I haven't been keeping up on this subject the last couple of months, but I was under the impression that the operations at the drive manufacturing plants were going to return to normal sooner rather than later. I would think that would cause prices to drop, even with the consolidation of the vendors. Otherwise, I'd suspect price-fixing.

I have worked at two major tech companies where they've tried this. At my last company, the COO used to be a senior exec at an outsourcing firm. Regardless, the results in both cases were the same: a waste of time and money.

If you're going to pay an outsourcing firm peanuts, you're going to get engineers who lack the necessary skills. You and your managers will spend an inordinate amount of time hand-holding these contractors. If you don't, you'll get really poorly written code. It may work, but it'll be completely unmaintainable spaghetti.

That's assuming you'll get a finished product. The turnover rate for outsourced engineers is ridiculously high. The moment these guys hear about some other firm that pays another dollar an hour, they'll jump ship. Every 6 to 12 months, you'll be training new people to replace the old ones.

There's also the question of logistics. It's hard to communicate with people who live on the opposite side of the world. It's bad enough that things get lost in translation, but when two groups get together for a conference call when one of the parties should be in bed, that's just not productive.

Think of Apple as the rebel Borg and Steve Jobs as Hugh.

sudo apt-get purge cli-common mono-runtime

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

It is fitting then that at the random quote machine at the bottom of slashdot currently says:

"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper

sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common

Grace Hopper

Your logic is seriously flawed, just as is your reaction to my previous post. Just because you claim Comcast's prices are "more or less" the same in different regions doesn't make the pricing "competitive." Competitive pricing suggests that there's competition that gives you a basis for comparison. There is next to no such thing in most broadband markets when communities grant official monopolies. You also should consider backing-up your claim about the Comcast pricing with some facts. I can just as easily claim that Comcast's pricing in one region is 15% more than in another region.

"They price their offerings to be competetive."

You're kidding, right? Comcast has no competition where I live, and neither do many providers around the country. There's no incentive to be competitive. Why do you think ISPs have gone so far as to sue whenever a city or town even whispers the words "municipal wifi"?

"and of the 1% who "need" more bandwidth, 99% of them probably aren't using it for legitimate downloads. "

That stat may have been true a few years ago, but I strongly suspect, if it hasn't changed already, it'll be different over the next few years. Video streaming services are becoming very popular, and it's gotten to the point where many Netflix users prefer the Watch Instantly option over receiving DVDs in the mail. The bitrate for HD Netflix content on the Roku box is 3.5 Mbit/sec. Let's suppose that some people keep increasing their usage of streaming services to the point where it replaces their usage of broadcast TV. Hell, why not? Netflix and Apple TV are cheaper than standard or premium cable. Let's then consider the statistic from http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3134/283/ that the average person spends about 142 hours in front of a TV per month. That means downloading over 218 GB in one month just from watching TV through a streaming service.