The worlds biggest company, makes all its money from selling less products, Even ones like the iPod Touch and iPads which are in general iPhones without the phone or iPhones in a bigger case.
Sure Apple drops product lines in the past, but that is only after they have a replacement that they want to sell.
iPod touches are popular with kids, where their parents won't buy them wicked expensive iPhones, but they want access to the Apple App store where still they have a selection of better quality apps.
iPads are actually popular in businesses outside of IT and Engineering circles. Marketing and Sales people love them, also executives who primary spend most of their jobs reading documents and emails.
They still have their place in the "Apple Ecosystem" so I don't expect to see them gone any time soon. Even just because you may personally hate Apple, their business model is strong. And their looser products are few compared to their winner products. Apples problem now is their growth isn't as fast as it use to be, this isn't a decline in sales, just less growth.
The Government and Media Companies are equally at fault.
The Government will always want to only have portrait what looks good to them, and not have their dirty Landry shown, they will always be a force to keep the news down and as censored as they think they can make it. Right now the two party system in America, where both parties have enough power to want the other side to be seen poorly, so they will tolerate such freedoms.
The Media companies are out for profit. To maximize profits all their stuff they show is targeted towards people with an 8th grade education, and is afraid to go into details, as that would get boring, and loose the audience. Also because of this, there is more money blurring the lines between Facts, Opinions, and Call to action. So we are getting most news mixed with commentary and trying to make us to go out and fight it. We get things like Changes that will hurt this group of people has passed with so much opposed and so much approved by which party, then we point out party members that had broken with their party and either give them props for being bipartisan, or admonish them for selling out. The change was passed (fact), the people who will get hurt by the change (opinion), those who and didn't cause the vote (call to action, to affect your vote)
Because the Media companies are getting dirt about the other party, the party will often give them more exclusive access to their side of the issue. Thus make the problem worse.
It takes a disciplined news source to be actually fair and informative. I think NPR does the better job at it, then others I have seen, where when they cover Trump voters they try to get the ones ones who can explain their position a bit more clearly and rationally, when they cover liberal groups they stay away from the more Hippy Pie in the Sky folks as well. While their political leaning does often come across (leaning left) they seem to try hard to be more fair on what is going on, then the others.
Which seems just as good of a reason for Microsoft to do its final update. There were probably a bunch of fixes in the work, just waiting for a release, and now that the product is at end of live, just push them all out. Giving the people who still use it, a little extra life out of it. Especially as Microsoft really isn't pushing a replacement for it.
Or because screws will be hard to find, device makers will switch to glue, and will create products of lower quality and less competitive to their foreign counterparts. If you are not selling to the rest of the world, selling to one customer is very risky, especially Apple. There are many cases of big companies getting seriously burned with making custom components for Apple.
The biggest problem with the economy isn't business needing more money, but more customers. Even if Apple is willing to spend 10x for the screws, chances are not too many companies will jump on the bandwagon to start up such a business, because of the risk, because they woudn't have enough customers.
The only game changer would be if there is some advancement in mass production, that will allow a company to mass produce and item and change its specs on a whim. Currently general use robotics are not good for mass production, they can the custom requirements but not sell 100,000 units in a week after the specs were given. Then the next week produce a different product.
As stated before the US economy is good with Big things, because big things have less tolerances, so we can build far more generic parts, and build a lot of them. We sell these big parts to a lot of customers.
Believe it or not, labor costs are rarely the biggest factor. The issue is with a global supply chain is there are some things that some countries can just do better then what others can for a wide range of reasons. Now China has an infrastructure that is better designed at making screws then there is at the US. Getting the right form of metal, to the places that can manufacture them, who have enough customers to make such verity profitable to mass produce. So this screw is made for US based Apple, and also Korea based Samsung, and LG...
For a company to manufacture such screws in America, they will need to find a place where there is a workforce ready to do such work, setup machinery and get a customer base for their products. American Manufacturing is good at making Big Things, Small things Asia seems to be better equip for.
As we moved away from Industrial Economy to Technology. The demand for small item manufacturing came into play.
The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.
Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.
As you already have a mountain of comments stating the paperwork is done for the patent but it hasn't gotten back yet, however for inventions that are simple and cheap to make, often means they are also really easy to copy. He is working out of his basement, a simple picture, could mean a large corporation can get the idea and mass produce them without completed paperwork. And facing one man against a big corporation in general means he lost a lot of research.
cheap = you can make more, not necessarily make them bigger. I can fold a Paper Crane with a cheap piece of paper. However If I were to make a 50 meter tall crane, I would need a different material then paper, and even cardboard. Scale on 3d objects often are very exponential, in cost over size. However cheap means you can often make a lot of them. Because their trade off of value vs cost is low. So you get a lot of value for little cost.
While there is less lock-in with Android, they are sneaky ways that Android and phone makers will lock you into their platform.
At work I have to support a mobile app that has IOS and Android ports.
The iOS version is easier to manage even when people upgrade their phones. Android has issues when people switch their phones. Say from Samsung to Pixel. OS version are different, phone features may be incompatible with the App, and screen size differences may make the usability pure garbage.
The issue isn’t really with Android but the phone makers. Who seem to want to be the next Apple.
$25,000 for a small business is a lot, but normally prohibitively expensive, especially if you plan to have it as an important part of your business. But I see this price akin to getting a delivery truck, or yearly rent on a storefront.
However this price is good against "get rich quick scammer businesses" such as buying as many crap TLD as you can, sit on them, awaiting for someone to really want it and sell it for thousands more. Like which was popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's for the.COM domains. These are 0 value to society businesses. Changing $25,000 means these guys will need to spend millions of dollars upfront to get enough names to scalp later on. And their markup prices may be too much for most customers. So there is a high cost and little return.
My opinion is there is problem as I see it is there is a big abuse on free speech. The line where someone is stating an opinion, is stating a fact, or is stating parody has gotten very blurred. Back in the 1990's I have (as I expect others would have too) posted some parody posts about a flat earth mainly to show the arguments against evolution (as Kansas blocking evolution from text books was an issue then).
What seemed to have happened was this parody had been passed with the pseudoscience and half baked conclusions got read by someone who just didn't see this as parody but as fact. And then increased on this topic, and combing with their belief of grand conspiracies to show the topic. Then it just grew further.
Before the internet we had our opinions which can be published in the opinion section of the news papers. People read it and know it was just our opinion. Parody was well defined as such, and fact had a lot of official backing behind it.
Now with the internet we are flooded with too much info, and need more skills to separate truth from fiction. And conspiracy logic will always seem to be a strong counter argument to official channels, to a point today where conspiracy theories are now on the official channels as well, muddying the water even further.
I never liked beer until I was in my 30s when the Craft Beer started to be commonly available in the States. Then I realized what I was tasting before was just crap. Before when offered a beer I would just politely refuse.
Like with a lot of technologies it isn't what it does, but how it is implemented. If your compiler send the report of warnings over to HR, where your raise is based on how many times you have a used a variable that you have never used, or had some debug code that you kept in with an "if (0) {"
For the cooks, if this lets them know they need to wash their hands, because they had just sneezed, this can be a friendly reminder. But if their face pops up on a Jumbo-tron saying this man is unhygienic avoid at all cost.
Could you explain quite common? I did a search beside the Wine 4.0 the previous direct discussion of Vulkan was about a year ago. Many of the topics these topics seemed to be a secondary feature, to the main article.
Then we have context, We are talking about Intel the Chip Maker, Valve and Steam are game makers, so this throws our ability to have the correct context is off.
It would be like a story "Apple give a major upgrade to emacs" Are they talking about their old Mac Platform that they use to sell to education market, or they decided to upgrade the open source text editor. Context is key.
As a longtime Unix/Linux user and MS Dos for PCs before that. I do like the ability to just be keyboard only. Heck I like the idea of all the functions being done with mostly the Alpha Numeric keys without the need for specialized system keys such as Control, Alt, Windows, and Menu keys.
VI actually did a good job of a robust set of options via normal keyboard controls, with the only exception would be the escape key.
I don't think the issue is that the developers have gotten excessively lazy, but most people are too hooked on the pointing interface, that coding hotkeys for all options just isn't worth it.
The other issue is most development languages for GUI's don't give nice consistent options for hotkeys. Meaning coding in hot keys is more then just a quick setting, but having to write a good set of additional code, especially if it is outside a context menu option.
A summary of a technology event, should give at least a cursory explanation of a product. In technology brand names and product code names are often used over and over again and dealing with different technologies.
Vulkan the god of volcanos, Gallium a medal with a low melting point, and Valve often to use to control the flow of liquids.
I am guessing this is a new 3D Printer that prints high resolution metal Jar-jar Binks (Mesa) which will melt if you touch it. And its heat source is super heated stone.
I think the biggest part is the horrible news reporting for science. For it to be part of the news cycle to bring in advertising money, often the latest hypothesis being called a theory, which get people all excited and rialed up, only to become like a lot of science, shown to be a wrong path.
Real science is not a good spectator sport. When something becomes classified a theory in science, actually a lot of strong evidence it going for it. But often when it gets to that level, there is a lot of peer review and able to duplicate the results, that often it is consider common knowledge.
Now people like to point to "Science" to prove their point. But it rarely really does, unless the Science has gone a long rigorous process.
Gee Wizz that sounds really sciencecy and stuff. I figured having my Cell phone next to me, is a distraction where when I wake up in the middle of the night other then just turning around and going back to sleep. I feel the need to check my email, get caught up on my daily comic strips, see the news alerts then not being able to get to sleep because other then a minute shifting to get comfortable, I had actually done a lot of activities that woke me up further. Then before I go to sleep I will watch that one more Video....
But I guess I am wrong and it must be radiation at types and levels that have no evidence of being harmful or effect the human body.
Apple already does this. Except they contract with other companies to make custom to meet Apple specs.
This is more likely so Apple has a tighter control of its supply chain market, and reduce the risks you get from having different vendors. Especially today with nearly every nation is hiding in its own little hole, making crazy rules to prevent others from getting too much control of their stuff. The B2B market is getting increasingly tougher to navigate, with governments, and a world of immediate outrage for anything that can go wrong. Say someone get abused at a company that makes parts for a company who uses that part to make a component that is used on the newest version of Apples iPhone. The outrage of a Products Vendor Vendor reflects on your own product now.
Heck today I feel like I cannot buy or not buy anything without having made some political statement. Heck I am not sure if I should shave or not. I need new gym sneakers but if I buy the wrong brand then I am making a statement that I may or may not believe in...
The Democrats say Businesses have to much control of the government. The Republicans say Government have too much control of business.
There seems to be symbiotic relationship between a business and government. Which both sides thinks the other is actually being parasitic.
What seems to be the problem, is really a good lack of a middle ground. They are government regulations that go too far, and needless hurt a company, while businesses need to realize some rules that may hurt their short term bottom line, actually will help for the long term survival, such as preserving natural resources.
But with a lot of symbiotic relationships, there is a careful balance that needs to be in place.
There was the popping of the Tech bubble, mostly because Y2k fixes have been applied, or most organizations have upgraded their systems to newer ones. But what else was the Clinton Administration opening the H1B Visa which had begin to flood the market with Cheap IT workers too. This created a double whammy. A lowering demand in IT goods and services with a rising supply of IT workers. This really caused the bubble to pop.
Back in the late 1990's Front Page "Web Developers" were being paid 70k a year, and real programmers were getting paid 6 digits out of college. Tech workers were at the C table suite, with power and authority.... Then it kinda just popped, so as their pay lowered because there was so many more options and less demand, their power rolls have decreased too.
Tech jobs started to pick up around 2009 or so, while the economy is recovering, tech was needed to work smarter and with less resources. Which made tech workers one of the few Middle class jobs. No where near like it was in 1999 but a good solid career.
So now that the old guard boomer tech workers are retiring, we are seeing a new generation wanting a decent quality of life studying classes that will bring them there with rather clear job paths.
Slashdot Mirror
The worlds biggest company, makes all its money from selling less products, Even ones like the iPod Touch and iPads which are in general iPhones without the phone or iPhones in a bigger case.
Sure Apple drops product lines in the past, but that is only after they have a replacement that they want to sell.
iPod touches are popular with kids, where their parents won't buy them wicked expensive iPhones, but they want access to the Apple App store where still they have a selection of better quality apps.
iPads are actually popular in businesses outside of IT and Engineering circles. Marketing and Sales people love them, also executives who primary spend most of their jobs reading documents and emails.
They still have their place in the "Apple Ecosystem" so I don't expect to see them gone any time soon. Even just because you may personally hate Apple, their business model is strong. And their looser products are few compared to their winner products. Apples problem now is their growth isn't as fast as it use to be, this isn't a decline in sales, just less growth.
The Government and Media Companies are equally at fault.
The Government will always want to only have portrait what looks good to them, and not have their dirty Landry shown, they will always be a force to keep the news down and as censored as they think they can make it. Right now the two party system in America, where both parties have enough power to want the other side to be seen poorly, so they will tolerate such freedoms.
The Media companies are out for profit. To maximize profits all their stuff they show is targeted towards people with an 8th grade education, and is afraid to go into details, as that would get boring, and loose the audience. Also because of this, there is more money blurring the lines between Facts, Opinions, and Call to action.
So we are getting most news mixed with commentary and trying to make us to go out and fight it. We get things like Changes that will hurt this group of people has passed with so much opposed and so much approved by which party, then we point out party members that had broken with their party and either give them props for being bipartisan, or admonish them for selling out. The change was passed (fact), the people who will get hurt by the change (opinion), those who and didn't cause the vote (call to action, to affect your vote)
Because the Media companies are getting dirt about the other party, the party will often give them more exclusive access to their side of the issue. Thus make the problem worse.
It takes a disciplined news source to be actually fair and informative. I think NPR does the better job at it, then others I have seen, where when they cover Trump voters they try to get the ones ones who can explain their position a bit more clearly and rationally, when they cover liberal groups they stay away from the more Hippy Pie in the Sky folks as well. While their political leaning does often come across (leaning left) they seem to try hard to be more fair on what is going on, then the others.
Which seems just as good of a reason for Microsoft to do its final update. There were probably a bunch of fixes in the work, just waiting for a release, and now that the product is at end of live, just push them all out. Giving the people who still use it, a little extra life out of it. Especially as Microsoft really isn't pushing a replacement for it.
Or because screws will be hard to find, device makers will switch to glue, and will create products of lower quality and less competitive to their foreign counterparts.
If you are not selling to the rest of the world, selling to one customer is very risky, especially Apple. There are many cases of big companies getting seriously burned with making custom components for Apple.
The biggest problem with the economy isn't business needing more money, but more customers. Even if Apple is willing to spend 10x for the screws, chances are not too many companies will jump on the bandwagon to start up such a business, because of the risk, because they woudn't have enough customers.
The only game changer would be if there is some advancement in mass production, that will allow a company to mass produce and item and change its specs on a whim. Currently general use robotics are not good for mass production, they can the custom requirements but not sell 100,000 units in a week after the specs were given. Then the next week produce a different product.
As stated before the US economy is good with Big things, because big things have less tolerances, so we can build far more generic parts, and build a lot of them. We sell these big parts to a lot of customers.
The problem is NASA did read the Slashdot Comments, they are still trying to get Gentoo Linux to compile.
Believe it or not, labor costs are rarely the biggest factor.
The issue is with a global supply chain is there are some things that some countries can just do better then what others can for a wide range of reasons.
Now China has an infrastructure that is better designed at making screws then there is at the US. Getting the right form of metal, to the places that can manufacture them, who have enough customers to make such verity profitable to mass produce. So this screw is made for US based Apple, and also Korea based Samsung, and LG...
For a company to manufacture such screws in America, they will need to find a place where there is a workforce ready to do such work, setup machinery and get a customer base for their products. American Manufacturing is good at making Big Things, Small things Asia seems to be better equip for.
As we moved away from Industrial Economy to Technology. The demand for small item manufacturing came into play.
The best thing about the Raspberry Pi is really the fact that has basic IO communications allowing people with basic Electronics Skills to be able to make rather complex devices. In a world where everything is soldered and shipped as a black box unit. Having a device which will allow us to make such a device ourselves is welcomed.
Now the Rasberry Pi, is good for a prototype system, I would recommend Arduino microcontrollers for more of a complete job (depending on its complexity) but the microcontrollers are cheaper and often offer the power for a lot of jobs.
As you already have a mountain of comments stating the paperwork is done for the patent but it hasn't gotten back yet, however for inventions that are simple and cheap to make, often means they are also really easy to copy. He is working out of his basement, a simple picture, could mean a large corporation can get the idea and mass produce them without completed paperwork. And facing one man against a big corporation in general means he lost a lot of research.
cheap = you can make more, not necessarily make them bigger.
I can fold a Paper Crane with a cheap piece of paper. However If I were to make a 50 meter tall crane, I would need a different material then paper, and even cardboard. Scale on 3d objects often are very exponential, in cost over size.
However cheap means you can often make a lot of them. Because their trade off of value vs cost is low. So you get a lot of value for little cost.
While there is less lock-in with Android, they are sneaky ways that Android and phone makers will lock you into their platform.
At work I have to support a mobile app that has IOS and Android ports.
The iOS version is easier to manage even when people upgrade their phones. Android has issues when people switch their phones. Say from Samsung to Pixel.
OS version are different, phone features may be incompatible with the App, and screen size differences may make the usability pure garbage.
The issue isn’t really with Android but the phone makers. Who seem to want to be the next Apple.
$25,000 for a small business is a lot, but normally prohibitively expensive, especially if you plan to have it as an important part of your business.
But I see this price akin to getting a delivery truck, or yearly rent on a storefront.
However this price is good against "get rich quick scammer businesses" such as buying as many crap TLD as you can, sit on them, awaiting for someone to really want it and sell it for thousands more. Like which was popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's for the .COM domains. These are 0 value to society businesses. Changing $25,000 means these guys will need to spend millions of dollars upfront to get enough names to scalp later on. And their markup prices may be too much for most customers. So there is a high cost and little return.
My opinion is there is problem as I see it is there is a big abuse on free speech.
The line where someone is stating an opinion, is stating a fact, or is stating parody has gotten very blurred.
Back in the 1990's I have (as I expect others would have too) posted some parody posts about a flat earth mainly to show the arguments against evolution (as Kansas blocking evolution from text books was an issue then).
What seemed to have happened was this parody had been passed with the pseudoscience and half baked conclusions got read by someone who just didn't see this as parody but as fact. And then increased on this topic, and combing with their belief of grand conspiracies to show the topic. Then it just grew further.
Before the internet we had our opinions which can be published in the opinion section of the news papers. People read it and know it was just our opinion. Parody was well defined as such, and fact had a lot of official backing behind it.
Now with the internet we are flooded with too much info, and need more skills to separate truth from fiction. And conspiracy logic will always seem to be a strong counter argument to official channels, to a point today where conspiracy theories are now on the official channels as well, muddying the water even further.
I never liked beer until I was in my 30s when the Craft Beer started to be commonly available in the States. Then I realized what I was tasting before was just crap.
Before when offered a beer I would just politely refuse.
Like with a lot of technologies it isn't what it does, but how it is implemented.
If your compiler send the report of warnings over to HR, where your raise is based on how many times you have a used a variable that you have never used, or had some debug code that you kept in with an "if (0) {"
For the cooks, if this lets them know they need to wash their hands, because they had just sneezed, this can be a friendly reminder. But if their face pops up on a Jumbo-tron saying this man is unhygienic avoid at all cost.
Could you explain quite common?
I did a search beside the Wine 4.0 the previous direct discussion of Vulkan was about a year ago. Many of the topics these topics seemed to be a secondary feature, to the main article.
Then we have context, We are talking about Intel the Chip Maker, Valve and Steam are game makers, so this throws our ability to have the correct context is off.
It would be like a story "Apple give a major upgrade to emacs"
Are they talking about their old Mac Platform that they use to sell to education market, or they decided to upgrade the open source text editor.
Context is key.
I think Donald Trump thinks his name is Hillary Clinton.
It seems like all the the threats and insults that he stated would happen with Clinton is happening with him.
As a longtime Unix/Linux user and MS Dos for PCs before that. I do like the ability to just be keyboard only. Heck I like the idea of all the functions being done with mostly the Alpha Numeric keys without the need for specialized system keys such as Control, Alt, Windows, and Menu keys.
VI actually did a good job of a robust set of options via normal keyboard controls, with the only exception would be the escape key.
I don't think the issue is that the developers have gotten excessively lazy, but most people are too hooked on the pointing interface, that coding hotkeys for all options just isn't worth it.
The other issue is most development languages for GUI's don't give nice consistent options for hotkeys. Meaning coding in hot keys is more then just a quick setting, but having to write a good set of additional code, especially if it is outside a context menu option.
And they probably think really high about themselves.
No we shouldn't
A summary of a technology event, should give at least a cursory explanation of a product. In technology brand names and product code names are often used over and over again and dealing with different technologies.
Vulkan the god of volcanos, Gallium a medal with a low melting point, and Valve often to use to control the flow of liquids.
I am guessing this is a new 3D Printer that prints high resolution metal Jar-jar Binks (Mesa) which will melt if you touch it. And its heat source is super heated stone.
I think the biggest part is the horrible news reporting for science.
For it to be part of the news cycle to bring in advertising money, often the latest hypothesis being called a theory, which get people all excited and rialed up, only to become like a lot of science, shown to be a wrong path.
Real science is not a good spectator sport. When something becomes classified a theory in science, actually a lot of strong evidence it going for it. But often when it gets to that level, there is a lot of peer review and able to duplicate the results, that often it is consider common knowledge.
Now people like to point to "Science" to prove their point. But it rarely really does, unless the Science has gone a long rigorous process.
So you sleep standing up at exactly midnight, and flat on your back with your feet facing east at 6am?
Gee Wizz that sounds really sciencecy and stuff.
I figured having my Cell phone next to me, is a distraction where when I wake up in the middle of the night other then just turning around and going back to sleep. I feel the need to check my email, get caught up on my daily comic strips, see the news alerts then not being able to get to sleep because other then a minute shifting to get comfortable, I had actually done a lot of activities that woke me up further. Then before I go to sleep I will watch that one more Video....
But I guess I am wrong and it must be radiation at types and levels that have no evidence of being harmful or effect the human body.
Apple already does this. Except they contract with other companies to make custom to meet Apple specs.
This is more likely so Apple has a tighter control of its supply chain market, and reduce the risks you get from having different vendors. Especially today with nearly every nation is hiding in its own little hole, making crazy rules to prevent others from getting too much control of their stuff. The B2B market is getting increasingly tougher to navigate, with governments, and a world of immediate outrage for anything that can go wrong. Say someone get abused at a company that makes parts for a company who uses that part to make a component that is used on the newest version of Apples iPhone. The outrage of a Products Vendor Vendor reflects on your own product now.
Heck today I feel like I cannot buy or not buy anything without having made some political statement. Heck I am not sure if I should shave or not. I need new gym sneakers but if I buy the wrong brand then I am making a statement that I may or may not believe in...
The Democrats say Businesses have to much control of the government.
The Republicans say Government have too much control of business.
There seems to be symbiotic relationship between a business and government. Which both sides thinks the other is actually being parasitic.
What seems to be the problem, is really a good lack of a middle ground. They are government regulations that go too far, and needless hurt a company, while businesses need to realize some rules that may hurt their short term bottom line, actually will help for the long term survival, such as preserving natural resources.
But with a lot of symbiotic relationships, there is a careful balance that needs to be in place.
There was the popping of the Tech bubble, mostly because Y2k fixes have been applied, or most organizations have upgraded their systems to newer ones.
But what else was the Clinton Administration opening the H1B Visa which had begin to flood the market with Cheap IT workers too.
This created a double whammy. A lowering demand in IT goods and services with a rising supply of IT workers. This really caused the bubble to pop.
Back in the late 1990's Front Page "Web Developers" were being paid 70k a year, and real programmers were getting paid 6 digits out of college.
Tech workers were at the C table suite, with power and authority.... Then it kinda just popped, so as their pay lowered because there was so many more options and less demand, their power rolls have decreased too.
Tech jobs started to pick up around 2009 or so, while the economy is recovering, tech was needed to work smarter and with less resources. Which made tech workers one of the few Middle class jobs. No where near like it was in 1999 but a good solid career.
So now that the old guard boomer tech workers are retiring, we are seeing a new generation wanting a decent quality of life studying classes that will bring them there with rather clear job paths.