Transportation is probably a factor, as well. For things like warranty work or build-to-order configs, the customer doesn't want to wait for the boat from China or pay for the plane from China.
Companies that sell nothing but prebuilds don't care as much; but if you do customization it isn't uncommon to have a 'slapping FRUs into boxes' plant somewhere in the US or northern Mexico that is supplied with more labor intensive parts from elsewhere.
From what I have heard there is a consensus that Thinkpads used to be much better back in the days. Before they got branded/involved with Lenovo.
Maybe they are going to be better built now?
The 'ideapad' line is more or less the same schlock you'd see from any other consumer facing brand. Thinkpads see the occasional controversy(I remember the T43 being considered rather a disappointment compared to the T42, among others, and it hasn't been entirely immune from the "Why would you possibly want a high resolution 4:3 panel when you could have a 1366x768 'HD' 16:9?" disease that took the industry by storm.) Overall, though, Lenovo seems to have realized that there wasn't much point in buying the Thinkpad brand and then fucking with it, and they were the OEMs behind many of the IBM Thinkpad models so it wasn't a fundamental shift in manufacturing...
Unfortunately, Apple might be about the last company that AMD has a decent shot with:
Like it or loath it, Apple adores thin-'n-light, caters to a less cost-sensitive customer segment, and has a fairly tightly polished ARM+hardware decode device strategy when it comes to HTPC type applications...
AMD has products that are quite cheap for the punch, but they tend to run a bit hot for the performance you get, and much of their virtue lies in comparatively strong IGPs, perfect for the light gaming and HTPC markets that Apple either doesn't much care about or would prefer you use an iOS device for.
AMD's features, particularly the comparatively strong GPU showing on even cheap parts(Intel has gotten better; but, because they don't have to care, they still tend to tie their best IGPs to their best CPUs, so you need to order some damn expensive CPU silicon to get the full punch, which still is fairly tepid, though not downright laughable, as historically), are an excellent fit in cost-sensitive laptops, all-in-ones, and desktops that aren't likely to get a discrete GPU upgrade. Unfortunately, those are niches that command serious volume; but not much in the way of margins.
Honestly, AMD might have much better luck cuddling up to Corporate IT. They don't, presently, have 'VPro'(but they could probably put a whole damn ARM SoC on their 'enterprise' motherboard reference model for half of what Intel charges for a CPU and chipset that doesn't have most or all of those management features lasered off, if the market demands it); but Team Corporate burns through generic good-enough beige boxes by the palletload, and pays somewhat better for them than does Joe Bestbuy. They'd have a hard time cracking CPU-intensive workstation applications; but the zillion desktop typenboxes, computationally unstressed servers that need huge slabs of RAM, and similar absolutely infest enterprise IT...
Be careful not to confuse dishonesty with ineffectiveness. If you go by their ostensible objective(reducing the already pretty tiny threat of 'terrorists' to an even tinier one), they are a total failure. Whether they have been quite as feckless on other metrics(number of jackboot keyboard jockeys employed, assorted entirely-legal-but-officially-disliked groups surveilled and/or COINTELPROed, etc.) is another question entirely.
It also allows to receiver of the so-called "truth" to disregard it even more easily.
That one arguably cuts both ways: On the anonymous intertubes I am free to stick my fingers in my ears and retreat to the safety of the nearest echo chamber; but I am also free to discard my previously espoused position without any significant stigma or emotional baggage associated with having 'backed down' or 'lost' the argument. In order to avoid that stigma, I probably won't gracefully tell everybody that I've been convinced; which makes it hard to measure how often it happens, but the stakes are very low indeed.
Would it be poor taste to sneak a large Steve Jobs poster onto the outside of Apple's release venue, with his quotes on 7 inch tablets?
"If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. Well, one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference. It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple's done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps."
All I ever read about is slavery. Is Dubai just a metaphor for "the rich can control everybody else" or is it a real country?
Dubai is an example of the glorious harmony between (middle) east and west! A city that wraps the middle east's robust traditions of rule of law and enlightenment liberalism and the west's values of sober financial honesty in the civic-planning expertise of Vegas developers on PCP... Truly, an example for us all.
Should something written by your great great grandfather still give you income?
Obviously not. However, the stuff my great great grandfather wrote under contract for Viacom should definitely still give them income. Anything less would be an attack on America, Job Creators, and our God-given property rights!
A couple of his equally straightforward comments(this one from the bench), during a case appealing an Illinois wiretapping law: "But I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police." and "Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,"
The Arduino does the temperature control (as that's what microcontrollers are good for) and the Pi is there to add a nice display and web server (as that's what a mini SBC is good for), seems like using the right tools for the right jobs to me. If you don't want a fancy display you could just use the Arduino part and skip the Pi.
In that vein, it's worth noting that an entire RPi sells for less(sometimes about the same, depending on distributor) than the most common W5100-based Arduino ethernet shields, while being markedly more powerful and having convenient features like USB host support and some I/O pins of its own. This probably helps explain some of the recent popularity of 'Arduino+RPi' projects where the RPi is, perhaps, a bit on the overkill side from a purely technical perspective...
Oh, I'd be the last to recommend it. It's ok for casual stuff; but it's a pain in the ass to get things like AD authentication and profile loading to actually work properly over wireless even in undemanding environments... It was mostly a preemptive note lest anybody take up the (wifi AP vendor's) refrain of how much wiring wireless deployments save you. Even when it does work, you end up with a surprising amount of cable snaking around to support the APs.
There is thingverse; but that is presently embroiled in some licensing-related controversy, peripherally related to makerbot's current togetherness problems with their OSS/OSH roots.. Most of the commercial 3d printing services also have some sort of 'library' feature to provide more things that you can order printed by them, shapeways and i.materialize come to mind; but there are others.
Running out of ethernet jacks after the fact is a damned pain, and the cost of putting in wires(unshockingly) rises once you have to punch through the wall and do a bunch of fishing to get them there.
Even if you are Embracing The Wireless Future, you'll want enough copper to support about twice as many APs as the vendor claims you'll need. If not, you'll want even more.
So, does anybody care to speculate about the mid/long term distribution/ownership of these things?
I keep seeing the breathless predictions of 'desktop manufacturing, one in every household!'; but I also see that (among the people, friends, family, neighbors needing computer assistance, etc. who I have cause to know about) ownership of inkjets is actually falling, despite the fact that those are nearly free; because it's easier to just upload the pictures to some service that owns a $20k+ printer but will sell you a tiny slice of it for under 10 cents a print. Laser printers are holding the line, so far, among people who push paper.
As a technology, 3d printing is obviously here to stay; but the value proposition of actually owning one, rather than renting a tiny slice of somebody's much classier one over the internet, seem about as mainstream as the economics of owning a high quality large format photo printer or a machine shop. Definitely something that certain professions would lead you to do, and definitely something that a hobbyist would want access to; but not necessarily something that you would seriously consider owning...
For the moment, costs and material limitations are probably keeping things on that front (mostly) in check. There are a few areas(like the Games Workshop figurines), where the price is quite high based largely on copyright and there is also a demand for numerous replicas(though, incidentally, I'm told that the real 'pirates' tend to use conventional mould-making and casting techniques, since those are reasonably efficient for small batches and far cheaper than a 3d printer that can capture fine detail properly).
There just aren't too many things that are made of dubious-quality plastic but are expensive enough to clone at current prices. Nothing like music where, even on dialup, the price of a CD worth went from $15 to ~$0...
Unless the technology improves substantially, 3d printed guns are going to succeed largely in stimulating the market for guns that you can operate with multiple missing fingers...
Now I don't know if there is ulterior motives, but if it was an American company they would probably do the same thing. China is not the issue. The concern is that wind farms effectively create radar blind spots. There is ongoing research attempting to solve this issue. It has happened a lot with British military bases.
It wouldn't entirely surprise me if somebody looked at the 'Red Chinese wish to place a field of antenna-shaped objects with wind turbines on top next to an ECM test site' concept and turned a slightly funny color, as well.
I know, I know "free market" and all that, sir. But is it really a free market if the country doing all the manufacturing isn't free?
Inconveniently, you can run something that looks remarkably like a free market economy while still executing inconvenient dissidents(the fantastic thing about dissidents is how often they are students, intellectuals, and other economically near-irrelevant bit players...) In fact, certain flavors of authoritarianism might actually make that easier: If the political process is free enough that it is viable and cost-effective to attempt to convert money into political influence(Americans should be readily familiar with this situation), there is a strong likelihood that either the private sector incumbents will gradually overrun the state and use it to suppress the aspects of the free market that are bad for margins(such as 'competition' and 'low barriers to entry') or public sector incumbents will gradually overrun the private sector in an attempt to suppress potential threats and ensure that the oligarchs of the private sector are in line with the strongmen of the public sector(the most notable case of this is probably Russia, where virtually anyone with a net worth worth talking about is either kissing Putin's ass, in prison on dubious tax charges, or hanging out in London).
If political authoritarianism is sufficiently ossified, such that money cannot be used to easily buy power, a certain dente comes to exist between the two sectors: because it is authoritarianism, the private sector will be coopted to some degree for state ends(espionage, vaguely mercantilist development/employment policies, enforcement of media blackouts and censorship; but because wealth is not easily transferrable to power, the state apparatus has an incentive to smile on anybody who is content to make money and keep his nose out of politics.
You can't have a command economy and a free market economy; but other flavors of unfreedom are substantially less incompatible...
In the specific case of the Amazon, it doesn't help that forests of that type, for all their lush biodiversity, have the curious quirk of locking an impressive percentage of their biological activity into the dense canopy of assorted foliage above the ground. The soil underneath it is actually pretty ghastly. So, not only do you replace a particularly dynamic ecosystem with a monoculture, a few years of rain will leave you with something that looks like Mars, only soggy. Hurray!
Slashdot Mirror
Transportation is probably a factor, as well. For things like warranty work or build-to-order configs, the customer doesn't want to wait for the boat from China or pay for the plane from China.
Companies that sell nothing but prebuilds don't care as much; but if you do customization it isn't uncommon to have a 'slapping FRUs into boxes' plant somewhere in the US or northern Mexico that is supplied with more labor intensive parts from elsewhere.
From what I have heard there is a consensus that Thinkpads used to be much better back in the days. Before they got branded/involved with Lenovo.
Maybe they are going to be better built now?
The 'ideapad' line is more or less the same schlock you'd see from any other consumer facing brand. Thinkpads see the occasional controversy(I remember the T43 being considered rather a disappointment compared to the T42, among others, and it hasn't been entirely immune from the "Why would you possibly want a high resolution 4:3 panel when you could have a 1366x768 'HD' 16:9?" disease that took the industry by storm.) Overall, though, Lenovo seems to have realized that there wasn't much point in buying the Thinkpad brand and then fucking with it, and they were the OEMs behind many of the IBM Thinkpad models so it wasn't a fundamental shift in manufacturing...
Unfortunately, Apple might be about the last company that AMD has a decent shot with:
Like it or loath it, Apple adores thin-'n-light, caters to a less cost-sensitive customer segment, and has a fairly tightly polished ARM+hardware decode device strategy when it comes to HTPC type applications...
AMD has products that are quite cheap for the punch, but they tend to run a bit hot for the performance you get, and much of their virtue lies in comparatively strong IGPs, perfect for the light gaming and HTPC markets that Apple either doesn't much care about or would prefer you use an iOS device for.
AMD's features, particularly the comparatively strong GPU showing on even cheap parts(Intel has gotten better; but, because they don't have to care, they still tend to tie their best IGPs to their best CPUs, so you need to order some damn expensive CPU silicon to get the full punch, which still is fairly tepid, though not downright laughable, as historically), are an excellent fit in cost-sensitive laptops, all-in-ones, and desktops that aren't likely to get a discrete GPU upgrade. Unfortunately, those are niches that command serious volume; but not much in the way of margins.
Honestly, AMD might have much better luck cuddling up to Corporate IT. They don't, presently, have 'VPro'(but they could probably put a whole damn ARM SoC on their 'enterprise' motherboard reference model for half of what Intel charges for a CPU and chipset that doesn't have most or all of those management features lasered off, if the market demands it); but Team Corporate burns through generic good-enough beige boxes by the palletload, and pays somewhat better for them than does Joe Bestbuy. They'd have a hard time cracking CPU-intensive workstation applications; but the zillion desktop typenboxes, computationally unstressed servers that need huge slabs of RAM, and similar absolutely infest enterprise IT...
Why do you hate the Homeland, citizen?
Be careful not to confuse dishonesty with ineffectiveness. If you go by their ostensible objective(reducing the already pretty tiny threat of 'terrorists' to an even tinier one), they are a total failure. Whether they have been quite as feckless on other metrics(number of jackboot keyboard jockeys employed, assorted entirely-legal-but-officially-disliked groups surveilled and/or COINTELPROed, etc.) is another question entirely.
It also allows to receiver of the so-called "truth" to disregard it even more easily.
That one arguably cuts both ways: On the anonymous intertubes I am free to stick my fingers in my ears and retreat to the safety of the nearest echo chamber; but I am also free to discard my previously espoused position without any significant stigma or emotional baggage associated with having 'backed down' or 'lost' the argument. In order to avoid that stigma, I probably won't gracefully tell everybody that I've been convinced; which makes it hard to measure how often it happens, but the stakes are very low indeed.
Securely decentralized in order to deter major thefts, I suspect.
Would it be poor taste to sneak a large Steve Jobs poster onto the outside of Apple's release venue, with his quotes on 7 inch tablets?
"If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on the seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad display. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion.
Well, one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference. It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of the present size. Apple's done extensive user-testing on touch interfaces over many years, and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touch screen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps."
Which is to say, it's a fantastic time saver if the plan is to consider, but then reject, the idea...
All I ever read about is slavery. Is Dubai just a metaphor for "the rich can control everybody else" or is it a real country?
Dubai is an example of the glorious harmony between (middle) east and west! A city that wraps the middle east's robust traditions of rule of law and enlightenment liberalism and the west's values of sober financial honesty in the civic-planning expertise of Vegas developers on PCP... Truly, an example for us all.
Should something written by your great great grandfather still give you income?
Obviously not. However, the stuff my great great grandfather wrote under contract for Viacom should definitely still give them income. Anything less would be an attack on America, Job Creators, and our God-given property rights!
I'd say that the jury is still out on Posner:
A couple of his equally straightforward comments(this one from the bench), during a case appealing an Illinois wiretapping law: "But I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police." and "Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,"
The Arduino does the temperature control (as that's what microcontrollers are good for) and the Pi is there to add a nice display and web server (as that's what a mini SBC is good for), seems like using the right tools for the right jobs to me. If you don't want a fancy display you could just use the Arduino part and skip the Pi.
In that vein, it's worth noting that an entire RPi sells for less(sometimes about the same, depending on distributor) than the most common W5100-based Arduino ethernet shields, while being markedly more powerful and having convenient features like USB host support and some I/O pins of its own. This probably helps explain some of the recent popularity of 'Arduino+RPi' projects where the RPi is, perhaps, a bit on the overkill side from a purely technical perspective...
It's almost as though he would really prefer to enable his cloud, or maybe your cloud on his hardware...
Oh, I'd be the last to recommend it. It's ok for casual stuff; but it's a pain in the ass to get things like AD authentication and profile loading to actually work properly over wireless even in undemanding environments... It was mostly a preemptive note lest anybody take up the (wifi AP vendor's) refrain of how much wiring wireless deployments save you. Even when it does work, you end up with a surprising amount of cable snaking around to support the APs.
There is thingverse; but that is presently embroiled in some licensing-related controversy, peripherally related to makerbot's current togetherness problems with their OSS/OSH roots.. Most of the commercial 3d printing services also have some sort of 'library' feature to provide more things that you can order printed by them, shapeways and i.materialize come to mind; but there are others.
C'mon Fujitsu, isn't the Hellenic pantheon large enough for you to leave Project Athena in peace?
Unless you are in a wildly electrically hostile environment, or forsee a need for 10GbE to the desktop, why bother?
Running out of ethernet jacks after the fact is a damned pain, and the cost of putting in wires(unshockingly) rises once you have to punch through the wall and do a bunch of fishing to get them there.
Even if you are Embracing The Wireless Future, you'll want enough copper to support about twice as many APs as the vendor claims you'll need. If not, you'll want even more.
So, does anybody care to speculate about the mid/long term distribution/ownership of these things?
I keep seeing the breathless predictions of 'desktop manufacturing, one in every household!'; but I also see that (among the people, friends, family, neighbors needing computer assistance, etc. who I have cause to know about) ownership of inkjets is actually falling, despite the fact that those are nearly free; because it's easier to just upload the pictures to some service that owns a $20k+ printer but will sell you a tiny slice of it for under 10 cents a print. Laser printers are holding the line, so far, among people who push paper.
As a technology, 3d printing is obviously here to stay; but the value proposition of actually owning one, rather than renting a tiny slice of somebody's much classier one over the internet, seem about as mainstream as the economics of owning a high quality large format photo printer or a machine shop. Definitely something that certain professions would lead you to do, and definitely something that a hobbyist would want access to; but not necessarily something that you would seriously consider owning...
For the moment, costs and material limitations are probably keeping things on that front (mostly) in check. There are a few areas(like the Games Workshop figurines), where the price is quite high based largely on copyright and there is also a demand for numerous replicas(though, incidentally, I'm told that the real 'pirates' tend to use conventional mould-making and casting techniques, since those are reasonably efficient for small batches and far cheaper than a 3d printer that can capture fine detail properly).
There just aren't too many things that are made of dubious-quality plastic but are expensive enough to clone at current prices. Nothing like music where, even on dialup, the price of a CD worth went from $15 to ~$0...
Unless the technology improves substantially, 3d printed guns are going to succeed largely in stimulating the market for guns that you can operate with multiple missing fingers...
Now I don't know if there is ulterior motives, but if it was an American company they would probably do the same thing. China is not the issue. The concern is that wind farms effectively create radar blind spots. There is ongoing research attempting to solve this issue. It has happened a lot with British military bases.
It wouldn't entirely surprise me if somebody looked at the 'Red Chinese wish to place a field of antenna-shaped objects with wind turbines on top next to an ECM test site' concept and turned a slightly funny color, as well.
I know, I know "free market" and all that, sir. But is it really a free market if the country doing all the manufacturing isn't free?
Inconveniently, you can run something that looks remarkably like a free market economy while still executing inconvenient dissidents(the fantastic thing about dissidents is how often they are students, intellectuals, and other economically near-irrelevant bit players...) In fact, certain flavors of authoritarianism might actually make that easier: If the political process is free enough that it is viable and cost-effective to attempt to convert money into political influence(Americans should be readily familiar with this situation), there is a strong likelihood that either the private sector incumbents will gradually overrun the state and use it to suppress the aspects of the free market that are bad for margins(such as 'competition' and 'low barriers to entry') or public sector incumbents will gradually overrun the private sector in an attempt to suppress potential threats and ensure that the oligarchs of the private sector are in line with the strongmen of the public sector(the most notable case of this is probably Russia, where virtually anyone with a net worth worth talking about is either kissing Putin's ass, in prison on dubious tax charges, or hanging out in London).
If political authoritarianism is sufficiently ossified, such that money cannot be used to easily buy power, a certain dente comes to exist between the two sectors: because it is authoritarianism, the private sector will be coopted to some degree for state ends(espionage, vaguely mercantilist development/employment policies, enforcement of media blackouts and censorship; but because wealth is not easily transferrable to power, the state apparatus has an incentive to smile on anybody who is content to make money and keep his nose out of politics.
You can't have a command economy and a free market economy; but other flavors of unfreedom are substantially less incompatible...
In the specific case of the Amazon, it doesn't help that forests of that type, for all their lush biodiversity, have the curious quirk of locking an impressive percentage of their biological activity into the dense canopy of assorted foliage above the ground. The soil underneath it is actually pretty ghastly. So, not only do you replace a particularly dynamic ecosystem with a monoculture, a few years of rain will leave you with something that looks like Mars, only soggy. Hurray!