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."

Comments

Bunny

[LS]

I met this guy at a Foo camp party in Beijing, and he gave a presentation on how he reverse engineers Nintendo Wiis. He uses some kind of custom chassis that connects to both sides of the Wii's motherboard and burns off the tops of chips to look at their structure through a microscope. Pretty impressive...

Re:Bunny

[HungWeiLo]

That's pretty amazing.

A friend of mine works in the MS DRM team. Their algorithm gets cracked within a couple days of release by some Eastern European (actually, they have no idea where) hacker. It's a pretty complex security algorithm that involves randomizing pointer locations and such. Nevertheless, it will take the team over a month to figure out how they broke it and to release a patch. Only then, the patch will be compromised within a few days.

It just takes one person...

Moral issues?

[Bieeanda]

Like the ones he just kind of hand-waves, by repeating 'Oh! It's so much better in the factories than it is outside, you know? And they've tried to fool me by bringing in good food on the days I'm there, you know. And the workers aren't going to tell me how shitty it really might be, because I don't really speak the language and they really don't want to lose their jobs... or get in shit with the mob like this rebuttal suggests might happen. You know.'

Nifty article

[drinkypoo]

Gem from the article: "...it's a little bit different in terms of its industrial design. It has a soft leather case and has electronics on the inside. So trying to explain something that the Chinese guys hadn't seen before..." where was teddy ruxpin manufactured again? (I don't honestly know, but it's still a hilarious sentence.)

Now what is interesting about this guy (which applies to manufacturing jobs anywhere) is that he goes and sleeps in the dorm and eats the food. And he even talks about how sometimes they will try to fool him, et cetera. So what he's talking about is personal responsibility for corporate actions. It's not forced on you, although sometimes in China they will execute you for fraud if it's politically expedient...

Here's a painful bit from the article:

I can't actually walk through the toy section anymore because toy factories are awful. They're really -- that's where you get the worst labor conditions these days. And when I walk through a toy section, I can hear the machines cranking away in my head, driving out Tickle Me Elmos or whatever there is on the shelf. And it is kind of a little bit nerve-wracking to see all of that stuff on the shelf and see people just picking them up for $5.00 a piece and not knowing all the effort that went into building it. But that's sort of the consumer mentality in Americans as well.

I would add that I can't walk through the toy section any more because the smell of offgassing plastic makes me want to puke. I'm not one of the super-sensitive types, or at least I'm not sensitive to everything. And I like toys, I'm not ashamed to admit that I still have a collection of 'em sprinkled around here and there collecting dust. When I start to reenact scenes from Spaceball with them, I'll start accepting snarky comments. Crap, I'll make a webapp for the purpose. I even just got a new LCD TV that my lady chased out of the living room until it stops stinking so badly. I don't think that has to do with inherent disgustingness of electronics so much as Sharp's failure to actually wash them after production to remove residues. I pick on them because I'm staring at their logo under my windows taskbar, but I've been noticing more and more of this as time has gone by, both from name-brands and crap-brands. (As in, when you get one as a present, you say crap. e.g. "Oh crap, it's a Coby." Maybe not out loud, depending on how polite you are.)

Finally, NERD FACTOR NINE:

Oh, yeah. The name. It comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where there's that rabbit with sharp, pointy teeth that everyone runs away from. It was given to me back in middle school because I used to play a lot of roll-playing fantasy-type games. My friends thought it was a hilarious name to give me. It was hilariously inappropriate. That was back in the day when this thing called Bulletin Boards was just coming up and I had to pick a name. So I picked the name then. It was actually Vorpal Bunnie and I had to shorten it to bunnie when I went to college because they didn't have enough characters for it. And back then, you just never thought that people would call you by your online handle. But it really stuck. And I've grown into it, so I like the name.

Seriously, if you don't have a story like this about your nickname, are you really a geek? Definitely +10 geek cred points on that paragraph. Now if they can just lose the ballbag picture frame, maybe they'll have something.

Re:Chumby homepage stinks, article OK

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There has been a shift in corporate thinking over the last 20 years. They have slowly been moving from selling products, to licensing products. Companies worldwide have taken their cue from the software industry.

DRM laden musics. Not for rental DVDs and videos. EULAs on video games. Proprietary printer cartridges. Cars that can only be fixed at licensed dealers. Homeowners associations. The list goes on.

The sad reality is that many companies now think, or behave as if they do think, that once you buy their product they still have control and veto power over how, when, when and who can use it. This has been a huge shift in western industry, thirty years in the making. Its genesis can essentially be traced back to this letter. Once the idea of selling numbers to people, and retaining indefinite control over their use of that number, became firmly entrenched in the law, culture and mindset of our industry, it was much smaller step to apply that same principle to books, cars, nintendos and houses.

I'm not sure where this will end, but I can guarantee you one thing. The myriad of artificial restrictions being placed on property in the western world are most certainly not being applied or enforced in developing countries.