Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

< 7:38:39 AM        >

The two hold outs in the service world are education and healthcare.  That means that while productivity improvements will allow wage increases and qualitative improvements in other service industries without inflation, both healthcare and education will continue to see massive inflation. 

The article included lots of great examples, including a nearly direct refutation of Baumol's disease (which claimed that a Mozart quartet would always take the same number of people over the same people regardless of technology improvements) for service productivity.  Here are some:

• Countrywide Financial Corp., a large mortgage lender based in Calabasas, Calif., says it has reduced the time required to originate a loan to about 10 days from nearly 60 days a decade ago. Richard Jones, the company's chief technology officer, says Countrywide aims to reduce the underwriting time to just 20 minutes in the months ahead. "We're not very far from being able to do that," he says.
  
• Jay Meetze, director of the Opera Company of Brooklyn, says using virtual players reduces his cost of hiring musicians to a little bit more than $5,000 for each performance, compared with a typical rate of $15,000. The savings will allow him to begin a 24-performance tour of another Mozart piece, "The Magic Flute," in April. The high-tech music system was donated by a small New York company called Realtime Music Solutions.
  
• The now-widespread efforts of airlines to install automated check-in kiosks at airports demonstrate how long it can take for companies to adapt. Since 1997, Northwest Airlines Corp. has installed 755 such kiosks at 188 locations. Two-thirds of Northwest's passengers -- up from 20% in 2001 -- now use either the kiosks or a separate feature that allows them to check in at home via the Internet...  Mr. Melnik says on average one kiosk has the capacity to replace 2[omega] employees. The cost of maintaining a kiosk is one-fourth the annual cost of compensating a single employee.

comments < 7:37:57 AM        >

It's interesting to see that economists are still predicting US's near-term productivity at 2-2.5%.  They had the same estimate two years ago but the average rate has been over 5%.  The difference is huge.  5% represents a ~12.5 year living standards doubling rate vs. ~36 years at 2%.  Here are some reasons that a higher rate can be sustained:

1. The higher averages may mean that greater information flow is smoothing the productivity enhancement curve as well increasing the "sharing" of best practices processes across industry segments.  That will yeild a higher sustainable average over the longer term. 
   
2. A large percentage of this increase in productivity growth is due to advances in information technology.  So as Moore's law marches on, we will continue to see this improve.  Information technology is also supercharging other technology segments to plunge them onto their own rapid doubling rates.
   
3. Finally, the infrastructure for sharing information services (SOA and IT dial-tone) is being put in place across industry segments.  This will make it possible to more quickly and fully realize the benefits of Moore's law across all industry segements.  

[John Robb's Weblog]
comments < 7:35:07 AM        >

A Bad Omen for Windows. Netcraft has published its November Web server survey data. And the new numbers do not paint a rosy picture for Microsoft. [Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley] Says that Linux is more than holding is own.

I have been using XP Professional a lot the past few weeks, and its been working quite well for me. I like the feature set too. I'm a left-brain, right-brain sort of person whose own desktop and notebook run Mac OS X, but I also have a long history with Windows products, and a bit with Linux. I strive to maintain diverse skills! Apple has released "Panther" or Mac OS X 10.3. Between 1% and 2% of upgraders have encountered some serious problems with data loss. I plan to upgrade to 10.3 at some point. I would also like to upgrade an old Windows 98SE machine to XP Professional. But after I read user feedback at Amazon.com, and spoke with several people who had attempted a Win98 to XP upgrade, the general consensus is that a lot more than 1% to 2% of such upgrades were not pleasant. A whole lot more. Results ranged from loss of disk drives, to loss of software applications, and inexplicable problems such as network access dying or printers no longer functioning. Seems like the safest way to do an OS upgrade is buy a new computer with the OS already installed! This just doesn't seem right! [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]

comments < 7:34:07 AM        >

Monster Solar flare was likely an X-28 class flare. The November 4th solar flare was the strongest solar flare ever recorded. Some scientists blamed this on global warming... hey, I'm joking! [Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 7:32:19 AM        >

Coverage of WPA Key Choice Weakness. An excellent analysis of the WPA key choice weakness problem: It's been a high-traffic week here at Wi-Fi Networking News since we posted Robert Moskowitz's paper on how short WPA passphrases comprised of words found in dictionaries could be broken. Many many thousands of people have read the paper, and a number of articles of varying levels of accuracy have been written. The IDG News Service story is about the best re-summarization in IT terms. But, IDG News Service, really: Moskowitz's paper is circulating informally on the Internet. No, it isn't. Robert provided it to me and gave me permission to post it on my site, along with a less technical summary that I wrote and had him vet before posting. This moment of wounded ego is over.... [Wi-Fi Networking News]
comments < 7:30:45 AM        >

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comments < 7:29:57 AM        >