Volume production isn't the problem. Looking at the list of Kickstarter projects labelled "Where the *** is it?", many of them are games, or even just videos. Game and video "manufacturing" is trivial. There's no excuse for "BronyCon, the documentary" or the "Leisure Suit Larry" remake being far behind schedule. Not when each raised over half a million dollars.
Should we make a concerted effort to send radio messages to Tau Ceti? We have not yet done so, although brief messages have been sent in the direction of other stars. Messages have been constructed which could be decoded without any external info. Maybe we should be sending those regularly to Tau Ceti and listening regularly for a reply starting 24 years from sending. It's not an expensive project.
"The defect rate on hardware is so low you don't need to"
I think the point of the article is to cast significant doubt on statements like this.
Right. Google assumes their server hardware (which is cheap, not good) is flaky, and designs their software to deal with that. I've heard a Google engineer say that if they sort a terabyte twice, they get two different results.
There are international collection agencies for this sort of thing. It costs about 20% of the amount collected, but it may be worth it. Check out the collection agency thoroughly; there are outfits on the web that claim to be international collection agencies but really just broker bad debt. Find a company that actually has their own staff in the target countries.
Irish law on debt is particularly severe. If you can go after them in Ireland, that's a good option.
The problem with these ABS extruders is not building the frame. The problem is not building a 3-axis positioning system. The problem is that you're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That's always going to be a marginal operation. Without a better welding process (I've suggested aiming a small laser at the weld point) this will continue to be a flaky technology. I've seen about five versions of this technology in action, and they all sort-of work, but don't yield consistently strong parts.
The ultraviolet stereolithography technology yields much better part quality, but still costs too much. Formlabs may succeed in getting the cost down to $3500 or so. They're demoing at CES.
Marx was writing in an era when about 90% of the workforce was engaged in farming or manufacture. It was an era when just producing enough stuff was a big problem. For the developed world, making enough stuff became a solved problem in the 1950s and 1960s. Making enough good stuff was solved in the 1980s.
We're seeing the return of the Iron Law of Wages: real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. That had been the case for most of history. For most of the 20th century, the Iron Law of Wages was viewed by economists as being obsolete. That may have just been a historical anomaly in capitalism. The period during which wages substantially exceeded survival level in the US was the period in which labor unions had enough power to push wages up. That's over.
"Machines should think, people should work". Humans just do the dumb manipulation jobs that still cost more to do with robots. Kiva Robotics video: "Training for a human picker on the system takes a minute or so." The end result is that most new jobs pay about $10.25 per hour. It's now cheaper to put the smarts in the software rather than train skilled workers. Computers are so cheap, and copying software is even cheaper.
As retail goes online, whole sectors of the economy disappear, buildings go vacant, and jobs go away forever. One (1) new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last decade. (We don't count the New Jersey Meadowlands debacle; they're not open after a decade and the roof collapsed.) Many, many malls are dead.
First, order processing and payment went online. Then warehouse operation and order fulfillment. Ordered from Staples, the Gap, Walgreens, Saks Fifth Avenue, Toys "R" Us, Follett, Timberland, Diapers.com, or Dillard's? Mobile robots did most of the work. Amazon just bought Kiva Robotics. Coming up next, Google same-day delivery service. (Not with automatic truck driving. Yet.)
We have an economic system which optimizes for lowest costs, including labor costs. It's working as designed. Do you want fries with that?
The story says she was Tasered when she came in to pick up phones she had already ordered on line. So she was rightfully demanding that the store fulfill an obligation to her.
As for "unauthorized export", that has no meaning in state law, and state cops have no authority in that area. There are some Federal restrictions, but they involve mostly the few countries the US still doesn't get along with, like Cuba and North Korea. You can ship all the iPhones you want to China as far as the US is concerned. Importing into China is difficult, much more so than importing into the US. But that's enforced at China customs processing. Not by some mall cop.
If you want to distribute a "newsletter" to real subscribers, set up an RSS feed, or a Twitter feed for little stuff. Readers can then subscribe if they want, and they can unsubscribe without having to beg to be taken off the list.
This clown sent 420,000 emails. Of course he's a spammer.
We're really lucky that the FCC clamped down on RF emissions from electronics. Otherwise, we'd all be looking at big electromagnetic compatibility charts before buying anything, trying to find combinations known to work well together. Offices would need RF spectrum analyzers to figure out who brought in something that was messing up other gear. I mentioned in another post that you couldn't operate a Milton Bradley Big Trak and an TRS-80 near each other. The other side of stopping RF emissions is that the shielding makes electronics much less sensitive to RF interference.
The development of really good RF noise management technology made modern cell phones possible. The concept of a handheld device with four radios (GSM, WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth), all operating simultaneously within a few inches of each other, was totally beyond the RF technology of a generation ago. Two generations ago, it was so bad that marine radio stations had miles of separation between the receivers and the transmitters.
The original TRS-80 was a wideband RF jammer. Cheap PCB design, plastic (unshielded) case, lots of ribbon cable external interconnects operating at megahertz frequencies.
Not only was the TRS-80 an RF noise generator, it was sensitive to other RF sources in the vicinity. It was noted at the time that a TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak would both crash if operated near each other.
The satellite appears to be in a stable, nearly circular orbit. Perigee 505.3 km, apogee: 588.3 km. That's higher than the ISS. It's not going to re-enter any time soon. Good launch. Some idiot seems to have looked at a tracking site, saw that the altitude was decreasing, which happens for about half of each orbit, and made a big deal out of this.
It's not clear that the satellite is out of control. Many satellites tumble during their early orbits, until attitude stabilization is commanded and achieved. Since North Korea doesn't have a worldwide network of tracking stations, they can only send commands when the satellite passes over their country. They may choose to let it orbit for a while and collect some telemetry data before trying to stabilize it. Assuming it's equipped for attitude stabilization. Early US and USSR satellites were not stabilized.
The Forbes article plays a video from some cooking show. With a player with no stop button.
There are other 3D printing service providers. Autodesk has a list. Autodesk itself also does some 3D printing as a sideline. They're more interested in selling the CAD tools for designing parts. Their printing service providers are more oriented towards working parts than decorative objects.
It's good to see the USAF with some general-purpose space capability. They now have something that can go up to low orbit for a reasonable cost, stay up for a while, and carry a range of payloads. Useful.
There's no problem building an automated production line. The description in the article would apply to the Sony Walkman production line from 20 years ago. Anything where you can do vertical assembly, just placing the parts in order onto a base, can be automated very effectively with simple robots.
It's amazing that Foxconn uses over 100,000 people just to make iPhones, which are not very complex mechanically.
Gigabit fiber to the home is quietly being deployed by Sonic.net in Sebastpol, CA. It costs them about $1500 per drop, but they gain back the $20 per month they were previously paying to AT&T for access to copper. Customers pay $70/month for 1Gb/s Internet connections. 20Mb/s for $40. Sonic makes money on this, and is slowly expanding the service.
The big players in cable hate Sonic, one of the last of the independent ISPs. Network neutral, EFF-endorsed privacy policies, no caching or "deep packet inspection". Just bits.
Sonic isn't in the TV business. (They do resell DirecTV if you want that, but that comes in via a dish, not the Internet connection.) So they don't have any bias towards sending their own content.
(I've been at this too long. I remember when the ARPANET went from 8-bit to 16-bit IMP addresses. I ordered one of the first class B networks in the early 1980s, [128.5.xxx.xxx]. I considered ordering a class C, but there was no charge for a class B, and we thought we might exceed 256 hosts some day.)
The military view of security (from the part that uses weapons) is that information needs to be protected only until the enemy can't use it. A classic line is "Where the ship was last week is UNCLASSIFIED. Where the ship was yesterday is CONFIDENTIAL. Where the ship is now is SECRET. Where the ship will be tomorrow is TOP SECRET."
The important secrets in the combat arms are about future plans and current vulnerabilities. The significant ULTRA interceptions during WWII were mostly boring but important position and strength returns from German units. They'd intercept daily reports like "13th Panzer: 1245 men, 45 tanks, 3350 liters fuel, 245 rounds tank ammo." Intel people would translate this into "13th Panzer down to half strength, has only enough fuel to move 6 km and fight for 1/2 hour." Churchill would then sometimes issue orders like "Do not lose heart! Press on and you will be victorious!" Allied tank units would attack the vulnerable unit, the German unit would run out of fuel and ammo and be destroyed.
The intel side wants to classify everything forever, because they don't want the enemy to know how much they know and what sources they have. There's something to be said for this, provided that the intel side shuts up. In the era when NSA was targeted on the USSR and didn't share with law enforcement, that worked. The problem now is a big collection vacuum coupled with selective leaks to the rest of the government.
Then there's pure bureaucratic classification to avoid embarrassment. This has become much worse since anti-terrorism paranoia. It was a big problem before that, though; too much of the USAF budget, for example, is "black". Eventually it comes out what was being built, and there really haven't been significant breakthroughs comparable to, say, the SR-71 in a long time.
Backup copy. (And because the document was created by a Congressional employee, it's not copyrightable. So there.)
Here's the proposal:
A. Free 12-year copyright term for all new works - subject to registration, and all
existing works are renewed as of the passage of the reform legislation. If passed
today this would mean that new works have a copyright until 2024.
B. Elective-12 year renewal (cost 1% of all United States revenue from first 12 years
-- which equals all sales).
C. Elective-6 year renewal (cost 3% of revenue from the previous 12 years).
D. Elective-6 year renewal (cost 5% of revenue in previous 6 years).
E. Elective-10 year renewal (10% of ALL overall revenue - fees paid so far).
This is a good proposal. Start circulating it around. For only a very small number of copyrighted items is there revenue beyond 12 years, and that's covered.
Cell phones just don't work. I'm in Silicon Valley, which you would think would have 100% cell phone coverage. It doesn't. My Sprint PCS cell phone barely works at home, because there's a hill between me and the nearest cell tower, and the neighbors have a NIMBY problem with cell towers. This isn't a remote area; I'm just outside Redwood CIty.
So I have to have a Sprint "Airave" cell-to-VIOP box at home. This is a Sprint-provided small cell node in a box tied to my DSL line. This drops voice quality to cell quality plus VoIP quality - there's more lag than the echo suppressors can handle. Worse, if I lose the DSL line, I lose cell phone service. The Airave box, upon losing Internet connectivity, does not stop promoting itself as a cell node, and will capture local Sprint phones, even though it can't connect calls. If DSL is down, I have to unplug the Airave to free the cell phone, and go to a window on the side of the house facing a cell tower to make a cell call.
Sprint doesn't have service at TechShop Menlo Park, either. That's in an industrial park, on flat land, so there's no excuse for that.
Another big coverage hole in Silicon Valley was Stanford. Stanford cut a deal with AT&T to make AT&T their official cell phone provider, and didn't allow non-AT&T cell sites on their land. So non-AT&T phones worked badly at Stanford. This angered so many people that Stanford finally had to give in. Still, AT&T cell service is said to work better on campus.
Even when there's good coverage, delay and echo is a problem. I frequently talk to a friend in a rural area of Lake County, about 200 miles away. She has good cell reception on AT&T, but for some reason, there's more than a second of delay round trip, which breaks the echo suppressors and makes conversation painful. I mostly talk to her cell on my land line, even if I have to call back to do it.
On the other hand, when I get calls from Switzerland, where they have IDSN home phones and the call is digitized in the handset and sent over a synchronous channel with no jitter, it sounds great.
Sprint, 1988: "You can hear a pin drop"
Verizon, 2000s: "Can you hear me now?"
Slashdot Mirror
Volume production isn't the problem. Looking at the list of Kickstarter projects labelled "Where the *** is it?", many of them are games, or even just videos. Game and video "manufacturing" is trivial. There's no excuse for "BronyCon, the documentary" or the "Leisure Suit Larry" remake being far behind schedule. Not when each raised over half a million dollars.
Should we make a concerted effort to send radio messages to Tau Ceti? We have not yet done so, although brief messages have been sent in the direction of other stars. Messages have been constructed which could be decoded without any external info. Maybe we should be sending those regularly to Tau Ceti and listening regularly for a reply starting 24 years from sending. It's not an expensive project.
"The defect rate on hardware is so low you don't need to" I think the point of the article is to cast significant doubt on statements like this.
Right. Google assumes their server hardware (which is cheap, not good) is flaky, and designs their software to deal with that. I've heard a Google engineer say that if they sort a terabyte twice, they get two different results.
The syntax is unreadable, of course. And Perl 6 seems to have been rejected by the market. Still, it's a vast improvement over shell scripts.
There are international collection agencies for this sort of thing. It costs about 20% of the amount collected, but it may be worth it. Check out the collection agency thoroughly; there are outfits on the web that claim to be international collection agencies but really just broker bad debt. Find a company that actually has their own staff in the target countries.
Irish law on debt is particularly severe. If you can go after them in Ireland, that's a good option.
The problem with these ABS extruders is not building the frame. The problem is not building a 3-axis positioning system. The problem is that you're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That's always going to be a marginal operation. Without a better welding process (I've suggested aiming a small laser at the weld point) this will continue to be a flaky technology. I've seen about five versions of this technology in action, and they all sort-of work, but don't yield consistently strong parts.
The ultraviolet stereolithography technology yields much better part quality, but still costs too much. Formlabs may succeed in getting the cost down to $3500 or so. They're demoing at CES.
I'm wondering how the legalization of marijuana in Washington state will affect Microsoft's software quality. Does Microsoft have drug testing?
Marx was writing in an era when about 90% of the workforce was engaged in farming or manufacture. It was an era when just producing enough stuff was a big problem. For the developed world, making enough stuff became a solved problem in the 1950s and 1960s. Making enough good stuff was solved in the 1980s.
Today, about 3% of the US labor force is involved in farming, and 9% in manufacturing, and 4% in construction. So about 16% of the work force produces all the stuff. Marx's writing assumes that goods production dominates the economy, and it just doesn't any more. We need different analysis now.
If Islam is that threatened by a badly produced video from a religious group, maybe it just needs a bigger push to bring it down.
We're seeing the return of the Iron Law of Wages: real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. That had been the case for most of history. For most of the 20th century, the Iron Law of Wages was viewed by economists as being obsolete. That may have just been a historical anomaly in capitalism. The period during which wages substantially exceeded survival level in the US was the period in which labor unions had enough power to push wages up. That's over.
"Machines should think, people should work". Humans just do the dumb manipulation jobs that still cost more to do with robots. Kiva Robotics video: "Training for a human picker on the system takes a minute or so." The end result is that most new jobs pay about $10.25 per hour. It's now cheaper to put the smarts in the software rather than train skilled workers. Computers are so cheap, and copying software is even cheaper.
As retail goes online, whole sectors of the economy disappear, buildings go vacant, and jobs go away forever. One (1) new indoor mall has been built in the US in the last decade. (We don't count the New Jersey Meadowlands debacle; they're not open after a decade and the roof collapsed.) Many, many malls are dead. First, order processing and payment went online. Then warehouse operation and order fulfillment. Ordered from Staples, the Gap, Walgreens, Saks Fifth Avenue, Toys "R" Us, Follett, Timberland, Diapers.com, or Dillard's? Mobile robots did most of the work. Amazon just bought Kiva Robotics. Coming up next, Google same-day delivery service. (Not with automatic truck driving. Yet.)
We have an economic system which optimizes for lowest costs, including labor costs. It's working as designed. Do you want fries with that?
The story says she was Tasered when she came in to pick up phones she had already ordered on line. So she was rightfully demanding that the store fulfill an obligation to her.
As for "unauthorized export", that has no meaning in state law, and state cops have no authority in that area. There are some Federal restrictions, but they involve mostly the few countries the US still doesn't get along with, like Cuba and North Korea. You can ship all the iPhones you want to China as far as the US is concerned. Importing into China is difficult, much more so than importing into the US. But that's enforced at China customs processing. Not by some mall cop.
If you want to distribute a "newsletter" to real subscribers, set up an RSS feed, or a Twitter feed for little stuff. Readers can then subscribe if they want, and they can unsubscribe without having to beg to be taken off the list.
This clown sent 420,000 emails. Of course he's a spammer.
We're really lucky that the FCC clamped down on RF emissions from electronics. Otherwise, we'd all be looking at big electromagnetic compatibility charts before buying anything, trying to find combinations known to work well together. Offices would need RF spectrum analyzers to figure out who brought in something that was messing up other gear. I mentioned in another post that you couldn't operate a Milton Bradley Big Trak and an TRS-80 near each other. The other side of stopping RF emissions is that the shielding makes electronics much less sensitive to RF interference.
The development of really good RF noise management technology made modern cell phones possible. The concept of a handheld device with four radios (GSM, WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth), all operating simultaneously within a few inches of each other, was totally beyond the RF technology of a generation ago. Two generations ago, it was so bad that marine radio stations had miles of separation between the receivers and the transmitters.
The original TRS-80 was a wideband RF jammer. Cheap PCB design, plastic (unshielded) case, lots of ribbon cable external interconnects operating at megahertz frequencies.
Not only was the TRS-80 an RF noise generator, it was sensitive to other RF sources in the vicinity. It was noted at the time that a TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak would both crash if operated near each other.
The satellite appears to be in a stable, nearly circular orbit. Perigee 505.3 km, apogee: 588.3 km. That's higher than the ISS. It's not going to re-enter any time soon. Good launch. Some idiot seems to have looked at a tracking site, saw that the altitude was decreasing, which happens for about half of each orbit, and made a big deal out of this.
It's not clear that the satellite is out of control. Many satellites tumble during their early orbits, until attitude stabilization is commanded and achieved. Since North Korea doesn't have a worldwide network of tracking stations, they can only send commands when the satellite passes over their country. They may choose to let it orbit for a while and collect some telemetry data before trying to stabilize it. Assuming it's equipped for attitude stabilization. Early US and USSR satellites were not stabilized.
The Forbes article plays a video from some cooking show. With a player with no stop button.
There are other 3D printing service providers. Autodesk has a list. Autodesk itself also does some 3D printing as a sideline. They're more interested in selling the CAD tools for designing parts. Their printing service providers are more oriented towards working parts than decorative objects.
It's good to see the USAF with some general-purpose space capability. They now have something that can go up to low orbit for a reasonable cost, stay up for a while, and carry a range of payloads. Useful.
Remember "Canonical, the sponsor of the Ubuntu project, today announces that Ubuntu is now available pre-loaded on the new ASUS Eee PC series". Never shipped.
"Canonical and Dell have teamed up to offer an extensive range of Dell desktop and notebook configurations, certified and suitable for home use, business use or software development." No mention of such products on Dell's site. Do they just make this stuff up?
There's no problem building an automated production line. The description in the article would apply to the Sony Walkman production line from 20 years ago. Anything where you can do vertical assembly, just placing the parts in order onto a base, can be automated very effectively with simple robots.
It's amazing that Foxconn uses over 100,000 people just to make iPhones, which are not very complex mechanically.
Gigabit fiber to the home is quietly being deployed by Sonic.net in Sebastpol, CA. It costs them about $1500 per drop, but they gain back the $20 per month they were previously paying to AT&T for access to copper. Customers pay $70/month for 1Gb/s Internet connections. 20Mb/s for $40. Sonic makes money on this, and is slowly expanding the service.
The big players in cable hate Sonic, one of the last of the independent ISPs. Network neutral, EFF-endorsed privacy policies, no caching or "deep packet inspection". Just bits.
Sonic isn't in the TV business. (They do resell DirecTV if you want that, but that comes in via a dish, not the Internet connection.) So they don't have any bias towards sending their own content.
OK, no more IPv4 addresses for the UK.
(I've been at this too long. I remember when the ARPANET went from 8-bit to 16-bit IMP addresses. I ordered one of the first class B networks in the early 1980s, [128.5.xxx.xxx]. I considered ordering a class C, but there was no charge for a class B, and we thought we might exceed 256 hosts some day.)
Just like drug dealers.
Seeing the words "Google" and "customer support" in the same sentence is amusing.
The military view of security (from the part that uses weapons) is that information needs to be protected only until the enemy can't use it. A classic line is "Where the ship was last week is UNCLASSIFIED. Where the ship was yesterday is CONFIDENTIAL. Where the ship is now is SECRET. Where the ship will be tomorrow is TOP SECRET."
The important secrets in the combat arms are about future plans and current vulnerabilities. The significant ULTRA interceptions during WWII were mostly boring but important position and strength returns from German units. They'd intercept daily reports like "13th Panzer: 1245 men, 45 tanks, 3350 liters fuel, 245 rounds tank ammo." Intel people would translate this into "13th Panzer down to half strength, has only enough fuel to move 6 km and fight for 1/2 hour." Churchill would then sometimes issue orders like "Do not lose heart! Press on and you will be victorious!" Allied tank units would attack the vulnerable unit, the German unit would run out of fuel and ammo and be destroyed.
The intel side wants to classify everything forever, because they don't want the enemy to know how much they know and what sources they have. There's something to be said for this, provided that the intel side shuts up. In the era when NSA was targeted on the USSR and didn't share with law enforcement, that worked. The problem now is a big collection vacuum coupled with selective leaks to the rest of the government.
Then there's pure bureaucratic classification to avoid embarrassment. This has become much worse since anti-terrorism paranoia. It was a big problem before that, though; too much of the USAF budget, for example, is "black". Eventually it comes out what was being built, and there really haven't been significant breakthroughs comparable to, say, the SR-71 in a long time.
Backup copy. (And because the document was created by a Congressional employee, it's not copyrightable. So there.)
Here's the proposal:
This is a good proposal. Start circulating it around. For only a very small number of copyrighted items is there revenue beyond 12 years, and that's covered.
Cell phones just don't work. I'm in Silicon Valley, which you would think would have 100% cell phone coverage. It doesn't. My Sprint PCS cell phone barely works at home, because there's a hill between me and the nearest cell tower, and the neighbors have a NIMBY problem with cell towers. This isn't a remote area; I'm just outside Redwood CIty.
So I have to have a Sprint "Airave" cell-to-VIOP box at home. This is a Sprint-provided small cell node in a box tied to my DSL line. This drops voice quality to cell quality plus VoIP quality - there's more lag than the echo suppressors can handle. Worse, if I lose the DSL line, I lose cell phone service. The Airave box, upon losing Internet connectivity, does not stop promoting itself as a cell node, and will capture local Sprint phones, even though it can't connect calls. If DSL is down, I have to unplug the Airave to free the cell phone, and go to a window on the side of the house facing a cell tower to make a cell call.
Sprint doesn't have service at TechShop Menlo Park, either. That's in an industrial park, on flat land, so there's no excuse for that.
Another big coverage hole in Silicon Valley was Stanford. Stanford cut a deal with AT&T to make AT&T their official cell phone provider, and didn't allow non-AT&T cell sites on their land. So non-AT&T phones worked badly at Stanford. This angered so many people that Stanford finally had to give in. Still, AT&T cell service is said to work better on campus.
Even when there's good coverage, delay and echo is a problem. I frequently talk to a friend in a rural area of Lake County, about 200 miles away. She has good cell reception on AT&T, but for some reason, there's more than a second of delay round trip, which breaks the echo suppressors and makes conversation painful. I mostly talk to her cell on my land line, even if I have to call back to do it.
On the other hand, when I get calls from Switzerland, where they have IDSN home phones and the call is digitized in the handset and sent over a synchronous channel with no jitter, it sounds great.
Sprint, 1988: "You can hear a pin drop"
Verizon, 2000s: "Can you hear me now?"