Knockoffs belong to an earlier stage of commerce. China is now moving into the branding era. Haier, the largest manufacturer of major appliances in the world, based in Shandong, now sells in the US under its own name.
Yesterday, BYD Cars, a major automaker in China, opened their US headquarters.
Someday, Foxconn will decide they no longer need Apple.
Recorded music is a dinky little business. Congress needs to be reminded of that occasionally. Total US music sales are only about $6.8 billion a year. If the entire US music industry was a single company, it would rank around 343 on the Forbes 500, around the level of Dole Food, Goodrich, and Peabody Coal. Each of the major computer companies is far larger. Microsoft loses more money in online services than the entire music industry makes.
Being current in some area of software today is about knowing its defects. You can read the manual about how it's supposed to work, but knowing what actually works is essential to high productivity.
I've been thinking about this recently in connection with Mozilla Jetpack, which is a library for making add-ons for Firefox, etc. There are two websites, a blog, a forum, a Google group, a development committee, two completely different sets of development tools, "hack sessions", and an IRC channel. There's even an "app store" of sorts with a review process. With all that, you might think it actually works.
No such luck. Only four Jetpack add-ons have made it through the approval process, and they're all rather simple. I've been converting over code from a working Greasemonkey script, and I've spent 80% of my time dealing with bugs in Jetpack. I've filed two bug reports so far, neither of which has generated any useful maintenance activity from the developers.
That's the kind of information you need to be current on to be effective. Knowing that A works and B sucks is important, and that info does degrade rapidly.
You're all missing the point here. When Jobs returned to Apple, what resulted was a set of more or less "meh" Mac machines, a detour through the PowerPC, and a kludged up version of the Next OS. Apple desktop market share remained in single digits through that period.
What worked was the iPod. The reason the iPod was successful was deals with music labels. Jobs was good at deal making in Hollywood. As CEO of Pixar, he was a studio head, at the top of the Hollywood food chain. The labels had to listen.
That's what made the iTunes store go, which is what really drove the product. The hardware was secondary.
I've been expecting this for some time. Google only knows what you look at. Visa and MasterCard know what you do. Amazon does this now, but only for sales within Amazon's system. Now it can work for everyone.
This could upset Google's dominance in online advertising. If some other search engine or social network partnered with Visa and MasterCard, they could do search ads much better than Google can.
Passive walkers have been around for a long time. There was a fad for studying them a few years back, but it didn't lead to anything. The important issues in legged locomotion all involve handling difficult terrain. On flat surfaces, wheels work better.
It took them this long to figure that out?
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The "threat of automation" is finally getting attention because it's hitting the middle class. It hit machine tool operators decades ago.
There was an assumption that if you went to college, there's always be some kind of office job for your. That's ending. The world of paper pushing is coming to an end. The paper industry itself is hurting and mills are closing. At first, computers increased paper consumption, but that peaked years back.
I expected it sooner. I was surprised to see new office buildings going up after 2000 or so.
What does the future look like? The favelas of Rio and Mexico City, surrounding the cities of the rich. That's where productivity and capitalism takes us.
Google is an ad agency. What do you expect?
Google has to pass the referrer to their advertisers or monetization won't work properly.
Expecting ad sites to run SSL is unreasonable. That would run up the cost of operating a content farm substantially. Made-for Adsense sites would have to have their own IP addresses; virtual hosting wouldn't work.
This is totally incompetent real-time programming and hardware design. There should be a stall timer in the hardware, and it should only be reset after all the safety-related conditions have been checked on each cycle. Safety-related functions and non-safety-related functions must be strongly isolated, preferably in different CPUs. This is all well understood. Some people need to be fired.
I worked with some of the people who designed the Ford EEC IV, which controlled most Ford cars in the 1980s. Backup systems included 1) a hardware stall timer, 2) a hard-wired dumb control unit for "limp home" mode if the software failed, and 3) limited throttle authority for the computer-controlled actuator. The program was etched onto the CPU chip (not Flash, not EPROM, not PROM, permanently masked onto the custom Intel 8061 CPU chip during manufacture) and was unchangeable. A bolt-on ROM module held the constants for the vehicle model.
The design life for the hardware was 30 years. Massive amounts of effort went into verifying the correctness of the software. Everything from proof of correctness to checking behavior during an EMP spike from a lightning strike was used. I've been in the Faraday cage used for that. No recall was ever necessary, and tens of thousands of Ford vehicles from the 80s are still running that software.
That's what you want down at the safety related levels. The "infotainment" software can be as sloppy as most web programming, but the low level stuff has to just work, no matter what.
I knew him. I went to Stanford in the early 1980s and took his "Epistemological Problems in Artificial intelligence" seminar. He was still determined to make AI based on predicate calculus work.
If Java applets started as quickly as Flash objects manage to then we would still be seeing Java implemented on major web sites.
First, the Flash run-time is incredibly tiny. It used to be under 1MB, and it's still not all that much bigger. Compare to browsers that need 100MB to display "Hello, World".
Second, Flash can display without loading the entire file. It's an animation format, remember. There are two streams, a timeline of events and a collection of assets (images, etc.) As soon as some timeline data and the assets called out in it have been loaded, play can start. Files are explicitly laid out in time order of use. That was a really good design decision.
Java is just loading and running programs. There's nothing special about the way it starts. First the VM has to load, then the JIT compiler has to do its thing, and then you get to execute something. There's no explicit concept of time, as their is with Flash files.
It's technically feasible to have a virtual world with property owned by the users. But it's not as profitable.
No one has yet built a distributed virtual world on the scale of Second Life. I'm surprised this hasn't been done in some place like Singapore, where there are a lot of high-bandwidth end users. Conceptually, you could have a system where a DNS-like service handles "land allocation", so that activity relative to some area is sent to the owner of that area of land. Each landowner then runs the server for their area.
Movable objects, including avatars, would be digitally signed by their owners. They could be made unique but transferable, if desired, by using something like the Bitcoin block chain, which catches attempts to "double spend". (Bitcoin is an failed financial system but a useful technology.)
Technically, this could work, but it's not easily monetized. And, technically, a virtual world will work better if all the servers have really high bandwidth server farm backbone connections between them. Distributed, it's going to suffer from lag.
Many at the top of the list are mutual fund companies. Some, like "Vanguard Group, Inc", are passive funds. Vanguard (#8) is the largest operator of index funds, so they don't even make active investment decisions. "The Depository Trust Company" and "Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan" are listed, and they're just nominal holders.
Some of this is a consequence of banking deregulation. The US used to have a separation between mutual funds, investment banks, and commercial banks. Only commercial banks were insured by the FDIC and backed by the Federal Reserve. That changed when Glass-Stegall was repeated in 1999, and it took less than ten years for the banking industry to screw up badly and break the economy.
That's why one of the demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement is to return to Glass-Stegall.
US space, outside NASA, is a small industry. Space-X has only 1000 employees.
In 1965, the Apollo program had 376,700 employees, about 36,000 within NASA and the rest contractors. NASA today has 18,000, which is too many considering how little NASA is doing right now.
Aurduno is far ahead for dinky-machine low level programming. It has a rational way for newbies to deal with interrupts, which you need down at that level.
Personally, I think the next step up ought to be a QNX on a chip system. QNX scales down further than Linux does; you can run QNX with no disk or writable flash. and get something useful going in well under 1MB. You still have a real OS, with processes, threads, a POSIX API, etc. It's still free for non-commercial use, although not open source. Now that RIM owns QNX, maybe they'll do something in that area. But I doubt it.
NASA had a "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" project in the early 90's. Don't know where it went...
Not very far. After some study contracts, a $233 million dollar contract was awarded, but not much resulted. A prototype arm was built and is for sale for $42,000. Early planning proposed a test flight in 1991, with a rather easy set of tests. ("Peg in hole". With a human remote operator. Really. )
However it doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a relationship established with your prospects.
"Relationship" has a specific meaning in the spam context, defined in the CAN-SPAM act. Here's the FTC's explanation:
Q. How do I know if what I'm sending is a transactional or relationship message?
A. The primary purpose of an email is transactional or relationship if it consists only of content that:
facilitates or confirms a commercial transaction that the recipient already has agreed to;
gives warranty, recall, safety, or security information about a product or service;
gives information about a change in terms or features or account balance information regarding a membership, subscription, account, loan or other ongoing commercial relationship;
provides information about an employment relationship or employee benefits; or
delivers goods or services as part of a transaction that the recipient already has agreed to.
Deliberately, CAN-SPAM defines "preexisting business relationship" to exclude marketing contacts.
(The effect of CAN-SPAM has been substantial, in an unexpected way. It's legal to send spam if you follow all the rules - opt out address, no fake source, etc. Spam filters recognize such messages and delete them, so legit commercial spam e-mail is dead. The Direct Marketing Association didn't anticipate that everybody would have spam filters. This leaves only spam with phony addresses, which is a criminal offense. That's become part of organized crime, since no legit business wans to take the risk.)
From the article: "In this case, the new CEO had sent a getting-acquainted message to 400 of the company's customers and prospects."
"And prospects"? That's "unsolicited commercial e-mail". No opt-in. No previous commercial relationship. Just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you can spam.
Microsoft is trying to keep their Office 360 product from becoming a spam engine, like Hotmail.
Information Technology is a lot like plumbing and electrical work, except you don't get too dirty, it's not dangerous, and it's non-union. You run pipes, hook them up to boxes, and get frantic calls to fix stuff that breaks. Lots of jobs, the pay is poor, and you get little respect. 2-year college plus specialized courses plus OJT.
Computer science is about the theory behind how computers work. You need to be good at math for this, and actually like math. And you need to go to a good school. Check out colleges very carefully in this area. 4-year degree is entry level, MSCS is typical. PhD needed only if you want to work in academia, although it's a nice status symbol if you can afford it.
Programming is making new apps and services. There's a huge range in programming, from very easy to very hard, and a wide range of specialized skills. Few people program much beyond age 40-45, so be prepared to move into management. College degree usually required, but a 2- year college may qualify you.
Game programming is near the harder end of programming, but pays like the easier end, because too many people want in. It's like the movie industry in that way. Big teams, frantic deadlines, unpaid overtime. It's not about playing games. Some jobs require a lot of math, but that's less true than it was 10 years ago because most games now use purchased solutions to the hard graphics and physics problems.
Software engineering is about making big apps and services, with a lot of pieces that have to work together. It's about design and team management. Few schools have really good training in this. Look around.
Outsourcing is when your job gets sent to China or India. You're in wage competition with low-wage countries.
Whoever broke into this had no idea how lame most directors meetings are. This is a simple but overpriced collaboration and calendar app for 70 year olds, with a 24 hour help desk. Nice, uncluttered GUI.
The main corporate secrets that filter up to board members involve mergers, acquisitions, and firing the CEO. Knowing about M&A activity early has trading value; not much else does. M&A activity is so slow right now that it's barely worth following.
Incidentally, this is "cloud-based". NASDAQ runs the "cloud". The client is available as an iPhone app. Competitors include BoardVantage and PWC Board Center.
Slashdot Mirror
Knockoffs belong to an earlier stage of commerce. China is now moving into the branding era. Haier, the largest manufacturer of major appliances in the world, based in Shandong, now sells in the US under its own name. Yesterday, BYD Cars, a major automaker in China, opened their US headquarters.
Someday, Foxconn will decide they no longer need Apple.
Recorded music is a dinky little business. Congress needs to be reminded of that occasionally. Total US music sales are only about $6.8 billion a year. If the entire US music industry was a single company, it would rank around 343 on the Forbes 500, around the level of Dole Food, Goodrich, and Peabody Coal. Each of the major computer companies is far larger. Microsoft loses more money in online services than the entire music industry makes.
Being current in some area of software today is about knowing its defects. You can read the manual about how it's supposed to work, but knowing what actually works is essential to high productivity.
I've been thinking about this recently in connection with Mozilla Jetpack, which is a library for making add-ons for Firefox, etc. There are two websites, a blog, a forum, a Google group, a development committee, two completely different sets of development tools, "hack sessions", and an IRC channel. There's even an "app store" of sorts with a review process. With all that, you might think it actually works.
No such luck. Only four Jetpack add-ons have made it through the approval process, and they're all rather simple. I've been converting over code from a working Greasemonkey script, and I've spent 80% of my time dealing with bugs in Jetpack. I've filed two bug reports so far, neither of which has generated any useful maintenance activity from the developers.
That's the kind of information you need to be current on to be effective. Knowing that A works and B sucks is important, and that info does degrade rapidly.
You're all missing the point here. When Jobs returned to Apple, what resulted was a set of more or less "meh" Mac machines, a detour through the PowerPC, and a kludged up version of the Next OS. Apple desktop market share remained in single digits through that period.
What worked was the iPod. The reason the iPod was successful was deals with music labels. Jobs was good at deal making in Hollywood. As CEO of Pixar, he was a studio head, at the top of the Hollywood food chain. The labels had to listen.
That's what made the iTunes store go, which is what really drove the product. The hardware was secondary.
I've been expecting this for some time. Google only knows what you look at. Visa and MasterCard know what you do. Amazon does this now, but only for sales within Amazon's system. Now it can work for everyone.
This could upset Google's dominance in online advertising. If some other search engine or social network partnered with Visa and MasterCard, they could do search ads much better than Google can.
Passive walkers have been around for a long time. There was a fad for studying them a few years back, but it didn't lead to anything. The important issues in legged locomotion all involve handling difficult terrain. On flat surfaces, wheels work better.
The "threat of automation" is finally getting attention because it's hitting the middle class. It hit machine tool operators decades ago. There was an assumption that if you went to college, there's always be some kind of office job for your. That's ending. The world of paper pushing is coming to an end. The paper industry itself is hurting and mills are closing. At first, computers increased paper consumption, but that peaked years back.
I expected it sooner. I was surprised to see new office buildings going up after 2000 or so.
What does the future look like? The favelas of Rio and Mexico City, surrounding the cities of the rich. That's where productivity and capitalism takes us.
Google is an ad agency. What do you expect? Google has to pass the referrer to their advertisers or monetization won't work properly.
Expecting ad sites to run SSL is unreasonable. That would run up the cost of operating a content farm substantially. Made-for Adsense sites would have to have their own IP addresses; virtual hosting wouldn't work.
This is totally incompetent real-time programming and hardware design. There should be a stall timer in the hardware, and it should only be reset after all the safety-related conditions have been checked on each cycle. Safety-related functions and non-safety-related functions must be strongly isolated, preferably in different CPUs. This is all well understood. Some people need to be fired.
I worked with some of the people who designed the Ford EEC IV, which controlled most Ford cars in the 1980s. Backup systems included 1) a hardware stall timer, 2) a hard-wired dumb control unit for "limp home" mode if the software failed, and 3) limited throttle authority for the computer-controlled actuator. The program was etched onto the CPU chip (not Flash, not EPROM, not PROM, permanently masked onto the custom Intel 8061 CPU chip during manufacture) and was unchangeable. A bolt-on ROM module held the constants for the vehicle model. The design life for the hardware was 30 years. Massive amounts of effort went into verifying the correctness of the software. Everything from proof of correctness to checking behavior during an EMP spike from a lightning strike was used. I've been in the Faraday cage used for that. No recall was ever necessary, and tens of thousands of Ford vehicles from the 80s are still running that software.
That's what you want down at the safety related levels. The "infotainment" software can be as sloppy as most web programming, but the low level stuff has to just work, no matter what.
I knew him. I went to Stanford in the early 1980s and took his "Epistemological Problems in Artificial intelligence" seminar. He was still determined to make AI based on predicate calculus work.
If Java applets started as quickly as Flash objects manage to then we would still be seeing Java implemented on major web sites.
First, the Flash run-time is incredibly tiny. It used to be under 1MB, and it's still not all that much bigger. Compare to browsers that need 100MB to display "Hello, World".
Second, Flash can display without loading the entire file. It's an animation format, remember. There are two streams, a timeline of events and a collection of assets (images, etc.) As soon as some timeline data and the assets called out in it have been loaded, play can start. Files are explicitly laid out in time order of use. That was a really good design decision.
Java is just loading and running programs. There's nothing special about the way it starts. First the VM has to load, then the JIT compiler has to do its thing, and then you get to execute something. There's no explicit concept of time, as their is with Flash files.
I couldn't care less about "just works". Half of the fun of running Linux laptops is the challenge to set them up to do all those things you want.
No, it's not. Unnecessary system administration is for people who have no life.
They've been talking about this since 2006. They've built prototypes. They have a web site, logos, a wiki, and a fan club.
What they don't have is shipping product.
They really need to shut up and ship. They we get to see if their price point is real.
GuruPlug, the $99 Linux wall wart, is real and available. Gumstix has been offering machines around $100 for years.
It's technically feasible to have a virtual world with property owned by the users. But it's not as profitable.
No one has yet built a distributed virtual world on the scale of Second Life. I'm surprised this hasn't been done in some place like Singapore, where there are a lot of high-bandwidth end users. Conceptually, you could have a system where a DNS-like service handles "land allocation", so that activity relative to some area is sent to the owner of that area of land. Each landowner then runs the server for their area.
Movable objects, including avatars, would be digitally signed by their owners. They could be made unique but transferable, if desired, by using something like the Bitcoin block chain, which catches attempts to "double spend". (Bitcoin is an failed financial system but a useful technology.)
Technically, this could work, but it's not easily monetized. And, technically, a virtual world will work better if all the servers have really high bandwidth server farm backbone connections between them. Distributed, it's going to suffer from lag.
Many at the top of the list are mutual fund companies. Some, like "Vanguard Group, Inc", are passive funds. Vanguard (#8) is the largest operator of index funds, so they don't even make active investment decisions. "The Depository Trust Company" and "Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan" are listed, and they're just nominal holders.
Some of this is a consequence of banking deregulation. The US used to have a separation between mutual funds, investment banks, and commercial banks. Only commercial banks were insured by the FDIC and backed by the Federal Reserve. That changed when Glass-Stegall was repeated in 1999, and it took less than ten years for the banking industry to screw up badly and break the economy.
That's why one of the demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement is to return to Glass-Stegall.
This is going to be very useful for real estate sales. No need to move furniture into an empty house for the pictures.
What is it actually doing that needs 16GB of RAM to compile?
The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. - Job 1.21
US space, outside NASA, is a small industry. Space-X has only 1000 employees.
In 1965, the Apollo program had 376,700 employees, about 36,000 within NASA and the rest contractors. NASA today has 18,000, which is too many considering how little NASA is doing right now.
This isn't Linux. It's a BASIC Stamp replacement, 30 years too late.
Aurduno is far ahead for dinky-machine low level programming. It has a rational way for newbies to deal with interrupts, which you need down at that level.
Personally, I think the next step up ought to be a QNX on a chip system. QNX scales down further than Linux does; you can run QNX with no disk or writable flash. and get something useful going in well under 1MB. You still have a real OS, with processes, threads, a POSIX API, etc. It's still free for non-commercial use, although not open source. Now that RIM owns QNX, maybe they'll do something in that area. But I doubt it.
NASA had a "Flight Telerobotic Servicer" project in the early 90's. Don't know where it went...
Not very far. After some study contracts, a $233 million dollar contract was awarded, but not much resulted. A prototype arm was built and is for sale for $42,000. Early planning proposed a test flight in 1991, with a rather easy set of tests. ("Peg in hole". With a human remote operator. Really. )
However it doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a relationship established with your prospects.
"Relationship" has a specific meaning in the spam context, defined in the CAN-SPAM act. Here's the FTC's explanation:
Q. How do I know if what I'm sending is a transactional or relationship message?
A. The primary purpose of an email is transactional or relationship if it consists only of content that:
Deliberately, CAN-SPAM defines "preexisting business relationship" to exclude marketing contacts.
(The effect of CAN-SPAM has been substantial, in an unexpected way. It's legal to send spam if you follow all the rules - opt out address, no fake source, etc. Spam filters recognize such messages and delete them, so legit commercial spam e-mail is dead. The Direct Marketing Association didn't anticipate that everybody would have spam filters. This leaves only spam with phony addresses, which is a criminal offense. That's become part of organized crime, since no legit business wans to take the risk.)
From the article: "In this case, the new CEO had sent a getting-acquainted message to 400 of the company's customers and prospects."
"And prospects"? That's "unsolicited commercial e-mail". No opt-in. No previous commercial relationship. Just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you can spam.
Microsoft is trying to keep their Office 360 product from becoming a spam engine, like Hotmail.
Tell them this:
Information Technology is a lot like plumbing and electrical work, except you don't get too dirty, it's not dangerous, and it's non-union. You run pipes, hook them up to boxes, and get frantic calls to fix stuff that breaks. Lots of jobs, the pay is poor, and you get little respect. 2-year college plus specialized courses plus OJT.
Computer science is about the theory behind how computers work. You need to be good at math for this, and actually like math. And you need to go to a good school. Check out colleges very carefully in this area. 4-year degree is entry level, MSCS is typical. PhD needed only if you want to work in academia, although it's a nice status symbol if you can afford it.
Programming is making new apps and services. There's a huge range in programming, from very easy to very hard, and a wide range of specialized skills. Few people program much beyond age 40-45, so be prepared to move into management. College degree usually required, but a 2- year college may qualify you.
Game programming is near the harder end of programming, but pays like the easier end, because too many people want in. It's like the movie industry in that way. Big teams, frantic deadlines, unpaid overtime. It's not about playing games. Some jobs require a lot of math, but that's less true than it was 10 years ago because most games now use purchased solutions to the hard graphics and physics problems.
Software engineering is about making big apps and services, with a lot of pieces that have to work together. It's about design and team management. Few schools have really good training in this. Look around.
Outsourcing is when your job gets sent to China or India. You're in wage competition with low-wage countries.
Whoever broke into this had no idea how lame most directors meetings are. This is a simple but overpriced collaboration and calendar app for 70 year olds, with a 24 hour help desk. Nice, uncluttered GUI.
The main corporate secrets that filter up to board members involve mergers, acquisitions, and firing the CEO. Knowing about M&A activity early has trading value; not much else does. M&A activity is so slow right now that it's barely worth following.
Incidentally, this is "cloud-based". NASDAQ runs the "cloud". The client is available as an iPhone app. Competitors include BoardVantage and PWC Board Center.