Growing up in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s I was one of "those guys" (if you're reading this, likely you were too) with several used PCs living in their bedroom running various hobbyist tasks, sometimes tinkering with linux etc.
Then in the 2010s I was down to a single "vm lab" server and desktop for games, plus a single laptop for travel. As time has gone on, priorities have changed, I use my laptop more and my desktop is somewhere under a heap of old things in a storage unit an hour from my home. The laptop is my primary machine.
With the advent of Thunderbolt 3 you can finally get enough bits across to outsource your GPU to a box on your desk, and Lenovo's selling a "graphics dock" with a midrange GTX 1050 for $400 not much larger than an Apple TV or VHS cassette tape.
My last "new" computer was a 2012 era Thinkpad x230, and I'll probably be upgrading to the x280 pr T480 when it comes out in a month or so, and also a graphics dock. Then when I need to upgrade the graphics, just plug in a new TB3 graphics dock/eGPU. My i5 from 2012 is still plenty fast, the only shortcoming is that it can address a max of 16GB memory and moderately weak graphics (although I did play Skyrim on it over Christmas for 40+ hours without an issue). I also upgraded the drive from magnetic to SSD for maybe $100 and replaced the battery for $50.
If power users can hold on to their laptops for five years, I can only imagine how long the average user keeps their computer these days. Being able to extend the graphics on a laptop indefinitely is going to extend the life of the device quite a bit.
We moved my office from downtown MTV to about a 22 minute walk from the caltrain station. What I quickly realized was that there were typically between 2-3 bikes just chilling out at the train station (about 3 miles from their main HQ, maybe more) so I and some coworkers would ride these bikes to our office, then dump them about a block from the office. The bikes always disappeared. Then around lunch we'd find another bike(s) and take them to the restaurant for lunch. In the evenings you can usually find one on your walk to the train station, and then just dump it as the station for someone else to use.
It's sort of Mountain View's unofficial bike share, especially now that the city of Mountain View has formally left the bay area bike share/ford gobike system.
The guy you're responding to has laid out pretty solid logic and you're basically saying "no it doesn't work that way" without providing any explanation, which is why people are jumping all over you, what you're doing looks like a typical 10 year old's response to an argument they don't understand or like. Maybe try fleshing out your responses better in the future.
This, pretty much. The product/sales/marketing departments are bred and educated on the yearly sales cycle; software development is ultimately dictated by them. The closest truce that I've seen has been the creation of LTS releases, which matches the annual or semi-annual cadence of the corporate sales/acquisition cycle with that of need for IT departments/software developers to ship and support stable software. Ubuntu's 2 years between LTS releases is rather long but it's extremely predictable and results in good stability with the interleaving releases being flexible enough to try out new features without screwing over seasoned IT professionals.
For consumer products like the iPhone there will almost always be an annual incremental upgrade over last year; you don't want to sell the same product (iPhone, Laptop, Tablet*) two years in a row with no improvements at Christmas, you're looking at a sales disaster. You'd have to get rid of the Christmas sales season to effectively kill annual software updates.
*The iPad seems to be the sole exception to this, the iPad Mini hasn't seen any significant upgrades since ~2013 and apple still sells the iPad Mini 2 despite being on version 4 or 5 now. Tablets with their larger batteries and internal volume pretty much maxed out on features within a couple of years of their introduction and hit full market saturation and last forever for whatever reason.
The colorado school of mines (i.e. MIT of the midwest) is heated largely by waste heat from the nearby Coors (yes that Coors) brewery. They run the steam vents under major sidewalks to help keep them clear of water and ice during the winter. Pretty cool to show up on campus and there's one sidewalk that's just bone dry all the time with green grass on either side. This has been going on since at least the 1950s, probably much earlier.
QA is a cost center, management is always looking to cut or make more efficent cost centers (and at the same time maximize profit centers)
It's no wonder every manager under the sun thinks they're the genius who can "solve the QA problem" and return 1-6 people's worth of payroll to the bottom line for that big annual bonus. The problem is that while YES you can get away with no QA in a very high functioning development team, on certain products,
A) most teams are not high enough functioning, even if they think they are to get away with no QA for 6+ months before quality fades B) usually only a few developers actually have contact with the customer and in particular, for enterprise-level apps (i.e. the software that drives people's business) these things are super complex and probably your customer depends on a particular feature working a particular way as a critical part of their workflow, and if you change that both of you are screwed
So yeah, your company functions ok doing facebook for dogs, snapchat for cats, or XYZ consumer web/mobile app? Cool. Your product is a button that has some business logic attached to it, yes you can totally QA a single function app. Enterprise apps that people actually use and depend on to function the same from release to release generally need dedicated QA that understands all the niche use cases that makes the product so popular in the first place.
Yeah some of our top guys rolled in around 4:30-5:00am local time, about two hours before the markets opened in New York, their primary purpose in life was to detect problems early, and be available if (when) things went horribly wrong. Luckily our operations were pretty smooth and practiced and we had no internal surprises, but there is always some cowboy in operations that doesn't feel the need to test their "small change" which takes down transmissions for the first half of monday.
Anyways, those guys that roleld in at 4:30am, were out the door by 2pm. Getting a meeting room at short notice between 8:30am-11:30am was virtually impossible because you had to book those guys in most of your meetings to get anything done or approved. On the plus side the office was deadly quiet after 4pm and 4-6:30 was when I got 99% of my work done.
I used to work for a major regional finance company in their IT department, after almost three years there I finally made it down to one of the processing floors. What a disaster, something like 200 people on this floor, all overweight "lifers" with at least 18" deep of nick-knacks on their desk, they did... something? One lady I helped, every 10th check did not have the company logo on it. Her job was to print checks for brokers. Somehow the 20 programmers up on the IT floor hadn't gotten around to automating her job yet. The other 199 people on this floor had similarly mind-numbing jobs that were likely 2-10 lines of scripting away from being automated away. I suspect as these people get hit by busses and/or die of clogged arteries, their jobs will be automated. But 200 jobs is roughly 10% of that company, an entire floor of a skyscraper, poof, gone. They'll likely be out-competed by a much smaller company that can do the same services for a quarter of the cost and 6x the uptime before the last of those lifers retires.
When I plug my USB-C phone in to my laptop to charge, it consumes power only, and then you have to manually enable data. I would imagine this is similar for other devices as well.
If you need 4 or 5 streaming services EVERY MONTH and can't alternate between them... you may be in need of a new hobby, and a gym membership
We have a baseline of netflix, and amazon prime* and add HBO for 2-3 months during Game of Thrones season, we've bought hulu for a month at a time for specific series, periodically, but we're not going to pay for services we don't use.
*I list prime simply because we have prime for the 2 day free shipping, and it's easier to bill hbo through prime than use hbo's standalone app.
Welcome to california, fellow Texan, I'm 6th generation Texan; you should google "microclimates of san francisco" at some point, that may clarify somewhat why I am dismissing your average temperature statistic. When I was first dating in SF it wasn't uncommon to take an uber from one side of nob hill where it was sunny and 75 to north beach where it was 63 and raining with heavy fog. Unsurprisingly population tends to cluster around the more pleasant parts of the city.
My personal experience living there, specifically north beach, fidi, tendernob, soma, it's about 63F during the day, which is where the bulk of the city's population is; inside temps are about 72F which is a term defined by Hadlock's law (lol are you really researching the legal definition? Texans would call 76 room temperature - get real dude) as room temperature and also defined by the temp that I don't want to put socks on to keep my toes cold (srsly, lol dude).
Good job on googling "facts" though, thanks for the laugh.
Just to clarify, while SF is pretty densely populated, it's barely 800,000 people, and average outside temperature is just 7 degrees below room temperature. Most often you need to open a window to keep your apartment or office building at room temperature. Given that heating and cooling make up the lion's share of most cities' power needs this makes SF a pretty easy target to hit. Cooking is another big consumer of electricity; something like 50%+ of homes and apartments are plumbed with natural gas for cooking. Only in the winter, and only on the coldest nights have I really ever needed to kick on the heat, and usually only for an hour or two because I left the windows open during the day.
It seems like the biggest hurdle for Amazon in other countries is that most other countries' parcel delivery systems are a total gamble as to whether or not your package (pick two):
A) arrives within one month B) arrives without damage (physical drop/crush or water) C) arrives at all
If amazon manages to figure out air delivery between warehouses (currently they're chartering two jets full time) and delivery services (they have their own fans/delivery employees in 5+ major cities in the US now) then they're 80% of the way towards solving the problems that prevent them from rolling out to third world countries.
As they get bigger I can see them building their own air strip and warehouses in each country, maybe even a private seaport in largest cities like Rio and Buenos Aires and partner with the government to do some sort of privatized customs. That's some serious cash outlay, but it's almost impossible to get quality products in third world countries. I'm traveling currently and the mid-tier ($10) headphones (about 1 weeks local wages) aren't even comparable to the cheapest headphones you can buy at walmart. For $15 you get a pair of amazon branded headphones that's equivalent to $35 local economy quality.
Currently in vietnam and haven't seen an old school PC in three weeks. Tablets are really popular, and the highest end shops here have laptops, but full blown desktop PCs don't seem to exist here as far as I can tell. I saw one a week ago and it was running Windows 98.
We have amazon branded ford courrier vans, they generally deliver to the door but about 10% of the time they deliver to the mailbox area. If your apartment complex doesn't have a way to deal with daily amazon cargo deliveries they may be behind the curve as most have adjusted to the daily deliveries.
I just add items to my cart throughout the week and when I hit $35-75 hot "buy" unless I'm running low on paper towels or something. My average order price is around $55 and I make 1-2 orders a week so add on items doesn't impact me a whole lot
They have Amazon fresh in Dallas now. The music streaming I use on my TV as a sort of radio, prime video is useful for the random stuff that isn't on Netflix. If all you care about is getting video games on their release date then yeah you're going to hate it. Personally I don't have the time to go shopping but once every two weeks; Amazon being price competitive with brick and mortar, I just order through Amazon unless I need fresh produce or it's an emergency.
I had sprint for 7 years and all they wanted to do was nickle and dime me to death. $4 a month charge to make international calls. Went straight down to T-Mobile store, got a blackberry with them in 2007 and never had to deal with bizzare nickle and diming fees again, always treated me really well, even adjusted my bill because they quoted me a lower price for calls from peru than was advertised. Then they rolled out unlimited 2G international data. Finally I left T-Mobile simply because Project Fi was marginally cheaper and gave me 4G international data at domestic rates. Never ever going back to Sprint, I'm glad to hear they're finally being put out to pasture. Ohio must be their primary market because I haven't seen a sprint store outside of a radioshack in probably a decade.
When I was little I probably accidentally swollowed, and pooped out tens of pennies, dimes, screws, nuts. Unless it's going to leech a chemical that mimics hormones, or heavy metals typically it just goes right through you, along with all the other undigestible parts of your food, like bone fragments, egg shell fragments, bugs, dirt, rocks... you do realize the human digestive system was designed to eat raw meat in an open field, right?
Yeah our digestive systems these days are a bit more sensitive because they almost exclusively eat processed, cooked foods, but your body is well designed to handle things that aren't edible.
Nothing like driving down the road at 15mph and your rear passenger window just falls into the door, shattering in to a million pieces. I'm sure VW has fixed the QC issues but after having that happen twice I'm sort of done with them. Ever since I've shared that story, family members come back to me, they say they're having dinner with a friend and their friend's kid had the window fall in to the door for no reason and they ask them if they had a VW or Audi and the friend is always suprised that they guessed right. I hear this from them about every six months from new people. Good times.
BMW's been milking the same systems data bus since... at least 1994 when they designed the E39 (5 series). It's been so successful they managed to add on GPS, navigation etc to it when all it was supposed to do was anti lock brakes and 6 CD changers. That system bus (down to the connectors) are present now in modern land rovers, making a 2017 land rover navigation unit compatible with a 1995 BMW 5 series.
When you design something for a ton of passenger cars, usually you want to design common systems to cut down on parts; in the late 90s-mid-2000s VW group cars (VW and Audi in particular) had awful window motors that failed all the time due to shared parts. The pontiac solstice sports car was basically assembled out of random parts from the GM parts bin and was even advertised as such.
I would imagine that if you're going to do EVs big, you will need some sort of modern systems bus that handles navigation, self driving CPU + sensors, battery charging, cooling, voltage etc etc, yes there will be a gas or diesel engine in a lot of these but effectively you're designing a shared platform for the next generation of cars; when you have 300 models (or likely sub-models) the more common parts you can use the better your cost savings.
Sheet metal, cars typically get a total redesign every 5-7 years. The mechanics are somewhat easy to retool for, and already budgeted for, but it's all the self-driving sensors, AI, CPU, charging wiring etc that needs to have a solid foundation so that they can make that big step forward and have many many interchangeable parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Growing up in high school in the late 90s/early 2000s I was one of "those guys" (if you're reading this, likely you were too) with several used PCs living in their bedroom running various hobbyist tasks, sometimes tinkering with linux etc.
Then in the 2010s I was down to a single "vm lab" server and desktop for games, plus a single laptop for travel. As time has gone on, priorities have changed, I use my laptop more and my desktop is somewhere under a heap of old things in a storage unit an hour from my home. The laptop is my primary machine.
With the advent of Thunderbolt 3 you can finally get enough bits across to outsource your GPU to a box on your desk, and Lenovo's selling a "graphics dock" with a midrange GTX 1050 for $400 not much larger than an Apple TV or VHS cassette tape.
My last "new" computer was a 2012 era Thinkpad x230, and I'll probably be upgrading to the x280 pr T480 when it comes out in a month or so, and also a graphics dock. Then when I need to upgrade the graphics, just plug in a new TB3 graphics dock/eGPU. My i5 from 2012 is still plenty fast, the only shortcoming is that it can address a max of 16GB memory and moderately weak graphics (although I did play Skyrim on it over Christmas for 40+ hours without an issue). I also upgraded the drive from magnetic to SSD for maybe $100 and replaced the battery for $50.
If power users can hold on to their laptops for five years, I can only imagine how long the average user keeps their computer these days. Being able to extend the graphics on a laptop indefinitely is going to extend the life of the device quite a bit.
We moved my office from downtown MTV to about a 22 minute walk from the caltrain station. What I quickly realized was that there were typically between 2-3 bikes just chilling out at the train station (about 3 miles from their main HQ, maybe more) so I and some coworkers would ride these bikes to our office, then dump them about a block from the office. The bikes always disappeared. Then around lunch we'd find another bike(s) and take them to the restaurant for lunch. In the evenings you can usually find one on your walk to the train station, and then just dump it as the station for someone else to use.
It's sort of Mountain View's unofficial bike share, especially now that the city of Mountain View has formally left the bay area bike share/ford gobike system.
The guy you're responding to has laid out pretty solid logic and you're basically saying "no it doesn't work that way" without providing any explanation, which is why people are jumping all over you, what you're doing looks like a typical 10 year old's response to an argument they don't understand or like. Maybe try fleshing out your responses better in the future.
This, pretty much. The product/sales/marketing departments are bred and educated on the yearly sales cycle; software development is ultimately dictated by them. The closest truce that I've seen has been the creation of LTS releases, which matches the annual or semi-annual cadence of the corporate sales/acquisition cycle with that of need for IT departments/software developers to ship and support stable software. Ubuntu's 2 years between LTS releases is rather long but it's extremely predictable and results in good stability with the interleaving releases being flexible enough to try out new features without screwing over seasoned IT professionals.
For consumer products like the iPhone there will almost always be an annual incremental upgrade over last year; you don't want to sell the same product (iPhone, Laptop, Tablet*) two years in a row with no improvements at Christmas, you're looking at a sales disaster. You'd have to get rid of the Christmas sales season to effectively kill annual software updates.
*The iPad seems to be the sole exception to this, the iPad Mini hasn't seen any significant upgrades since ~2013 and apple still sells the iPad Mini 2 despite being on version 4 or 5 now. Tablets with their larger batteries and internal volume pretty much maxed out on features within a couple of years of their introduction and hit full market saturation and last forever for whatever reason.
I think that a larger chunk of them (in SF at least) suffer from schizophrenia than FAS, that has been my experience at least.
The colorado school of mines (i.e. MIT of the midwest) is heated largely by waste heat from the nearby Coors (yes that Coors) brewery. They run the steam vents under major sidewalks to help keep them clear of water and ice during the winter. Pretty cool to show up on campus and there's one sidewalk that's just bone dry all the time with green grass on either side. This has been going on since at least the 1950s, probably much earlier.
As I've graduated out of my 20's I've noticed I'm a lot, a LOT more sensitive to time changes than I used to be.
QA is a cost center, management is always looking to cut or make more efficent cost centers (and at the same time maximize profit centers)
It's no wonder every manager under the sun thinks they're the genius who can "solve the QA problem" and return 1-6 people's worth of payroll to the bottom line for that big annual bonus. The problem is that while YES you can get away with no QA in a very high functioning development team, on certain products,
A) most teams are not high enough functioning, even if they think they are to get away with no QA for 6+ months before quality fades
B) usually only a few developers actually have contact with the customer and in particular, for enterprise-level apps (i.e. the software that drives people's business) these things are super complex and probably your customer depends on a particular feature working a particular way as a critical part of their workflow, and if you change that both of you are screwed
So yeah, your company functions ok doing facebook for dogs, snapchat for cats, or XYZ consumer web/mobile app? Cool. Your product is a button that has some business logic attached to it, yes you can totally QA a single function app. Enterprise apps that people actually use and depend on to function the same from release to release generally need dedicated QA that understands all the niche use cases that makes the product so popular in the first place.
Yeah some of our top guys rolled in around 4:30-5:00am local time, about two hours before the markets opened in New York, their primary purpose in life was to detect problems early, and be available if (when) things went horribly wrong. Luckily our operations were pretty smooth and practiced and we had no internal surprises, but there is always some cowboy in operations that doesn't feel the need to test their "small change" which takes down transmissions for the first half of monday.
Anyways, those guys that roleld in at 4:30am, were out the door by 2pm. Getting a meeting room at short notice between 8:30am-11:30am was virtually impossible because you had to book those guys in most of your meetings to get anything done or approved. On the plus side the office was deadly quiet after 4pm and 4-6:30 was when I got 99% of my work done.
I used to work for a major regional finance company in their IT department, after almost three years there I finally made it down to one of the processing floors. What a disaster, something like 200 people on this floor, all overweight "lifers" with at least 18" deep of nick-knacks on their desk, they did... something? One lady I helped, every 10th check did not have the company logo on it. Her job was to print checks for brokers. Somehow the 20 programmers up on the IT floor hadn't gotten around to automating her job yet. The other 199 people on this floor had similarly mind-numbing jobs that were likely 2-10 lines of scripting away from being automated away. I suspect as these people get hit by busses and/or die of clogged arteries, their jobs will be automated. But 200 jobs is roughly 10% of that company, an entire floor of a skyscraper, poof, gone. They'll likely be out-competed by a much smaller company that can do the same services for a quarter of the cost and 6x the uptime before the last of those lifers retires.
When I plug my USB-C phone in to my laptop to charge, it consumes power only, and then you have to manually enable data. I would imagine this is similar for other devices as well.
If you need 4 or 5 streaming services EVERY MONTH and can't alternate between them... you may be in need of a new hobby, and a gym membership
We have a baseline of netflix, and amazon prime* and add HBO for 2-3 months during Game of Thrones season, we've bought hulu for a month at a time for specific series, periodically, but we're not going to pay for services we don't use.
*I list prime simply because we have prime for the 2 day free shipping, and it's easier to bill hbo through prime than use hbo's standalone app.
Welcome to california, fellow Texan, I'm 6th generation Texan; you should google "microclimates of san francisco" at some point, that may clarify somewhat why I am dismissing your average temperature statistic. When I was first dating in SF it wasn't uncommon to take an uber from one side of nob hill where it was sunny and 75 to north beach where it was 63 and raining with heavy fog. Unsurprisingly population tends to cluster around the more pleasant parts of the city.
My personal experience living there, specifically north beach, fidi, tendernob, soma, it's about 63F during the day, which is where the bulk of the city's population is; inside temps are about 72F which is a term defined by Hadlock's law (lol are you really researching the legal definition? Texans would call 76 room temperature - get real dude) as room temperature and also defined by the temp that I don't want to put socks on to keep my toes cold (srsly, lol dude).
Good job on googling "facts" though, thanks for the laugh.
Just to clarify, while SF is pretty densely populated, it's barely 800,000 people, and average outside temperature is just 7 degrees below room temperature. Most often you need to open a window to keep your apartment or office building at room temperature. Given that heating and cooling make up the lion's share of most cities' power needs this makes SF a pretty easy target to hit. Cooking is another big consumer of electricity; something like 50%+ of homes and apartments are plumbed with natural gas for cooking. Only in the winter, and only on the coldest nights have I really ever needed to kick on the heat, and usually only for an hour or two because I left the windows open during the day.
It seems like the biggest hurdle for Amazon in other countries is that most other countries' parcel delivery systems are a total gamble as to whether or not your package (pick two):
A) arrives within one month
B) arrives without damage (physical drop/crush or water)
C) arrives at all
If amazon manages to figure out air delivery between warehouses (currently they're chartering two jets full time) and delivery services (they have their own fans/delivery employees in 5+ major cities in the US now) then they're 80% of the way towards solving the problems that prevent them from rolling out to third world countries.
As they get bigger I can see them building their own air strip and warehouses in each country, maybe even a private seaport in largest cities like Rio and Buenos Aires and partner with the government to do some sort of privatized customs. That's some serious cash outlay, but it's almost impossible to get quality products in third world countries. I'm traveling currently and the mid-tier ($10) headphones (about 1 weeks local wages) aren't even comparable to the cheapest headphones you can buy at walmart. For $15 you get a pair of amazon branded headphones that's equivalent to $35 local economy quality.
Currently in vietnam and haven't seen an old school PC in three weeks. Tablets are really popular, and the highest end shops here have laptops, but full blown desktop PCs don't seem to exist here as far as I can tell. I saw one a week ago and it was running Windows 98.
peep that four-digit slashdot id, yo
We have amazon branded ford courrier vans, they generally deliver to the door but about 10% of the time they deliver to the mailbox area. If your apartment complex doesn't have a way to deal with daily amazon cargo deliveries they may be behind the curve as most have adjusted to the daily deliveries.
I just add items to my cart throughout the week and when I hit $35-75 hot "buy" unless I'm running low on paper towels or something. My average order price is around $55 and I make 1-2 orders a week so add on items doesn't impact me a whole lot
They have Amazon fresh in Dallas now. The music streaming I use on my TV as a sort of radio, prime video is useful for the random stuff that isn't on Netflix. If all you care about is getting video games on their release date then yeah you're going to hate it. Personally I don't have the time to go shopping but once every two weeks; Amazon being price competitive with brick and mortar, I just order through Amazon unless I need fresh produce or it's an emergency.
I had sprint for 7 years and all they wanted to do was nickle and dime me to death. $4 a month charge to make international calls. Went straight down to T-Mobile store, got a blackberry with them in 2007 and never had to deal with bizzare nickle and diming fees again, always treated me really well, even adjusted my bill because they quoted me a lower price for calls from peru than was advertised. Then they rolled out unlimited 2G international data. Finally I left T-Mobile simply because Project Fi was marginally cheaper and gave me 4G international data at domestic rates. Never ever going back to Sprint, I'm glad to hear they're finally being put out to pasture. Ohio must be their primary market because I haven't seen a sprint store outside of a radioshack in probably a decade.
When I was little I probably accidentally swollowed, and pooped out tens of pennies, dimes, screws, nuts. Unless it's going to leech a chemical that mimics hormones, or heavy metals typically it just goes right through you, along with all the other undigestible parts of your food, like bone fragments, egg shell fragments, bugs, dirt, rocks... you do realize the human digestive system was designed to eat raw meat in an open field, right?
Yeah our digestive systems these days are a bit more sensitive because they almost exclusively eat processed, cooked foods, but your body is well designed to handle things that aren't edible.
Nothing like driving down the road at 15mph and your rear passenger window just falls into the door, shattering in to a million pieces. I'm sure VW has fixed the QC issues but after having that happen twice I'm sort of done with them. Ever since I've shared that story, family members come back to me, they say they're having dinner with a friend and their friend's kid had the window fall in to the door for no reason and they ask them if they had a VW or Audi and the friend is always suprised that they guessed right. I hear this from them about every six months from new people. Good times.
BMW's been milking the same systems data bus since... at least 1994 when they designed the E39 (5 series). It's been so successful they managed to add on GPS, navigation etc to it when all it was supposed to do was anti lock brakes and 6 CD changers. That system bus (down to the connectors) are present now in modern land rovers, making a 2017 land rover navigation unit compatible with a 1995 BMW 5 series.
When you design something for a ton of passenger cars, usually you want to design common systems to cut down on parts; in the late 90s-mid-2000s VW group cars (VW and Audi in particular) had awful window motors that failed all the time due to shared parts. The pontiac solstice sports car was basically assembled out of random parts from the GM parts bin and was even advertised as such.
I would imagine that if you're going to do EVs big, you will need some sort of modern systems bus that handles navigation, self driving CPU + sensors, battery charging, cooling, voltage etc etc, yes there will be a gas or diesel engine in a lot of these but effectively you're designing a shared platform for the next generation of cars; when you have 300 models (or likely sub-models) the more common parts you can use the better your cost savings.
Sheet metal, cars typically get a total redesign every 5-7 years. The mechanics are somewhat easy to retool for, and already budgeted for, but it's all the self-driving sensors, AI, CPU, charging wiring etc that needs to have a solid foundation so that they can make that big step forward and have many many interchangeable parts.