Category Archives: Society

Stuff I think is worth talking about

Shopping for Quality not Quantity

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A few months ago, I was introduced to DealExtreme online shopping from China. Oh WOW! They sold everything and the prices were absolutely insane and they included postage! Headsets for my IPhone that I would normally pay $15-20 for were available for under 2 bucks!. I could buy 5 and even if they didn’t last very long, who cares I was still ahead financially.

I went a bit nuts, placing orders in lot’s of about $50 each combining things I “needed” with things I “wanted” combined with “what the hell, it’s only a buck”. I became a regular at the Post Office picking up my parcels as they arrived in dribs and drabs, and having Xmas every few days as I ripped through the packaging to see what I had gotten this time. This was Nirvana.

That’s about when I realised something my uncle Sid had told me a few years ago; there is Made in China and Made in China! Goods made in china on contract to western firms (like Apple, HP or my uncle’s furniture business) could be of the highest quality because those same firms exercised rigorous quality control standards. Goods made in China designed to copy those goods made for the same firms have no such controls; make it quick make it cheap, send it out. Those sub-$2 headsets were lucky to last me 2 weeks. Synch cables fell apart just as quickly and only scrooge would give some of those toys to children in order to watch their disappointment as they collapsed on first use.

I still shop online (and group buy) but I now pay more attention to user feedback (which tends to surprisingly be uncensored and honest) and look for things that seem more realistically priced.

I learned that the rule “You get what you pay for” still applies, even with goods made in countries with ludicrously cheap labor rates. A lot of Australian retailers have been crying poor over their customers fleeing to online shoppers. Whilst there is some truth to that, it is also true that they – like the recording industry – have been monopolistic-ally ripping people off for decades and – like the recording industry – are suffering for it. Apple proved that if you charge a fair price for a product ($1 per song or <$5 for a small application), people will buy that product in droves. I think the same thing will happen with general goods and the first major retailer to focus predominantly on selling their quality wares online for prices that show a realistic markup will be the real winner in the current economic climate.

Oh, and the headphones? I now use Sennheisers. They offer fantastic audio quality. Retail shops offer them for about $150 but I paid about half that online.

 

 

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In with the Old out with the New

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I’m sure that I’m not the first person to cover this topic but I thought I’d add my bit.

One thing that amazes me is the cycle of technology that goes on. The old cliche of “put the old dress in the closet and 20 years from now it will be back in fashion” seems to pretty much apply equally with IT. I think it was seeing those “reto-handsets” they are offering everywhere for the IPhones that got me thinking. Let’s take a few examples..

The first “real” laptop computers (from about 1989/90 or so) came out with specs more or less similar to a conventional desktop with screens between 14-15 inches. The in the late 90s, there was a rage of “Micro Notebooks”. I had an IBM x240 which was about 8 or 9 inches wide, and I was given an original Toshiba Libretto (Pentium 166) as a keepsake from a friend a few years back (still the smallest production notebook I’ve even seen and it still works perfectly). They were popular for a while but quickly became stale as people realised they didn’t have the horsepower to do any real work on and had crummy battery life. So we moved to the “ultra portables” – with the Toshiba leading the way again with the Portege – which were slightly bigger, had much more grunt and better battery life, and a much bigger pricetag. Execs and graphic designers had them but the majority went back to notebooks with specs more or less similar to a conventional desktop and screens between 15-15.4 inches.

Along comes 2007/8 and suddenly everyone needs a “Netbook” (i.e. Micro Notebook). They can’t build them fast enough and every vendor jumps on the bandwagon. In Australia, the government gave away literally tens of thousands of them to high-school students as part of their “Digitial Education Revolution” funding program…only to realise that they didn’t have the horsepower to do any real work and had crummy battery life (this was particularly depressing for students as they tend to be power users and finding out that you can’t edit photos or videos on your brand new notebook was not a good thing). This buzz this year is for “ultra portable” which are slightly bigger, have much more grunt and a much bigger pricetag. Sound familiar?

About 15 years ago, Microsoft brought out a product called Windows CE (sometimes horribly abbreviated to WinCE) designed specifically for portable computing devices, often employing touch-screens. At around the same time, Apple brought out their Newton portable touch-screen computing device. There was a brief flurry of interest and activity with many vendors (most notably HP) bringing Windows CE devices to market and many die-hard Apple fans swearing by their Newton. Eventually, Steve Jobs killed off the Newton when he took back the reigns of Apple and set about transforming the company whilst Windows CE is still around but used mostly for devices like Thin Clients. About 18 months ago, Apple released a device called the “IPad”, and once again we are off and running with touch-screen computing devices (AKA Tablets).

Finally (for this article) there’s cloud computing. 25+ years ago pretty much all business computing was centralised. Big Data Centers housed monster computers that consumed so much electricity and produced so much heat that they needed dedicated power distribution and cooling separate from other buildings around them. Everyone connected to them via relatively slow data links, which didn’t matter too much since they did all the work centrally. Then we got the PC which placed a reasonable fraction of that processing power directly on to the business user’s desktop allowing them to work discretely without having to share the central computer with 100s of other people; followed shortly thereafter a slightly more powerful PC that was called a “File Server” which further allowed businesses to localise their data and processing all the way down to the branch and individual user level. The Information Sprawl was thus born and the amount of data and information gathered and collected (and dispersed) started growing exponentially as more and more devices were purchased and deployed until the business reached a state where virtually no organisation could even come close to accounting for where all their data is actually located. Around 1998, a company called VMWare popped up, promoting technology that allowed companies to carve up their existing File Servers into multiple “virtual file servers”. They called this technology a “Hypervisor” (they didn’t invent it, but they were certainly the first company to make it work). At the same time, a company called Citrix was starting to gain decent acceptance of their “Winframe” or “Metframe” product which allowed businesses to carve up their existing File Server into multiple “virtual desktops” that users remotely accessed in order to gain access to company applications and data. Both these technologies developed a reasonable following but were limited to use by very large organisations since even though they didn’t need much network bandwidth to operate (i.e. the capacity of the link sitting between where the user and file servers were located), they needed more than most home users, small or even medium businesses had available (i.e. generally dial-up links). The we finally got the last main piece of the puzzle which was the wide availability of high-speed, low cost data links to almost everywhere in the world. So now businesses are moving all their data and processing into Big Data Centres which has monstrous arrays of computers that comsume so much electricity and produce so much hear that they need dedicated power distribution and cooling separate from the other buildings around them.

What’s next on the technology cycle?

Australia – the gambling country

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Human beings gamble. It’s part of our nature and probably one of the reasons we came out of the trees in the first place. Gambling is OK, if we didn’t gamble, we couldn’t win and the world would stagnate. Excessive gambling on the other hand is an illness every bit as bad and destructive as alcoholism. Australia has proportionately one of the highest number of gamblers in the world and it’s a huge problem in our society. Why then do we encourage, or even indoctrinate our children from the moment they can speak into becoming gamblers.

I never really noticed this fact until I became a parent myself and then it became almost impossible not to notice and I reminisced about how long it had been around me and realised it goes back to when I moved here from Canada in 1985.

When I moved here, one of the first things I discovered at Bondi beach (near where we lived) was that there was no restriction put on Children playing video games (in Montreal you had to be over 14). I also noticed these strange things called “skill testers” where you put money in and if you got lucky won some tickets that could be redeemed for prizes worth substantially less than any possible minimum investment needed to win them.

Thinking back, I am amazed at how gambling surrounds our children. Sure, they can’t go into the poker machine rooms at clubs (which are nevertheless in plain sight and hearing of them) but right there in the bistro is the inevitable skill tester where if you dump $5 into it you might win $0.20 worth of chocolate. And the contests, always the contests. One in 6 Mars Bars wins a free Mars Bar, McDonald’s Millions, Paddle Pop Lick-a Prize. All designed to separate children (or their beleaguered parents) from their money. All designed to continue the trend of developing our society of gamblers. All designed to ensure that a significant amount of money flows back into the businesses’ and government’s coffers. The main difference between adult gambling and children gambling is that it is legislated that adults have a chance of winning a prize greater than their investment whereas children get no such protection.

Then there is how to control it. Whenever a problem occurs in society, the immediately reaction of many is “The Government should make a law against it!!”. This has proven, unfortunately, to be the wrong solution. So frequently when the government tries to create a law to control a situation, it just makes it worse (the most glaring example I can think of being Prohibition in the US around the Depression years, and see my upcoming post regarding the debacle the occurred from banning incandescent light globes). What is needed is education. Education not just from schools (Why didn’t they learn that in school?!?! is another common – and pathetic – reaction to so many issues) but first and foremost in the home. There’s a great anti-alcoholism campaign where it shows how this illness propagates through generations (go get your old man a beer, son). This teaches parents the dangers of demonstrating and encouraging alcoholic behavior to children. I would like to see a similar campaign geared towards gambling addicts. Like alcoholics, they know they are miserable, they know they are sick and they know they are ruining their lives but they can’t stop. Why would anyone want to pass this same behavior down to their children? The problem is that gambling in our society is so insidious and pervasive that its almost impossible for them not to.