Banker bonuses: a customer’s view
So far the debate on banker bonuses seems to have focused on two areas: the unfairness and inequality that the bonuses represent, and the value (or not) that they add to the businesses they run. The first represents the view of society as a whole, questioning whether anyone is worth a million-pound bonus on top of their million-pound salary. The second represents (or is supposed to represent) the view of the shareholders, who are putting it in perspective with the billion-pound profits of the banks they own.
However I think there is another equally valid perspective, namely that of the customers. Let’s see how well they’ve done there:
1. Customer service. I recently had a problem with my bank and rang my branch in an effort to get it sorted. I was automatically routed through to an Indian call centre where the woman I spoke to had a poor understanding of English and was obviously reading off a crib sheet. I have nothing against Indian call centres - Dell Computers have some very friendly and knowledgeable people in theirs. However I can remember 20 years back when customers actually had personal bankers – someone in your local branch who was responsible for your account and even knew you by name. Not a good performance there then.
2. Bank charges. I have been told that I will automatically be charged £25 for going overdrawn, despite the fact that I’m usually in credit and the bank is well aware that I’ve got funds elsewhere. I do have a meeting with someone I’ve never met in a few days time who may have the power to waive the fee if I jump through the appropriate hoops, but it’s a waste of my time and theirs (which ultimately I’m paying for). Not good there either.
3. Interest rates. The reason for this sorry story is that I’m trying to find a decent interest rate. The so-called savings accounts offered by the high-street banks pay laughably low rates – often less than 1%. When they do offer a higher rate, perhaps 3%, it’s only for a year, which means that every year you have to go through the process of opening an account with someone else and transfering your hard-earned savings from one account to another. And the only reason they do this is because they’re hoping you’ll forget, and leave your money where it is.
So no, I don’t think they deserve their bonuses.
The nature of money (1)
A stranger is staying at a hotel in a small town high up in the mountains for a few days. Shortly after his guest has eaten breakfast and left for the day, the hotel owner notices that he has left his wallet on the table. Business is bad, and the baker has refused to sell the hotelier any more bread until he pays the £100 that he owes. The hotelier can see that there are five £20 notes in his guest’s wallet, and after wrestling with his conscience for a short while, steals the money and takes it down the baker, who restores the hotelier’s line of credit.
The baker is particularly grateful to the hotelier as he happens to owe the butcher £100, so he takes the banknotes across to the butcher’s shop and settles his bill. The butcher in turn owes the local garage £100 for repairs to his car, so he uses the money to pay off his bill. The garage owner realises that he can now pay the hotelier the £100 he owes for the meal bought last weekend, so he pops into the hotel and gives the money to the hotelier. Moments later, the guest returns. The hotelier, seeing him come through the door, quickly puts the £100 back in the wallet and hands it back to the guest.
At first sight, there is something odd about this tale. Everyone in the town appears to be £100 better off and yet, at the end of the day, the stranger still gets his £100 back. How can this work? Where did the money come from? Read more…
Tom Abba on the future of the book
I went to a talk last night by Tom Abba entitled “This isn’t the future of the book”. I was expecting something different – more to do with eBooks, iPads and Amazon – but what I got was altogether more interesting.
Abba is a lecturer in New Media and Visual Culture at University of West of England in Bristol and recently completed a PhD, out of which came the subject of the main part of his talk. What concerns Abba is the future of the book in an age where both creation and consumption is (or can be) digital. Right away he suggested that “we can’t see the wood for the huge tree labeled ‘interactive fiction’ that is blocking our view.” By this he means multi-threaded or hyperlinked stories where your route through the story is determined by choices you make, but all the paths are predetermined by the author. Read more…
Windows Azure
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2011 issue of HardCopy magazine.
Cloud computing is entering a new phase, moving beyond simple ‘servers in the sky’ to something rather more sophisticated and even more useful. Microsoft has thrown huge resources into this new arena and come up with Windows Azure.
Of course cloud computing itself is not new. It has long been common for small and even medium-sized businesses to host their Web sites externally, paying a monthly fee to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) for access to a Web server and perhaps a database on which they can run their Web applications. This could be an ASP.NET application talking to SQL Server, or something written in PHP or Perl that interacts with MySQL. The ISP looks after the operating system and the hardware, keeping it updated and properly backed up, leaving the customer to look after the application.
What is new, and quite genuinely changing the landscape, is the application of virtual machine technology to such services. Microsoft Hyper-V, for example, allows a customer’s installation to run in a virtual machine that can be scaled in terms of memory and virtual processor cores according to demand, or seamlessly moved between servers or even data centres for the purposes of load-balancing and maintenance. This is cloud computing in a more literal sense in that the physical location of the server is less well defined and can change moment-to-moment. This is what Microsoft is using to deliver Windows Azure. Read more…
The power of Apple
What follows is my editorial from the Winter 2011 issue of HardCopy magazine:
Just recently I discovered a couple of things that brought home to me just how much this industry is changing, and just how much Apple’s influence has grown. The first concerned Amazon’s Kindle. I have been using the Kindle eBook app for some time on my Windows Phone and, more recently, I’ve been using the Kindle itself. One thing that has impressed me is the ease with which I can browse the Kindle Store for books and ‘1-Click’ buy straight from both the device and the app. However, this experience is no longer available to owners of the Apple iPhone or iPad. This is because Apple has changed the rules governing the applications available through the iTunes App Store, explicitly prohibiting apps that have “external mechanisms for purchasing content… such as a ‘buy’ button that goes to a Web site to purchase a digital book.” Read more…
Darik’s Boot and Nuke
If you ever need to completely wipe a hard disk, so that all the data on it is erased, then you need Darik’s Boot and Nuke. I’ve used it a couple of times on computers that have reached the end of their time with me, but might still be useful to someone else, and it’s worked a treat. It’s also free of charge.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) creates a self-contained boot device that takes you straight into the program’s main menu. From here you can simply enter ‘autonuke’ to have the program work out the optimum settings, or you can fine-tune the process. It generally takes eight to ten hours to wipe a modern hard disk, but the display keeps you updated on progress. Erasure is achieved by overwriting the data with random numbers.
DBAN creates its own Linux environment and can run on most Intel x86 or PowerPC systems. It comes as an EXE file for creating a bootable floppy disk or memory stick, or as an ISO file for creating a bootable CD or DVD, both available for download from the SourceForge Web site. One of those programs that you don’t need often, but it does the job when you do.
The benefits of competition
What follows is my editorial from the September 2011 issue of HardCopy magazine:
IBM launched the IBM PC in 1981, bringing the microcomputer into the office and simultaneously opening up a whole new market for IBM ‘clones’ from companies such as Compaq, Ericsson and Tandy. The IBM PC used Intel’s 8088 processor and introduced an architecture that allowed a full megabyte of memory to be addressed; so when Intel launched the 80286 processor a year later, which could directly address 16MB of data, the industry waited to see what IBM would do. Two years later, IBM responded with the IBM PC AT, which again was widely cloned.
Then in 1985, Intel introduced its first general-purpose 32-bit processor in the 80386, and IBM hesitated. The company was frankly fed up with the clone manufacturers, whose ranks now included Dell, Gateway, Olivetti and Zenith, and was looking for strategies that would enable it to reclaim the market. Furthermore, the power of Intel’s new processor meant that a PC based around it might well compete with IBM’s own lucrative minicomputer range, which did not seem like a good idea at the time. Read more…
Useful sites for writers (2)
Editors and proofreaders may be suprised to discover that there is an organisation devoted to their needs, namely the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. The society runs training courses, holds conferences and has a magazine called (rather cleverly) Editing Matters. It even includes a self-test in proofreading that you can run online to find out just how good you are at proofreading.
It’s also worth noting that Scrivener for Windows 1.0 has now been released. You can buy a copy from the Web site for just $40 or download a 30-day trial version for free, and I highly recommended it.
PSU failure and flashing green light? Find a hair dryer
So how’s this for a nightmare situation: you turned the power to your server off last night, to allow some electrical work to be done. Next morning, you turn the server back on and… nothing happens: nothing lights up, none of the fans are turning, everything seems dead - except for a solitary green light flashing away next to the power inlet. Pull the power plug out and the light stops flashing: plug it back in and the light’s flashing again, but the machine still won’t turn on.
Yes, everything important is backed up (or at least I think it is), but what do I restore it to? Thankfully my desktop PC still connects to the Internet, so in desperation we do a Google search on ‘psu failure flashing green light’. The result: a whole bunch of references to hair dryers, which all sound totally crazy, but what the heck, I’ve got nothing else to try. Unsurprisingly, no-one in the office has a hair dryer to hand, so it’s a quick trip home to borrow one. But what’s totally amazing is that it actually works!
What you do is take the side panels off the server box and then plug it into the mains, so the green light is flashing. Then play the hot air from the hair dryer around the light and around the power supply area with the object of generally raising the temperature of the metal. It takes some time for the heat to permeate into the internal electronics, but just as I’m thinking WHAT AM I DOING THIS IS CRAZY, the green light stops flashing. I press the power switch and the server boots up as if nothing’s happened. And it’s still running now, 12 hours later.
It’s all to do with the fact that the server hadn’t been switched off for such a long time for years, and the temperature within the power supply had dropped causing metal components to shrink, and brittle solder joints to crack. Heating it up caused the metal to expand and the solder to soften, restoring a broken connection somewhere. It’s only a temporary solution but it gives me time to get a new server, or think about moving it all out into ‘the cloud’.
So if you find yourself in a similar situation, go find a hair dryer before you do anything more drastic.
Where the market fails (5) exploitation
The final part in our occasional series on the shortcomings of the free market. This is an extract from a work in progress:
The price mechanism, like justice, is blind. It operates regardless of the nature of the produce or of the consumer or supplier. It works just as efficiently when it comes to drugs, prostitution and slavery as it does with groceries and leisure wear. The price that a paedophile pays to rape a child is just that needed to match the supply of enslaved children with the demand for such activities, regardless of our moral scruples. The price that an addict pays for a gram of heroin on the streets of London or Los Angeles is that needed to match the supply available from local dealers with the demand from local addicts, in just the same way as it is in the fish or fruit market, and the damage caused as a result to families and society is an externality in just the same way as the cost of cleaning our pavements is an externality to the chewing gum industry. Read more…
