Taking things to extremes...anyone who bothers to read your site will either be educated and Jewish, a theologian or extremely determined. Very high learning and retention rate.
There is a tradeoff with anodising: alumina is very hard, aluminum is rather soft, so if the anodised layer is too thick it can spall off the surface under impact. In my experience, high quality anodising works best when applied to flat surfaces and tubing, where there are no sharp edges where the stresses can concentrate. This is the thing that amazes me about Apple: any competent electronic engineer could have foreseen the antenna problem. Any competent manufacturing engineer experienced with plating and anodising could have foreseen this problem. Is there a management culture that nobody dares tell the designers that something isn't a good idea?
For those who don't know, and may not care, it was "manufacturing engineers not daring to tell the designers" that did for the British motorcycle and car industries.
It depends. If nuclear and renewables are used for base load generation then organic molecule fuels are under less pressure, and they are still by far the most effective compact energy storage solution for vehicles. They may not be a dead end in the long run; low MW synthesis might still be far more economical than hydrogen when the entire manufacturing and logistics train is taken into account.
The Yaris hybrid undercuts on costs small EVs like the iEV. The Prius undercuts the Leaf on price. Really it isn't hard to understand; for every current EV niche other than the bicycle and the milkfloat there is now a cheaper alternative using either hybrid or advanced IC engine technology, and many of them probably produce less real-world carbon dioxide emissions given the current electrical generation dependence on fossil carbon. It would be sensible to stop trying to build EVs until the battery technology catches up. It is there for bicycles and small boats, but nowhere near for cars.
Making it a swappable unit would make it even more uneconomic. The engineering challenges to be overcome would be pretty extreme, even with your viola. (Voilà, you mean, a French contraction of "look here" (voi' la)). A viola is an instrument which for some reason is legendary for the stupidity of its players - look up viola jokes.
(Who know a thing or two) are abandoning pure electric cars because they can't make the engineering sums add up with present battery technology. They have even produced a hybrid (Yaris hybrid) that undercuts the cheapest electric cars without subsidy. Now that Mercedes is bringing out hybrids and are producing their first fuel-cell cars, meaning we have gasoline, diesel and fuel cell hybrids, it looks like Tesla and the other all-electric experiments are a dead end.
Exactly. Lots of people write scripts for automating little jobs, but I do not want the sort of person who is likely to be doing an install messing with my install scripts!
One of my kids is a competition lawyer and these cases are held before judges at the European Court. For the lawyers to explain these cases to a jury, they'd need to start with a four-year economics degree. There are some technical issues which require an awful lot of background to understand, where one juror with half a clue could persuade 11 with no clue. It's obvious why lawyers like clueless, emotional juries - but law is far too important to be run for the convenience of lawyers.
The really good schisms are still over money, it's just that they manage to conceal it as doctrine. Do you really think Joseph Smith didn't mainly benefit financially from starting Mormonism?
What happened to the concept of a "jury of peers" as in English law (i.e. equals)? If corporations are people in the USA, then the jury in a trial between corporations over technical issues should consist of retired (as in no ax to grind) design engineers with experience of the patent, trademark and design system. This won't happen because they would rapidly expose the ignorance of the lawyers, simply by the questions they would ask. But it would eliminate an awful lot of bad decisions and legal costs.
The ability to take small alterations to an automated manufacturing process quickly has been a focus of research since the 80s. I've been out of for a while (in fact since I got out of manufacturing when my then company decided that they needed a plant in China so the VPs could boast about it) and I wonder if eyes have been taken off the ball. But with the latest generations of small manufacturing robots, I suspect the example you gave no longer holds. A lot of the expense in trivial engineering changes is documentation required for the human activities around the change. CAD to machine workflow automation should take care of that.
There is a big difference in design for automation and design for hand assembly. One important factor is that design for automation involves eliminating fiddly assembly - things that have to slot into things at an angle and then be rotated into place, for instance. Before cheap manufacturing abroad, Japanese watch and camera manufacture became highly automated, but then a lot of designs were changed for hand assembly.
I think the answer is you could pretty well 100% automate phone assembly and packing if you had the right design. The downside would be that repairability might be low (it's easier to dispense glue than insert screws) and the design might be more constrained. The cost of the equipment would vary according to the complexity of the final assembly and the expected volumes, but we are probably talking in the 1-10 million dollar range for an assembly system. Re-tooling is the expensive part. Ideally you want to decide on a form factor and stick to it until the tooling wore out, which is the most economical approach. But the basics of an assembly machine - pick and place, automatic screwdrivers, robot arms- would stay pretty constant.
Which is cheaper? The short answer is that in the long run automatic assembly will be cheaper again, it is just a question of when. Every Chinese riot brings that day a little closer.
As a university student many years ago, we used to keep bacon in our refrigerator. And someone used to steal it - only full vacuum packs. Right up until someone injected a pack with some lab strain K E Coli. (Kids: do not try this at home. Access to the bathroom may become problematic).
Yes it was who we thought it was. There were no repetitions.
C Diff is not so easily preventable. It is out there in the wild because antibiotics are routinely fed to meat animals in the US, and many people carry it asymptomatically in the gut. When my mother was admitted to hospital with pneumonia, the antibiotic used to treat it killed the pneumonia bacteria but allowed the C Diff to multiply unchallenged, causing an infection that took months to treat. No improved hygiene in the hospital would have had any effect whatsoever.
It is said that Murdoch tells his newspapers to support the political parties that look like winning, so that the can then frighten politicians by claiming to be an influence on elections, and get privileges like relaxed media control and access to senior Ministers. But I imagine that in the US, where advertising income is so important, it's more about appealing to the demographic that the advertisers regard as desirable - i.e. well off, sense of entitlement to material goods, and gullible.
A direct marketer once told me that if he ever managed to get an accurate list of 500 rich, narcissistic and gullible individuals, he would never need to work hard for a living again.
Too much of the Argentine economy consists of raising cheap beef for the US market. Most countries that are de facto producers for the US are screwed up. (And before you decide that is flamebait, go take a serious look at the CIA World Factbook.)
It's a strange choice. Two HTCs, the Samsung that isn't as good in the USA as the equivalent South Korean version, a phone that may not be available for months and another one that the IT department won't have had time to check for compatibility and security. One small(ish) one and four big ones. It looks like a collection thrown together by someone in HR who had a quick read of gsmarena or bgr and then asked their usual supplier for their best prices.
Fortunately there isn't the slightest possibility that I would ever be recruited by Yahoo or, in the event that a stray high energy cosmic ray shower happened to hit their HR server in exactly the right way, that I would accept the resulting job offer. But this piece really does suggest that they don't have a sense of direction. A new shiny smartphone most of whose features you won't be allowed to use at work and which you won't use at home because you don't want them tracking you? The ability to annoy you 24/7 with irrelevant requests from managers?
RIM may nor may not be dying. It may or may not be doing a pre-second-Jobs-incarnation Apple. I certainly wouldn't buy a BB 7 phone now because we all know it has as much future as a flea in a liquidiser. But being left of the Yahoo list - it's a list that many people might want to be left off.
As another minor issue, I can't help feeling that some of RIM's bad press is because many user experiences are based on the locked down corporate market where all the good stuff is turned off, from the camera through the hotspot. How long will it be before the other manufacturer's products get locked down in the same way by IT, and the users perceive it as the phone's fault? Apple may be a "walled garden" now, but by the time some banks have finished with it, the iPhone 5 will be the fastest Nokia dumbphone on the market.
Off topic, but here in the UK the Humbrol model paint company now has a poster advertising "Thirty shades of grey". Witty, but try explaining it to a 7 year old. Is that too many?
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Taking things to extremes...anyone who bothers to read your site will either be educated and Jewish, a theologian or extremely determined. Very high learning and retention rate.
For those who don't know, and may not care, it was "manufacturing engineers not daring to tell the designers" that did for the British motorcycle and car industries.
The Yaris hybrid undercuts on costs small EVs like the iEV. The Prius undercuts the Leaf on price. Really it isn't hard to understand; for every current EV niche other than the bicycle and the milkfloat there is now a cheaper alternative using either hybrid or advanced IC engine technology, and many of them probably produce less real-world carbon dioxide emissions given the current electrical generation dependence on fossil carbon. It would be sensible to stop trying to build EVs until the battery technology catches up. It is there for bicycles and small boats, but nowhere near for cars.
Making it a swappable unit would make it even more uneconomic. The engineering challenges to be overcome would be pretty extreme, even with your viola. (Voilà, you mean, a French contraction of "look here" (voi' la)). A viola is an instrument which for some reason is legendary for the stupidity of its players - look up viola jokes.
No mod points, but that was a good one.
(Who know a thing or two) are abandoning pure electric cars because they can't make the engineering sums add up with present battery technology. They have even produced a hybrid (Yaris hybrid) that undercuts the cheapest electric cars without subsidy. Now that Mercedes is bringing out hybrids and are producing their first fuel-cell cars, meaning we have gasoline, diesel and fuel cell hybrids, it looks like Tesla and the other all-electric experiments are a dead end.
Exactly. Lots of people write scripts for automating little jobs, but I do not want the sort of person who is likely to be doing an install messing with my install scripts!
One of my kids is a competition lawyer and these cases are held before judges at the European Court. For the lawyers to explain these cases to a jury, they'd need to start with a four-year economics degree. There are some technical issues which require an awful lot of background to understand, where one juror with half a clue could persuade 11 with no clue. It's obvious why lawyers like clueless, emotional juries - but law is far too important to be run for the convenience of lawyers.
The really good schisms are still over money, it's just that they manage to conceal it as doctrine. Do you really think Joseph Smith didn't mainly benefit financially from starting Mormonism?
What happened to the concept of a "jury of peers" as in English law (i.e. equals)? If corporations are people in the USA, then the jury in a trial between corporations over technical issues should consist of retired (as in no ax to grind) design engineers with experience of the patent, trademark and design system. This won't happen because they would rapidly expose the ignorance of the lawyers, simply by the questions they would ask. But it would eliminate an awful lot of bad decisions and legal costs.
The ability to take small alterations to an automated manufacturing process quickly has been a focus of research since the 80s. I've been out of for a while (in fact since I got out of manufacturing when my then company decided that they needed a plant in China so the VPs could boast about it) and I wonder if eyes have been taken off the ball. But with the latest generations of small manufacturing robots, I suspect the example you gave no longer holds. A lot of the expense in trivial engineering changes is documentation required for the human activities around the change. CAD to machine workflow automation should take care of that.
I think the answer is you could pretty well 100% automate phone assembly and packing if you had the right design. The downside would be that repairability might be low (it's easier to dispense glue than insert screws) and the design might be more constrained. The cost of the equipment would vary according to the complexity of the final assembly and the expected volumes, but we are probably talking in the 1-10 million dollar range for an assembly system. Re-tooling is the expensive part. Ideally you want to decide on a form factor and stick to it until the tooling wore out, which is the most economical approach. But the basics of an assembly machine - pick and place, automatic screwdrivers, robot arms- would stay pretty constant.
Which is cheaper? The short answer is that in the long run automatic assembly will be cheaper again, it is just a question of when. Every Chinese riot brings that day a little closer.
I think you just described a certain subset of Apple product buyers too. It shows how closely related we are to the rest of the animal kingdom.
Yes it was who we thought it was. There were no repetitions.
It means the pictures get automatically uploaded to Facebook, with face recognition for tagging. Remember "Privacy is dead, get over it?"
C Diff is not so easily preventable. It is out there in the wild because antibiotics are routinely fed to meat animals in the US, and many people carry it asymptomatically in the gut. When my mother was admitted to hospital with pneumonia, the antibiotic used to treat it killed the pneumonia bacteria but allowed the C Diff to multiply unchallenged, causing an infection that took months to treat. No improved hygiene in the hospital would have had any effect whatsoever.
A direct marketer once told me that if he ever managed to get an accurate list of 500 rich, narcissistic and gullible individuals, he would never need to work hard for a living again.
Several cannabinoid-based drugs are nearing production. By "monied interests" I assume you mean the Southern cotton producers.
Provided the land has not been bought up by US business, which I suspect is the case.
Too much of the Argentine economy consists of raising cheap beef for the US market. Most countries that are de facto producers for the US are screwed up. (And before you decide that is flamebait, go take a serious look at the CIA World Factbook.)
The UK had both price fixing and rationing in WW2, and we lost to the United States, which didn't.
Fortunately there isn't the slightest possibility that I would ever be recruited by Yahoo or, in the event that a stray high energy cosmic ray shower happened to hit their HR server in exactly the right way, that I would accept the resulting job offer. But this piece really does suggest that they don't have a sense of direction. A new shiny smartphone most of whose features you won't be allowed to use at work and which you won't use at home because you don't want them tracking you? The ability to annoy you 24/7 with irrelevant requests from managers?
RIM may nor may not be dying. It may or may not be doing a pre-second-Jobs-incarnation Apple. I certainly wouldn't buy a BB 7 phone now because we all know it has as much future as a flea in a liquidiser. But being left of the Yahoo list - it's a list that many people might want to be left off.
As another minor issue, I can't help feeling that some of RIM's bad press is because many user experiences are based on the locked down corporate market where all the good stuff is turned off, from the camera through the hotspot. How long will it be before the other manufacturer's products get locked down in the same way by IT, and the users perceive it as the phone's fault? Apple may be a "walled garden" now, but by the time some banks have finished with it, the iPhone 5 will be the fastest Nokia dumbphone on the market.
Lawyers totally depend on security through obscurity. Laws are deliberately made made vague and obscure, thus providing job security for lawyers.
Off topic, but here in the UK the Humbrol model paint company now has a poster advertising "Thirty shades of grey". Witty, but try explaining it to a 7 year old. Is that too many?
Given your nick, don't you mean that from where you're standing a merkin looks like a beard?