble a bit on the occasional "high profile" site that's not yet making a profit.
I can assure you that as a guy on the other end of the table from many of the salespeople sent to talk with me about products or services, I typically find myself losing interest in everything they're saying - NOT because they didn't keep 100% eye contact or I got the idea they were distracted by a cellphone text or call. It's because they try too hard to put on what's a clearly FAKE show, while not really having good answers to my questions.
It's pathetic how often businesses want to sell a very technical service or high-tech and costly product, but the salespeople sent to close the deal have little knowledge about any details of how the product/service would perform in the environment. I'm SO tired of the "pretty people" showing up with a huge (fake) smile and over-eagerness to laugh any any of my jokes, but can't answer a damn thing about technical concerns we have if we buy it vs. another technology.
You're wrong... Your sales team needs KNOWLEDGE far more than any of those other 4 things, and yes - most of us in I.T. can do without the business cards too. Just send us that in an email, please.
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Fair enough.... But I'm not sure anyone's ready to utilize this processor power for something else (like curing cancer or getting us to colonize another planet)? Projects like Folding@Home created a lot of buzz and sounded amazing on paper, until you talk to researchers about it and find out there are very few computational problems they need to solve which could best be handled in a distributed computing nature.
I think some of this goes back to the old sayings like, "You can't bake a cake any faster by adding more chefs in the kitchen.", and "You can't birth a baby in 1 month instead of 9 by putting 9 pregnant women on the task."
I don't really see how the computing power focused on bitcoin "stole it away" from some other more worthy project? Everyone I know doing mining purchased brand new hardware for the purpose, or simply re-used existing machines for the task (deciding they'd rather make some money with high end video cards than doing nothing with them except playing video games occasionally with them).
No, I don't think it's "sad" at all. You've got to remember a few key things here:
1. This is more than just "wasting an amazing amount of computing power on transaction handling". This is the start of a revolution in payments and currency. I don't think it's really fathomable that you could create a universal, decentralized yet reliable digital payment system like this via a commercial entity (such as PayPal) trying to market it. You need something much bigger to make it viable; something on this scale of adoption.
2. Over half of the total number of bitcoins allowed to exist have been mined already. By the time they're all mined, where will we be with everything? I suspect the big "arms race" to mine as much as possible up to that point will serve to advance the computing technology as far and as rapidly as possible. So by the time mining is done for the sake of generating new coins -- we'll have far more energy efficient machines, at lower up-front costs, able to do the job. The amount of hardware that remains online to process the transactions will likely drop back off too, as the only profit to be found in doing it at that point is whatever you can charge as transaction fees for helping the existing coins get moved around.
Not saying you're wrong... but simply saying it's complicated enough that I sure wouldn't write it off yet.
Bitcoin may have a fixed limit, but there are literally dozens of other cryptocoins out there vying for attention and viability. Some appear to be little more than bad ripoffs of existing code used for an earlier coin, and likely pre-mined by the author in the hopes of making a quick buck off of them. Others (like litecoin) seem to be following in lock-step with the rises and falls of bitcoin in the marketplace, although at a much lower value per coin.
I think it's very short-sighted to believe bitcoin would ever be used by itself as a form of digital currency. It's worth a high enough value already (and continues to trend upwards) that it's very inconvenient to use to pay for smaller items or more inexpensive services. (Nobody likes to work with numbers multiple digits to the right of the decimal place.) The litecoin proponents often use the analogy of it being "silver to bitcoin's gold". Who knows ... but it's certain that when using U.S. currency, simply having $100 bills to pay for smaller items is impractical. (Many shops caution you with signs in the window that they don't make change for bills larger than $20.)
I'm not sure if bitcoin would run into the perceived "volume required exceeds coins in existence" issues, causing deflation, if it wound up only used for very large transactions, alongside multiple other altcoin options? As long as coin exchanges exist and other cryptocoins are in active use, there would be ways to convert bitcoin into other coins anyway -- further eliminating the concerns of it becoming a deflationary currency.
Heck, there's really nothing saying bitcoin will be around in the long haul either! It's essentially a version 1.0 attempt at all of this stuff.... I could easily see bitcoin deprecated in the marketplace, with people instructed to convert it to some newer, better cryptocoin alternative before a certain "drop dead" date when it would become worthless.
I live in a small, rural community myself ... yet we have both the local cable provider AND Verizon FiOS available to most homes and farms in the area.
If you *really* have your heart set on living literally in the middle of nowhere, that's one thing (and at that point, I'm not sure one can even expect DSL service?). But we've got clean country air and plenty of peace and quiet in our town of 5,000 or so people -- while still having enough customers to apparently make broadband offerings viable. (A number of people complained that we can't get a Redbox video rental kiosk in town because our population is too low to meet the corporate requirements though.)
I think you're absolutely right. Govt. mandated safety rules aren't what made the auto-makers sell vastly more reliable cars that the American public wanted to buy. And for the record? Most cars STILL lose "almost half their value the moment you drive them off the lot". As much as anything, that's just due to the public's desire to own a new car with the new car smell and everything. As soon as someone takes ownership, it's impossible to resell it as "new" -- so the perceived value drops sharply. (There's also a somewhat baseless fear of what the previous owner might have done to the vehicle before reselling it, or what he/she might have discovered and not wanted to deal with.)
And sure, it's not good for consumers when several big companies get together and agree not to improve what they sell. So what? A free marketplace cures that every time -- because it's called a "huge window of opportunity" for the next small business to pop up with something better and take over. Personally, I think we're seeing it now with cellular carriers, and would see it more clearly if they didn't have so much govt. regulation and assistance behind them to start with. (EG. T-Mobile comes in with all sorts of plans that NONE of the other 1st. tier carriers were ever going to offer people otherwise, since they all colluded to sell contract phones under the same business model they've always used. Now you see carriers like AT&T following suit with $45 for unlimited talk/text plans bundled with a little bit of monthly data.)
I can't remember who it was now, but I just read an article about a black stand-up comedian who is making millions off of a business he created where he produces low-budget TV shows. The key to his success? He realized there are many time slots out there on TV stations that need to be filled with content, but especially for the early morning (1AM to 5AM) -- the low number of viewers means they can't justify paying the prices usually demanded for the right to air existing programming. (That's why you see so many ridiculous 30 minute to 1 hour long infomercials in those time slots.)
So what he does is he cranks out material on an accelerated time-table (shooting a whole episode of a comedy show in a day, where it would normally be done over the span of several days to a week), and using non-union labor. Half of the actors/actresses are friends of his from the stand-up comedy scene and others are "fresh out of college" people who want to catch a break in the business. Then he gives the shows away FREE to the TV stations to air, with the stipulation that they split ad revenue earned while it's airing with his company, 50/50.
His latest tactic is creating multiple Court TV type shows, except none of it is real. (He said he was able to buy a complete courtroom set for only a $1 when a real courtroom wanted to remodel and get rid of all of the old furniture and decor.) He saves a bunch of money on production since there are no real litigants who need to be flown in, put up in a hotel while filming is taking place, etc. And the real win for him? These types of shows draw in a lucrative advertising crowd of people offering legal services!
Sure, this guy might just be creating a bunch of garbage quality television ... but I think he's on to something. It speaks to the "big picture" changes, where studios need to come down to earth on the costs of producing programming. Today's actors are where yesterday's rock stars were before the music industry was turned on its head by digital distribution. People, now, are starting to say, "Hey.... I like the entertainment you make, but enough's enough! I'm not going to keep giving you this much of my paycheck for the right to enjoy it! Make me a better deal....."
Actually, I purchased a few of the claimed "instant on" CFL bulbs that General Electric started selling.
They're, IMO, even more annoying than the regular CFL bulbs! It seems the way they achieve "instant on at full brightness" is by sending more than the usual amount of current through it for the first few seconds, resulting in the bulb coming on extremely brightly when you first turn the switch, followed by it dropping back to normal brightness. I found it really distracting.
For the record, I don't see what's not to be impressed about with the libertarian arguments? They hit the nail on the head, IMO, as to why forcing a technology change via govt. regulation yields poor results. I voluntarily switched quite a few of my incandescent bulbs out with alternatives, long before these bans began. Obviously, I'd voluntarily switch out the remaining traditional bulbs if there weren't VALID reasons not to in certain cases. Cost is a big one.... For example, I have some enclosed fixtures where the CFL bulbs just fail from cooking themselves inside the glass domes covering them up. They last maybe 3-6 months, followed by intermittently flickering on and off. Removing them to examine them reveals burn marks around the white plastic base, where the circuity is contained. It's not cost effective to replace entire light fixtures to resolve this!
Nope.... The frustrating thing is, eBay has gotten away with it this long because frankly, they're "best in class" at what they do -- enabling online auction sales.
I don't know that eBay felt any real need to innovate when they're just the digital equivalent of the traditional auction house, which has remained essentially the same for hundreds of years?
Unfortunately for the users, eBay (especially with the PayPal merger) has really built an "all your base belong to us" model where they charge you to list an item, charge you a (ever increasing) percentage of any final sale prices, and profit AGAIN when the buyer pays using PayPal, which they conveniently made the ONLY allowable online payment mechanism.
This winds up screwing the users in another way ... lack of options to seek recourse when a transaction goes wrong. With a traditional credit card purchase, I know my credit card issuer offers me certain assurances I won't get ripped off (ability to do a chargeback, and to request an investigation into a fraudulent sale). With the monolithic eBay/PayPal model, it's all about what the company decides to do.
Cryptocoins (bitcoin, etc.) could turn out to force some change over at eBay/PayPal though, IMO. Right now, the auction site AND the payment service both have policies against allowing the sale of any cryptocoins. However, a lot of people are interested in the ability to purchase them directly from an owner, vs. getting on an exchange and placing buy orders like they were purchasing stock shares. The current system doesn't allow eBay/PayPal to conduct one of these transactions safely though (which may be why they disallow it). The REAL fix for them would involve upgrading PayPal to accept cryptocoins as a form of deposit. Will be interesting to see if it's willing to innovate in that manner or not.
I think people "like the impression of ownership" not simply because it's some sort of quirk of human nature, but because it equals control of what's owned. If you think about it though, when it comes to most things of large value - we don't really own what we say we own. A lender does.
I don't know very many people in the U.S. who own their homes, free and clear. Most people I know with relatively nice cars have a loan on them, too.
So why would we be so eager to make those arrangements? Well, there's still the promise that at the end, when all the payments are complete, it truly becomes yours. And just as importantly, as long as you pay on time, nobody ELSE out there has any say so or ability to borrow/use what you're paying for.
That's my problem with a lot of these cloud based services. They offer a number of benefits, but you give up some control in order to use them. I think some people are so used to payment arrangements as part of a purchase, they feel like they're still in control of what they put in the cloud. "I get my very own unique username and password, and I can log in and do whatever I like with the service at any time as long as I keep making my payments on time!" Problem is, there's no end to those payments when the service becomes "yours". You're just a renter of the service, and the law isn't even very clear as to what the "landlord" is obligated to do with your data if you're evicted from the system.
Society wouldn't be so obsessed with telling other people what to do if obesity wasn't something that caused a visible change to a person's body. The bottom line? An awful lot of the feigned "concern" about weight loss is driven by people's own selfish desires for people around them to fit a personal preference of what they deem physically attractive.
IMO, so much of this comes down to individuals making personal decisions about lifestyle. Since I know myself better than anyone else, I'll use myself as an example. I think I eat "somewhat healthy". I grew up with a parent who worked in the medical profession and imposed a lot of rules on my eating, growing up. Never had a snack between meals under my parent's roof, for example, and got into the habit of never eating any of those sugary cereals for breakfast ... only the healthy ones like Special K, Product 19, Grape Nuts or Kellogg's "Nutri Grain" products. We always had well balanced meals, even if some of my mom's decisions and beliefs are currently considered wrong. (EG. I remember she avoided avocados, believing they were "too fatty" and therefore bad for you.) But here's the thing. I *also* decided long ago that computers and I.T. was what made me happy and was my career path. That's not very compatible with an "active lifestyle" since you're usually just sitting in front of a screen for 8+ hours a day. I could do what some people do, and go to the gym early in the morning or at night every day or two. But I don't, because it bores me to death and I have so many other things I'd rather do with those hours of my life.
So here I am in my 40's now and surely I could be in better health if that was my primary focus ... but I'm "good enough" to suit me, and IMO, that's ALL that should matter. I'm not the "ideal weight" but I'm not obese either. Last doctor's visit, everything checked out just fine, such as blood pressure. Could stand to have lower HDL levels, I was told, but they weren't horrible. I don't smoke and I don't even drink very often anymore, so I figure I have those things in my favor at least.
It disturbs me when I see other people in a very similar situation to myself, yet they're actually paying doctors to inform them they "need to lose 15 or 20lbs." and they're trying to make all these extra efforts towards that goal. If you didn't already decide for YOURSELF you want to do that, you shouldn't let someone else scare you into doing it now. Nobody ever "got out of life alive" anyway. Live a fulfilling life and live it the way YOU like. It belongs to nobody else but you, and only you can say if making a bunch of changes or compromises in an effort to add a few years onto it is worth it or not. (In my case, it's really not.)
I think you're probably right, if you're talking about random applicants. I wound up relocating for my current job position, but I was already friends with a couple of people working for the same company when I found out an opening was available. I think they realized I was going to be more serious about actually accepting the position because I already knew people there.
(I did find out later that they'd been interviewing local candidates for months, and didn't really find anyone they thought was a good fit. So that worked in my favor too, obviously.)
I will say this much: Don't pay TOO much attention to general hype about how many tech jobs exist in a certain area. If you want to relocate, do it for other reasons besides a generic idea that "it has a lot of work for people who do what I do". The area I moved to was recently voted among the top 10 (or even top 5) in tech jobs, but the truth is -- the vast majority of openings are government and military related, so often requiring active security clearances, and are just as often unstable jobs (govt. agency loses funding for reason X and all of a sudden your job gets terminated indefinitely). It's not the "techtopia" the magazines portrayed it to be, especially with the high cost of living. Many of the private sector tech jobs that remain are available/unfilled because the salary is too low to attract anyone any good at tech, vs. the price to rent or buy housing out here.
And when I lived in the midwest before this, I'd also read the occasional article promising how successful one could be there in I.T. But those figures were always heavily slanted. For example, we had one large financial firm in town who constantly ran pages of want-ads for all manner of tech positions. The catch? Those positions were almost always already filled. They just liked to collect up resumes to keep on file in H.R. Good bargaining chips if an employee started demanding a raise.... "I've got X number of people right HERE (waves stack of resumes around) who want to do your job right now!" In general, we really only had a hand-full of other firms doing much I.T. hiring, but they were all big corporate HQ's that employed a lot of people. So collectively, they could really push up the statistics and make things look promising -- but many good I.T. workers would never land a job at any of them, if their previous experience was only working in smaller to mid-size companies. "What? You have no experience dealing with Asian character sets on an Exchange server?! Well, our sister company over in China needs support from here so that's a MUST." (Yep, I actually heard that once in an interview with one of them.)
I believe the entire R9 series of cards are little more than rebranded versions of older cards AMD just discontinued. The R9 280X for example? It's just a 7970 card. Sure, it may have a few BIOS tweaks and such, but you can even peel the label off the circuit board of many of them and find 7970 etched on the board underneath the R9 280X label.
Personally, I think AMD should have waited until it had legitimate improvements to offer before releasing anything, rather than trying to fool people with the R9 series.
Private enterprise can absolutely screw things up, just like governments can. But claiming otherwise is no more absurd than the claims in the original story that currency is inherently a "tool of the State" and therefore doomed to fail if handled privately.
The thing about cryptocoins like Bitcoin is, it's far more difficult to "print the money" than firing up a printing press loaded with the appropriate ink and paper types. It's mined by the whole community, based on a set of mathematical limitations that ensure there's a significant and growing cost involved in minting the stuff. Irresponsible money printing is essentially out of the question with a properly implemented cryptocoin.
At least, this shouldn't concern you any more than using US dollars would.
With the current state of the US dollar, if you just "put it under your mattress" for a while and then pull it out to spend it? You've lost a considerable chunk of its buying power. All the government has really done is mask the reality of things. The fact is, your US dollar is backed by an exponentially increasing amount of debt and an arguably misguided faith in the long term viability of the currency.
I'm not going to link to all sorts of studies or graphs to make my point here. I'm sure you're capable of using Google yourself. But suffice it to say there's plenty of information out there showing you how most salaries haven't really gone up in decades for equivalent job positions/titles, yet inflation has. The recent outcries to raise the minimum wage (Maryland just voted to raise it to $11.50 in stages over the next couple years) are really a symptom of this problem, although not a solution -- since raising the minimum just means raising the entire pay scale across the board by an equal amount (if not immediately, inevitably over a short span of time - to fix the suddenly narrowed gap between doing basic labor and doing something far more advanced or demanding).
While yes, Bitxcoin values are wildly fluctuating at the moment, it's bound to settle down as it gets more established as a viable currency. When you don't have a whole lot of retailers willing to accept it for transactions, it's going to get treated more like a stock or investment property than a currency. But not a day goes by that I don't hear about at least one new merchant accepting it. There's a Jeep dealer in Kansas City, MO who lets you buy a new car with Bitcoin, and an antique shop in the French Quarter in New Orleans has the "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in its window. I don't think this is just going to fade away.
I was referring to the number of women I've known who were actively working full-time doing software development/coding for a living -- without regard to how long they held the position.
I don't know where you work, and for that matter -- I never worked for a company primarily focused on software development, so maybe my personal experiences don't include a lot of situations? But I have worked in I.T. for companies who had software development teams on staff -- and I haven't run into any women writing the actual code any of those teams yet. (We had a female manager in charge of one of the teams, but she technically had a background in database administration - not coding. That was a good fit, tthough, since the custom app they supported was linked to a back end database.)
A buddy of mine used to do QC for a software development firm and I remember him telling me about a couple of female software devs over there. The rest of the employees were male. (As I recall, one of the females was pretty well known for not really being very bright or good at coding either. Unfortunate in such a lopsided industry to further reinforce a flawed concept that "women can't code" ... but it was what it was.)
Scarcer than "we" thought? Who is the "we"? In close to 30 years of working with computers, I can count on one hand the number of females I've run into who actually code for a living.
I think more wind up in some sort of project management position over a group of developers ... but even that's not quite commonplace.
I don't think this has much of anything to do with equality of pay between men and women, nor is it the fault of sexist hiring practices. It's simply fact that very few women get too excited about the prospects of working in a job where you have to sit in front of a computer screen all day, entering lines of code and trying to figure out small syntax or logic errors causing your code not to work properly.
By and large, I find the women I've known to be more interested in creative pursuits (like photography, art or music), or there's an interest in being a little more people oriented (everything from Human Resources jobs to middle management to marketing or sales). Those who really embrace the idea of having a quiet desk job in a comfortable office and would rather solve problems than shake hands and talk to people tend to lean towards accounting/payroll positions.
In fact, I'd say you find a few more women interested in software coding when the task is more creative (Roberta Williams, for example, who co-founded Sierra Entertainment and wrote the King's Quest adventure game series). But the kind of development most companies are hiring for is far from creative, except at a very micro level where few people even appreciate a novel, efficient line or two of code to accomplish some small portion of the overall task.
Yeah, this is unfortunately quite true.
Our company would LOVE to migrate everyone away from Outlook and Exchange for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it encourages the use of the email system as an all purpose filing system, yet turns around and imposes severe limits on the number of objects it can handle before performance degrades and functions simply quit working properly. (I believe the speed and memory capacity of the client have some bearing on what the limit is for a particular user, but I've often heard recommendations to keep it under 1,000 or so objects per folder. That may sound like a lot until you realize people often have more than that in their Outlook calendar alone, if they've worked for the company for 4 or 5 years and never thought to try to delete any scheduled appointments or entries that happened in the past. Not only that, but recurring entries, such as "schedule my staff meeting every Wednesday at 1PM through the end of 2015" create separate entries for EACH occurrence!)
Regardless, there's really not much of anything out there that's provably better. Zimbra looks interesting as a possible web-based alternative? But mostly, people really like all of this data stored (or at least cached) locally on the computer running the client, for fast access and ability to work with everything even when offline. Combine that with the functionality Outlook/Exchange provides -- and it's a tall order to match or beat it with another product.
Not defending the "net surfing while driving" thing in any way, shape or form .... but the "just pull over to the side" thing is almost too impractical to consider in most real-world situations.
For starters, no, there's really NOT always a shoulder to pull off to the side. The rural community I live in, for example, has only a couple of 2 lane roads as the primary paths in or out of the town. On one of them, it's really more like 1 1/2 lanes and there's absolutely NO extra room to pull over. On the other, it's a little bit better but areas to pull off to the side only appear randomly.
Other times you have the opposite problem.... If you're on a 6 or 7 lane interstate full of traffic, it's no easy task getting all the way over and safely pulling off the highway. And once you do? Motorists assume you're having some sort of vehicle problem, so it's only a matter of minutes before people come up behind you asking if you need assistance, and/or the cops pull up behind you to ask what's going on. The shoulders are really treated as places your car or truck doesn't belong unless it's disabled.
Rebox refuses to place a kiosk in a town with as population as low as 5,000 people. They've got minimums for that.
I think the "its expensive" excuse might be the one with some validity to it. For starters, it's not always sunny and many homes sit in the shade (often by design).
Then, you've got the issue that those big solar panels on the roof need to be kept clean or else they'll lose efficiency. Not everyone is comfortable climbing up on a ladder and running around on their roof, getting all the dust and debris off the solar panels on a regular basis -- so that means another expense hiring someone to do it for them. And then, because storing all the power in batteries really wasn't practical or cost-effective (batteries wear out after a while - especially if we're talking about the types made a couple decades ago, and they create disposal issues when someone wants to discard them) -- most solar installs relied on receiving energy credits from the power company for putting the power back onto the grid.
When you get too many people doing that, the power companies start losing interest in paying you back for it. (A big challenge for the electric company lies in the power distribution. A given line can only handle so much power going over it. At some point, it starts becoming a problem instead of a help if you've got a bunch of electricity suddenly pouring down your lines from homes with solar power on a bright, sunny day.)
I get where you're coming from on this. The townhouse I'm renting now winds up costing me a small fortune in utilities when it gets cold and the family wants it to remain comfortably warm, or to keep it tolerably cool in July and August.
I was promised "because it has a heat pump", my bills were going to be really reasonable. Well, maybe that's better than not having one at all ... but I'm sure the landlord used the cheapest one he could get his hands on when it was new, and it's been repaired and patched up to keep it going for many years now. So it's not giving anywhere near the savings one would see with a good, updated model.
I'm not a big fan of legislation forcing people to make changes like this though. What would probably be smart is if some landlords got a clue and voluntarily made properties very energy efficient, and then used that as a selling point when advertising the property for rent. I don't think I've ever seen this done yet, which strikes me as a little bit odd.
I wonder about this myself.
I currently live in a small town (population 5,000 or so) where they used to have a small video rental store called Jerry's before I moved here. It went under, because the cost of rent and employee wages + utilities and buying new product was just more than the store could bring in.
A number of people in town keep talking about missing the store though. Turns out some people simply don't have cable or satellite, and don't necessarily want to watch programming from a home computer, even if they've got broadband internet. Especially if you have those combo DVD player/TV sets - sometimes you simply want the physical DVDs to watch movies.
I think it's a dying niche, but one that's there still some interest in -- especially if a rental store offers good advise/recommendations. I don't know if Blockbuster leaving will be enough to justify independents re-opening though? Personally, I think the answer might be a hybrid situation. EG. Offer physical DVD rentals out of an existing establishment that's already successful on its own - like a gas station, bar or grocery store.
Yes, I believe Redbox basically built itself a monopoly on the rental kiosks, for that matter. There were several independent firms selling vending kiosks (such as "DVDNow" systems) but everything I've read from people maintaining them says it's little more than a break-even proposition at best.
The companies offering the independent kiosks try to profit off monthly fees charged for such things as fresh artwork designed to put on the kiosks to advertise the current offerings for rent, and for the bar-coded labels required on each DVD so the machine can catalog it properly. But the big profit killer has always been the credit card processing fees. Especially when each transaction tends to be for as little as $1 or so each, card processors want a large cut to handle those. And don't forget the internet connection to the kiosk so it can do the card transactions.... If you install your kiosk at a location where the owner says you can just use his/her existing internet connection, you're at their mercy if the connection goes down, so that can eat into any savings obtained by not paying for a dedicated line.
As an independent, you're also stuck running out to stores like WalMart regularly to buy new DVDs to load in the machines, not to mention keeping on top of replacing scratched or damaged discs. Imagine how much work is involved in maintaining a vending machine route, and multiply it by all the complexities involved in renting (vs. just selling product) and a more complicated and expensive vending machine (more costly repairs when it breaks down).
It stands to reason that once a "big player" like Redbox (initially backed financially by McDonalds -- who also conveniently served as an ideal high-traffic location for thousands of the kiosks) got into the game, everyone else was squeezed out.
Could tech be at the end of another bubble? Sure, I suppose. But it seems to me the college tuition situation is more clearly ripe to burst? And how about govt. treasury bonds?
At least with tech, I think quite a few of the highly valued companies are truly successful. (Apple, as a prime example.) For every one of these questionable Tumblr type purchases of some web-based service, therre are dozens of others who nobody seems to be interested in buying at all. I'd say most investors are being fairly selective, even if they do gamble a bit on the occasional "high profile" site that's not yet making a profit.
This is exactly why sales is for suckers.
I can assure you that as a guy on the other end of the table from many of the salespeople sent to talk with me about products or services, I typically find myself losing interest in everything they're saying - NOT because they didn't keep 100% eye contact or I got the idea they were distracted by a cellphone text or call. It's because they try too hard to put on what's a clearly FAKE show, while not really having good answers to my questions.
It's pathetic how often businesses want to sell a very technical service or high-tech and costly product, but the salespeople sent to close the deal have little knowledge about any details of how the product/service would perform in the environment. I'm SO tired of the "pretty people" showing up with a huge (fake) smile and over-eagerness to laugh any any of my jokes, but can't answer a damn thing about technical concerns we have if we buy it vs. another technology.
You're wrong... Your sales team needs KNOWLEDGE far more than any of those other 4 things, and yes - most of us in I.T. can do without the business cards too. Just send us that in an email, please.