I used to work in manufacturing but then the assembly moved to where the suppliers were concentrated and vice-versa.
I've worked in manufacturing for most of the last 25 years and run an contract assembly company. The notion that manufacturing in the US has disappeared is demonstrably not true. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be the 9th largest economy in the world and it is growing. Exports of US manufactured goods has quadrupled since 1990 from around $330 billion to $1.4 trillion in 2014. What moved overseas were industries were mostly high labor content low value products. Do you really want to be manufacturing happy meal toys or would you rather do jumbo jets and microprocessors?
I've spent years doing global sourcing, manufacturing engineering, cost accounting and running manufacturing operations. I run into people like you all the time who have a factually incorrect view of the state of US manufacturing. While there are challenges like any industry the state of US manufacturing is just fine and I've made a very good living in it. People who expect it to be simple and can't adapt to the changes and challenges are the ones who get eaten.
Ones with nothing else but that and nepotism behind them may as well be.
Spare me. You're looking for a scapegoat and people in management you perceive as an easy target and you are pandering to others who are similarly looking for someone to blame. It's no different than the idiots who claim that corrupt jews run all the banks. It's just nonsense. A Master of Business Administration is a college degree. Nothing more. Saying "MBAs are screwing up these companies" is as dumb as saying "Mechanical Engineers are ruining these companies". Neither statement withstands the slightest objective scrutiny. Business is a team sport and it's very never the case that a company fails because of a category of people with the same college degree.
This sounds a great deal to me like "middlemen making money" by ensuring that everything is routed through them at least once, need it or not.
You'd think so but actually not. It's genuinely just the distributor and manufacturer being penny-wise pound-foolish. We originally dealt directly with the manufacturer of these parts but even though we buy a lot of terminals and connectors (over 250,000 connectors and 1.5M terminals per year on one product) we're actually not a big enough customer for the manufacturer to want to deal directly with us. (We spend about $150,000-200,000/year with them and you need to be over a million to go direct with companies like TE or Yazaki on OEM stuff) So the manufacturer decided we would have to go through a distributor of their choosing. Not entirely unreasonable because the distributors are better set up to deal with smaller accounts. But there is only one distributor for these parts and it is partly owned by the manufacturer so it's not a classic middle man mark up sort of thing. The manufacturer is actually giving up margin by not dealing direct with us but they feel the reduction in complexity is worth it. (I disagree as you may have guessed)
The problem is that it's logistically easier for the distributor to have everything shipped to the distributor and then ship it where it ultimately goes themselves. It's less complex, particularly for the billing. Setting up the infrastructure and billing systems to do drop shipments on this sort of scale is a non-trivial undertaking. But it's not like it's a weird problem nobody has ever solved. Drop shipping has been done for a long time and it's not impossibly hard. The companies and purchasing agents are trading off cost to reduce complexity and unfortunately they are doing a crap job of it.
Many things in this describe why China is eating our lunch.
China has nothing to do with the problems I described. The problems I describe exist with all the large auto OEMs and they a structural problems of big companies, not competitive ones. It's one of the problems with developing very large complex products. In a product with 10,000+ parts it is more than a little challenging to carefully monitor all of them. It can be done but it isn't easy. The Japanese probably do it the best but the Americans and Europeans aren't far behind. China's auto makers on the other hand have a long way to go to catch up.
They are running things in manufacturing the way we used to before trust fund babies and MBAs added arbitrary busywork and office politics but lost sight of the supply chain.
I have news for you. US manufacturing is incredibly strong and much better than it was 30+ years ago. US manufacturing has never been more efficient and the US manufacturing sector is huge - over $3 Trillion annually. The reason some of the work is headed to places like China is simple - labor costs. Any work with a high labor content is going to naturally go where labor is cheap. It has always been that way and always will be. China is not better at manufacturing than the US. China simply has a very large supply of cheap labor which they have done a good job of mobilizing. They're developing into a modern economy but since they are 20% of the world's population it's only surprising that they have taken this long to get there. When China has 5 people for each 1 in the US you should expect them to be an economic power.
I have no idea what your pointless dig is about. You think "trust fund babies" run the auto companies? 'Fraid not. Even the Ford family lets outsiders run the day to day operations of the company. And your dig at people with MBAs is equally misplaced. None of the problems I described were caused by anyone except engineers and purchasing agents (who very rarely have MBA degrees). You apparently think people with MBA degrees are some sort of boogie man causing all our problems. It's not true and such scapegoating serves no useful purpose.
Not in this case it isn't. In many cases you would be correct but not here.
You make something non standard, so that once you hooked the customer, it is difficult for him to leave you at a moment notice.
Often that is true but not in this situation. It would be annoying but the OEM in this case could force a connector change tomorrow (figuratively speaking) if they wanted to go to the trouble. It's basically a monopsony. The OEM can dictate what goes into the vehicle and it would have been trivial for them to specify off the shelf connectors even if they abdicated design responsibility. In fact there is almost no upside whatsoever for the OEM to use a custom connector in this particular case. Even the connection interfaces are USCAR standard.
Is there anything special about the voltage, current or signalling on those cables that would make them Bad to plug in wrong?
The connectors are keyed so that is impossible. There have been "off the shelf" equivalent connectors available for decades (no exaggeration) that would provide identical functionality at lower cost and a substantially simplified supply chain. This part is installed at the factory and is never seen by an end customer unless they tear apart the entire rear door of the vehicle.
It's actually even worse than I described. The terminals are manufactured in northern Michigan and then shipped to California before being shipped back to us in Southeast Michigan. Instead of drop shipping them directly to us they waste and extra two weeks and substantial freight costs shipping these terminals thousands of unnecessary miles. One of the connector manufacturers also grossly over-packages the connectors. They wrap them in foam and plastic wrap and put 400 in a box when they could easily fit 3000 in the same box if they didn't bother with the foam. The connectors are plastic and nearly indestructible so they spend 5X the freight cost shipping unnecessary boxes. We just pass these costs along but it would be trivial to pull 20-30% out of the cost of this part if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to get engineering to redesign the damn thing. (OEM engineers HATE to touch something once the PPAP has been completed)
Part of the reason it ended up being a custom connector is the financial incentives of the connector manufacturers and engineers. I won't bore you with the details but rest assured that it plays a big role in why they designed a custom connector when it was totally unnecessary and counter productive. There are some conflict of interest issues, engineers who don't understand how to manage costs effectively, lazy OEMs who don't understand the products well enough, etc.
Big auto manufacturers routinely step over a dollar to pick up a nickel. My company is engaged in a series of meetings right now for a low volume part. (something like 3000 units annually estimated) The OEM is insisting on a series of weekly meetings with 10 people in attendence. The hourly wage costs of these meetings is something like $4000 each and the product we are going to sell MIGHT sell for $40 each. There is absolutely no way that the OEM will not take a financial bath on this. The meeting costs alone will be more than the revenue from the parts. The funny thing is that they will demand 3% price reductions per year for the next 3-5 years and what will happen is the suppliers will jack up the price to absorb the price reductions up front. They would have much better results if they simply bothered to collaborate with their suppliers closely.
The scientific ROI is too low. I'd much rather see more planetary or soar observation missions if there has to be a choice.
Those missions are valuable but they will tell you close to nothing about how to have living organisms (including us) living and thriving in space. You're comparing apples to oranges. Sure there is lots of value to a project like New Horizons but the second probe we send will have marginally less ROI and the third still less. This is because we've already learned some stuff and now our questions become more specific and nuanced. That's where we are in LEO manned space flight. We've figured out a lot of stuff so we're trying to fill in the cracks in our knowledge where the budget permits.
And the fact is that there doesn't have to be a choice. We have plenty of money to support manned spaceflight and robotic probes. It's not an either/or proposition the only limitation is our willingness to do it.
Sometimes the road more frequently traveled is, in fact, the better road.
I run into this all the time. My company manufactures a wire harness product that uses several connectors which is used on an OEM auto that sells in large volumes. The engineers could have designed in pre-existing, widely available and standard connectors available from numerous sources for reasonable amounts of money. Instead they decided to custom design some new connectors for the application despite the fact that they provide zero extra functional benefit, cost substantially more, have 4 month lead times for delivery, have to be ordered in 50,000 piece quantities and can be purchased from precisely one source. Whichever engineer came up with this idiocy probably added their entire salary over the lifetime of the product in unnecessary cost to this product. (We sell about 250,000/year at around $4 each so it would be easy to get $100,000 in cost per year out of this product with a more sensible design)
The wiring harness industry is awash with countless different unnecessary designs of terminals, connectors and other hardware than never should have been seen the light of day. I have a bookshelf 10 feet from me as I type this that has probably 120 thick catalogs that are full of redundant, unnecessary or non-standard hardware. Maybe 5% of those designs are actually necessary and the rest are nothing but waste.
My basic take is that while there is nothing wrong with going bespoke in principle, you need to have a VERY good reason to deviate from standards or to use unusual designs, even if those standards aren't totally optimized for your application. Engineers who don't understand or ignore this principle are essentially engaging in a form of malpractice.
Having a battery powered vehicle attached to your electrical supply would actually help get you through the glitchy power.
So does having a tank of gasoline and a generator and that's a lot easier to do.
If you are suggesting talking about having the car power your little portion of the grid during an outage that is a bad idea on several levels. First off it would require substantial upgrades and clever controls to be put into a grid that is barely functional as it is. If India can't even get the basic transmission right I think that fancy distributed power routing is going to be beyond their abilities on any sort of wide scale. Second, exactly how does this help when the car isn't parked in the garage? Third, it burns through battery cycles faster and reduces lifespans of the rather expensive battery packs. Fourth, it would require the vehicle be adapted for uses it was never really designed for and shouldn't be used for. It is FAR more cost effective and efficient to actually fix the grid to work properly.
Ah well... It's still really kind of neat that there's so little excitement about this sort of thing.
I would agree with you if it were for the fact that people are more interested in the latest Kardashian family hijinks or whatever drivel Donald Trump is spewing recently. I find it depressing that genuinely valuable engineering and science research is considered uninteresting in comparison to most of the nonsense that does actually make it into the news cycle. Of course engineering companies have never been very good at public relations so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
"India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing,"
They've got a LOT of electrical infrastructure to fix before this is anything more than a pipe dream. Electric outages in India aren't terribly rare in large parts of the country as of the last time I checked. Not to mention the challenges of installing all the charging infrastructure.
Spend 20 seconds on wikipedia to find out. Rare earth elements are used in capacitors, electrodes, microchips, stainless steel, fiber optics, magnets and quite a lot more. Virtually every modern bit of electronics has some amount of rare earth elements in it.
Silicon solar panels-- the ones that are cheap-- don't use rare earths.
But the electronics that control the panels do use rare earth minerals. So there is some amount of rare earths required even if it isn't as much as it once was.
rare earths aren't actually rare
They aren't especially rare but they are relatively challenging to separate and they tend to be dispersed. The scarcity of economically exploitable ore deposits is how they got their name, not because the elements themselves are especially rare.
I disagree: ***selling price*** of PV panels is coming down. However, the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't.
Ok, first off you'll need to provide some evidence to support your assertion regarding energy costs not falling. All the evidence I've ever seen indicates that we are slowly but steadily learning how to make them more efficiently both economically and thermodynamically. Solar panels really are still a fairly new technology and they are progressing fast with no indication of that changing soon. Second, you seem to be forgetting about a positive feedback loop with solar panels. Solar panels provide energy so system-wide the more solar panels you add the more they can power the manufacturing of solar panels. (system-wide is a key concept there) That means that (hugely simplified) each panel reduces the net input of additional energy needed to produce the next panel. Add to that the fact that we are constantly learning how to make things more efficiently (economics drives the need to reduce energy costs) and over time we really are reducing the marginal energy cost of making additional panels.
The rare earths are, not surprisingly, rare, and both mining and refining them have not changed much.
Mining of rare earth minerals is a substantial factor but its by no means the only one or even the dominant cost.
PV may work for many residential applications, but lacks both the energy density and constant load delivered that many industrial applications require.
You are making several logical errors here. First, there already are industrial scale solar plants capable of powering industrial applications. They exist today. Second, energy density is not so important when you can transport the energy. Solar panels don't have to be co-located where the energy is used. Third, once you have enough distributed solar panels and batteries in the system solar (and wind) can do a pretty good job of providing even base load power under all but the most exceptional circumstances. Fourth, nobody (nobody sane) is suggesting that we should make solar our only source of power. That's not sensible or possible. But it makes a LOT of sense to make solar a much larger part of our energy supply.
If true that is about the most superficial way possible to "act like a startup". Stuff like a ping pong table are just trappings. You have to really change the company culture (very hard to do) to have it actually mean anything.
Samsung on Thursday announced that it plans to reform its internal culture to act like a startup.
Big companies cannot act like a startup. The very structures that allow them to be big prevent it from happening. They protect their current businesses and they ignore market opportunities that are too small to move their balance sheet. Big companies pay mouth service to trying to "act like a startup" but the plain fact is that doing so is impossible and unnecessary. Being big has lots of advantages. GE has been huge for over a century but they've updated their business as times have changed and have not acted like a startup since they were one.
I daresay almost all of Apple's consumers do not face a three-letter $8 bn budget agency trying to break into their devices.
Umm, have you watched the news lately? There are all kinds of three letter agencies trying to break into our devices on a routine basis. Supposedly some of those agencies are actually pretty good at it.
So if Apple pays the hackers $10,000 then the hackers won't go to the FBI when the FBI offers them $100,000?
Given that Apple has $200 Billion in the bank I'm pretty sure Apple can win that competition if they want to. The FBI's entire budget is something like $8 billion.
I took that to mean you were not aware the option existed. Apologies for misunderstanding.
No worries. Perhaps I was unclear. I am aware that there are ways to limit their use but they are needlessly arcane and should be enabled by default. Basically I'm trying to say that it should be relatively difficult to unintentionally turn on the ability to run macros. Most people (self included) rarely need the feature and it's nothing but a big security hole for them.
It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware.
No, nerds like us did that. Most of the rest of the world either hired a nerd or couldn't be bothered. Even those who did bother often run into problems of limited bandwidth, time consuming administration, clumsy interfaces and other technical problems that make it not worth the trouble.
But people are lazy and cheap.
Or busy and don't have the time. Or have other important things to do. Or don't understand the technology well enough to do it. Honestly I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own web server and email server and have done it any number of times but most of the time it just isn't worth the bother. A lot of technology like that utterly fails the mom test. Not everyone is a geek who readily understands web servers and email or how to build a web site.
The masses got to choose between freedom and easy, and they picked easy.
No argument but that hardly means the end of the world as was being implied. Things SHOULD be easy or at least as easy as is reasonable. Hyperbolic statements about us being "slaves" to technology are absurd and frankly more than a little naive. It's the sort of drivel that 18 year olds who've just read their first philosophy books spout when they become convinced they are now smarter than everyone around them.
You can disable them via a setting for anything except trusted locations, and manage this setting via GPO also.
So what? They should be off by default and require users to enable them to be utilized. 99% of users will never need macros and the few who do will be able to figure out how to enable them. In the mean time it's a huge security hole which costs millions of dollars to deal with every year. As with many things it should be opt-in not opt-out.
YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve.
That's a little hyperbolic don't you think?
My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
What color is the sky on your planet? A peer to peer system with all peers being equal? Never been true in practice since the internet was founded. It has aspects of a peer-to-peer system but the internet is more complicated than that. Differences in bandwidth alone make a true peer-to-peer internet impossible even if we ignore the legal and economic landscape. Empowering the little guys? It already does. But empowered does not and never will mean equal results. Letting unpopular messages be heard? It does that but only to a point. Getting an unpopular message heard requires an audience and unless you can match the big content makers economic resources you're very unlikely to be able to match their audience.
Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Ok Neitsche, calm down. Sounds like you were a young idealist and you've grown up and figured out that the world is a touch more complicated than you hoped it would be. It's not all roses but it's not all gloom and doom either. Technology isn't "enslaving us" any more than it ever did. Just because it didn't turn out to be a utopian fantasy doesn't mean everything is bad and we are all slaves.
It's sad that we actually need them to provide this, but users are idiots. Users click buttons. Users click "agree". Users click "run macro" users ignore "this could be dangerous".
All true but that also indicates that the system is stupidly designed. Software companies have conditioned them to ignore warning messages and EULAs and pop up buttons. Users are concerned with getting their task done and asking them to worry about the security of the system is dooming the system to failure right from the start. Any developer that thinks my technologically naive mother is going to be able to deal with macro malware is an idiot.
There is no need for macro support, no one actually uses these features other than malware.
That's straight up false. There are some groups that HEAVILY use macros. The financial industry in particular uses the crap out of them in Excel. (save the snark - it works for them) What should probably happen is that user defined macros should be disabled by default for most users. And no they should be possible to enable via a pop up. I almost never use macros so I'd be happy to have a way to disable them quasi-permanently. They're little more than a malware vector for me but that doesn't mean they aren't useful to other people.
The chip does another thing. It makes it almost impossible to clone the card for Online transactions.
Don't care since 2/3 of the merchants I deal with have not upgraded their equipment to accept the chip and you still can swipe the card. Furthermore It does nothing to solve the problem of my card getting stolen which is why I give a shit about the pin in the first place. Chip+Signature is not secure and never will be. No security is perfect but chip+pin is pretty basic stuff.
Yes it is technically true that the chip does add some security by itself but without the other features it doesn't really matter much. It stops a handful attack vectors but leaves all the rest more or less intact while simultaneously pushing a lot of expensive equipment. Stupid on so many levels.
Mag stripe readers are scheduled to basically disappear from the US in 2017.
Won't happen. Plenty of companies are taking their good sweet time and I don't see them getting on board quickly.
By disappear I mean that the terminal will still have them but it will not let you use the mag stripe reader unless you first dip the card and the terminal determines that it is unable to process the transaction with a chip.
Some do. Most still do not.
It is the issuing banks that are not enabling PIN at this time. I suspect that it is merely a convenience period to help transition "dumb Americans" into getting used to the idea of using a PIN for credit transactions.
Correct. I cannot even do it voluntarily. Basically the banks didn't want to staff up to deal with the lost/forgotten/confused people who can't deal with a pin.
When you sell tens of millions of something it cannot be a status symbol, or if it is it is a very poor one. Nobody gives a shit if you have an iPhone or thinks you are special for it. Nobody I've ever met has bought one with the expectation of gaining meaningful social status. It's just not that special. I have people working for me that make barely over minimum wage who have iPhones and they don't regard it as a status symbol. The meme that Apple users are self absorbed social climbers out of proportion to the general population is ridiculous nonsense.
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I used to work in manufacturing but then the assembly moved to where the suppliers were concentrated and vice-versa.
I've worked in manufacturing for most of the last 25 years and run an contract assembly company. The notion that manufacturing in the US has disappeared is demonstrably not true. The US manufacturing sector by itself would be the 9th largest economy in the world and it is growing. Exports of US manufactured goods has quadrupled since 1990 from around $330 billion to $1.4 trillion in 2014. What moved overseas were industries were mostly high labor content low value products. Do you really want to be manufacturing happy meal toys or would you rather do jumbo jets and microprocessors?
I've spent years doing global sourcing, manufacturing engineering, cost accounting and running manufacturing operations. I run into people like you all the time who have a factually incorrect view of the state of US manufacturing. While there are challenges like any industry the state of US manufacturing is just fine and I've made a very good living in it. People who expect it to be simple and can't adapt to the changes and challenges are the ones who get eaten.
Ones with nothing else but that and nepotism behind them may as well be.
Spare me. You're looking for a scapegoat and people in management you perceive as an easy target and you are pandering to others who are similarly looking for someone to blame. It's no different than the idiots who claim that corrupt jews run all the banks. It's just nonsense. A Master of Business Administration is a college degree. Nothing more. Saying "MBAs are screwing up these companies" is as dumb as saying "Mechanical Engineers are ruining these companies". Neither statement withstands the slightest objective scrutiny. Business is a team sport and it's very never the case that a company fails because of a category of people with the same college degree.
This sounds a great deal to me like "middlemen making money" by ensuring that everything is routed through them at least once, need it or not.
You'd think so but actually not. It's genuinely just the distributor and manufacturer being penny-wise pound-foolish. We originally dealt directly with the manufacturer of these parts but even though we buy a lot of terminals and connectors (over 250,000 connectors and 1.5M terminals per year on one product) we're actually not a big enough customer for the manufacturer to want to deal directly with us. (We spend about $150,000-200,000/year with them and you need to be over a million to go direct with companies like TE or Yazaki on OEM stuff) So the manufacturer decided we would have to go through a distributor of their choosing. Not entirely unreasonable because the distributors are better set up to deal with smaller accounts. But there is only one distributor for these parts and it is partly owned by the manufacturer so it's not a classic middle man mark up sort of thing. The manufacturer is actually giving up margin by not dealing direct with us but they feel the reduction in complexity is worth it. (I disagree as you may have guessed)
The problem is that it's logistically easier for the distributor to have everything shipped to the distributor and then ship it where it ultimately goes themselves. It's less complex, particularly for the billing. Setting up the infrastructure and billing systems to do drop shipments on this sort of scale is a non-trivial undertaking. But it's not like it's a weird problem nobody has ever solved. Drop shipping has been done for a long time and it's not impossibly hard. The companies and purchasing agents are trading off cost to reduce complexity and unfortunately they are doing a crap job of it.
Many things in this describe why China is eating our lunch.
China has nothing to do with the problems I described. The problems I describe exist with all the large auto OEMs and they a structural problems of big companies, not competitive ones. It's one of the problems with developing very large complex products. In a product with 10,000+ parts it is more than a little challenging to carefully monitor all of them. It can be done but it isn't easy. The Japanese probably do it the best but the Americans and Europeans aren't far behind. China's auto makers on the other hand have a long way to go to catch up.
They are running things in manufacturing the way we used to before trust fund babies and MBAs added arbitrary busywork and office politics but lost sight of the supply chain.
I have news for you. US manufacturing is incredibly strong and much better than it was 30+ years ago. US manufacturing has never been more efficient and the US manufacturing sector is huge - over $3 Trillion annually. The reason some of the work is headed to places like China is simple - labor costs. Any work with a high labor content is going to naturally go where labor is cheap. It has always been that way and always will be. China is not better at manufacturing than the US. China simply has a very large supply of cheap labor which they have done a good job of mobilizing. They're developing into a modern economy but since they are 20% of the world's population it's only surprising that they have taken this long to get there. When China has 5 people for each 1 in the US you should expect them to be an economic power.
I have no idea what your pointless dig is about. You think "trust fund babies" run the auto companies? 'Fraid not. Even the Ford family lets outsiders run the day to day operations of the company. And your dig at people with MBAs is equally misplaced. None of the problems I described were caused by anyone except engineers and purchasing agents (who very rarely have MBA degrees). You apparently think people with MBA degrees are some sort of boogie man causing all our problems. It's not true and such scapegoating serves no useful purpose.
it is not a flaw, it is a marketing design.
Not in this case it isn't. In many cases you would be correct but not here.
You make something non standard, so that once you hooked the customer, it is difficult for him to leave you at a moment notice.
Often that is true but not in this situation. It would be annoying but the OEM in this case could force a connector change tomorrow (figuratively speaking) if they wanted to go to the trouble. It's basically a monopsony. The OEM can dictate what goes into the vehicle and it would have been trivial for them to specify off the shelf connectors even if they abdicated design responsibility. In fact there is almost no upside whatsoever for the OEM to use a custom connector in this particular case. Even the connection interfaces are USCAR standard.
Is there anything special about the voltage, current or signalling on those cables that would make them Bad to plug in wrong?
The connectors are keyed so that is impossible. There have been "off the shelf" equivalent connectors available for decades (no exaggeration) that would provide identical functionality at lower cost and a substantially simplified supply chain. This part is installed at the factory and is never seen by an end customer unless they tear apart the entire rear door of the vehicle.
It's actually even worse than I described. The terminals are manufactured in northern Michigan and then shipped to California before being shipped back to us in Southeast Michigan. Instead of drop shipping them directly to us they waste and extra two weeks and substantial freight costs shipping these terminals thousands of unnecessary miles. One of the connector manufacturers also grossly over-packages the connectors. They wrap them in foam and plastic wrap and put 400 in a box when they could easily fit 3000 in the same box if they didn't bother with the foam. The connectors are plastic and nearly indestructible so they spend 5X the freight cost shipping unnecessary boxes. We just pass these costs along but it would be trivial to pull 20-30% out of the cost of this part if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to get engineering to redesign the damn thing. (OEM engineers HATE to touch something once the PPAP has been completed)
Part of the reason it ended up being a custom connector is the financial incentives of the connector manufacturers and engineers. I won't bore you with the details but rest assured that it plays a big role in why they designed a custom connector when it was totally unnecessary and counter productive. There are some conflict of interest issues, engineers who don't understand how to manage costs effectively, lazy OEMs who don't understand the products well enough, etc.
Big auto manufacturers routinely step over a dollar to pick up a nickel. My company is engaged in a series of meetings right now for a low volume part. (something like 3000 units annually estimated) The OEM is insisting on a series of weekly meetings with 10 people in attendence. The hourly wage costs of these meetings is something like $4000 each and the product we are going to sell MIGHT sell for $40 each. There is absolutely no way that the OEM will not take a financial bath on this. The meeting costs alone will be more than the revenue from the parts. The funny thing is that they will demand 3% price reductions per year for the next 3-5 years and what will happen is the suppliers will jack up the price to absorb the price reductions up front. They would have much better results if they simply bothered to collaborate with their suppliers closely.
The scientific ROI is too low. I'd much rather see more planetary or soar observation missions if there has to be a choice.
Those missions are valuable but they will tell you close to nothing about how to have living organisms (including us) living and thriving in space. You're comparing apples to oranges. Sure there is lots of value to a project like New Horizons but the second probe we send will have marginally less ROI and the third still less. This is because we've already learned some stuff and now our questions become more specific and nuanced. That's where we are in LEO manned space flight. We've figured out a lot of stuff so we're trying to fill in the cracks in our knowledge where the budget permits.
And the fact is that there doesn't have to be a choice. We have plenty of money to support manned spaceflight and robotic probes. It's not an either/or proposition the only limitation is our willingness to do it.
Sometimes the road more frequently traveled is, in fact, the better road.
I run into this all the time. My company manufactures a wire harness product that uses several connectors which is used on an OEM auto that sells in large volumes. The engineers could have designed in pre-existing, widely available and standard connectors available from numerous sources for reasonable amounts of money. Instead they decided to custom design some new connectors for the application despite the fact that they provide zero extra functional benefit, cost substantially more, have 4 month lead times for delivery, have to be ordered in 50,000 piece quantities and can be purchased from precisely one source. Whichever engineer came up with this idiocy probably added their entire salary over the lifetime of the product in unnecessary cost to this product. (We sell about 250,000/year at around $4 each so it would be easy to get $100,000 in cost per year out of this product with a more sensible design)
The wiring harness industry is awash with countless different unnecessary designs of terminals, connectors and other hardware than never should have been seen the light of day. I have a bookshelf 10 feet from me as I type this that has probably 120 thick catalogs that are full of redundant, unnecessary or non-standard hardware. Maybe 5% of those designs are actually necessary and the rest are nothing but waste.
My basic take is that while there is nothing wrong with going bespoke in principle, you need to have a VERY good reason to deviate from standards or to use unusual designs, even if those standards aren't totally optimized for your application. Engineers who don't understand or ignore this principle are essentially engaging in a form of malpractice.
Having a battery powered vehicle attached to your electrical supply would actually help get you through the glitchy power.
So does having a tank of gasoline and a generator and that's a lot easier to do.
If you are suggesting talking about having the car power your little portion of the grid during an outage that is a bad idea on several levels. First off it would require substantial upgrades and clever controls to be put into a grid that is barely functional as it is. If India can't even get the basic transmission right I think that fancy distributed power routing is going to be beyond their abilities on any sort of wide scale. Second, exactly how does this help when the car isn't parked in the garage? Third, it burns through battery cycles faster and reduces lifespans of the rather expensive battery packs. Fourth, it would require the vehicle be adapted for uses it was never really designed for and shouldn't be used for. It is FAR more cost effective and efficient to actually fix the grid to work properly.
Ah well... It's still really kind of neat that there's so little excitement about this sort of thing.
I would agree with you if it were for the fact that people are more interested in the latest Kardashian family hijinks or whatever drivel Donald Trump is spewing recently. I find it depressing that genuinely valuable engineering and science research is considered uninteresting in comparison to most of the nonsense that does actually make it into the news cycle. Of course engineering companies have never been very good at public relations so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I find that incredible and inspiring.
I find it depressing and pathetic.
Please convert to standard units Library Of Congress's transmitted per micro-fortnight
"India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this program self-financing,"
They've got a LOT of electrical infrastructure to fix before this is anything more than a pipe dream. Electric outages in India aren't terribly rare in large parts of the country as of the last time I checked. Not to mention the challenges of installing all the charging infrastructure.
What are you talking about ?
Spend 20 seconds on wikipedia to find out. Rare earth elements are used in capacitors, electrodes, microchips, stainless steel, fiber optics, magnets and quite a lot more. Virtually every modern bit of electronics has some amount of rare earth elements in it.
Silicon solar panels-- the ones that are cheap-- don't use rare earths.
But the electronics that control the panels do use rare earth minerals. So there is some amount of rare earths required even if it isn't as much as it once was.
rare earths aren't actually rare
They aren't especially rare but they are relatively challenging to separate and they tend to be dispersed. The scarcity of economically exploitable ore deposits is how they got their name, not because the elements themselves are especially rare.
I disagree: ***selling price*** of PV panels is coming down. However, the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't.
Ok, first off you'll need to provide some evidence to support your assertion regarding energy costs not falling. All the evidence I've ever seen indicates that we are slowly but steadily learning how to make them more efficiently both economically and thermodynamically. Solar panels really are still a fairly new technology and they are progressing fast with no indication of that changing soon. Second, you seem to be forgetting about a positive feedback loop with solar panels. Solar panels provide energy so system-wide the more solar panels you add the more they can power the manufacturing of solar panels. (system-wide is a key concept there) That means that (hugely simplified) each panel reduces the net input of additional energy needed to produce the next panel. Add to that the fact that we are constantly learning how to make things more efficiently (economics drives the need to reduce energy costs) and over time we really are reducing the marginal energy cost of making additional panels.
The rare earths are, not surprisingly, rare, and both mining and refining them have not changed much.
Mining of rare earth minerals is a substantial factor but its by no means the only one or even the dominant cost.
PV may work for many residential applications, but lacks both the energy density and constant load delivered that many industrial applications require.
You are making several logical errors here. First, there already are industrial scale solar plants capable of powering industrial applications. They exist today. Second, energy density is not so important when you can transport the energy. Solar panels don't have to be co-located where the energy is used. Third, once you have enough distributed solar panels and batteries in the system solar (and wind) can do a pretty good job of providing even base load power under all but the most exceptional circumstances. Fourth, nobody (nobody sane) is suggesting that we should make solar our only source of power. That's not sensible or possible. But it makes a LOT of sense to make solar a much larger part of our energy supply.
If true that is about the most superficial way possible to "act like a startup". Stuff like a ping pong table are just trappings. You have to really change the company culture (very hard to do) to have it actually mean anything.
Samsung on Thursday announced that it plans to reform its internal culture to act like a startup.
Big companies cannot act like a startup. The very structures that allow them to be big prevent it from happening. They protect their current businesses and they ignore market opportunities that are too small to move their balance sheet. Big companies pay mouth service to trying to "act like a startup" but the plain fact is that doing so is impossible and unnecessary. Being big has lots of advantages. GE has been huge for over a century but they've updated their business as times have changed and have not acted like a startup since they were one.
I daresay almost all of Apple's consumers do not face a three-letter $8 bn budget agency trying to break into their devices.
Umm, have you watched the news lately? There are all kinds of three letter agencies trying to break into our devices on a routine basis. Supposedly some of those agencies are actually pretty good at it.
So if Apple pays the hackers $10,000 then the hackers won't go to the FBI when the FBI offers them $100,000?
Given that Apple has $200 Billion in the bank I'm pretty sure Apple can win that competition if they want to. The FBI's entire budget is something like $8 billion.
I took that to mean you were not aware the option existed. Apologies for misunderstanding.
No worries. Perhaps I was unclear. I am aware that there are ways to limit their use but they are needlessly arcane and should be enabled by default. Basically I'm trying to say that it should be relatively difficult to unintentionally turn on the ability to run macros. Most people (self included) rarely need the feature and it's nothing but a big security hole for them.
It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware.
No, nerds like us did that. Most of the rest of the world either hired a nerd or couldn't be bothered. Even those who did bother often run into problems of limited bandwidth, time consuming administration, clumsy interfaces and other technical problems that make it not worth the trouble.
But people are lazy and cheap.
Or busy and don't have the time. Or have other important things to do. Or don't understand the technology well enough to do it. Honestly I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own web server and email server and have done it any number of times but most of the time it just isn't worth the bother. A lot of technology like that utterly fails the mom test. Not everyone is a geek who readily understands web servers and email or how to build a web site.
The masses got to choose between freedom and easy, and they picked easy.
No argument but that hardly means the end of the world as was being implied. Things SHOULD be easy or at least as easy as is reasonable. Hyperbolic statements about us being "slaves" to technology are absurd and frankly more than a little naive. It's the sort of drivel that 18 year olds who've just read their first philosophy books spout when they become convinced they are now smarter than everyone around them.
You can disable them via a setting for anything except trusted locations, and manage this setting via GPO also.
So what? They should be off by default and require users to enable them to be utilized. 99% of users will never need macros and the few who do will be able to figure out how to enable them. In the mean time it's a huge security hole which costs millions of dollars to deal with every year. As with many things it should be opt-in not opt-out.
YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve.
That's a little hyperbolic don't you think?
My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
What color is the sky on your planet? A peer to peer system with all peers being equal? Never been true in practice since the internet was founded. It has aspects of a peer-to-peer system but the internet is more complicated than that. Differences in bandwidth alone make a true peer-to-peer internet impossible even if we ignore the legal and economic landscape. Empowering the little guys? It already does. But empowered does not and never will mean equal results. Letting unpopular messages be heard? It does that but only to a point. Getting an unpopular message heard requires an audience and unless you can match the big content makers economic resources you're very unlikely to be able to match their audience.
Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Ok Neitsche, calm down. Sounds like you were a young idealist and you've grown up and figured out that the world is a touch more complicated than you hoped it would be. It's not all roses but it's not all gloom and doom either. Technology isn't "enslaving us" any more than it ever did. Just because it didn't turn out to be a utopian fantasy doesn't mean everything is bad and we are all slaves.
It's sad that we actually need them to provide this, but users are idiots. Users click buttons. Users click "agree". Users click "run macro" users ignore "this could be dangerous".
All true but that also indicates that the system is stupidly designed. Software companies have conditioned them to ignore warning messages and EULAs and pop up buttons. Users are concerned with getting their task done and asking them to worry about the security of the system is dooming the system to failure right from the start. Any developer that thinks my technologically naive mother is going to be able to deal with macro malware is an idiot.
There is no need for macro support, no one actually uses these features other than malware.
That's straight up false. There are some groups that HEAVILY use macros. The financial industry in particular uses the crap out of them in Excel. (save the snark - it works for them) What should probably happen is that user defined macros should be disabled by default for most users. And no they should be possible to enable via a pop up. I almost never use macros so I'd be happy to have a way to disable them quasi-permanently. They're little more than a malware vector for me but that doesn't mean they aren't useful to other people.
The chip does another thing. It makes it almost impossible to clone the card for Online transactions.
Don't care since 2/3 of the merchants I deal with have not upgraded their equipment to accept the chip and you still can swipe the card. Furthermore It does nothing to solve the problem of my card getting stolen which is why I give a shit about the pin in the first place. Chip+Signature is not secure and never will be. No security is perfect but chip+pin is pretty basic stuff.
Yes it is technically true that the chip does add some security by itself but without the other features it doesn't really matter much. It stops a handful attack vectors but leaves all the rest more or less intact while simultaneously pushing a lot of expensive equipment. Stupid on so many levels.
Mag stripe readers are scheduled to basically disappear from the US in 2017.
Won't happen. Plenty of companies are taking their good sweet time and I don't see them getting on board quickly.
By disappear I mean that the terminal will still have them but it will not let you use the mag stripe reader unless you first dip the card and the terminal determines that it is unable to process the transaction with a chip.
Some do. Most still do not.
It is the issuing banks that are not enabling PIN at this time. I suspect that it is merely a convenience period to help transition "dumb Americans" into getting used to the idea of using a PIN for credit transactions.
Correct. I cannot even do it voluntarily. Basically the banks didn't want to staff up to deal with the lost/forgotten/confused people who can't deal with a pin.
When you sell tens of millions of something it cannot be a status symbol, or if it is it is a very poor one. Nobody gives a shit if you have an iPhone or thinks you are special for it. Nobody I've ever met has bought one with the expectation of gaining meaningful social status. It's just not that special. I have people working for me that make barely over minimum wage who have iPhones and they don't regard it as a status symbol. The meme that Apple users are self absorbed social climbers out of proportion to the general population is ridiculous nonsense.