My dad just bought one of these last month. He had an Epson before and cartridges were about $28 a pop. When we went to Circuit City to pick out a printer he saw the big "$10 black cartridge" blurb on the front of the printer and it was a sale. Didn't care about print quality or features or anything else.
I think Kodak is ahead of the curve on this one. The cartridge racket has pissed off enough average consumers that I can't believe Epson and HP are idiot enough to still continue it. By the time this crypto whackadoodle scheme comes to market hopefully their existing business model will be dead.
Generalizing all of IT under one umbrella is a bit like saying that "electrical work" is boring. Yes, installing a new junction box might be a bit mundane, but working on the electrical system of the Mars Rover probably is not.
Most of IT might seem to involve putting together off the shelf solutions, but that's because the industry is much bigger. In contrast, the cutting edge seems much smaller. There are still quite a few people working on clustering systems for bioinformatics or better tree sort algorithms, but compared to the number of database administration jobs, those jobs are few. If you want one of them, get a PhD and spend a few years proving yourself. Don't expect a job in the latest research if you have a BS in software engineering and have been spending the last five years writing Java code for a bank.
We don't need tens of thousands of 170IQ creative types in IT any more than we need them in plumbing or electrical engineering.
Actually, I work in deployment in an HP shop, and I can save you from that "O/S Not Found" message.
Allow me to tell you more.
The vendor supplies us with the MAC address before the system gets here. I can put that into our management system (Altiris), and when the computer first boots, it's going to boot into our PXE server by default. Then it will get a nice WinPE image downloaded to it and voila, it does what we want it to do.
Not every PC runs spreadsheets and a browser. If I wanted to set up a cluster to handle distributed bioinformatics analysis, I really wouldn't care what's on the hard drive. Could be Windows 98 for all I know. I just care about that nice CPU and maxed out RAM.
Yes, we've been pouring millions of US dollars into MANY different countries, not just this particular one. What has it accomplished exactly? Africa was starving when I was in high school, they're still starving.
The problem most Westerner planners have is that they just assume that everyone else thinks like them. You really DON'T need solar panels and batteries in a rural village with no power. What you need is a cheap and disgustingly low tech way to hook up a couple of bicycles so that they can produce enough power to run what you need run.
I don't know if anyone here has read "The Ugly American" by Lederer and Burdick (1958), but it is the book that should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in projects in developing countries. Technological improvements should be incremental by design. If a village has 500 bicycles and no gasoline station, designing a cart that can be pulled by 2 bikes and carries a few hundred pounds would be a LOT more useful than buying them a Ford F350.
Now don't get me wrong - Gates' money can be used to tremendous effect in any given developing country. But you'd be much better off spending it on old-fashioned textbooks and pencils than solar panels and laptops.
And how exactly are sub-Saharan Africans going to build the roads? By melting tar in their cooking utensils over camp fires? Or do you propose we send over several dozen highway crews from the US at a time when we're not even adequately maintaining our own infrastructure?
Construction of a robust transportation system assumes that you have machinery and expertise, both of which would be in very short supply in a developing country. The only way out of a situation like that, and I mean the ONLY way, is education. You can't plop an industrial foundation into place overnight - you have to educate people as to what is possible, and let them build their own.
Even "rule of law" presupposes a certain level of literacy - how are you going to codify and distribute your laws if noone can read them? In this case the solution lies with people, not technology. It's better to have a trained doctor in a village who has the bare supplies he needs to function rather than boxes of powerful antibiotics that noone knows how to use.
If you intentionally sabotage your employers offshoring efforts you could acutally expose your self to a lawsuit.
Yet, last time I checked, juries were mostly comprised of Americans. I think I could live with those odds - can you see Bank of America going to court to prosecute an American over inadequately training his foreign replacements? Freaking hilarious.
The creationists are doing us a favor! Look at how much kids have to learn these days in school. Instead of more complicated stuff like punctuated equilibria, doesn't it save so much of their time by just teaching them that God made the universe? Do we really want our underpaid teachers having to spend their valuable time explaining Planck time and inflationary schemes when they can just condense if into a couple of classes of "God made all that, and ain't it pretty?"
For instance, sometimes people ask me how when I add a new computer to our network, the other computers know where it is to talk to it. Sure, I could drone on about the OSI 7 layer model and DHCP, DNS, whatever, but instead I just tell them that every night after eveyone logs out the computers have a party and the new computer introduces itself to everyone, and that's why the power strips have to stay on overnight or the computers can't wake themselves up. They're happy, I've saved valuable time, and they leave their power strips on our wake on lan actually works. Win-win situation all around!
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My dad just bought one of these last month. He had an Epson before and cartridges were about $28 a pop. When we went to Circuit City to pick out a printer he saw the big "$10 black cartridge" blurb on the front of the printer and it was a sale. Didn't care about print quality or features or anything else.
I think Kodak is ahead of the curve on this one. The cartridge racket has pissed off enough average consumers that I can't believe Epson and HP are idiot enough to still continue it. By the time this crypto whackadoodle scheme comes to market hopefully their existing business model will be dead.
Most of IT might seem to involve putting together off the shelf solutions, but that's because the industry is much bigger. In contrast, the cutting edge seems much smaller. There are still quite a few people working on clustering systems for bioinformatics or better tree sort algorithms, but compared to the number of database administration jobs, those jobs are few. If you want one of them, get a PhD and spend a few years proving yourself. Don't expect a job in the latest research if you have a BS in software engineering and have been spending the last five years writing Java code for a bank.
We don't need tens of thousands of 170IQ creative types in IT any more than we need them in plumbing or electrical engineering.
Allow me to tell you more.
The vendor supplies us with the MAC address before the system gets here. I can put that into our management system (Altiris), and when the computer first boots, it's going to boot into our PXE server by default. Then it will get a nice WinPE image downloaded to it and voila, it does what we want it to do.
Not every PC runs spreadsheets and a browser. If I wanted to set up a cluster to handle distributed bioinformatics analysis, I really wouldn't care what's on the hard drive. Could be Windows 98 for all I know. I just care about that nice CPU and maxed out RAM.
The problem most Westerner planners have is that they just assume that everyone else thinks like them. You really DON'T need solar panels and batteries in a rural village with no power. What you need is a cheap and disgustingly low tech way to hook up a couple of bicycles so that they can produce enough power to run what you need run.
I don't know if anyone here has read "The Ugly American" by Lederer and Burdick (1958), but it is the book that should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in projects in developing countries. Technological improvements should be incremental by design. If a village has 500 bicycles and no gasoline station, designing a cart that can be pulled by 2 bikes and carries a few hundred pounds would be a LOT more useful than buying them a Ford F350.
Now don't get me wrong - Gates' money can be used to tremendous effect in any given developing country. But you'd be much better off spending it on old-fashioned textbooks and pencils than solar panels and laptops.
Construction of a robust transportation system assumes that you have machinery and expertise, both of which would be in very short supply in a developing country. The only way out of a situation like that, and I mean the ONLY way, is education. You can't plop an industrial foundation into place overnight - you have to educate people as to what is possible, and let them build their own.
Even "rule of law" presupposes a certain level of literacy - how are you going to codify and distribute your laws if noone can read them? In this case the solution lies with people, not technology. It's better to have a trained doctor in a village who has the bare supplies he needs to function rather than boxes of powerful antibiotics that noone knows how to use.
Yet, last time I checked, juries were mostly comprised of Americans. I think I could live with those odds - can you see Bank of America going to court to prosecute an American over inadequately training his foreign replacements? Freaking hilarious.
For instance, sometimes people ask me how when I add a new computer to our network, the other computers know where it is to talk to it. Sure, I could drone on about the OSI 7 layer model and DHCP, DNS, whatever, but instead I just tell them that every night after eveyone logs out the computers have a party and the new computer introduces itself to everyone, and that's why the power strips have to stay on overnight or the computers can't wake themselves up. They're happy, I've saved valuable time, and they leave their power strips on our wake on lan actually works. Win-win situation all around!