Slashdot Mirror
Inside Factory China
blackbearnh writes "While China is attempting to pull its industry up out of mere manufacturing mode, for now the country is the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new Internet appliance. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase."
Put yourself in the Chinese situation. If you had to work months and months and months to save up to buy something for yourself, would you buy the frivolous electronic gadgets you are manufacturing now, or would you work your tail off for something more rewarding like health care, better housing, national defense, or better quality food?
The Chinese economy is undergoing changes to serve its own people now. Factories will be modified to produce goods the Chinese people want, rather than what we want. It won't happen over night, but it's a process that will continue as they shift away from being an export economy.
What would you expect from the author of "Hacking the Xbox"? Next you'll be surprised that RMS is in favour of open-source software...
Let's have China be a giant slave labor pool but then borrow trillions of dollars of them to cover our own increased social welfare costs. Let's face it, the whole concept of trade coming into balance with them is just impossible, will never happen, and the more we trade with them, the more bankrupt we will get. Anyone who seems to think otherwise, please let me know what year it will be that US and China trade will be in balance. What year is that going to be?
This is my sig.
Flying spaghetti monster and all his noodley appendages, just go and read a bloody book or talk to someone or do something other than sit there watching a non-stop stream of the same five websites.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I read the article, and the guy uses right, like and whatever an awful lot. I realize it was supposed to read like a conversation, but it was awfully annoying.
It was also quite rambling. I would have loved more detail on the kinds of things he took apart as a kid, or some of the neat things he built with his 200 in 1 radio shack kit. These are the kinds of comments that inspire future hackers & product designers. But they spent very little time on what he had actually done.
All in all not a bad article, and certainly fodder for additional reading into this guy. I will say that the Chumby is getting some interest in my office. Folks have latched onto it in a "Web 2.0" kind of way, using it as an emblem of what the future of commerce, not just ecommerce, will be in the future.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
He has it wrong. Unlocked communication devices are different, because they can cause additional costs/damage on the network they are connected to. This is the reason smartphone makers cripple their devices.
How does that work? An unlocked communications device can simply be used on a different provider. That provider still has to provide you (see what I did there?) with the services in order for you to use them. A malfunctioning, locked device can cause communications problems - if the network is poorly designed. The same is true of a rogue device. You don't mean to tell me that the cellphone companies are trusting phones they have sold simply because they once held them, do you? Because somehow, I doubt that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think so. He specifically mentions(in the bit just after what is quoted above) the case of interaction with services. He never says that carriers are under any obligation to allow malicious activity on the network.
Also, in many cases, particularly among the smarter smartphones and more complex devices(which are generally the ones people are most interested in modding), there is a substantial degree of separation between the cellular modem bit, and the processor running the OS(Hayes AT ain't dead yet). Lockdown of the communication side is often about FCC regulations or legitimate network concerns. Lockdown of the application side is all about squeezing more money for worse service.
No one is stopping people from buying things that conform to there required interpretation of 'freedom'. How would it be a free market if the government legislated to control how a company is allowed to build physical devices? Sadly, sometimes it is exactly because a market is free that people choose to make choices that we as individuals may wish they wouldn't.
Even if we could assume that by, itself, a scenario of long term debt and eventual bankruptcy would not have terrible consequences for the USA, losing our ability to manufacture for ourselves is corrosive to our society. A slave economy retards technological innovation, undermines scientific achievement and ultimately results in social stagnation. The Romans collapsed as they went more and more into a slave economy, and having an economic reliance on slaves also doomed the old African tribal states, the Muslim states, and then most recently even the old Confederacy. Why invest millions into building machinery, when you can just add more slaves to your mix without any real capital cost at all? In that sense, slavery and a destruction of worker's rights is not just evil, its stupid.
This is my sig.
It's just plain inefficient. Before, companies made products that were governed mainly by the "laws" of nature; they tried to offer as much as nature allowed. Now, companies are actively creating new laws and restrictions, which ultimately means the products aren't doing as much as they could do. Any country which avoids this idiotic situation will have an advantage.