Re: Banks don't understand IT staff
If it's their third time trying this on in as many years, then they've presumably realised that they can indeed get away with it.
1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
Sounds like a decent plan to me, at least for fairly low-value goods. You can order your pet food online and have it delivered to your parked car (either at work or at home). You don't have to be present to open the door, and the delivery driver doesn't have to wait around for you to turn up. Obviously you wouldn't order a new MacBook this way, nor any frozen or refrigerated items, but for sub-£100 dry goods it's a neat idea.
Do you buy a new wardrobe when you have too many clothes?
Just get your users to clean up their data from time to time. Their own productivity will improve as they learn to chuck out useless info and only keep the important stuff; and you'll spend far less on storage costs.
This week the IT guys presented me with a (proposed) massive bill for new storage hardware, based on the fact that the current disks were 91% full. After a couple of hours of deleting redundant data, it was down to 35% full.
Just as we would throw away old clothes (or put them in a box in the attic), we should make more effort to throw away old data. If you keep buying new wardrobes for your end users, and not charging for them, then no wonder they just keep filling up.
If you shell out for a real server, you're going to have considerably higher power costs. A NAS, particularly one powered by a Marvell CPU, will consume much less power than a full-blown server. A Dell PowerEdge server uses 250W, whereas this WD My Cloud EX4 uses around 30W. In a single year the Dell will cost you £320 in 'leccy, compared with just £40 for the WD device.
As for the commenter above who suggested Windows Server 2012 would be suitable, may I gently point out that it isn't cheap either. I can't make head or tail of Microsoft's pricing system, but it looks like the software alone would blow your budget out of the water. Sure, there are Linux versions available, but if you're billing clients by the hour and you value your free time, you might prefer something that works out of the box.
Any business where you hand your card over to somebody is vulnerable. When your friendly waiter takes your card and inserts it in the chip-and-pin terminal, you're unlikely to spot him surreptitiously scanning it through a dodgy mag-stripe reader hidden underneath. That's all it takes.
The real question is where did the crims manage to use the information gleaned from the stripe? Pretty much everywhere requires chip-and-pin these days.
Video just doesn't add much value to a tele-conference. Seeing other people's faces is actually quite distracting.
Screen-sharing does add value. For that it's better to be at your desk and at your computer, rather than in a dedicated conference room.
Voice quality is another issue - people in video-conferencing rooms forget that they still need to speak into the microphone, and the sound ends up worse.
2014 will be the year of video-conferencing, just like it will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Obviously with the box and claims of higher speeds, it's just a local cloud cache. Nothing fancy about the hardware; so presumably there's some clever software deciding what to cache. Nevertheless, there's no such thing as unlimited storage - they'll have to impose limits eventually.
Nope, not at all. If you're a crisp company and the cost of one of your inputs (potatoes) rises, why should the cost of your other inputs (sunflower oil, marketing) also rise? If anything, the CEO tells everyone we've had a tough year and there'll be no salary increase for marketing this year because the rising cost of potatoes wiped out our profits.
Yes, it's the same principle as in New York. A Parisian medallion costs € 200,000 - € 250,000 so obviously the drivers need high fares to recoup the cost. The government could lower the cost of medallions (and hence lower fares) by issuing more medallions, but it chooses not to, because it would anger existing cab drivers.
A medallion is not a natural asset. It only exists thanks to government rules. In Britain we have a similar situation with planning permission: it's a piece of paper issued by the government which is only valuable because the government restricts their numbers. If the government issued more of these pieces of paper, their cost would go down and we'd have cheaper housing; but they choose not to, because it would anger existing home owners.
Apple's fiercest competitor is itself: people don't always buy the latest and shiniest new iPhone 5S because they can pick up a two year old iPhone 4S second hand for much less. First sales matter most to Apple, but even the second-hand sales are useful because those second customers will go out and buy iTunes / App Store content. Also, as long as they're buying used iPhones, they remain in the Apple ecosystem and are more likely to buy other Apple gadgets.
On Windows, most of these "apps" are consumed as mere websites.
This morning my Android device prompted me to update the HungryHouse.co.uk app. It requested an additional permission: get the list of currently running tasks. I cannot fathom why a takeaway ordering website wants to know what tasks I'm running in the background. I'll stick to ordering my food via the website, thank you very much.
Browsers: the original sandbox.
Goodwill? Can they pay their scientists with goodwill? Can they pay their suppliers with goodwill? Can the pensioners who rely on their IBM share dividends heat their homes with goodwill?
For a similar reaction, try asking a professional photographer or graphic designer to do some work for free. Tell them it'll make a great portfolio piece, or it'll look good on their CV, or some such nonsense. Or how about you just give away years of your work in exchange for "goodwill"?
The accounts guys love clear fixed prices; they hate the budgetary unknown of pay-as-you-go contracts. Imagine going to your boss and saying "I need about $2m for a new software rollout, but it might actually cost $7m if we like it and use it a lot, or it might just be $0.5m." It's the same principal behind mobile phone contracts with more free minutes than anybody could use: people don't want to be shocked by high bills, and would actually prefer to pay a bit more to avoid them.
The linked article "What's wrong with computer scientists" nails it.
> Computer scientists are far more likely than other graduates to study at post-92 universities (64.4% of computer scientists study at post-92, whereas only 13% study in the Russell Group).
New universities attract students with lower A-level grades. Many employers skip the university section of the CV, because it's so hard to compare: is a 2:2 from Durham worth less than a 2:1 from Bucks New University? Instead they look directly at the A-level grades which are likely to be familiar ("I did Maths at A-level yonks ago, so I know what's involved").
Since more CS students go to former polytechs, we can infer that they have lower A-level grades. That would partly account for their lack of success in the job market.
The point is that they are (finally) listening to their customers. One of the major issues with VS 2012 was general responsiveness; 2013 is a damn sight faster (I've been using it since it came out). I for one am glad they're paying attention to their customers. Now if we could just get the API teams to listen to us too....
"... the UK was currently relying on immigration to pick up the slack ..."
That's the problem though. Why should I study a hard degree for many years, only to have to compete against 1.2 billion Indians? Much easier to study something like Law, or even a "soft" subject like History or English, where there is no competition from immigrants. It's called Comparative Advantage. If the good Prof had studied a soft subject like Economics, he might have heard of it.
Why would a company which sells mostly non-tangible products need a showroom? Their few tangible products include £199 tablets, £299 phones, the $1,500 Glass beta product, and maybe in future some self-driving cars. The first two don't have the added value to justify the cost of the boat; the Glass might at that price, but presumably the final price will be significantly lower; and the cars need an open road for test drives.
In short, I don't believe it's a showroom.
Wokingham Borough is indeed home to many techies, with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle nearby; but it's not a hub of innovation. Those dinosaurs arrived in the 1980s and 1990s at a time when London was considered a dangerous urban wasteland with poor schools and high crime. Today's dynamic tech companies (Google, Facebook, even the likes of LastMinute.com) choose offices in central London, and their staff seem to prefer London living to the comparative delights of suburban Berkshire.
Perhaps the long-term goal is to install WinRT on phones, not WinPho on tablets. Advances in mobile CPU technology mean that today's phones are already more powerful than yesterday's tablets. I seem to recall reading that WinPho wasn't designed for multi-core processors, at least in the beginning. It may just be a matter of WinRT being the better architecture.
Of course all this means that WinPho 9 or 10 won't be backward-compatible with 8, but that hasn't stopped MS before.