Apple doesn't make the iPod.Asus and Inventec do. Most production is in Suzhou and Pudong in China. Apple handles the distribution and marketing.
Such arrangements have been around for years. But they are on the way out. The major Chinese electronics companies are establishing their own brands. Asus is a well known motherboard manufacturer. Asus and Inventec both sell PCs and laptops under their own names. They're rapidly moving from contract manufacturing to owning the entire business.
The margins are much better when you own the brand.
Flextronics, the big player, is moving in this direction aggressively. They used to just assemble boards. Now they do design, engineering, procurement, and manufacturing. They're even partnered with frogdesign, so their stuff can look cool, too. All they need is a marketing channel.
The Chinese manufacturing companies have been accepting low margins.
But that's coming to an end. Too many US companies have become
"pure brands", middlemen between Chinese manufacturers and US retailers.
Such companies can be bypassed. And WalMart will help them do it.
You mean like the hi-jacking transponders the 9/11 terrorists turned off after hijacking the plane? I never knew there was such a thing until I read the 9/11 commission report. I guess it was somewhat of a secret to allow pilots to subtly notify controllers of a hijacking until the hijackers found out.
When hijacked, you're supposed to set the transponder code to 7500.
That's one of those ideas left over from the days when hijackers were clueless nuts. It's never been much of a secret. Hijacking procedures are in the Airman's Information Manual, available in any bookstore. One would hope by now that the guys flying the big iron have something better available to them.
No way is this going to happen. The US doesn't have the money. And they're not going to get it. Even conservatives are now fed up with Bush's spending.
But it's great for NASA bureaucrats. They can just idle along, issuing press releases, running their "centers", and promoting their "education" programs, without actually building anything flyable. And they get to blame Congress for not providing more money.
You can see this already. NASA just converted their home page to Flash.
The next people on the moon will be Chinese. They have such a strong manufacturing economy that it won't be a stretch to build a big booster. The "China price" on a booster should be low. Maybe the US will buy some.
And right now GNU/Linux has that in spades. Not just GNU/Linux, but the BSDs, Mac OSX, Solaris and even Windows have it. If the source code is properly written, and properly packaged, then it will compile on any machine that is up to the job of running it.
Yeah, right. Try building some package that builds with "./configure" on QNX, which is POSIX-compliant but isn't Unix or Linux. You almost always find build errors, usually due to some dependency that shouldn't be there or isn't properly turned off for less popular configurations. Typically the problems are easy to fix, but it's a hassle.
Typical error: do we really have to have "uint16_t", "uint_16_t", and "__uint16_t"? In the same program? POSIX specifies "uint16_t". Now go fix your source code. Thank you.
Yes, that's the classic Minox with the Document Copying Attachment (part #69319). Developed in 1938 and still in production, the Minox was the classic spy camera of WWII and the early days of the Cold War.
First, ownership of intellectual property isn't a big problem for open source. The SCO debacle has settled that. There have been no succesful lawsuits involving open source that affected users of it. The article sounds like typical Microsoft FUD.
There are real problems with open source, though. A major one is that, once you get past the top 20 or so projects, the number of people involved per project is very small. Only the big-name projects have enough of a community that one can count on continued interest or support. From a commercial user perspective, this is a major problem.
Open source as a process has the problem that it's very tough to fix a bad design decision. The "little fixes" mentality makes it tough to go back and make a broad-based change. X-windows is a classic example.
There's cruft. Everybody puts in their favorite stuff, but there's nobody throwing out the old stuff. Long-running projects tend to crud up with support for long-forgotten devices and standards. Sendmail, for example, still has support for UUCP and FidoNet. Forgotten protocols are a good place to look for exploits.
Open source also suffers from lack of an establishd middleware base. In the Microsoft world, everything that needs a little database uses Jet. Everything that needs interprocess communication uses OLE.
Most of the relationships Wildberger explains are well known to those of us who write physics engines, or the more geometrical parts of game engines. Trig functions are too expensive to use in inner loops, and their corner cases are annoying. If at all possible, everything is done with linear operations on vectors, matrix multiplies, and quaternions. These operations not only go fast, they parallelize; all 16 multiplies of a 4x4 matrix multiply can be done simultaneously, and every modern graphics card has the 16 multipliers necessary to do that.
Wildberger has put a cleaner theory underneath the kind of geometry game engine developers use. This may turn out to be useful.
Lately I've been doing robot motion planning, which has too much unnecessary trig in it. With enough work, it's often possible to derive a trig-free solution to some of the key problems. Better ways to think about trig-free solutions will help.
New Orleans is the only major US city below the
current sea level. The city should be rebuilt,
but elsewhere, on higher ground.
Over time, much of the population of coastal Florida and the Keys will have to be relocated, too. It's time to start this now. Pay off the residents as each disaster happens, but don't fund rebuilding near sea level.
Anyone remember the Sun 386i? Intel 386 based. Ran SunOS 4. Not successful - worked OK, but not price competitive with PCs and not compatible with Sun's other product lines.
This isn't that impressive for RTLinux, which is really a scheme for loading applications as loadable kernel modules running without memory protection. RTLinux is an obsolete approach; the more recent Linux variants from Lynuxworks and Montevista have a much cleaner approach, based on the low-latency fixes in the 2.6 kernel.
Learning a programming language isn't a big deal after you've learned a half dozen or so. But today, each one comes with an API of several thousand buggy functions you have to learn. That's the hard part. And it's so unrewarding.
This is is Houston. Five hundred miles from New Orleans. There's no emergency there. It's not even like Baton Rouge, whose population has doubled. Houston has a population of 5 million. Another 100,000 people isn't a massive overload on the city.
Houston gets that many extra people when there's a major football game in town.
The person responsible, Bob Royall, is a assistant chief of the Harris County (Houston) fire department. That's not a high enough political position to try to pull something like this. He's probably going to get wised up over the weekend.
About half of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. And, after Vista comes out, probably half of corporate America will still be running Windows 2000, less further migration to Linux.
There just isn't enough new in Longhorn/Vista to justify the buy. Where's the return on investment here? Why buy a new computer for everybody in your call center? Hello?
There's nothing wrong with rendering the entire user interface in the GPU. Softimage was doing that under NT 4 in 1997, using OpenGL. It was clunky back then, but it's worked fine for years. Multiple windows tend to run slowly in OpenGL on Windows, but that's because of a common bug that allows only one window to update per refresh. Buffer swapping needs to be better worked out for the multiple window case. But all of this requires relatively minor improvements.
There are may still be a few badly-designed CRT-type monitors out there that can be damaged by bad sync rates. Very few. Anything that can display "no signal" when not connected to an signal source has enough onboard logic to deal with bad sync. This problem belongs to the era when monitors had four coax connectors and a number of screwdriver adjustments on the back.
It was possible to do that on the original IBM PC, but very few monitors since have had that problem.
The monitor on the original IBM PC was borrowed from the IBM Displaywriter, which wasn't user-programmable. The PC's display card allowed setting the horizontal and vertical sync rates in software, not so you could change the resolution but just because the hardware was built that way. The monitor turned on when it got vertical sync. The horizontal sync, in typical TV style, was used to generate the input waveform for the high voltage supply for the CRT.
So if you set the vertical sync to normal and the horizontal sync to zero, the flyback transformer saw DC. With no inductive reactance to block the current, the flyback transformer would burn out. This would produce smoke. And there were viiri that did this.
But that's ancient history. Modern hardware-damaging viruses attack boot programs, firmware, and the keys in "trusted computing" systems. The effect can be a dead PC that cannot be restarted.
There are only a few newspapers in the US in which you can't plant a puff piece for a product. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal used to be the two leading examples. It looks like the WSJ is caving.
Newspaper content today is embarassing. Huge sections like "Food and Wine", "Drive", and "Technology" (i.e. ads for buyable gadgets).
A good exercise for students: Take a daily paper, discard all the ad sections, then cross out all remaining ads, then cross out all stories that promote products, then cross out all stories based on political figures saying something, and see what's left.
News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity.
What S3 really does is design the graphics controllers that go into Via chipsets. There are huge numbers of those controllers out there. They're pretty good graphics controllers, considering that they come almost for free as part of the motherboard chipset.
That's probably the future. The plug-in graphics card is rapidly headed for the same fate as the plug-in math coprocessor chip, the plug-in MMU chip, the plug-in DMA controller chip, the plug-in serial port board, the plug-in network adapter, and the plug-in disk controller.
Without the barrier islands, New Orleans needs even bigger and stronger levees to stay above water. The existing system was intended to resist only a Cat 3 hurricane, and that was with the barrier islands in place to slow down the storm surge. With them gone, a relatively minor hurricane could swamp the city again. And minor hurricanes come through all the time. There might even be another one this year. So the city really can't be reoccupied until new, stronger, levees are in place.
There will be some rebuilding. The central business district and the tourist areas will probably be fully protected and rebuilt. There will be housing for oil industry and port workers, but probably not in the low-lying areas. But when rebuilding is over, the population of New Orleans will be much smaller than it is now.
A similar hurricane, in 1900, flattened Galveston, TX.
A hurricane with 120 MPH winds killed 6000 people
and levelled much of the town.
The entire town, 500 city blocks, had to be jacked up several feet, and a huge seawall built. The jacking and filling job took eight years. Building the seawall took from 1900 to 1962. Sixty two years. And Galveston wasn't below sea level.
Ever after, Galveston was a smaller and less important city than it was before the 1900 hurricane.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."
That's unbelievable.
There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
Bush is now under heavy fire for picking heads of Homeland Security and FEMA who, when the crunch came, turned out to unequal to the job. Congress will be more critical of his appointments from now on. Being a Friend of Bush isn't going to be enough next time.
If more cell phones went to Iridium satellite roaming when no ground station was available, communications out of New Orleans would have stayed up.
We need to get Iridium capability into lower-priced handsets. Yes, airtime costs $1.49 per minute, but sometimes you need to get through. This is more useful than 4G, or even 3G. What we have now goes out as soon as you get five miles off the Interstate in hilly rural terrain.
The real trouble here seems to be that the cell phone people now have the Microsoft Disease - systems that ship with a huge range of little-used but externally accessable services turned on. The number of people with PCs attacked via Universal Plug and Play or Windows Messenger service is bigger than the number of people who actually use those services for anything. Microsoft also likes to put auto-launch into everything, from CD drivers to IE to Outlook to Word to Excel, thus providing a virus-friendly environment.
Now the phone people are doing this. Which they shouldn't. Why should a phone be offering services over Bluetooth? So it can receive spam?. Yes, there's now Bluetooth spam, and with a high-powered transmitter the spam station can achieve a 100 meter range.
Slashdot Mirror
Such arrangements have been around for years. But they are on the way out. The major Chinese electronics companies are establishing their own brands. Asus is a well known motherboard manufacturer. Asus and Inventec both sell PCs and laptops under their own names. They're rapidly moving from contract manufacturing to owning the entire business. The margins are much better when you own the brand.
Flextronics, the big player, is moving in this direction aggressively. They used to just assemble boards. Now they do design, engineering, procurement, and manufacturing. They're even partnered with frogdesign, so their stuff can look cool, too. All they need is a marketing channel.
The Chinese manufacturing companies have been accepting low margins. But that's coming to an end. Too many US companies have become "pure brands", middlemen between Chinese manufacturers and US retailers. Such companies can be bypassed. And WalMart will help them do it.
When hijacked, you're supposed to set the transponder code to 7500. That's one of those ideas left over from the days when hijackers were clueless nuts. It's never been much of a secret. Hijacking procedures are in the Airman's Information Manual, available in any bookstore. One would hope by now that the guys flying the big iron have something better available to them.
But it's great for NASA bureaucrats. They can just idle along, issuing press releases, running their "centers", and promoting their "education" programs, without actually building anything flyable. And they get to blame Congress for not providing more money.
You can see this already. NASA just converted their home page to Flash.
The next people on the moon will be Chinese. They have such a strong manufacturing economy that it won't be a stretch to build a big booster. The "China price" on a booster should be low. Maybe the US will buy some.
Yeah, right. Try building some package that builds with "./configure" on QNX, which is POSIX-compliant but isn't Unix or Linux. You almost always find build errors, usually due to some dependency that shouldn't be there or isn't properly turned off for less popular configurations. Typically the problems are easy to fix, but it's a hassle.
Typical error: do we really have to have "uint16_t", "uint_16_t", and "__uint16_t"? In the same program? POSIX specifies "uint16_t". Now go fix your source code. Thank you.
Yes, that's the classic Minox with the Document Copying Attachment (part #69319). Developed in 1938 and still in production, the Minox was the classic spy camera of WWII and the early days of the Cold War.
There are real problems with open source, though. A major one is that, once you get past the top 20 or so projects, the number of people involved per project is very small. Only the big-name projects have enough of a community that one can count on continued interest or support. From a commercial user perspective, this is a major problem.
Open source as a process has the problem that it's very tough to fix a bad design decision. The "little fixes" mentality makes it tough to go back and make a broad-based change. X-windows is a classic example.
There's cruft. Everybody puts in their favorite stuff, but there's nobody throwing out the old stuff. Long-running projects tend to crud up with support for long-forgotten devices and standards. Sendmail, for example, still has support for UUCP and FidoNet. Forgotten protocols are a good place to look for exploits.
Open source also suffers from lack of an establishd middleware base. In the Microsoft world, everything that needs a little database uses Jet. Everything that needs interprocess communication uses OLE.
Anyone remember the "Turtle geometry" of LOGO?
REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RIGHT 1]
draws a circle.
Wildberger has put a cleaner theory underneath the kind of geometry game engine developers use. This may turn out to be useful.
Lately I've been doing robot motion planning, which has too much unnecessary trig in it. With enough work, it's often possible to derive a trig-free solution to some of the key problems. Better ways to think about trig-free solutions will help.
Over time, much of the population of coastal Florida and the Keys will have to be relocated, too. It's time to start this now. Pay off the residents as each disaster happens, but don't fund rebuilding near sea level.
Anyone remember the Sun 386i? Intel 386 based. Ran SunOS 4. Not successful - worked OK, but not price competitive with PCs and not compatible with Sun's other product lines.
This isn't that impressive for RTLinux, which is really a scheme for loading applications as loadable kernel modules running without memory protection. RTLinux is an obsolete approach; the more recent Linux variants from Lynuxworks and Montevista have a much cleaner approach, based on the low-latency fixes in the 2.6 kernel.
Learning a programming language isn't a big deal after you've learned a half dozen or so. But today, each one comes with an API of several thousand buggy functions you have to learn. That's the hard part. And it's so unrewarding.
The person responsible, Bob Royall, is a assistant chief of the Harris County (Houston) fire department. That's not a high enough political position to try to pull something like this. He's probably going to get wised up over the weekend.
There just isn't enough new in Longhorn/Vista to justify the buy. Where's the return on investment here? Why buy a new computer for everybody in your call center? Hello?
There's nothing wrong with rendering the entire user interface in the GPU. Softimage was doing that under NT 4 in 1997, using OpenGL. It was clunky back then, but it's worked fine for years. Multiple windows tend to run slowly in OpenGL on Windows, but that's because of a common bug that allows only one window to update per refresh. Buffer swapping needs to be better worked out for the multiple window case. But all of this requires relatively minor improvements.
There are may still be a few badly-designed CRT-type monitors out there that can be damaged by bad sync rates. Very few. Anything that can display "no signal" when not connected to an signal source has enough onboard logic to deal with bad sync. This problem belongs to the era when monitors had four coax connectors and a number of screwdriver adjustments on the back.
The monitor on the original IBM PC was borrowed from the IBM Displaywriter, which wasn't user-programmable. The PC's display card allowed setting the horizontal and vertical sync rates in software, not so you could change the resolution but just because the hardware was built that way. The monitor turned on when it got vertical sync. The horizontal sync, in typical TV style, was used to generate the input waveform for the high voltage supply for the CRT.
So if you set the vertical sync to normal and the horizontal sync to zero, the flyback transformer saw DC. With no inductive reactance to block the current, the flyback transformer would burn out. This would produce smoke. And there were viiri that did this.
But that's ancient history. Modern hardware-damaging viruses attack boot programs, firmware, and the keys in "trusted computing" systems. The effect can be a dead PC that cannot be restarted.
Can you say "bribe"?
That's why Consumer's Union buys their products at retail.
Newspaper content today is embarassing. Huge sections like "Food and Wine", "Drive", and "Technology" (i.e. ads for buyable gadgets).
A good exercise for students: Take a daily paper, discard all the ad sections, then cross out all remaining ads, then cross out all stories that promote products, then cross out all stories based on political figures saying something, and see what's left.
News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity.
That's probably the future. The plug-in graphics card is rapidly headed for the same fate as the plug-in math coprocessor chip, the plug-in MMU chip, the plug-in DMA controller chip, the plug-in serial port board, the plug-in network adapter, and the plug-in disk controller.
Without the barrier islands, New Orleans needs even bigger and stronger levees to stay above water. The existing system was intended to resist only a Cat 3 hurricane, and that was with the barrier islands in place to slow down the storm surge. With them gone, a relatively minor hurricane could swamp the city again. And minor hurricanes come through all the time. There might even be another one this year. So the city really can't be reoccupied until new, stronger, levees are in place.
There will be some rebuilding. The central business district and the tourist areas will probably be fully protected and rebuilt. There will be housing for oil industry and port workers, but probably not in the low-lying areas. But when rebuilding is over, the population of New Orleans will be much smaller than it is now.
A similar hurricane, in 1900, flattened Galveston, TX. A hurricane with 120 MPH winds killed 6000 people and levelled much of the town. The entire town, 500 city blocks, had to be jacked up several feet, and a huge seawall built. The jacking and filling job took eight years. Building the seawall took from 1900 to 1962. Sixty two years. And Galveston wasn't below sea level.
Ever after, Galveston was a smaller and less important city than it was before the 1900 hurricane.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials? State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President. Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job." That's unbelievable. There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
Bush is now under heavy fire for picking heads of Homeland Security and FEMA who, when the crunch came, turned out to unequal to the job. Congress will be more critical of his appointments from now on. Being a Friend of Bush isn't going to be enough next time.
We need to get Iridium capability into lower-priced handsets. Yes, airtime costs $1.49 per minute, but sometimes you need to get through. This is more useful than 4G, or even 3G. What we have now goes out as soon as you get five miles off the Interstate in hilly rural terrain.
You can only use a stupid name if you have a really big advertising budget.
Now the phone people are doing this. Which they shouldn't. Why should a phone be offering services over Bluetooth? So it can receive spam?. Yes, there's now Bluetooth spam, and with a high-powered transmitter the spam station can achieve a 100 meter range.