Yes, you're correct .... but I'd maintain that in most (all?) cases, at least in the USA, they've been doing it wrong.

For example, do you know what the salary is for a DC metro subway driver? I had no clue until I saw a job posting on one of the govt. job boards. It's in the 6 figures. I'd sure like to know why a $100,000/yr. plus salary is necessary to get someone to operate a metrorail train!

When you look at what each individual spends to use a personal motor vehicle to commute to/from work each day, it simply doesn't make logical sense that a mass transit system can't beat those operating costs per-person, by sheer volume. And yet, it generally costs me almost the same price to drive from point A to B as to take the metro between those same places. And STILL they say it needs subsidizing with large tax collections?

No ... reality is, mass transit is a big cash cow for a lot of folks on the inside. Every time the system is expanded, contractors are making big bucks on the project.... Unionized maintenance staff probably costs more than is really necessary to keep it all running too. Who knows where else money is being spent inefficiently on the whole thing -- but there sure are plenty of opportunities for it.

Nope, you're right.... DC is really *not* that great an area to live in. However, I'm pretty happy with the small town in Maryland we wound up buying a house in. Only about 20 minutes outside Frederick, MD, which is a fairly nice city itself.

The only reason I moved up to the the DC area in the first place is a need to get out from a dead-end I.T. job I was in, in the midwest, working for a steel supplier and fabricator. In general, I.T. careers in the midwest doing server/network administration on hands-on PC support are mainly found in the manufacturing sector. (Exceptions would primarily be hospitals or education -- both of which handle I.T. fairly differently than the typical business.... sort of their own worlds.)

Not just one, but two of my friends who used to live near me and also worked in I.T. wound up moving away and taking jobs with the company that offered me the DC area position. The fact I'd get to work with two of my long-time personal friends (albeit each of us in different offices in different cities) was a major reason I accepted. This was also a company which was actually growing during the recession, while most were downsizing.

Truthfully? I think a lot of folks up here relocated for jobs that were far from "elite" - simply because they were promising-sounding career jobs in a bad economic climate. (I've met several people who moved here from other parts of the country for jobs with MedImmune in Gaithersburg, for example. Probably pays well, but not "defense contractor well" or anything like that.)

Bingo! This is definitely a HUGE factor for those of us living and working in the metro D.C. area! (I'm pretty sure Californians working in the Silicon Valley area have the same experience, but I can't speak about it with any direct knowledge.)

My commute is a little over an hour each direction. (Basically, I can take the train in to a station where I have to transfer to the metro and ride it for about 4 stops until I get to my workplace. Alternately, I can drive in but it takes about the exact same amount of time.)

Either way, it's "lose, lose", really. Everyone loves to point out that if you take public transportation, the time is really "your own time" since you don't have to drive. But due to the lack of reliable cellular data connections through much of the trip, it doesn't let me do a lot of productive things I'd like to do with that time (like check email or handle trouble tickets that came in). It's good for reading a book or magazine, but honestly? I'm not too enthused about spending 45 minutes to an hour reading that early in the morning, or right after a long day of work. I like to read on weekends or possibly at night just before bedtime. If I opt to drive, then I'm out the cost of the gas money and wear and tear on my vehicle. I also get stuck paying about $8 a day for parking. (The train and metro fare is over $275 a month though, too.)

But in this part of the country, you don't have any other realistic options to live closer to your job if you have a family with kids. Singles or child-free couples can usually find a reasonably affordable apartment that's nearby, but adding kids to the mix really makes that unworkable unless you're one of the "elite" (such as govt. contractors getting huge paychecks or politicians or their lawyers).

Out here, it used to be, you were directed to one of the "inner D.C. suburbs" like Rockville or Gaithersburg or Silver Spring if you needed to find a 3 or 4 bedroom house at a somewhat normal price. But so many people have relocated up here for the government and military jobs and contracts, those properties were quickly snapped up and priced escalated with the demand. So you have to look further and further out to find something at a sane price point.

Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to defraud telephone companies with custom made electronic boxes that let people cheat the established system, making long distance calls for free. That was before their careers took off, building and selling computers. Please elaborate on how that activity done as teenagers for kicks invalidates Apple as a legitimate business today?

I disagree. 1st. tier cellphone companies DO in fact have to be big .... The dollar amounts involved to roll out and maintain a cellular network across a whole country the size of the United States is steep enough that the little guys just can't accomplish it well.

What we do have room for are the 2nd. tier "regional carriers" -- and personally, I'm disappointed we haven't really seen more happening in that arena. If you're not big enough to compete with the likes of Verizon or AT&T in nationwide coverage, fine. How about focusing on providing top quality coverage and customer service, with good data performance, all within a few states?

For many years, I had an account with U.S. Cellular, in St. Louis, Missouri, and was very pleased with them. Their little marketing strategy of "all incoming calls are free" meant I didn't really need to buy a lot of cellular minutes on my plan. (It's relatively rare I place a call to someone vs. all the times I'm taking a call.) Signal strength and call quality were excellent too. Really, the only downside was a relative lack of choices in phones, because you had to select one designed to work on their network - and they didn't have as much pull as the top carriers to get the latest handsets first. Still, they'd typically manage to get at least 1 or 2 of the "hot" phones out there at any given time. (I had a Motorola Razr flip phone with them, when it was still the in thing.)

T-Mobile, IMO, has really gotten on a roll with upgrading its network to become something respectable. It has a lot of issues still, but as a current customer, I see evidence all the time that change is happening. (My phone has carrier updates pushed to it practically every week, as new towers come online.) Just last week, something changed where I live, too. For a couple days, all of us received "no service" or weak signals throughout the business day, but then suddenly, things came back up with a signal strength far superior to what we ever had before. (I used to use a signal booster in the house, but was able to turn it off after the upgrade.) Can't say if it was a new tower, or a modification or repair made to some existing one -- but it was a nice improvement.

Interesting..... Honestly though, as great as it sounds, I have a feeling this may be another one of those practices I hear about (often from the Netherlands) that's excellent where it's used, but might not scale up very well for a larger nation (such as the USA).

From my observations in the U.S. -- we've got a lot of folks who accept jobs simply because they need the money, but really don't have much motivation to do the job they're hired for. Their motivation comes, initially, from the relief that they finally got a job and a desire to do whatever is needed to keep a steady paycheck coming.

2 or 3 years into it though? The best thing that can happen to them is to feel pressure to improve, or be terminated.

You could argue that this is a very broken system, and perhaps you'd be right in the "big picture" sense. Unfortunately, I don't think the big picture is fixable any time soon. (Core reasons for it include our nation making a decision, decades ago, to jettison most of our manufacturing and manual labor -- under the belief we were better off leaving those tasks to other countries.) Given the fact we have more people in need of good paying jobs than we have available good paying jobs? There's simply no real benefit to encouraging slackers to do better while a company keeps paying them to under-perform. There are too many other, unemployed candidates out there who'd LOVE to take that position and do much more work while they're in it. And as I say, the person you push out may actually need the "kick in the pants" to rethink his/her plans about the type of work to apply for next time.

I think you raise a few valid concerns (unlike some of the people who replied to you already).

For starters, who cares about all the "military grade encryption!" and "practically unhackable!" propaganda? If there's anything we should have learned by now, it's that just about everything out there that's computerized has been or is subject to being hacked into. If Google or anyone else wants to pretend a network connecting driver-less cars together is at no risk of a hack, just because of the level of encryption used? Then I'd have to ask why just about every credit card out there has been downloaded by hackers at least once in the last couple years? Are you say nobody else ever though to use military grade encryption and all along, that's been the whole issue?!

There's going to be a lot of motivation to hack such a network, too. (Think of all the people who'd love to have a secret "mode" rigged up on their personal vehicle so if they press a button, their car suddenly takes priority over everyone else on the road and forces them to yield to it!)

I will say, though -- I'm far less swayed by your argument about "owning your mobility". I think anyone buying or leasing a vehicle is already doing that, regardless of how the driving is accomplished. You're expressing your freedom by telling your car where to go and when, just like you are when you get behind the wheel and drive it there. If you're referring more to wanting to drive off-road? Well, I think there's going to continue to be a demand for manually driven vehicles for off-road use (like Jeeps) -- where they'll probably operate in a driver-less mode OR manual control. But statistically., the majority of people who buy an off-road vehicle never even use it off of the public streets ..... so it's truthfully only a niche market who cares about that capability.

Yeah, no doubt the earbuds don't cost nearly as much to manufacture as the sale price on them. There's just not THAT much to a pair of them, no matter who sells them. But to be fair, the big difference in sound quality of the more expensive ones comes largely due to money invested up-front in R&Ding a specific pair. (You can bet companies like Skullcandy don't get sound engineers as deeply involved with the production process as Sennheiser does.) They have to roll the development costs into the product price too.

I think part of the problem is, people simply have no idea how many other people are calling in with issues on the same product!

At one of my old jobs, I remember constantly getting called on by the boss to help with his HP printer issues -- both in the office and sometimes at home. He'd volunteer to drive me out to his place over lunch (and usually buy me lunch as compensation) to take a look at it for him.

Truthfully, most of his issues were bugs that MANY, MANY people using multiple HP wireless printers were running into, as evidenced by Google searches on it. He used to complain and complain about how long he had to wait on hold to talk to reps at HP, who would then spend HOURS remote-controlling in to his computer(s) to try to iron everything out. Yet he was sure these issues had to be fairly unique to his environment. He wouldn't accept the idea that lots of people experienced these issues, because in his mind, "HP wouldn't be able to afford to keep the products on store shelves if this was happening to too many people."

What I don't think he realized was that yes, that's exactly why he had to wait on hold for an hour or more each time, and struggle through tech support with language barriers. There were that many people calling in with issues! Apparently though, when you're the size of HP, it's still more cost-effective for the company to keep cranking out printers and all-in-one devices that have known software problems, and just take the calls as they come in. (I imagine the money is mostly made on the ink anyway, and HP is fine with people wasting ink and paper trying to get test or network config. pages to print, in an attempt to fix them when they quit talking on the network.)

I don't think your example really proves much?

Sennheiser is a fairly large company that sells a lot of higher-end audio gear. It's quite possible they take a loss supporting the cheaper products in their line-up, but consider that an overall acceptable expense if it makes happy customers who eventually step up to their higher-end products.

The real problems with support come in with the companies who really only specialize in the cheaper items. Say you primarily sell 4-port USB hubs and generic 3-button mice for laptops? Or say you specialize in selling 3rd. party replacements for cellphone batteries? It's all a customer can really expect, IMO, to get a prompt exchange or refund for a clearly defective item within the stated warranty period. A toll-free number to get live support on these things isn't financially sensible.

Customer support forums are great, no matter WHO provides the solutions, as long as solutions come in a timely manner.

I think that's where each company needs to look at what it's doing for support, and using whichever method suits it best.

For example, I've been on a few forums for specialized music hardware or software where it was highly structured. You weren't really allowed to post messages helping out the next user. Rather, you had to post specific questions and wait for one of their support people to reply, as though it was an official "trouble ticket".

This gave a much worse result than a forum where the company provide no direct help at all, IMO. The official staff was slow in responding, and it usually required multiple emails back and forth as they asked for all sorts of details the company apparently made a procedure of collecting before assisting a person.

I think what USUALLY works best is an open forum where everyone can assist each other, but official employees are tasked with keeping up with the forum topics and interjecting assistance as well. But I can't tell you how often I've gotten useful advice from the Apple Support Forums, even though nobody from Apple gave any official help at all in there. When you sell a product that's very widely used (like Apple does), almost anything you come across has also been observed by somebody else. The forums help get those people communicating with each other and raise awareness of an issue. Other readers quickly chime in if they have any suggestions or also saw the problem -- and before long, there's usually an answer. When it's clearly a problem that's insurmountable without a bug-fix from Apple, there's always the option to file an official bug report with Apple's online bug-tracker, and that usually gets it corrected for you by the next software or firmware release.

It's also true that sometimes, I've found the users of a product who are interested enough in it to frequent forums in the first place will know MORE about it than the staff at the company who sells it! So just calling in for support is inferior to asking on a public forum in those cases.

Initially, it's impressive looking -- but as others said, the fact it gives you no more vertical resolution than you get with many of today's laptop screens is kind of a "non starter" for me. When web browsing (which, let's face it, almost all of us do quite a bit of, no matter what other task(s) we claim a given computer was purchased for), you're always scrolling pages up and down. I wouldn't spend this much on a display that didn't let me see a single bit more information on a web site without scrolling down.

Same thing tends to happen for tasks like photo editing. Your typical photos are going to have a lot more vertical resolution in pixels than this monitor can display at a time.

I dislike the bezel between multiple monitors too -- but I don't think anyone's really offered a worthy substitute yet. (I have a pair of 27" LG monitors side-by-side on a monitor stand right now, and at least with this arrangement - I can go full screen to play a game while keeping the main Steam window open and visible on the second display the whole time. Same with other apps that were coded to work best in a full screen mode. You can do that and still have another screen to work with.) Cost-wise, these displays were only about $249 each plus $49 for the stand from NewEgg. So $550-ish to have the whole thing? I'll learn to live with the bezels before paying the $1000-ish prices for most higher resolution 30" displays out there and the like.

Well, one real obvious reason the "MS hopes people will balance the Surface's cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet" claim is false is this:

Employees don't pay for their work-supplied computer! And by contrast, your employer isn't financially obligated to pay for your personal computer or tablet needs.

If the best argument for a new Surface is the idea it replaces both a work PC and a home tablet ... then they've got nothing. The rise in employer-supplied computers actually helps drive the interest in individuals buying personal tablets, IMO. There's a lot of stuff people can't really do with a work supplied machine. I've seen some that are a nightmare just to get on a home wireless network because they're so customized to work with internal network authentication and an encrypted VPN tunnel. If you're even granted local administrator rights on the system in the first place, you're still going to be cautious about installing games and other software. Meanwhile, these same people are often going to feel like they can't justify spending the $'s on a second laptop when they already carry one around for work -- so they consider the iPad or other tablets as good, cheaper alternatives.

....your intruder is a deaf guy!

I, too, spend years living in a pretty rough neighborhood. (Two houses down from me, someone ran an old Chevy through the middle of a guy's living room on purpose, because he wasn't happy with the drugs they sold him. A few houses down the street, the other direction, I heard a single gunshot -- and found out the next day the guy had an argument with his wife and decided to make sure he had the last word, using his shotgun.)

In 6 years there, though? I never had anyone break in once. (Some teenagers did steal my lawnmower that was sitting on the back porch, but I heard later that was going on all over town as a group of kids figured out they could make some quick money reselling the engines to repair shops.) I solved that by chaining up its replacement with a bike chain to the railing going up my back porch steps.

The whole time, I was known as the "computer guy" in the neighborhood and had expensive systems set up at home. So why wasn't I ever targeted?

I didn't waste time or money on an alarm system. (Heck, my next-door neighbor had ADT and he was still burglarized twice.) The biggest thing that helped in my case was making good friends with my neighbors on both sides of my place and letting them know if I was going to be gone for any length of time. Most burglaries really are "inside jobs", at least in the sense that the burglar knows something about the situation. If they get the idea that someone's usually home at your place, they'll choose a different target. (Most thieves aren't thrilled about the idea of having to commit armed robberies instead. They'd rather not up the ante quite that high.....) Additionally, if they get the idea your neighbors actually watch out for you -- they'll go elsewhere. Ideally, they want a place where they can park a vehicle and load it up with your stuff, and nobody will notice or care.

I agree that some cameras can't hurt though. If you're into computers anyway, surely you can rig up a few wi-fi webcams with night vision to watch over your vehicle in your driveway and so forth, and automate it so it only records when it sees motion. Cheap insurance. Probably also helps if you have a loud, barking dog -- but I didn't even do that.