Not that this is some kind of deep insight only apparent to me, but it's no coincidence that Dell's reputation as a supplier of a quality product has faded as they've moved more and more of their R&D work overseas (and I use the term R&D loosely here).
Back in the 90s when Dell was a quality machine, they had quality people designing them. It was a good job, and everyone I went to school with was excited about the prospect of working there. So, they could pick the best and the brightest.
Today, they just pick the cheapest. They know their engineers overseas aren't as good. They just don't care. Dell doesn't even do a lot of their own R&D. They contract a lot of it out to Foxconn. A friend of mine was "sold" to Foxconn when he was due for a promotion. He sits in the exact same cube, but doesn't have access to the Dell gym. He went without software for several weeks because Foxconn didn't get him licenses right away. Turns out the last Dell laptop I bought (Inspiron 1720) wasn't designed by Dell. Someone else did the R&D work (I assume Foxconn), and Dell slapped their name on it. And yes, that model has a quality issue with the GPU detaching from the motherboard.
Contrast that with Apple... Yeah, they manufacture stuff overseas. But, as far as I can tell, they still do their R&D work in the US. Most engineers I know would love to work for them. They make a good product. They charge more for it, but people pay it.
Maybe Dell should think about that. Bring your R&D back here and start caring about quality from the beginning. If that makes your stuff more expensive, I'd like to think people will be receptive when they know you make a good product. Heck, I even wonder if it would be economical to put manufacturing in a less affluent part of the US (West Texas, deep South, etc). You'd get to market your stuff as made/assembled in the US, you'd save on freight, and you wouldn't have to pay the workers that much (in US terms) to give them a decent standard of living. I'm no bean counter, but I've got to think the tradeoffs there aren't all that crazy.
I work on Icecrown, horde side, as a Tauren, "Cownselor." This is a pretty tough job sometimes. Here's a chat transcript from a couple of nights ago:
To [Stabbz]: Hello, Stabbz. My name is Cownselor. My mother asked me to speak with you about your time in the World of Warcraft.
[Stabbz]: Stabbz is busy fighting against Freya (32%, 22/24 people alive)
Someone mentioned XML/XSL/FO. Don't try to write your content in XSL-FO. You'll hate every minute of it.
I'd look in to using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It's a set of canned XML structures, plus a specification for how to process and customize those structures. It includes tags for stuff like footnotes...I bet it covers a lot of your use cases. There are some good intros to how these XML structures work here: http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase
As DITA is XML, you can convert it to HTML and whatever else you feel like, pretty easily. There's an open-source implementation of the DITA spec called the DITA Open Toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/). The DITA Open Toolkit includes stylesheets/scripts to publish HTML and PDF, among other things. PDFs are published via XSL-FO. Just like HTML needs a web browser to render something useful, XSL-FO requires a FO processor to create a PDF. So, in the end you write DITA, XSLT and other scripts transform that DITA to XSL-FO, the a FO processor consumes the XSL-FO and spits out a PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit comes with an open-source FO processor (Apache FOP). FOP doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it might work very well for you.
Not to mention using petroleum for energy, construction, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#History
This is a tiny bit of an exaggeration, but it kinda is as simple as we figured out we could get a whole bunch of the stuff by sticking a straw in the ground, then we found all kinds of uses for it. There's a huge difference between that and desperately needing another way to do all the things we do today.
Forget energy for a moment... How are we going to fertilize crops? Make plastic? Rubber? I know, someone's going to say we can make plastic from corn. But what do we use to fertilize that corn? Fossil fuels are nature's way of spending millions of years to store solar energy and convert it to amazingly usable forms. I question whether a substitute for something like that can be "innovated."
Re:Another take on Peak Oil
on
Google Goes Green
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not a very good analogy. We've moved from energy source to energy source in the past, not because we needed to, but because something better sort of fell in our lap. Today we're looking at a scenario where we need to move past fossil fuels to survive as a society and possibly as a species, but there's not anything better staring us in the face.
Not quite. After skimming some Wikipedia articles, Universal Music Group is wholly owned by Vivendi, who also owns Blizzard and Sierra. NBC-Universal, on the other hand, is owned 80% by GE and 20% by Vivendi. Not the same company. Not sure if that's enough ownership for them to influence each other's policy.
So you might have read that the iPhone and i!Phone will detect when it's near a Starbucks and let you see/buy the songs that have played recently. What happens if you're in range of 4 Starbuckses though? Will it be smart enough to not charge my card 4 times?
As stupid as Jack Thompson is and as much as we'd like this to be an "I told you so," The report basically said that he played Sonic, therefore violent games didn't have a role. A "no shit" conclusion. If investigators found that he played more violent games, they and the media would have jumped to the conclusion that playing those games must mean those games played a role.
Isn't attach rate just the number of games you walk out of the store with when you buy the system? If so, I'm not surprised if they're close. But I was mainly talking about that a Wii owner might have bought Wii Play, Mario Party, and one other thing after the initial pickup of Zelda. A 360 owner is probably a more "serious" gamer and picked up Gears of War, Saints Row, numerous sports games, Bioshock, etc since they bought the system. A serious gamer on Wii may see Zelda and Metroid as their only must-haves right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even remember if I ever entered my CC info on PSN. Too bad I can't log in and check. =/
Not that this is some kind of deep insight only apparent to me, but it's no coincidence that Dell's reputation as a supplier of a quality product has faded as they've moved more and more of their R&D work overseas (and I use the term R&D loosely here). Back in the 90s when Dell was a quality machine, they had quality people designing them. It was a good job, and everyone I went to school with was excited about the prospect of working there. So, they could pick the best and the brightest. Today, they just pick the cheapest. They know their engineers overseas aren't as good. They just don't care. Dell doesn't even do a lot of their own R&D. They contract a lot of it out to Foxconn. A friend of mine was "sold" to Foxconn when he was due for a promotion. He sits in the exact same cube, but doesn't have access to the Dell gym. He went without software for several weeks because Foxconn didn't get him licenses right away. Turns out the last Dell laptop I bought (Inspiron 1720) wasn't designed by Dell. Someone else did the R&D work (I assume Foxconn), and Dell slapped their name on it. And yes, that model has a quality issue with the GPU detaching from the motherboard. Contrast that with Apple... Yeah, they manufacture stuff overseas. But, as far as I can tell, they still do their R&D work in the US. Most engineers I know would love to work for them. They make a good product. They charge more for it, but people pay it. Maybe Dell should think about that. Bring your R&D back here and start caring about quality from the beginning. If that makes your stuff more expensive, I'd like to think people will be receptive when they know you make a good product. Heck, I even wonder if it would be economical to put manufacturing in a less affluent part of the US (West Texas, deep South, etc). You'd get to market your stuff as made/assembled in the US, you'd save on freight, and you wouldn't have to pay the workers that much (in US terms) to give them a decent standard of living. I'm no bean counter, but I've got to think the tradeoffs there aren't all that crazy.
I work on Icecrown, horde side, as a Tauren, "Cownselor." This is a pretty tough job sometimes. Here's a chat transcript from a couple of nights ago:
To [Stabbz]: Hello, Stabbz. My name is Cownselor. My mother asked me to speak with you about your time in the World of Warcraft.
[Stabbz]: Stabbz is busy fighting against Freya (32%, 22/24 people alive)
Someone mentioned XML/XSL/FO. Don't try to write your content in XSL-FO. You'll hate every minute of it.
I'd look in to using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It's a set of canned XML structures, plus a specification for how to process and customize those structures. It includes tags for stuff like footnotes...I bet it covers a lot of your use cases. There are some good intros to how these XML structures work here: http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase
As DITA is XML, you can convert it to HTML and whatever else you feel like, pretty easily. There's an open-source implementation of the DITA spec called the DITA Open Toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/). The DITA Open Toolkit includes stylesheets/scripts to publish HTML and PDF, among other things. PDFs are published via XSL-FO. Just like HTML needs a web browser to render something useful, XSL-FO requires a FO processor to create a PDF. So, in the end you write DITA, XSLT and other scripts transform that DITA to XSL-FO, the a FO processor consumes the XSL-FO and spits out a PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit comes with an open-source FO processor (Apache FOP). FOP doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it might work very well for you.
Unfortunately, working with the Open Toolkit and customizing its output can be a bit unwieldy. http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=dita+users is a pretty good place to look for help.
Time for a sequel to Animal Farm. At some point in the story, the paranoid pigs will order a culling of all humans.
Great idea...Bet our energy future on something that's succeptible to FoxDie.
Just have her start playing World of Warcraft. She'll find out if she has a keylogger pretty quick.
"A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide last week."
That's kinda crazy. My sister had me do lots of things I didn't want to do when I was growing up, but she never proposed suicide.
The Cylons were created by Man.
They Rebelled.
They Evolved.
There are many copies.
And they have a Plan.
Oh wait, there's fossil fuel interests there too.
Not to mention using petroleum for energy, construction, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#History This is a tiny bit of an exaggeration, but it kinda is as simple as we figured out we could get a whole bunch of the stuff by sticking a straw in the ground, then we found all kinds of uses for it. There's a huge difference between that and desperately needing another way to do all the things we do today. Forget energy for a moment... How are we going to fertilize crops? Make plastic? Rubber? I know, someone's going to say we can make plastic from corn. But what do we use to fertilize that corn? Fossil fuels are nature's way of spending millions of years to store solar energy and convert it to amazingly usable forms. I question whether a substitute for something like that can be "innovated."
Not a very good analogy. We've moved from energy source to energy source in the past, not because we needed to, but because something better sort of fell in our lap. Today we're looking at a scenario where we need to move past fossil fuels to survive as a society and possibly as a species, but there's not anything better staring us in the face.
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.
As awesome as that Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man screenie looks, this game just HAS to come out on the Wii.
Holla at a playa when you see him in the street!
Perfect! Just in time for the ren faire this weekend. You think they'll be selling these there yet?
Sounds like something intentionally put in for The DoD budget.
The home of Senators Inhofe and Coburn and of Oral Roberts University is a common sense area and merely on the edge of the Bible Belt?
Not quite. After skimming some Wikipedia articles, Universal Music Group is wholly owned by Vivendi, who also owns Blizzard and Sierra. NBC-Universal, on the other hand, is owned 80% by GE and 20% by Vivendi. Not the same company. Not sure if that's enough ownership for them to influence each other's policy.
I saw it demoed about a month ago. Dude drove a wheelchair and talked through it. Two questions:
Does it have an internal monologue feature?
How long until the NSA makes us all wear one?
Yeah, that's literally tens of tho...well, tens of games.
This certainly isn't a business move to tap into an existing market. AMD can only hope this helps to create a real Linux gaming market.
So you might have read that the iPhone and i!Phone will detect when it's near a Starbucks and let you see/buy the songs that have played recently. What happens if you're in range of 4 Starbuckses though? Will it be smart enough to not charge my card 4 times?
Wow. You actually used Star Trek V as an example of what's good about the series.
As stupid as Jack Thompson is and as much as we'd like this to be an "I told you so," The report basically said that he played Sonic, therefore violent games didn't have a role. A "no shit" conclusion. If investigators found that he played more violent games, they and the media would have jumped to the conclusion that playing those games must mean those games played a role.
Isn't attach rate just the number of games you walk out of the store with when you buy the system? If so, I'm not surprised if they're close. But I was mainly talking about that a Wii owner might have bought Wii Play, Mario Party, and one other thing after the initial pickup of Zelda. A 360 owner is probably a more "serious" gamer and picked up Gears of War, Saints Row, numerous sports games, Bioshock, etc since they bought the system. A serious gamer on Wii may see Zelda and Metroid as their only must-haves right now.