From the way I see it, the fundamental problem with outsourcing development is the communication and revision of requirements. Because the outsourced developers are so far removed from the actual users/customers, they have no way of calibrating their internal assumptions about what would make the customer happy. There is little chance for direct iteration or refinement. Thus, requirements must be over-specified and, like an old game of "telephone", what can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. It's not that India doesn't have brilliant developers, they're just too far removed from the battle to be worth what an American programmer is worth.
The interesting part of that to me is the fact that this is also true in China, however China is rapidly developing a domestic market and many other Pacific rim countries have long-since done so. Thus, it's the American developers who are too far removed from this market. I wonder how that is going to change the outsourcing game. (Note that India is also a whole lot closer to China...)
WoW isn't an expensive passtime in terms of cost, but it's probably one of the most expensive passtimes in the geek community in terms of lost opportunity cost. Imagine what problems could have been solved with the number of hours sunk into WoW.
We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.
Yeah, if only Michael Jackson had co-wrote "We Are The World" for hunger relief in Africa, donated millions to charities for drug and alcohol abuse, broke down racial barriers, send millions in food to Sarajevo, and countless other humanitarian acts. Oh wait, he did.
If that ROE is reasonable, why aren't zillions of commercial solar farms popping up everywhere? Or at least co-located with the wind farms that are being installed?
I looked into that post. It makes some good points, but it was trying to refute a specific assertion (that off-shore turbines could replace coal plants), not look at the overall practicality of wind power. It assumed no on-land turbines, only off-shore ones and that the biggest turbine was 3MW.
So you put most of the turbines on land which eliminates most of the land-area problem. Turbines have gone from 3MW to 4.5MW turbines (which are available now) in the last 5 years or so, and I can imagine them doubling again (6MW turbines are already being tested). Now you're talking a few hundred thousand turbines to supply all the electricity in the country. Even with the low volume today, you're talking about maybe $3-4M installed per turbine, or about $1.2T. Or less than the cost of all the recent bailouts. I'm sure there's a lot of games you can play with the numbers, but it doesn't have to be impossible to make a HUGE dent in our oil consumption.
The iPhone actually does run OS X, but doesn't provide the desktop UI that the Mac does, of course. The flaw with "market share" numbers, of course, is how you define a "market". Coming up with a definition that includes all desktops, laptops, and netbooks but no cellphones or small tablets seems a little arbitrary. But if you include everything with a CPU, embedded linux and VxWorks are probably the top contenders for market share.
Asustek assembles the laptops, but certainly doesn't manufacture or supply the batteries. If you know who supplies those batteries, their controllers, or the controller software please share (and cite). I certainly couldn't find that information.
Here's another idea: Anandtech and the others who have tested the batteries and verified Apple's numbers don't have any reason to lie.
Really, now, which is more likely: everyone's lying from reporters to users and in some huge conspiracy, or Apple's batteries really meet the stated specs?
I used to avidly play the game but stopped when they stopped updating the Mac client. A lot of honest (the cheats didn't work on the Mac anyway) and fun players left then, too. Despite having a tiny market share it did seem to have a disproportionate effect on the game.
The First Amendment is commonly interpreted to imply a right to anonymity-- otherwise there would be a significant burden to free speech, and the First Amendment precludes "abridging" speech. Here's what the EFF and Citizen Media Law have to say.
Just like the 2nd amendment is interpreted to apply mainly to guns even though the word "gun" (or even firearm) doesn't appear within it, anonymity is assumed to be part of one's freedom to speak openly in defiance of the majority opinion.
YouTube may have some effect on the de-facto internet codecs, but Theora has been losing this battle for awhile now so this isn't an out-of-the-blue decision. Many desktop and embedded video chips can decode h.264 in hardware, it's the primary Blu-Ray codec, it's used in several video chat applications, and many cable and satellite providers are going from MPEG2 to h.264. In addition, YouTube has been using h.264/AAC for over a year for "high quality" videos and videos delivered to iPhones, so they already have an h.264 infrastructure.
And for consumers, it actually seems to work really well. The "encumbered" nature of the codec may affect some tiny number of people, but for most it appears to be a huge win.
The "high quality" YouTube videos are all h.264/AAC already, and have been for at least a year. Never having uploaded to YouTube, I don't know how to specify a video as high-quality, but I know there are many h.264 as those are the only YouTube videos viewable on the iPhone, for which there are many.
It's not just that it could mutate and that it's more contagious... it's also peaking counter to almost any recent flu. The flu virus is packaged in lipids which tend to dissolve in heat, and aren't carried well in moist air. Add in some summer sun to sterilize surfaces and boost people's immune system with some vitamin D and you tend to get very little flu after March-April. We now have a virus that is peaking in June yet retains flu's ability to sicken and mutate, which implies that this fall could see a VERY BAD flu season. In fact, we're more or less tracking some of the deadliest pandemics for the spread of the virus. The saving grace here is that this vaccine doesn't contain some of the worst "deadly" flu genes from the big killer flus. But now that it's making its rounds through Asia and elsewhere, there is some fear it could absorb some of that. Imagine something as deadly as bird flu that is also more easily transmissible than any flu in decades... THAT'S why it's something to monitor. Not panic about, just be prepared for.
The biggest problem I see with this theory is that just today a huge 23% decline in US video game sales was reported. This quarter video game sales dropped below $1B for the first time in years. I could be wrong, but I doubt we're going to see anything like a $300M jump in music sales this quarter.
Apple has never been about the checkbox list of features. There are a lot of other vendors willing to load a gadget full of every button, feature, and gizmo under the sun, and there is a definite market for those devices among a certain crowd. But many Apple customers definitely find value in the deliberation and design Apple puts into their products, and that takes time. I've had an iPhone 3G for almost a year and it's one of the most useful devices I've ever owned. The iPhone 3GS appears to be even better. I don't see the competition light years ahead in usability and integration into my life, so I don't see any reason to switch. Needless to say, I wouldn't switch over lack of MMS.
Besides, why do folks take the most trivial part of the huge list of features and try to use that as a claim of how backwards the iPhone is? If you love your Android great! More power to you. I like not only the iPhone, but the iPhone ecosystem and I find a lot of utility in it.
It doesn't matter what is legally binding here. You've already given them your bio information and legally there's nothing stopping them from doing whatever they want with it. Facts aren't copyrighted. Now, images and writing is, which is why Facebook's rights to reproduce the works are important.
But why would those other companies give WindRiver advance copies of hardware or unannounced chip plans now? It seems like they'd just give the stuff to MontaVista and encourage their customers to go there instead of tipping Intel off to all their plans. If you want these OSes to work with the hardware on announcement day there has to be a lot of pre-release information being passed around.
To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals
This statement was thrown in there seemingly at random. Why can't Apple just be the best, most usable platform? And why can't it rely on a billion downloaded applications that only run on its platform as some lock-in? Not that I'm *not* advocating Apple continuing to innovate, but why do they have to be held to a higher standard than everyone else?
Seems to me Apple could sue for trademark infringement. You've got a competitor's device intentionally identifying itself such that it shows up as an "iPod", which is most definitely an Apple trademark.
In theory, LEDs should be very efficient. However, it is actually really difficult to make a LED that "natively" emits green light. Blue LEDs and red LEDs are both much easier. So a "white" LED is really a blue LED driving the fluorescence of some coating which saps away a lot of the efficiency. What you get is a very expensive bulb with a spectrum no better than a CFL and efficiency in the same ballpark as well. The lifetime is dramatically better, though.
I believe there have been several Slashdot stories about ways of getting "native" efficiencies in a LED lightbulb, so I would expect the cost and performance of LED to have way more of a future than CFL, which are still Mercury-filled, hand-made monstrosities in comparison. But right now it's a hard sell.
Agreed. PageMaker on the low and and later FrameMaker on the high end virtually drove the entire industry for awhile. In fact, Photoshop may not have had a place to live if PageMaker hadn't created a zillion newsletters to put photos in. After all, the professionals could afford LetraSet ColorStudio, which was Photoshop's functional predecessor. But at a few thousand a pop, small shops couldn't afford ColorStudio to adjust the photos going into the PageMaker newsletters, thus the "low-end" Photoshop was born.
Mainly, I'm happy that the Pre is out to give Apple some much-needed competition and force issues like MMS, video recording, background apps, etc.
Pre "force issues"? Those are all features that are widely reported to be part of the 3.0 release coming at the annual WWDC. I'm sure Apple is tracking the Pre closely, but the Pre is mostly winning on pre-announcement of features so far. In terms of what you can actually buy today, obviously the iPhone wins since the Pre doesn't actually exist yet. And when it's released, we'll have to compare it against the iPhone that will also be released about the same time.
My personal suspicion is that Apple planned the next iPod Touch to be called the Touch HD, Microsoft got wind of it, and decided to pre-announce to "reserve" the name in the public's mind. The iPod has already done video out at 480p and 576p via (optional) component cables for awhile, so my guess was that they'd bump that up to 720p and call it the Touch HD with June's hardware refresh.
The catch is, of course, the bitrate. I haven't seen what the Zune HD's "High Definition" bitrate actually is. For example, a Blu-Ray disc can transfer 10x the bitrate of most download "HD" services, which means less compression and better visuals.
Agreed... just the fact that this piece instigated a "what is art?" debate, IMHO, shows that it is art.
There are a lot of folks on Slashdot who try really, really hard to hate Apple and iPhones, but I think this story really is news for nerds, and really does matter. If you disagree, go click on another story.
Slashdot Mirror
From the way I see it, the fundamental problem with outsourcing development is the communication and revision of requirements. Because the outsourced developers are so far removed from the actual users/customers, they have no way of calibrating their internal assumptions about what would make the customer happy. There is little chance for direct iteration or refinement. Thus, requirements must be over-specified and, like an old game of "telephone", what can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. It's not that India doesn't have brilliant developers, they're just too far removed from the battle to be worth what an American programmer is worth.
The interesting part of that to me is the fact that this is also true in China, however China is rapidly developing a domestic market and many other Pacific rim countries have long-since done so. Thus, it's the American developers who are too far removed from this market. I wonder how that is going to change the outsourcing game. (Note that India is also a whole lot closer to China...)
WoW isn't an expensive passtime in terms of cost, but it's probably one of the most expensive passtimes in the geek community in terms of lost opportunity cost. Imagine what problems could have been solved with the number of hours sunk into WoW.
We put too much interest in people whose saving grace is that they can put a song together when there are so many other problems in the world that need resolving.
Yeah, if only Michael Jackson had co-wrote "We Are The World" for hunger relief in Africa, donated millions to charities for drug and alcohol abuse, broke down racial barriers, send millions in food to Sarajevo, and countless other humanitarian acts. Oh wait, he did.
If that ROE is reasonable, why aren't zillions of commercial solar farms popping up everywhere? Or at least co-located with the wind farms that are being installed?
No, I think he was referring to reality. It's an Iranian affair, and they're funding their own misinformation and corruption, thank you very much.
I looked into that post. It makes some good points, but it was trying to refute a specific assertion (that off-shore turbines could replace coal plants), not look at the overall practicality of wind power. It assumed no on-land turbines, only off-shore ones and that the biggest turbine was 3MW.
So you put most of the turbines on land which eliminates most of the land-area problem. Turbines have gone from 3MW to 4.5MW turbines (which are available now) in the last 5 years or so, and I can imagine them doubling again (6MW turbines are already being tested). Now you're talking a few hundred thousand turbines to supply all the electricity in the country. Even with the low volume today, you're talking about maybe $3-4M installed per turbine, or about $1.2T. Or less than the cost of all the recent bailouts. I'm sure there's a lot of games you can play with the numbers, but it doesn't have to be impossible to make a HUGE dent in our oil consumption.
The iPhone actually does run OS X, but doesn't provide the desktop UI that the Mac does, of course. The flaw with "market share" numbers, of course, is how you define a "market". Coming up with a definition that includes all desktops, laptops, and netbooks but no cellphones or small tablets seems a little arbitrary. But if you include everything with a CPU, embedded linux and VxWorks are probably the top contenders for market share.
Asustek assembles the laptops, but certainly doesn't manufacture or supply the batteries. If you know who supplies those batteries, their controllers, or the controller software please share (and cite). I certainly couldn't find that information.
Here's another idea: Anandtech and the others who have tested the batteries and verified Apple's numbers don't have any reason to lie.
Really, now, which is more likely: everyone's lying from reporters to users and in some huge conspiracy, or Apple's batteries really meet the stated specs?
I used to avidly play the game but stopped when they stopped updating the Mac client. A lot of honest (the cheats didn't work on the Mac anyway) and fun players left then, too. Despite having a tiny market share it did seem to have a disproportionate effect on the game.
So... maybe.
The First Amendment is commonly interpreted to imply a right to anonymity-- otherwise there would be a significant burden to free speech, and the First Amendment precludes "abridging" speech. Here's what the EFF and
Citizen Media Law have to say.
Just like the 2nd amendment is interpreted to apply mainly to guns even though the word "gun" (or even firearm) doesn't appear within it, anonymity is assumed to be part of one's freedom to speak openly in defiance of the majority opinion.
YouTube may have some effect on the de-facto internet codecs, but Theora has been losing this battle for awhile now so this isn't an out-of-the-blue decision. Many desktop and embedded video chips can decode h.264 in hardware, it's the primary Blu-Ray codec, it's used in several video chat applications, and many cable and satellite providers are going from MPEG2 to h.264. In addition, YouTube has been using h.264/AAC for over a year for "high quality" videos and videos delivered to iPhones, so they already have an h.264 infrastructure.
And for consumers, it actually seems to work really well. The "encumbered" nature of the codec may affect some tiny number of people, but for most it appears to be a huge win.
The "high quality" YouTube videos are all h.264/AAC already, and have been for at least a year. Never having uploaded to YouTube, I don't know how to specify a video as high-quality, but I know there are many h.264 as those are the only YouTube videos viewable on the iPhone, for which there are many.
It's not just that it could mutate and that it's more contagious... it's also peaking counter to almost any recent flu. The flu virus is packaged in lipids which tend to dissolve in heat, and aren't carried well in moist air. Add in some summer sun to sterilize surfaces and boost people's immune system with some vitamin D and you tend to get very little flu after March-April. We now have a virus that is peaking in June yet retains flu's ability to sicken and mutate, which implies that this fall could see a VERY BAD flu season. In fact, we're more or less tracking some of the deadliest pandemics for the spread of the virus. The saving grace here is that this vaccine doesn't contain some of the worst "deadly" flu genes from the big killer flus. But now that it's making its rounds through Asia and elsewhere, there is some fear it could absorb some of that. Imagine something as deadly as bird flu that is also more easily transmissible than any flu in decades... THAT'S why it's something to monitor. Not panic about, just be prepared for.
The biggest problem I see with this theory is that just today a huge 23% decline in US video game sales was reported. This quarter video game sales dropped below $1B for the first time in years. I could be wrong, but I doubt we're going to see anything like a $300M jump in music sales this quarter.
Apple has never been about the checkbox list of features. There are a lot of other vendors willing to load a gadget full of every button, feature, and gizmo under the sun, and there is a definite market for those devices among a certain crowd. But many Apple customers definitely find value in the deliberation and design Apple puts into their products, and that takes time. I've had an iPhone 3G for almost a year and it's one of the most useful devices I've ever owned. The iPhone 3GS appears to be even better. I don't see the competition light years ahead in usability and integration into my life, so I don't see any reason to switch. Needless to say, I wouldn't switch over lack of MMS.
Besides, why do folks take the most trivial part of the huge list of features and try to use that as a claim of how backwards the iPhone is? If you love your Android great! More power to you. I like not only the iPhone, but the iPhone ecosystem and I find a lot of utility in it.
It doesn't matter what is legally binding here. You've already given them your bio information and legally there's nothing stopping them from doing whatever they want with it. Facts aren't copyrighted. Now, images and writing is, which is why Facebook's rights to reproduce the works are important.
But why would those other companies give WindRiver advance copies of hardware or unannounced chip plans now? It seems like they'd just give the stuff to MontaVista and encourage their customers to go there instead of tipping Intel off to all their plans. If you want these OSes to work with the hardware on announcement day there has to be a lot of pre-release information being passed around.
To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals
This statement was thrown in there seemingly at random. Why can't Apple just be the best, most usable platform? And why can't it rely on a billion downloaded applications that only run on its platform as some lock-in? Not that I'm *not* advocating Apple continuing to innovate, but why do they have to be held to a higher standard than everyone else?
Seems to me Apple could sue for trademark infringement. You've got a competitor's device intentionally identifying itself such that it shows up as an "iPod", which is most definitely an Apple trademark.
In theory, LEDs should be very efficient. However, it is actually really difficult to make a LED that "natively" emits green light. Blue LEDs and red LEDs are both much easier. So a "white" LED is really a blue LED driving the fluorescence of some coating which saps away a lot of the efficiency. What you get is a very expensive bulb with a spectrum no better than a CFL and efficiency in the same ballpark as well. The lifetime is dramatically better, though.
I believe there have been several Slashdot stories about ways of getting "native" efficiencies in a LED lightbulb, so I would expect the cost and performance of LED to have way more of a future than CFL, which are still Mercury-filled, hand-made monstrosities in comparison. But right now it's a hard sell.
Agreed. PageMaker on the low and and later FrameMaker on the high end virtually drove the entire industry for awhile. In fact, Photoshop may not have had a place to live if PageMaker hadn't created a zillion newsletters to put photos in. After all, the professionals could afford LetraSet ColorStudio, which was Photoshop's functional predecessor. But at a few thousand a pop, small shops couldn't afford ColorStudio to adjust the photos going into the PageMaker newsletters, thus the "low-end" Photoshop was born.
Mainly, I'm happy that the Pre is out to give Apple some much-needed competition and force issues like MMS, video recording, background apps, etc.
Pre "force issues"? Those are all features that are widely reported to be part of the 3.0 release coming at the annual WWDC. I'm sure Apple is tracking the Pre closely, but the Pre is mostly winning on pre-announcement of features so far. In terms of what you can actually buy today, obviously the iPhone wins since the Pre doesn't actually exist yet. And when it's released, we'll have to compare it against the iPhone that will also be released about the same time.
My personal suspicion is that Apple planned the next iPod Touch to be called the Touch HD, Microsoft got wind of it, and decided to pre-announce to "reserve" the name in the public's mind. The iPod has already done video out at 480p and 576p via (optional) component cables for awhile, so my guess was that they'd bump that up to 720p and call it the Touch HD with June's hardware refresh. The catch is, of course, the bitrate. I haven't seen what the Zune HD's "High Definition" bitrate actually is. For example, a Blu-Ray disc can transfer 10x the bitrate of most download "HD" services, which means less compression and better visuals.
Agreed... just the fact that this piece instigated a "what is art?" debate, IMHO, shows that it is art.
There are a lot of folks on Slashdot who try really, really hard to hate Apple and iPhones, but I think this story really is news for nerds, and really does matter. If you disagree, go click on another story.
Was it the license that was preventing a downloadable dump of Wikipedia from being distributed on an iPhone? Does the CC license change that?