I do believe it is a canary in a coal mine. I'm amazed at companies that will have no problem spending $125,000 in salary on a high end programmer, which is probably $150,000 with benefits and all that but if they want a second monitor for $400 it's a big no-can-do. Soda/tea/coffee is $0.10-$0.30 a serving, even if someone were a major drinker at 5 servings a day of the expensive stuff that's $375/person/year, or about the same cost. Gives you an idea of what they are willing to spend on a happy, productive employee.

People don't need a lot to be happy, but basic respect and curtesy go a long way. If you went to someone's house to visit them one of the first things they are likely to offer is some sort of beverage. It's basic hospitality. And the company isn't just inviting the employees into their environment, but what about vendors, partners, or customers come to visit? There should be something to offer to them.

Lots of management types are under the impression that getting a paycheck is what makes people happy. It's a false logic, just because not getting a paycheck makes people unhappy doesn't mean it works the other way around.

It's obvious from your post that you suffer from a sort of bigotry that the technologies you have chosen are somehow better than other technologies because they are "old school", for your own definition of "old school". It will not serve your professional or social life well.

Things like IRC, console windows, and a plain black laptop can all be used to do quite cutting edge things. They are not old school the way most people would define the term. Browsing using lynx in a console when you have a perfectly good GUI and graphical web browser? That's just being a technological hipster, trying to show off to people that you're different. What you're doing isn't new either, back in the early 1990's I remember people complaining that X terminals were killing vt100 terminals, that the new squishing DEC keyboards were worse than IBM's mechanical ones, and that those new fangled web browsers were a total waste of resources, after all gopher and archie worked just fine.

What you'll find is that people trust the opinion of those who have actually used different systems far more than those who have simply developed a prejudice against anything that isn't their supposedly superior choice. The systems engineers I respect the most can sit down and just get work done on a Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, or Linux box. The great ones can also work on a VMS box, or a System/360 box, and tell you what was cool about OS/2 and BeOS. They can work in a GUI, or at the command line. They can do basic editing in both vi and emacs. They understand the right tool for the job depends on the job and is not an absolute. Most importantly they will tell you the areas in which their favorite technology needs improvement , usually by pointing out areas in which tools they don't prefer surpass the ones they do prefer. They are open minded enough to understand other peoples situations, understand their use cases, and test the tools in ways that make their recommendations meaningful.

The most important though is what others have pointed out. The technology industry is all about face paced change. I remember when pine did not exist. Seriously, if you wanted to be old school you need to ditch that new junk and use elm, or mh, or mailx. You're destined to be eternally grumpy if your reaction to every new technology is "the old thing works just fine", and you should get out of the industry right now. It's fine to chose to work on technologies you love, but it's not fine to think other technologies and the people who use them are beneath you. It's bigotry. It's nearly the same as looking down on people because of their race or religion. It's arbitrary, capricious, rude, and uninformed.

While his degree is not in engineering, quoting his Wikipedia page:

Otellini joined Intel in 1974. From 1998 to 2002, he was executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, responsible for the company's microprocessor and chipset businesses and strategies for desktop, mobile and enterprise computing.

I'm pretty sure he knows more about microprocessor engineering than many fresh college graduates. His business bacgroung is all about making engineering driven decisions, which was my point.

The only thing worse than no data, is bad data.

I'm going to assume that Intel is pretty good at projecting their cost to make a chip, and that while that estimate was wrong it was unlikely wrong by a factor of 100x, more like 10-30%. That's probably still counts as good data.

Making a guess as to the volume of a brand new device, which to quote him "no one knew what the iPhone would do" is the essence of making a decision based on bad data. Any projection there was completely made up. A straw man for Apple to negotiate pricing. Treating that as some sort of number that could be plugged into a spreadsheet and used to make a decision is tantamount to incompetence at his level.

The iPhone created a new market. With even a minimal amount of information (which they had to have to do a chip cost estimate, I believe) they could have realized that. Business school 101 talks about the first mover advantage, and how locking up a market early on is often one of the make or break elements. They should have had a serious discussion about how much money they were willing to risk losing with Apple just to be the ones that walked into this new market with Apple hand in hand. By having a head start on designing chips with the right qualities they stood a good chance of selling them to other companies who wanted to get into the competitor-to-iPhone market and needed similar capabilities.

There is an aspect of hindsight being 20/20 here, but the big wins in business all come from a calculated risk. Apple's original projections for the iPod were blown away as they dominated the portable music player market. There was good reason to think the phone would be the same. Intel had a strong balance sheet at the time, and could have risked a loss if it flopped for the chance of being the go-to chip guy for an entire class of new cellular telephones.

This was someone with an engineering background, who trusted questionable numbers over rational risk taking business decisions. That's extremely not good for someone in his position.

You correctly point out the initial misrepresentation, and then make one of your own.

This is actually more like the car manufacturer telling you they are going to stop making fenders and axles and intake manifolds as replacement parts. "We no longer provide support for X" means exactly that. In the case of physical goods they are no longer going to manufacture the parts (which includes things like line cards in routers or switches), and in the case of virtual goods like software means things like no more bug fixes or troubleshooting . In some cases third parties will pick up the slack, for instance with auto parts someone else may start making a compatible part, and with routers and switches used equipment vendors may buy up spares, test them, and sell you sparing services.

A car manufacturer (or more likely dealership) may well tell you "we can't get parts for your car anymore because it is so old, so if you don't want the hassle of spending a week searching junkyards for replacement parts we recommend you buy a newer car". This is perfectly reasonable advice.

A previous commenter hit the nail on the head though, how important this is depends entirely on your organization. If being able to call the vendor and have a part on site in 4 hours is an important component of your business, you need to use products they keep in the depot. If buying 5 spares and leaving them sitting in your data center is cheaper, that can be a viable option. If you're ok with it going down for 2-3 days when it fails while you search for a part on e-bay, rock on. What I find though is that most managers make very poor decisions in this area. The guy who doesn't want to have to ever explain down time wants 4 hour maintenance on everything, when in fact it supports some non-critical function that does not bring in enough revenue to ever justify that expense. The folks who would rather pay a vendors high rates than use a 3rd party for parts.

Do vendors use this process for arm twisting? Absolutely. Shocker.

Without election reform, term limits, and changes to the "perks" (like being exempt from some laws) given to elected officials the rest doesn't matter. We can't reform any of those areas without good people in office, and right now the system is rigged to keep good people out.

Car companies are the ultimate hardware companies. They exist to build large chucks of complex hardware. They are treating infotainment like a hardware company, build some cool hardware and to the extent it's necessary to make it go add some software, ship it, and forget about it. Hardware doesn't get "upgraded" later, so the concept of software upgrades later is foreign to them.

A software company would look at it differently; they see the hardware as something software can exploit and that people will come up with new and novel uses over time. I can think of only one sort-of example right now, and that's Tesla. The large (17") touch screen is all software driven, no buttons or knobs anywhere. They are also willing to push software improvements with relatively quick development cycles.

I think Tesla shows the future here, but it's going to be a long time coming. The car should have an API to access the onboard hardware features. A large display panel should be driven by a general purpose computer. Software updates will come not only from manufacturers, but also third parties making everything from skins for visual effect, to full replacement software to do everything in a different way. With a proper hardware design these general purpose computers could even be swapped out down the road for more powerful models, needing only a connection to the CAN bus to interact with the car.

Automakers will come around, in part because people want it, but mostly due to cost. With the cost of all electronic controls (for things like HVAC) coming down it becomes practical to do away with mechanical knobs. When that happens, reducing the number of parts and sharing them across more models will reduce costs of development and support. The eventual end game will be one generic CPU driving perhaps 2-3 sizes of generic displays across a large group of models. Being hardware companies though it will take them longer to get there, I predict late 2020's before we see new cars from the major manufacturers like I describe.

For a lot of users the speed of the modem is not germane to the need for Gigabit Ethernet.

My need for GigE, and 802.11n wireless is because my WiFi only laptops backup to a wired NAS device. The SSD's in the laptops are quite happy to saturate 802.11n at 300Mbps, and would be bottlenecked on the other side without 802.11n. Back when we had G-only one laptop backing up made the WiFi nearly unusably slow for everyone else, now with 802.11n that doesn't occur.

OpenWRT's IPv6 support is what I would call "usable". I do some IPv6 work and change home gateways regularly testing various IPv6 things, and OpenWRT isn't bad. The UI still needs some work to make it easy to use, but all the basic features are there. A couple advanced ones require manually editing config files. A basic tunnel and LAN setup should just work.

I've been extremely pleased with the combo of a Netgear WNDR3700v2 and OpenWRT.

The WRT54G came out in 2002. The newer WRT54GL version was released in 2005. While these were phenomenal products with a long lifespan, they are obsolete by any standard. Things like no N support, no Gigabit Ethernet, and the lack of CPU and Memory to do cool things have been huge issues for a while.

Serious users have already moved on. Platforms like the Netgear WNDR3700v2 are cheap, easy to find, and offer modern features. No one is suggesting rolling your own from a Raspberry will be the most popular option, but that enabling it will be a cool option for many hackers.

Note that my 1.86 million figure made a couple of gigantic assumptions of 40 servers per rack, and 30 square feet per rack. It would be possible (physically) to do 10' or 11' racks, and get upwards of 60 servers in a rack. Blades (of which OpenCompute is sort of one) figures differently. This also assumes 100% servers, massive disk storage would take up space and power and reduce the number of servers.

Given what Facebook does I'm going to guess somewhere between 25-50% of the floor space is dedicated to storage. Storage is (relative to servers) low watts per square foot, so it takes up a lot of space.

I think I would describe the numbers as completely plausible, but very inefficient...but then their business model isn't based on efficiency.

There are a few differences in how the figures are compared here. With a commercial building like Trump World Tower, the figure is for semi-finished space. That's the cost to erect the main structure, build the lobby and other common areas, shell each office (4 walls and a dropped ceiling), and sell the space. It does not include the cost to fit out an individual office space. If you bought a floor and wanted it done in Marble, that would be on-top of the $300 million cost, paid by the tenant. It's not cost to the investors in Trump World Tower, so isn't in the $300M figure. If somewhere someone tallied all the construction and build out costs for all the tenants of that building, it would substantially higher.

In a single user data center, the costs to build include the shell, power and the fitment of the space. To use some official numbers from a builder in the data center marketplace, CBRE suggests "Data center construction costs average $295 per square foot ($150 to $200 per SF shell, $12M to $18M per MW thereafter depending on the required design resiliency) ".

1.4 million square feet and $300 per, that's a $420M for a shell. I would hope a project of that size could get some economies of scale and come in at least 20% cheaper than that figure, but it really depends on some of the features a tenant might want.

I suspect you could run shell costs from near half that for a "bare bones" setup, to near double for some of the fancier features possible to add (biometrics on every door type bells and whistles).

The big question, is how much power (and cooling, they go together). Low power equipment might require 75 watts/square foot (105 MW), giving a power cost (using the low figure of $12M/MW) of 1.26 Billion; and high power equipment at 300W/square foot (420 MW) would be 5 Billion! Facebook has actually been a pioneer in reducing these costs with it's Open Compute project to make for more efficient setups. This should reduce their power cost well below the average, perhaps shaving 20-30% off that figure as well.

There's one last thing, what about servers? If it's a single tenant data center some folks might include the servers for such a data center. Conservatively 40 servers a rack, 30 square feet per rack, the building could house 1.86 million servers. At $5000/server, that would be another 9.3 billion!

Facebook claims just over a billion active users, or about 537 users/server, if this was their only data center. I'll let the rest of the crowd here debate if that's a reasonable amount of infrastructure per user, or too low, or too high.

Having used the older satellite services, I would agree completely...however there is a new choice in the last year or so. If you haven't check out the new Excede service. 12Mbps down, 3Mbps up. Yes, the latency is still bad so no online gaming, but it's a HUGE improvement over the previous offering.

I do spend some time in the country, and I do believe the answer there is FTTH as well. The country houses you're talking about have electricity and phone service. We managed to figure out how to provide both of those to everyone, and yes, part of the answer is cost sharing. I get better quality meat when the farmer raising my cows has access to the Internet, so we all chip in a little.

Why not water and sewer? Part is technology, sewer in particular tends to be largely gravity fed, which is difficult over long distances and varied terrain. But most of it is policy. There was federal policy to share the money between urban and rural areas, and a federal goal of 100% connected to electricity and telephone. And you know what? It worked. Largely there are no similar policies for water and sewer, they are handled all locally.

Fiber is the best technology to send data over long distances. The infrastructure can be vastly simpler than even basic telephone service to rural residents. Would the exact technologies be the same un rural and urban areas? No. Would the best solution be based on fiber in both, yes. Plus, in the estimates I've seen connecting up lots of rural areas (but not all) isn't really more expensive than urban areas. While the distances are greater, the cost to build is far cheaper per mile in the country.

We need federal policy that everyone should have Gigabit to the home by 2025, complete with a universal service fund tax on all connections and a sane regulatory plan to use that money wisely towards the goal. I refuse to believe that FTTH is any harder than building an electric grid in the 30's and 40's, or telephone in the 50's and 60's. We did it before, we can do it again!

Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is awesome, and how all of America should be connected. Just as the first half of the 20th century was spent wiring all of the homes for the telephone, the first half of the 21st century should be spent wiring for broadband. Gigabit (and higher, in the future) over fiber is what will enable the really interesting applications and increase the entire economic productivity of the nation.

Google Fiber is not the answer. Worse, several replies in this thread have talked about other competitors, multiple people delivering Gigabit to every neighborhood. This is simply crazy. How many water pipes reach your house? How many sewer pipes? How many roads? How many phone lines? How many cable lines?

ONE

Building this sort of infrastructure is a HUGE cost. Much of it is reaching your neighborhood, once there getting to each home is relatively easy. Simply having two competitors comes close to doubling the cost, as the number of homes to bear the cost is cut in half. This is the reason there's no independent company with water pipes in your neighborhood competing for your business. It's also why we granted monopolies for telephone and cable in the past; rather than have government build it we "outsourced" to corporate entities for those services.

There are really two choices moving forward. We will either end up with FTTH providers with government granted monopolies similar to telephone and cable, or with "municipal fiber" where government provides the fiber infrastructure (similar to water, sewer and roads). There is no other viable end game. In that sense Google is a play in the first camp, becoming a monopoly FTTH provider.

Over time I suspect this will be no better than our current monopoly providers. Eventually complacency sets in, and the service degrades. There's no long term incentive for a monopoly provider to be cutting edge.

Unlike water, sewer, and other traditional government services, Government could provide the "pipes" without supplying the "service". Government could operate a Layer 1 or Layer 2 broadband FTTH network, and allow any Layer 3+ provider to connect. Consumers would pay once for the infrastructure (a huge win), and have competition for the service (a huge win). Telephone and cable have no analog. Electricity comes close, where some places let you select the electricity provider; but even there it's fungible asset. Broadband is the only one that provides the layering needed such that the infrastructure can be fully divorced from the service.

In short, is the Google model better than the current telecom and cable monopolies? Yes. Does it compare with municipal broadband with multiple choices of providers? No, not even close. We should all be demanding much, much more.