Financially, you will come out better doing the 3-6 month contracting gigs. You have to commit to working hard (or employing others to work hard for you) if you want to make your current skill set work for you. Working for someone else is a much easieir option with less commitments, but lacks much of the opportunities. Maybe in a couple years...
Well, I spent 10 days in the (nice) hospital here in Thailand with Dengue Fever. I had complications which made it more expensive (suspected DCS from scuba diving), but my bill was $4k. My wife got it at the same time, and her bill for 8 days in the hospital was only $2k.
The important thing (at least for Thailand) is catastrophic healthcare coverage for hospitalization; a doctors visit will cost you less than a co-pay in the US, but westerners are always getting into motor cycle accidents and other such fun.
I am currently telecommuting from Thailand. MarcusQ brings up a good point, don't talk salary! I am currently at 100% of my US salary, although a different arrangement will eventually be required.
Some pitfalls for you to understand:
Internet access can be spotty in availability and reliability. You always need a backup plan. It can sometimes take months to get ADSL, and without a proper residence and sometimes a work permit it can be hard to get at all.
Much of my job is on the phone. My US phone had a bill for the first month roughly approaching half my take-home pay. Fortunately, it was paid by the company. I had good intentions of using Skype, but 24-hour internet cafes aren't available anywhere near me.
Can you do your job via dial-up? Often that is the best speed you will find! Make sure you have contingencies; I end up using GPRS for transferring large files. It hurts!
You will be working odd hours. I start at 6am so I have a few PST hours, end at about 11am, take a break, and start working from about 8pm to midnight for time with EST hours. I feel sorry for my wife and neighbors when I am on a 3am conference call and having a heated discussion. The time difference can turn something you thought could be done overnight in the US into a 3-day activity if you end up needing help from someone else.
There is no such thing working for a US company as part-time. If you are worth enough to them to let you telecommute, you will be putting in roughly the same hours, but likely working harder. The logical extension to this is that to succeed in the long-run, you need to start a business and have local people (and gullible travelling experts)working for you and billing them out at 10x their salaries. I hate to admit it, but that is the only way.
The exception to the above rule is that if you happen to have irreplaceable experise, and a fantastic relation with your boss, and much of your work involves being remote from co-workers and clients, you might be able to pull something mutually beneficial for 6 months.
Relationships with co-workers will degrade over time, especially if you used to be in the same office. Think in advance about how that might impact you.
Finding just the right place to live could take a lot of time. Factor this in when you make your business plan.You also might need to move around seasonally. Under stand your need for access to an airport!
One last tip, find an expat website for the area you think you want to go and hang out there for a while to understand the pitfalls and work-arounds before you encounter them yourself! For Thailand, I suggest ThaiVisa.
You COULD lok at industry metrics for efficiency and look at why you have a higher efficiency with senior management, and discuss how that fits into IT's contribution.
You could also look at the applications you run and how they contribute to the bottom line (change-order programs, especially). You can TALK to employees and management in the office and find out how you can help. (No frigging surveys!)
But, the most effective approach is going to be to figure out how to help the foremen in the field get their job done as efficiently as possible. Find out who is the best, most organized foreman, and look for ways to automate things he does on paper. Talk to the least organized (but not just a good-guy talker) person and see if any tools could get things under control.
Think about things like (say) a nokia 770 webpad- can that help the foreman when he isn't in the trailer? What applications could he use?
Of course, the person to really lead this type of operation is the construction management, but you can always directly support their needs, or try an initial investigation...
If you really want to help the company, get people out of the server room and finding out people's needs.
Despite being an apple fanboy myself, sometimes there IS a desire to give a friend specifically selected tracks rather than a gift certificate. A gift certificate has no connection to the giver when executed (heh, that could be read funny).
For the other camp, iTunes computers can be de-authorized. You can use 5 computers at once, provided something unheard of like a hard drive dying doesn't happen.
DRM doesn't work for consumers. The only question is if the not working will be annoying enough for consumers to say that buying isn't worth the hassle.
Sounds like a RAZR. Same complaints from me as a simple starter.
While some of the little (read cheap) Nokias do the job well enough, when you want a quad-band phone with long battery life, and GPRS/EDGE things get much harder!
I love my blackberry (7290), but only because I don't use it as a phone. Simple little things like any micro-usb plug can charge the thing (laptop, iPod charger with micro-usb cable, Airport Express, or my RaZR charger) all work fine. For the RAZR, you actually have to buy software to let you charge from a laptop!
Who designs these things!
(I won't even start on the goofy menu system on the RAZR...)
For a financial data center ("Tier-4" class, 2(N+1)), the cost per kW is $10-15,000 for infrastructure alone. That quickly matches cost of WinTel boxes (although the depreciation cycle is considerably longer).
Energy Consumption works out close to 3x server power consumption, so 1kW of load is equal to 3kW total energy input. That comes close to $2,700 per year in energy costs for 1kW of server power.
I used to enjoy think geek ads, and often clicked on them. They were well targeted to the audience and unobtrusive. I would like to still see ads from think geek. Unfortunately, ads are generally aggregated by companies that have good ads and bad. The bad ads are often obtrusive enough to warrant blocking.
The easy solution to failure of ads is to go the "sponsorship" route. Sponsorship can create a very well connected tie to a site, without (say) pushing a particular company's products. It is possible that not all areas of a site are well suited for a sponsor, but maybe enough to turn a profit and encourage visitors. If a website takes enough ownership of their advertising, they can make the ads harder to block, and do a better job of encouraging visitation.
Conversely, if the specific advertisers aren't important enough to a website to encourage a "partnership," how much right do they have to my eyeballs.
If ads are printed on both sides of a magazine page, I rip them out. Always.
I did the same with my high school newsweek/time subscriptions. You could save almost half the weight/size getting rid of that crap, especially because an individual sheet was usually all ads.
The same holds true for most web advertising. It is sufficiently annoying and interferes with the reading experience to the point that the effort required to eliminate it is well warranted.
I'll admit that almost ALL ads bother me now online. I used to be willing to put up with the/. ads knowing it supported the site and that I enjoyed, but they became too easy to avoid: Flash had to be stopped, popups had be gone forever, and anything served by the "big guys" or that was annoying just once on some website is gone for good.
I don't know what the answer is for creating "reasonable" advertising, but if the advertising aggregators don't do a better job policing their customers they won't last long. Google isn't the answer either, as more and more ads have less to do with the information at hand. Effectiveness just goes down over time.
The thing is that the marketing can easily pay for itself with iTunes. Bands have an incentive to focus on the marketing, and what Apple does is limited to web pages and maybe podcasts.
The other barrier that apple breaks down is the cost to produce with their software.
It could be a real synergy, and if I were a record exec I would be scared!
Management and Technical are real forks in the engineering field. While it is quite possible to be a well-paid and respected "senior engineer", it is not a lateral move between senior engineering and senior management. From a career standpoint, a good engineer that can manage people, projects, and clients should focus on the management side. It does not belittle the technical side, but it respects the fact that a renaissance person skilled in several areas makes the most effective manager for a technical organization.
There are a couple problems with this simplification-- different consumers have different reliability and capacity requirements, and that long-distance distribution does not conflict with said reliability and capacity needs.
The key to making distributed generation work is the ability to manage loads as well as generation. If light levels can be reduced by 25% and the air conditioning ramped up a couple degrees if the wind is not strong enough to power all of the loads. Unfortunately, this is hard to really make work. It requires a great understanding of all loads and priorities to the user.
Microgrids are a newer term for this, but there are inherent advantage to decentralizing generation to match consumption. A "utility" simplifies economic matters for the consumer, but does so at a cost. This cost could be insufficient reliability, capacity above or below needs, or poor load profile through the course of a day or year.
The problem for deregulation of the electricity utilities was that the "best" consumers were quickly picked up by the vultures, leaving unprofitable homes for the regulated utility. This creates an opportunity for home-specific utilities to crop up...
I was at the apple store today, and yes... the nanos look pretty bad. These ones have never made it into someone's pockets, and hopefully have never made an encounter with keys.
BUT: How is this different from LCD panels? What kind of moron touches the screen? Also, anybody that has ever owned an iPod knows that you need a protective case! (I do think it is silly that Apple didn't have any protective cases on the market on launch, but... they focused on the surprise element.
I hope the scratch-removal products work as well as people suggest.
First off, a monorail or light rail is considered RAPID transit; a bus system is MASS transit.
Deciding to go for a surface train vs tunnel or elevated is purely an economic decision. Surface is always cheapest, and it is generally the best decision where ridership (or population density) for the region cannot overcome the additional cost of a dedicated right-of-way.
Personally, I much prefer elevated systems to tunnels. Not much to see in a tunnel, and it takes additional effort to maintain communications systems. I don't think I have ever seen a subway system that provides as high of a quality user experience over an elevated system (obvious exception is really cold places like Chicago). Surface and elevated systems are easier for tourists and infrequent riders to understand. Subways are only really good at handling rush hour traffic between housing centers and work centers; they generally languish at bringing people into the city nights and weekends.
Lastly, the monorail vs LRT argument... it's best to pick the one that matches the city best. Monorail systems can be narrower, LRT's can get more passengers in a given length train. Hopefully someone actually did a traffic study and decided that the monorail would be better for Seattle.
The problem with your logic is that as a monopoly (oligopoly) price is not determined by supply and demand.
Variable pricing makes sense, but the reality is that you have to focus on discounts so that the average price paid goes below $0.99 (at least initially) to make consumers find value.
The lesson from online retail is the "long tail." You can make a lot of money on the 90% of the music that makes up less than 1% of sales today. I hope Apple finds a way to really promote the long tail, like Netflix has.
These little UPS things, especially in a home environment, are really the wrong solution.
More likely than not they pose added risk of fire. They are a cheap consumer device with a short life. Don't make them permanent. Make them easy to unplug.
For those people out there who don't think they live in a "disaster prone" area, it might be useful to check out San Francisco's emergency preparedness site. There are lots of things that should be in your emergency kit.
A radio is important, and a hand-crank one is a great idea if you have several people that need to listen. Batteries are the easiest way out, though... maybe with a hand-crank recharger.
Convergence is fantastic if you can make things work properly. A better battery is the first problem to solve; user interface is a problem that can be more readily solved.
Personally, I would love to have a Phone, 2-way Radio, GPS, MP3 player, and a PDA in a single device that had a week-long battery.
The fundemental flaw with that desire is that the different functions have different priorities (life needs), and to complicate matters further these needs change over time (and cyclicly). As long as power is in the critical path, usability will suffer, and the devices will fail.
My very simple gripe to using audio only is that people value from different styles of information presentation-- audio, visual, and physical (writing by hand). It is a shame that the audio and visual are so hard to synch up as the iPOD operates today.
It would be great to be able to see a word in two languages and hear it in both, as an example.
Fortunately or not, interest rates six or eight years ago were considerably higher than today or two years ago. It's pretty hard to cover per-transaction costs if you can only earn 1% annual interest, especially if you accept that money at a discount by allowing for credit card "deposits."
A ways back, I was told that the cheapest credit card processing was $0.10 per transaction (wholesale, all electronic). Without regulatory oversight and a reasonable transaction tracking system, they could shave close to 20% off that cost, and maybe get it as low as $0.08.
Granted, these are just the back-end processing cost of each transaction, and do not include things like fees PayPal pays on deposits, front-office and marketing costs, and profit margin, but it does give an idea where the money lies.
Most companies in the US have 8 or 10 "govenment holidays" paid. "Standard" vacation time is 10 days, but you usually get another week after 5 years working with the same company. In addition, most companies give 5 sick days per year. This gives a standard benefit of 23 days.
For my company, they combine sick and vacation days and just count it PTO. This works out pretty well if you don't get sick or have kids.
Compared to Sweden, which I think has a standard benefit closer to 45-50 days... I would say that Americans have a very limited vacation benefit.
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Financially, you will come out better doing the 3-6 month contracting gigs. You have to commit to working hard (or employing others to work hard for you) if you want to make your current skill set work for you. Working for someone else is a much easieir option with less commitments, but lacks much of the opportunities. Maybe in a couple years...
Commonwealth. Americans are not eligible.
Well, I spent 10 days in the (nice) hospital here in Thailand with Dengue Fever. I had complications which made it more expensive (suspected DCS from scuba diving), but my bill was $4k. My wife got it at the same time, and her bill for 8 days in the hospital was only $2k.
The important thing (at least for Thailand) is catastrophic healthcare coverage for hospitalization; a doctors visit will cost you less than a co-pay in the US, but westerners are always getting into motor cycle accidents and other such fun.
Sadly, the people that don't realize when to get out! Try reading The World is Flat.
Some pitfalls for you to understand:
One last tip, find an expat website for the area you think you want to go and hang out there for a while to understand the pitfalls and work-arounds before you encounter them yourself! For Thailand, I suggest ThaiVisa.
You COULD lok at industry metrics for efficiency and look at why you have a higher efficiency with senior management, and discuss how that fits into IT's contribution.
You could also look at the applications you run and how they contribute to the bottom line (change-order programs, especially). You can TALK to employees and management in the office and find out how you can help. (No frigging surveys!)
But, the most effective approach is going to be to figure out how to help the foremen in the field get their job done as efficiently as possible. Find out who is the best, most organized foreman, and look for ways to automate things he does on paper. Talk to the least organized (but not just a good-guy talker) person and see if any tools could get things under control.
Think about things like (say) a nokia 770 webpad- can that help the foreman when he isn't in the trailer? What applications could he use?
Of course, the person to really lead this type of operation is the construction management, but you can always directly support their needs, or try an initial investigation...
If you really want to help the company, get people out of the server room and finding out people's needs.
Despite being an apple fanboy myself, sometimes there IS a desire to give a friend specifically selected tracks rather than a gift certificate. A gift certificate has no connection to the giver when executed (heh, that could be read funny).
For the other camp, iTunes computers can be de-authorized. You can use 5 computers at once, provided something unheard of like a hard drive dying doesn't happen.
DRM doesn't work for consumers. The only question is if the not working will be annoying enough for consumers to say that buying isn't worth the hassle.
Sounds like a RAZR. Same complaints from me as a simple starter.
While some of the little (read cheap) Nokias do the job well enough, when you want a quad-band phone with long battery life, and GPRS/EDGE things get much harder!
I love my blackberry (7290), but only because I don't use it as a phone. Simple little things like any micro-usb plug can charge the thing (laptop, iPod charger with micro-usb cable, Airport Express, or my RaZR charger) all work fine. For the RAZR, you actually have to buy software to let you charge from a laptop!
Who designs these things!
(I won't even start on the goofy menu system on the RAZR...)
For a financial data center ("Tier-4" class, 2(N+1)), the cost per kW is $10-15,000 for infrastructure alone. That quickly matches cost of WinTel boxes (although the depreciation cycle is considerably longer).
Energy Consumption works out close to 3x server power consumption, so 1kW of load is equal to 3kW total energy input. That comes close to $2,700 per year in energy costs for 1kW of server power.
I used to enjoy think geek ads, and often clicked on them. They were well targeted to the audience and unobtrusive. I would like to still see ads from think geek. Unfortunately, ads are generally aggregated by companies that have good ads and bad. The bad ads are often obtrusive enough to warrant blocking.
The easy solution to failure of ads is to go the "sponsorship" route. Sponsorship can create a very well connected tie to a site, without (say) pushing a particular company's products. It is possible that not all areas of a site are well suited for a sponsor, but maybe enough to turn a profit and encourage visitors. If a website takes enough ownership of their advertising, they can make the ads harder to block, and do a better job of encouraging visitation.
Conversely, if the specific advertisers aren't important enough to a website to encourage a "partnership," how much right do they have to my eyeballs.
I did the same with my high school newsweek/time subscriptions. You could save almost half the weight/size getting rid of that crap, especially because an individual sheet was usually all ads.
The same holds true for most web advertising. It is sufficiently annoying and interferes with the reading experience to the point that the effort required to eliminate it is well warranted.
I'll admit that almost ALL ads bother me now online. I used to be willing to put up with the
I don't know what the answer is for creating "reasonable" advertising, but if the advertising aggregators don't do a better job policing their customers they won't last long. Google isn't the answer either, as more and more ads have less to do with the information at hand. Effectiveness just goes down over time.
The thing is that the marketing can easily pay for itself with iTunes. Bands have an incentive to focus on the marketing, and what Apple does is limited to web pages and maybe podcasts.
The other barrier that apple breaks down is the cost to produce with their software.
It could be a real synergy, and if I were a record exec I would be scared!
Management and Technical are real forks in the engineering field. While it is quite possible to be a well-paid and respected "senior engineer", it is not a lateral move between senior engineering and senior management. From a career standpoint, a good engineer that can manage people, projects, and clients should focus on the management side. It does not belittle the technical side, but it respects the fact that a renaissance person skilled in several areas makes the most effective manager for a technical organization.
There are a couple problems with this simplification-- different consumers have different reliability and capacity requirements, and that long-distance distribution does not conflict with said reliability and capacity needs.
The key to making distributed generation work is the ability to manage loads as well as generation. If light levels can be reduced by 25% and the air conditioning ramped up a couple degrees if the wind is not strong enough to power all of the loads. Unfortunately, this is hard to really make work. It requires a great understanding of all loads and priorities to the user.
Microgrids are a newer term for this, but there are inherent advantage to decentralizing generation to match consumption. A "utility" simplifies economic matters for the consumer, but does so at a cost. This cost could be insufficient reliability, capacity above or below needs, or poor load profile through the course of a day or year.
The problem for deregulation of the electricity utilities was that the "best" consumers were quickly picked up by the vultures, leaving unprofitable homes for the regulated utility. This creates an opportunity for home-specific utilities to crop up...
I was at the apple store today, and yes... the nanos look pretty bad. These ones have never made it into someone's pockets, and hopefully have never made an encounter with keys.
BUT: How is this different from LCD panels? What kind of moron touches the screen? Also, anybody that has ever owned an iPod knows that you need a protective case! (I do think it is silly that Apple didn't have any protective cases on the market on launch, but... they focused on the surprise element.
I hope the scratch-removal products work as well as people suggest.
First off, a monorail or light rail is considered RAPID transit; a bus system is MASS transit.
Deciding to go for a surface train vs tunnel or elevated is purely an economic decision. Surface is always cheapest, and it is generally the best decision where ridership (or population density) for the region cannot overcome the additional cost of a dedicated right-of-way.
Personally, I much prefer elevated systems to tunnels. Not much to see in a tunnel, and it takes additional effort to maintain communications systems. I don't think I have ever seen a subway system that provides as high of a quality user experience over an elevated system (obvious exception is really cold places like Chicago). Surface and elevated systems are easier for tourists and infrequent riders to understand. Subways are only really good at handling rush hour traffic between housing centers and work centers; they generally languish at bringing people into the city nights and weekends.
Lastly, the monorail vs LRT argument... it's best to pick the one that matches the city best. Monorail systems can be narrower, LRT's can get more passengers in a given length train. Hopefully someone actually did a traffic study and decided that the monorail would be better for Seattle.
The problem with your logic is that as a monopoly (oligopoly) price is not determined by supply and demand.
Variable pricing makes sense, but the reality is that you have to focus on discounts so that the average price paid goes below $0.99 (at least initially) to make consumers find value.
The lesson from online retail is the "long tail." You can make a lot of money on the 90% of the music that makes up less than 1% of sales today. I hope Apple finds a way to really promote the long tail, like Netflix has.
These little UPS things, especially in a home environment, are really the wrong solution.
More likely than not they pose added risk of fire. They are a cheap consumer device with a short life. Don't make them permanent. Make them easy to unplug.
For those people out there who don't think they live in a "disaster prone" area, it might be useful to check out San Francisco's emergency preparedness site. There are lots of things that should be in your emergency kit.
A radio is important, and a hand-crank one is a great idea if you have several people that need to listen. Batteries are the easiest way out, though... maybe with a hand-crank recharger.
Convergence is fantastic if you can make things work properly. A better battery is the first problem to solve; user interface is a problem that can be more readily solved.
Personally, I would love to have a Phone, 2-way Radio, GPS, MP3 player, and a PDA in a single device that had a week-long battery.
The fundemental flaw with that desire is that the different functions have different priorities (life needs), and to complicate matters further these needs change over time (and cyclicly). As long as power is in the critical path, usability will suffer, and the devices will fail.
Moreover, when you rip CDs with iTunes, unlike WMP it will not default to add DRM to your own songs.
My very simple gripe to using audio only is that people value from different styles of information presentation-- audio, visual, and physical (writing by hand). It is a shame that the audio and visual are so hard to synch up as the iPOD operates today.
It would be great to be able to see a word in two languages and hear it in both, as an example.
Fortunately or not, interest rates six or eight years ago were considerably higher than today or two years ago. It's pretty hard to cover per-transaction costs if you can only earn 1% annual interest, especially if you accept that money at a discount by allowing for credit card "deposits."
A ways back, I was told that the cheapest credit card processing was $0.10 per transaction (wholesale, all electronic). Without regulatory oversight and a reasonable transaction tracking system, they could shave close to 20% off that cost, and maybe get it as low as $0.08.
Granted, these are just the back-end processing cost of each transaction, and do not include things like fees PayPal pays on deposits, front-office and marketing costs, and profit margin, but it does give an idea where the money lies.
Most companies in the US have 8 or 10 "govenment holidays" paid. "Standard" vacation time is 10 days, but you usually get another week after 5 years working with the same company. In addition, most companies give 5 sick days per year. This gives a standard benefit of 23 days.
For my company, they combine sick and vacation days and just count it PTO. This works out pretty well if you don't get sick or have kids.
Compared to Sweden, which I think has a standard benefit closer to 45-50 days... I would say that Americans have a very limited vacation benefit.