"The changing economics of Made in China will benefit both the rich and poor world."
It won't help the U.S! We keep demanding cheap goods, no matter how poorly made they are, and the only way to get that is to take advantage of poorer countries and manufacture overseas. Of course, that means there are no manufacturing jobs anywhere in the country, so in another few years, the only place in the U.S. where anyone will be able to shop or work will be Walmart.
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
On the other hand, I don't know where to buy decent clothes. I bought a 12-pack of socks a couple weeks ago and three of them were mis-sewn. Every time my wife buys a 3-pack of underwear for the kid, she takes them out of the package, washes them, and 1 or 2 will come out of the washer--their first wash, having never been worn--with the waistline frayed.
I'm not saying that everything that is (or was) made in America is automatically great, but wouldn't it be great if people DID give a shit about the quality of what they made, and that the money would stay within our borders? But I think the opportunity to do good has passed. I saw Schmatta a few months ago and that, too, is depressing as hell. It's the story of New York's fabled garment district and it ends with some fun stats: 40 years ago, 95% of clothing sold in America was made here. Today, 5% is.
The only thing America has now is an entertainment industry and bullshit I.P. laws. Oh yeah, and prisons and wars. And a bailed-out, fucked-up auto industry that somehow managed to learn almost NOTHING after they started loosing their asses in the 80s. (They started to regain their composure a bit in the 90s but then they just started making SUVs.)
Maybe I've seen Jerry McGuire too many times but I really would be happy owning fewer things that held together better and I would be more than happy to pay more for that. My parents bought a microwave within a few years of when they first became common (early/mid-80s) and it has been replaced exactly once, and that replacement is still in use. Sure, new ones cost less than $100 at Walmart now, but I've bought 3 or 4 since buying my house in the late 90s. I don't care if it costs less overall to live like this--money isn't everything. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch should make anyone stop and think "hmm, maybe rampant consumerism isn't the way to go."
PS: we also, as a country, need to stop looking down on blue-collar work. Not everyone needs a college degree. We really need to have trade schools at the high school and college levels.
I'm personally looking forward to "laundering" my music, but mainly in the technical sense: I'll be converting all of my low-bitrate, badly-tagged songs, many of which are incomplete or with audible flaws, to properly-tagged, professionally-mastered, quality-checked 256kbps files--complete with album artwork!
The good news is, with Find My iPhone (free since iOS 4) you can remotely set a lockscreen code AFTER it has been stolen. So if you a) don't have any super-secret stuff on your phone and b) notice it missing soon after it's stolen, the worst that will happen is the thief will make some calls and use some data. Of course, my preference would be for the thief to keep using the phone, and hopefully Find My iPhone would enable me to actually recover the phone.
... maybe we can give it honorary "never released" status so it can continue to earn a spot on "top vaporware" lists. Or we can all just say "The original was great--too bad they never made a sequel", like The Matrix.
> I've been waiting for Google Maps to be able > to save the route I chose on the desktop > Maps and sync it with Android for two > years-ish, but with every update all I > see is "new Latitude features!"
+1 for this. Or how about making routes that are more complex than just Point A to Point B? I'm not saying I need it to solve the traveling salesman problem, but it'd be nice to be able to plot out a few errands all at once, rather than figuring out my next route each time I get back into the car.
... but wow, what a fanboyish piece of shit. There is nearly no mention of Apple after its origin.
Leading into Windows 1 (after talking about Xerox, the Lisa, and the first Mac) he says "The era of GUI's was about to start. But apple [sic] was not meant to be the king."
I'm not saying Apple has never copied anything either, but once the article hits Windows 1.0, it is all about MS. He goes from Windows 3 to Microsoft Bob, lays down exactly 10 words about Windows 95, then goes straight to XP, Vista, and 7. He dismisses over two decades of Mac OS with the words "In the meantime, Mac OS was undergoing a similar, slow evolution."
He then says "Last couple of years were really eventful. New families of computing devices became wildly popular -- smartphones, netbooks, tablets. Mobile operating systems became almost as complex and capable as desktop ones. Multi touch technologies challenged the age-old interface design, and required new approaches. And now Microsoft tells us the future belongs to tiles." and the rest of the article is about Windows 8 and tiles. REALLY? No mention at all of the iPhone, who was the first to market with multitouch, even if they didn't invent it? No mention of Palm, or WinCE or BeOS or the Amiga or a million other omissions? Come on. If he isn't a shill, he's got a BIG set of blinders on. If you want to see the history of GUIs, go here. They have a ridiculously thorough collection of screenshots.
I'm not sure if this was changed late in 10.5 or somewhere in 10.6 (it wasn't in early builds of 10.5 for sure) but you can use pretty much any Mac to back up another, and you don't even need this hack. Just turn on file sharing: Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Sharing -> [x] File Sharing
I have two machines at work: an old G5 with 10.5 and two hard drives and a MacBook pro with 10.6. The MBP connects to the G5's second hard drive with file sharing over the network for Time Machine.
Yeah, it's like money laundering but for your songs. In addition to the legality, I'll get guaranteed good files, at a high bitrate, in a good codec, all properly tagged, and they'll even have artwork. And if my computer and all backups go kaflooey the next day I can download them all over again. I'll pay $25 for that in a HEARTBEAT.
MS wants one OS to cover everything from phones to Surface and it AIN'T GONNA FUCKING HAPPEN. Is there one type of vehicle that scales perfectly from single-person transport to the size of a bus? Is there one type of vehicle for land, sea, and air? Is there one type of building that scales perfectly from storage shed to multi-story office? No, no, and no. Different things have different needs. "When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns." Programmers always want to solve "the general problem" but one-size-fits-all solutions rarely work.
Dear MS: Please make a great desktop OS. And a great mobile OS. And a great server OS. And before you start, realize that they're different things.
I've bought a pool. Yes, they spend plenty of time telling you what might go wrong. That doesn't stop rich people from being arrogant self-important assholes.
Quite the contrary, actually. If the TV networks and movie studios keep going in the direction they're going, you'll soon have one set-top box for each channel.
Google will create and maintain it and it can be any kind of file at all--image, document, movie, slide deck, virtual machine HDD image, whatever. There will be a few bytes at the beginning of the file to tell Chrome how to deal with it. It will integrate nicely with all of Google's services. Everyone else can either support it or not.
Rather than just passively saying "Oops, you went over your data limit, we'll automatically give you more and charge you for it", they just switch you to 2G data speeds if you hit your limit. Cell companies have been looking for "we'll give you enough rope to hang yourself" opportunities at every turn ("oh, gee, you didn't know your kid was sending hundreds of messages and downloading porn at $1.00 per kilobyte until the gigantic bill showed up at the end of the month?") and it's nice to see one of them giving you a NICE way out instead of using data overages as another way to screw you.
Now, if carriers would just quit charging me once for the bits, and again for sending them to another device (tethering), I'd be REALLY happy.
Slashdot Mirror
"The changing economics of Made in China will benefit both the rich and poor world."
It won't help the U.S! We keep demanding cheap goods, no matter how poorly made they are, and the only way to get that is to take advantage of poorer countries and manufacture overseas. Of course, that means there are no manufacturing jobs anywhere in the country, so in another few years, the only place in the U.S. where anyone will be able to shop or work will be Walmart.
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
On the other hand, I don't know where to buy decent clothes. I bought a 12-pack of socks a couple weeks ago and three of them were mis-sewn. Every time my wife buys a 3-pack of underwear for the kid, she takes them out of the package, washes them, and 1 or 2 will come out of the washer--their first wash, having never been worn--with the waistline frayed.
I'm not saying that everything that is (or was) made in America is automatically great, but wouldn't it be great if people DID give a shit about the quality of what they made, and that the money would stay within our borders? But I think the opportunity to do good has passed. I saw Schmatta a few months ago and that, too, is depressing as hell. It's the story of New York's fabled garment district and it ends with some fun stats: 40 years ago, 95% of clothing sold in America was made here. Today, 5% is.
The only thing America has now is an entertainment industry and bullshit I.P. laws. Oh yeah, and prisons and wars. And a bailed-out, fucked-up auto industry that somehow managed to learn almost NOTHING after they started loosing their asses in the 80s. (They started to regain their composure a bit in the 90s but then they just started making SUVs.)
Maybe I've seen Jerry McGuire too many times but I really would be happy owning fewer things that held together better and I would be more than happy to pay more for that. My parents bought a microwave within a few years of when they first became common (early/mid-80s) and it has been replaced exactly once, and that replacement is still in use. Sure, new ones cost less than $100 at Walmart now, but I've bought 3 or 4 since buying my house in the late 90s. I don't care if it costs less overall to live like this--money isn't everything. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch should make anyone stop and think "hmm, maybe rampant consumerism isn't the way to go."
PS: we also, as a country, need to stop looking down on blue-collar work. Not everyone needs a college degree. We really need to have trade schools at the high school and college levels.
I'm personally looking forward to "laundering" my music, but mainly in the technical sense: I'll be converting all of my low-bitrate, badly-tagged songs, many of which are incomplete or with audible flaws, to properly-tagged, professionally-mastered, quality-checked 256kbps files--complete with album artwork!
All this time I've just been using that trick to get free porn.
The good news is, with Find My iPhone (free since iOS 4) you can remotely set a lockscreen code AFTER it has been stolen. So if you a) don't have any super-secret stuff on your phone and b) notice it missing soon after it's stolen, the worst that will happen is the thief will make some calls and use some data. Of course, my preference would be for the thief to keep using the phone, and hopefully Find My iPhone would enable me to actually recover the phone.
and it crashed with the message "Number of matches exceeds allocated memory."
... maybe we can give it honorary "never released" status so it can continue to earn a spot on "top vaporware" lists. Or we can all just say "The original was great--too bad they never made a sequel", like The Matrix.
> I've been waiting for Google Maps to be able
> to save the route I chose on the desktop
> Maps and sync it with Android for two
> years-ish, but with every update all I
> see is "new Latitude features!"
+1 for this. Or how about making routes that are more complex than just Point A to Point B? I'm not saying I need it to solve the traveling salesman problem, but it'd be nice to be able to plot out a few errands all at once, rather than figuring out my next route each time I get back into the car.
... if I'm likely to be eaten by a grue where I currently am.
Siouxsie and the Banshees :-)
> Cheaper Content Distribution *
> Direct Access to Community and Civic News *
* Might not apply in Alaska.
... but wow, what a fanboyish piece of shit. There is nearly no mention of Apple after its origin.
Leading into Windows 1 (after talking about Xerox, the Lisa, and the first Mac) he says "The era of GUI's was about to start. But apple [sic] was not meant to be the king."
Oh really?
- Vista copied many features straight out of Tiger
- I think we can all agree that WP7 would not look like it does if the iPhone had never been on the scene
- And now, after ten years of making poorly-selling tablets, Apple has shown how it should be done and MS is falling over themselves trying to catch up
I'm not saying Apple has never copied anything either, but once the article hits Windows 1.0, it is all about MS. He goes from Windows 3 to Microsoft Bob, lays down exactly 10 words about Windows 95, then goes straight to XP, Vista, and 7. He dismisses over two decades of Mac OS with the words "In the meantime, Mac OS was undergoing a similar, slow evolution."
He then says "Last couple of years were really eventful. New families of computing devices became wildly popular -- smartphones, netbooks, tablets. Mobile operating systems became almost as complex and capable as desktop ones. Multi touch technologies challenged the age-old interface design, and required new approaches. And now Microsoft tells us the future belongs to tiles." and the rest of the article is about Windows 8 and tiles. REALLY? No mention at all of the iPhone, who was the first to market with multitouch, even if they didn't invent it? No mention of Palm, or WinCE or BeOS or the Amiga or a million other omissions? Come on. If he isn't a shill, he's got a BIG set of blinders on. If you want to see the history of GUIs, go here. They have a ridiculously thorough collection of screenshots.
I'm not sure if this was changed late in 10.5 or somewhere in 10.6 (it wasn't in early builds of 10.5 for sure) but you can use pretty much any Mac to back up another, and you don't even need this hack. Just turn on file sharing: Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Sharing -> [x] File Sharing
I have two machines at work: an old G5 with 10.5 and two hard drives and a MacBook pro with 10.6. The MBP connects to the G5's second hard drive with file sharing over the network for Time Machine.
Or you can also use Time Machine with any external USB or FireWire drive. A 500 GB USB Seagate costs $60 at NewEgg.
It's really funny to see Android fans get all snooty about borrowing/stealing/copying ideas, since Android was nothing but a warmed-over Blackberry up until January 2007.
Dear Android,
Thanks for notifications and OTA updates. You're welcome for EVERYTHING ELSE.
- Apple
Yeah, it's like money laundering but for your songs. In addition to the legality, I'll get guaranteed good files, at a high bitrate, in a good codec, all properly tagged, and they'll even have artwork. And if my computer and all backups go kaflooey the next day I can download them all over again. I'll pay $25 for that in a HEARTBEAT.
> What exactly do you plan on doing when your 10k
> in Cocaine doesn't show up at your doorstep?
http://resolutioncenter.ebay.com/
I bought an item.
[x] I haven't received it yet.
[_] I received an item that does not match the seller's description.
I sold an item.
[_] I received an item that does not match the seller's description.
[_] I want to cancel a transaction.
MS wants one OS to cover everything from phones to Surface and it AIN'T GONNA FUCKING HAPPEN. Is there one type of vehicle that scales perfectly from single-person transport to the size of a bus? Is there one type of vehicle for land, sea, and air? Is there one type of building that scales perfectly from storage shed to multi-story office? No, no, and no. Different things have different needs. "When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns." Programmers always want to solve "the general problem" but one-size-fits-all solutions rarely work.
Dear MS: Please make a great desktop OS. And a great mobile OS. And a great server OS. And before you start, realize that they're different things.
... is that IDDQD and IDKFA still work. :-)
> This is not an issue of the two party system, this is an issue of "the public is largely ignorant."
It's a little more complicated than that. There's also the little issue of "those with power will use that power to keep their power."
> Politicians are salesmen: they're going to give the customer what they want, not what they need.
Also wrong. A GOOD salesman doesn't give a fuck what you want, he sells you whatever the hell he wants to sell.
I've bought a pool. Yes, they spend plenty of time telling you what might go wrong. That doesn't stop rich people from being arrogant self-important assholes.
Quite the contrary, actually. If the TV networks and movie studios keep going in the direction they're going, you'll soon have one set-top box for each channel.
Right next to Mars Fonzie's jacket and Mars Archie Bunker's chair. :-)
MY distro goes to ELEVEN hundred. :-)
Have you seen these things? It's pretty damn blatant.
Google will create and maintain it and it can be any kind of file at all--image, document, movie, slide deck, virtual machine HDD image, whatever. There will be a few bytes at the beginning of the file to tell Chrome how to deal with it. It will integrate nicely with all of Google's services. Everyone else can either support it or not.
Rather than just passively saying "Oops, you went over your data limit, we'll automatically give you more and charge you for it", they just switch you to 2G data speeds if you hit your limit. Cell companies have been looking for "we'll give you enough rope to hang yourself" opportunities at every turn ("oh, gee, you didn't know your kid was sending hundreds of messages and downloading porn at $1.00 per kilobyte until the gigantic bill showed up at the end of the month?") and it's nice to see one of them giving you a NICE way out instead of using data overages as another way to screw you.
Now, if carriers would just quit charging me once for the bits, and again for sending them to another device (tethering), I'd be REALLY happy.