If it wasn't clear from my original post, I was saying that Palm Hardware should go to ACCESS and get the rights back for Cobalt so they can finally ship a Cobalt device rather than screwing around with Linux. Clear as mud?
As for ALP, I have my doubts about it. I suppose we'll see if it fares any better than Cobalt.
No, they DIDN'T! The article you linked to is about licensing of Garnet. Garnet is the current codename for the classic Palm OS that's been around since the stone ages. All this licenses is about is letting Palm Hardware pickup the source code where Palm Software (aka PalmSource) left off.
The BeOS-based Palm OS is called Cobalt, and is going nowhere fast.
Were they not going to do this a few years ago as well and then shelved the whole thing.
They've been on and off talking about it. What I don't get is why Palm Hardware never used the BeOS-based Palm Software OS. It was an ultra-modern OS, with features that WinCE could only dream of having, was better suited to handheld profiles, and yet Palm Hardware started making WinCE devices.
Ever since then, they keep pulling out this idea of a Linux handheld, then sticking it back in the box. Pull it out, put it back in. Pull it out, put it back in. Why don't they just go get their rights back from ACCESS so they use the bloody PALM OS?!?
The majority of "hardcore" gamers tend to be fixed in their ways; be it PC games or traditional consoles, they (not everyone) do not want something new. Why should they have to use the Wii nunchuck instead of the traditional controllers?
Exactly. This gamepad thing is never going to catch on. One button joysticks, For The Win!
(dramatic pause)
We've been here before. Several times, in fact. We'll be here again. The "hardcore" gamers will adapt, just as they always have.
The Wii is interesting at the moment, not just because of its controller. It's so much more than that. First, you can grab all the used Gamecube games you can handle. All for super-cheap if you know where to look. Which means that the Wii can be used to play all the cool titles you might have missed. (I highly recommend Donkey Kong Jungle Beat!)
Secondly, the Virtual Console gives you all the classics under one roof. Whether you want to finally play Bonk, zip along with Sonic, relive Mario World or Mario 64, fly with StarFox, enter your favorite adventures with Zelda, or have a go at the hidden classics that you missed, the Virtual Console has a lot to offer.
I won't even get into the fun you can have with hacking your Wii through the SD Cards and WiiMote. (If you're into that sort of thing.) Suffice it to say that you can transfer your Miis to the Internet, play your favorite SCUMMVM games, use your WiiMotes to play your computer games, and other fun hacking possibilities.:)
I hate to nitpick, but the 2600 didn't fail. It lived far beyond its intended lifetime. It was the followup (the 5200) that failed horribly thanks to Warner's mismanagement. If the 5200 hadn't failed, the 2600 wouldn't have been in the line of fire when the video game crash came'a'knocking.
Of course, games were still produced for the 2600 until nearly 1990, so it still wasn't a failure.:)
I don't know if it's any good, but I saw one in Bestbuy that came with a steering wheel in the package.
If you want a bit of advice, don't waste your money on GT Pro. The Steering Wheel attachment might make it tempting, but I guarantee that you'll regret the purchase. Try one of Ubisoft's better games, like Rayman. I have not heard anything about Monster 4x4 World Circuit, but I recommend that you be wary of it. Nintendo really had to strain the quality in order to round out the Wii launch titles.:-(
The Wii could get a reputation for having nothing but crap ports
Nintendo usually has enough first-party titles in the pipeline to prevent that from happening. As a result, the third parties get a reputation for making nothing but half-assed ports to the Wii. Glad to see that not much has changed since the GameCube.:-/
Though that's great news for Wii gamers, the question is: how many of these titles are going to be 'shovelware'?
Sugarcoating: Developers are going to port their existing set of games to the Wii, but they're going to spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning the controls for the Wii Remote. The graphics won't matter because it will be so much fun playing on the Wii!
Real Answer: Developers are going to do a half-ass port of existing games to the Wii, and they're going to spend most of their time removing graphical features and figuring out how to read "waggle" from the controller. Since no one will actually optimize their games for the ArtX chip, the graphics will be substandard in comparison to the first-party Nintendo titles. Even worse, the games will have all the "fun" sapped out of them as the publishers don't yet "get" the Wii.
What are you talking about? All I see are happy pictures of happy people hanging around China's grand Tiananmen Square. It sounds like you've been listening to too many American conspiracies! Would you like to visit our special hotel for American conspirists?
Instead he founded the core of a new company in the best and brightest new graduates coming out of the engineering schools.
Only a year later the staff was already fed up with Shockley's increasingly bizarre behavior. In one famous incident Shockley's secretary accidentally cut her finger and he became convinced it was a plot against him. He then ordered everyone in the company to take a lie detector test to track down the culprit. It was later demonstrated she had cut herself on a broken thumbtack and Shockley calmed down, but the damage was already done. This had proven to be a decisive example to several key personnel of Shockley's increasing paranoia, and a group of eight engineers decided they had had enough.
As for the building itself, I always have a bit of a struggle in deciding how to approach potential landmarks. The problem is that every time we reserve land as a "landmark", we reduce the ability of that particular area to advance. That land could be used for a larger, more modern building supporting new and exciting development. And yet, what would we lose to history if it was torn down?
In the end, I think there must be a balance struck. Unless the site is incredibly valuable to history, it should be thoroughly documented (including the transfer of any and all objects/materials related to the site to a historical society) and then allowed to be replaced or torn down.
Wait... He hooked up three PS3's to do real-time raytracing, and you _don't_ find it impressive?
Not really. You can do more with a stack of FPGAs for a lot less. Not to mention that real-time raytracing on desktop computers has been a hot topic of research for a while now. (Especially in the demo community.) Here's one of my favorites.
For having hooked up 3 Cell cores, I actually would have expected something slightly more impressive than a car on a pedastal. I hate to be negative, but this is really nothing more than a marketing stunt by IBM. Sega pulled the same stunt with the Dreamcast marketing 8 years ago, and look where it got them.:-/
I'm sure that Accenture is more than happy & able to through senior level programmers at your problems if you're welling to hand them buckets of cash for the work.
Unfortunately, no. Accenture would just charge you more for the same workers.:-/
While you were there, did you learn a bit about career advancement inside Accenture? Theses junior coders (which are often billed as far more experienced) are not really expected to advance in technology. They're expected to learn how to become account representatives. i.e. Managers who's job it is to make powerpoint slides and tell the client how wonderfully the project is going. If you don't want to become an account representative, then they simply burn you out on crazy hours, then replace you in the next batch.:-(
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of humor to be derived from the nuttiness of it all, but the bigger picture is actually quite frightening. And now the "offshoring companies" have picked up the same business model. Only with less accountability.
I'm a sysadmin working in South America for two American accounts that have been outsourced and customer satisfaction has actually increased because we have more formal processes and more motivated people.
Believe it or not, I'm actually very happy for you. It sounds like a few companies did some shopping around and found a GOOD outsourcing company. The fact that you're not located in the usual places lends credence to that fact. But trust me, from our perspective here in the states, outsourcing is rarely so rosey. I am not kidding when I say that American companies are being taken for a ride by outsourcing. This has been true since the idea of outsourcing to consultants really took off in 90's.
Suddenly, most companies stopped paying attention to the fact that they needed to show good value in their partnerships. They just heard "outsourcing == good" and ran with it. The fact that they were getting crap in return for their investments wasn't entirely lost on them. So they got the bright idea of (wait for it) offshoring the consulting for cheaper! That's right, rather than hiring talent and/or companies with a GOOD reputation, they can get even more crap work for less! W00T!
I really despise decisions like these, whether it's onshored or offshored. Unfortunately, the caliber of management these days is poor at best. There's no real attempt to foster management talent, which means that the new management has a disdain for talent in technology. Corporations are imploding on themselves, but they have so much capital that they can keep up an image that everything is fine and dandy. Yet we have strategic mergers and acquisitions of companies that used to be powerhouses unto themselves.
In reality, it will all work out in the end. Startups who know better will grow into their own megacorps, displacing those that have come before. Unfortunately, the process is going to be incredibly painful for all involved, not to mention counter-productive to the American economy.:(
Actually, what they are saying that it is too expensive for them to remain competitive the US.
Bullshit.
They in fact do have a vision for remaining competitive
More bullshit.
I've been in this industry for well over a decade now, and I've seen some pretty interesting attempts at outsourcing. You know what? Nearly all of them fail. It doesn't matter if we're talking about local outsourcing inside the U.S. or foreign outsourcing of cheaper "talent". 95% of the time, outsourcing companies are leaches that slurp up many times the funds that companies could use to hire competent talent. All they do is hire warm bodies on a company's behalf, then charge 10x what those bodies are worth. The majority of them are fresh out of college (if even), have no real experience to draw on, and have no experienced leadership to direct them.
For a similar set of leaches, see Technology Recruiters.
The truly competitive companies have one thing in common: They eschew the idea of outsourcing/consulting in favor of direct-hiring a good mix of experienced talent and promising talent. Combined with good management (which is usually required to get the talent in the first place), these companies are able to produce far more than their competitors on far less capital.
The funniest part is that Accenture could practically do that
What's this "practically"? I worked side by side with Accenture consultants at a previous job. (We embedded employees inside their organization. It was the only way to get the job done after management screwed up by hiring them in the first place.) The employees are good kids and all, but they are just people hired off the street. They learn most of what they do on the job. While they try very hard to get it done, they don't have the first clue what they're doing and end up making a massive, unmaintainable mess. The result is that the system gets so large and complex that you need more and more manpower to keep making progress. Eventually, it becomes too costly and the project gets canned.
I think you're missing the point*. I'm perfectly happy with outsourcing jobs as long as the guys over the pond are able to do the job as effectively as U.S. developers. That's how competition works, and I'm all for that. However, TFA shows what I've been saying for a while now: Outsourcing rarely results in high quality work. In fact, many companies are being taken for a ride, because they don't do any of the shopping around and due dilligence that they would normally do with a U.S. company.
Err... scratch that...
They're getting taken for a ride even worse than U.S. consulting companies (very few gems there, either) because there's even less accountability involved. As long as the foreign company can keep stringing along the U.S. company, they keep making money. It doesn't really matter if their "developers" are some guys they just pulled off the street. (Hey, that sounds a lot like Accenture!) They produce something, and the executives on the other side of the pond don't know the difference. For all they know, the entire source base could be:
public class Suresh { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Suresh is Brilant!");}}}
As long as something keeps coming in, and the PowerPoints show beautiful progress, then the project is on track, right?
* Note to self: Quote TFA next time, because no one reads it anyway.
[The study] asserts that the United States is risking losing its global edge by outsourcing critical R&D and India is falling behind by playing politics with education.
Duke's 2005 study reported serious problems with the quality of Indian and Chinese bachelor-level engineering graduates, and predicted both shortages in India and unemployment in China. The current report finds these predictions to be accurate, with China's National Reform Commission reporting that the majority of its 2006 graduates will not find work. There are also oft-heard whisperings of a engineering shortage in India, though private colleges and "finishing schools" are going far to make up for the Indian deficiencies, the report said.
"Respondents said the advantages of hiring U.S. engineers were strong communication skills, an understanding of U.S. industry, superior business acumen, strong education or training, strong technical skills, proximity to work centers, lack of cultural issues, and a sense of creativity and desire to challenge the status quo," wrote Wadhwa in the 2007 report.
Thus the basic issue is that you're giving up your best and your brightest who are ALREADY familiar with your business and the local marketplace, and you're replacing them with cheap "yes-men" who have no concept of your business, cultural barriers, aren't even in the same time zone, run effectively unchecked by the corporation, and have little chance of being India or China's "best and brightest". (As you say, those people are making their money elsewhere.)
For a good feel for what's happening with outsourcing, check out these horror stories:
While not every company sees results this bad, I've heard very few positive reports. And more of those were before the outsourcing "craze", when it was easier to find the competent developers overseas.
Shades of the tech bubble? Yeah. I'm glad we learned so much from that debacle.:-/
new elements of traditional corporations like R&D may in fact be next on the outsourcing chopping block.
Allow me summarize: "It's too expensive to be competitive, and we don't have a vision for being competitive anyway. So we're going to make our shareholders happy and shoot ourselves in the foot. Twice. Just to be certain. But hey, think of all the money we'll be saving!"
There will always be a huge disparity between the capabilities of dedicated fab plants and home fab gear. I'm not saying they will stay static, just that the disparity will always be large, and that home gear will never be able to fab anything thats non-trivial for a product engineering facility.
There used to be a huge disparity between what a high-end mainframe was capable of and what a home microcomputer was capable of. Is there a huge disparity between what a 64-way Sun machine is capable of and what a Personal Computer is capable ok? Yes. Does that mean that a Personal Computer cannot be used for anything non-trivial? No.
It's the same way with 3D printers. Eventually, they will cross a threshhold of usefulness, even if there is still a huge disparity between them and heavy industrial capabilities.
Actually, you can create it in any material supported by the printer. As the 3D Printers evolve, they're beginning to print other materials besides plastic. For example, that 3D House Printing story a few weeks ago was not done out of plastics and resins. It was done out of concrete materials designed to work well with the printer. Unsurprisingly, there are also metal printers available for many tasks. You only hear about plastic materials so much because they're easy to work with, cheap to produce, and are very versatile in creating different objects.
You're missing one other obvious use. Even though it may not be cheaper per se, it will one day be possible to design custom parts that are unavailable on the open market. For example, the first thing I'd do with a 3D printer is develop a holder for all my Atari 2600 carts. This would make sense for me, because there are very few such holders left on the market. The few that do exist are based on the economics of the 80's. (i.e. When everyone was only able to afford a dozen or so cartridges rather than the hundred or so cartridges I can cheaply purchase today.)
While people have been making similar items out of wood for as long as man has been around, not everyone has the tools, the open space, and the skills to properly craft such items. 3D printers could offer the much easier method of crafting objects in a CAD program. And you can tweak the design in ways that are difficult or impossible with wood-working.
Speaking of cartridges, one of the designs I used to test the eMachineShop CAD program was a replica of an Atari 2600 cartridge. If there weren't already more economic ways of obtaining such replacement shells, I could have easily have had a 3D printed replica at my door for a hundred dollars or so. (Or so the program told me.) If it was just a bit cheaper, I'd probably would ship myself some custom cartridge holders.;)
These 3d scanners are good for only what their ads say: prototyping. There will not be a day when you will be able to scan copy and duplicate even a nut or a bolt in your garage anywhere near as cheaply as it can be done en masse at a production plant simply because the mould, tools and materials are too expensive on a small scale to be feasible.
I agree and yet I disagree at the same time. I agree that scanning is an imperfect process that isn't likely to improve sufficiently in the next few decades. However, when a modern engineer is developing a part, does he still use a pen and paper to design the diagram? Of course not! The object is designed in detail in a CAD program. Those CAD drawings are then used in manufacturing a mold to spec.
Now consider for a moment, what happens when you take that 3D model and feed it into a 3D Printer? In theory, at least, the printer will be able to reproduce the object with perfect quality. In reality, the printer will be limited by its design (as most manufacturing methods are), possibly requiring the 3D model to be tweaked for the printer. However, most parts are created with similar limitations in mind (e.g. a plastic part is likely to be in two pieces with open ends that fit together) making the models very easy to transfer over to 3D printing.
Now I don't disagree that there will continue to be significant differences between what someone can manufacture in the home and what can be manufactured in an industrial environment, but the gap will close. It has always closed and will continue to close in every industry in existence. Today, we can develop high-quality prints of photos from digital negatives with an in-store machine. We can print and bind nearly any book with an in-store machine. We can press a CD or DVD with a color label with a simple machine. We can quickly produce a custom PCB board with a simple machine. These things have come down to the consumer scale, even if machines that can do even better exist.
The same will happen with 3D printers. You're going to have everything from a home machine capable of printing toys, widgets, and useful household items; you're going have large machines capable of printing houses and ship hulls; and you're going to have everything in-between. I for one can't wait for the day when I can print my own customized CD shelf or cup holder.:)
from the examples I've seen, the rapid prototyping tools can't currently create a durable item
This has been changing. Modern printers use much stronger materials based on resins similar to those used in Legos. So if you need a plastic part, you should be able to print one of reasonable strength. For example, I could see a huge market for toys on demand much in the way that books are slowly moving to print on demand.
nor can they create moving parts to any great degree
It's fairly rare to be able to create a moveable part in a single mold. Usually, you create a variety of parts, then assemble them. When this starts to catch on with consumers, I imagine you'll first see products coming in many parts with "some assembly required". Later revisions of the technology might include robotic assemblers that construct devices in a manner similar to how PODs are now able to print and bind nearly any book. While the precise assembly options may not be comprehensive, model developers will know the limitations of the machines and attempt to modify their models so that they're more easily assembled by the robotics.
Also, there is an issue of scale that needs to be considered. There's nothing preventing a larger 3D printer from printing in concretes or metals. In fact, there was a story here a few weeks ago about a 3D printer that could construct a house in a few days. But why stop there? Ship hulls, car bodies, air foils, and many other items which are so large as to be difficult to mold could conceivably be printed instead. In many cases it may even be advantageous, as the part will be producable as a single object with no seams or rivets. This can potentially strengthen the object overall. Chemical agents can also be used to treat the object for better strength and endurance.
Obviously, the technology is just getting started. But it has been making great strides in the short time it's been available. Give it a decade or two more and the necessary material injection techniques and production methods will get most of the bugs worked out.:)
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If it wasn't clear from my original post, I was saying that Palm Hardware should go to ACCESS and get the rights back for Cobalt so they can finally ship a Cobalt device rather than screwing around with Linux. Clear as mud?
As for ALP, I have my doubts about it. I suppose we'll see if it fares any better than Cobalt.
No, they DIDN'T! The article you linked to is about licensing of Garnet. Garnet is the current codename for the classic Palm OS that's been around since the stone ages. All this licenses is about is letting Palm Hardware pickup the source code where Palm Software (aka PalmSource) left off.
The BeOS-based Palm OS is called Cobalt, and is going nowhere fast.
They've been on and off talking about it. What I don't get is why Palm Hardware never used the BeOS-based Palm Software OS. It was an ultra-modern OS, with features that WinCE could only dream of having, was better suited to handheld profiles, and yet Palm Hardware started making WinCE devices.
Ever since then, they keep pulling out this idea of a Linux handheld, then sticking it back in the box. Pull it out, put it back in. Pull it out, put it back in. Why don't they just go get their rights back from ACCESS so they use the bloody PALM OS?!?
Ok, rant over.
Exactly. This gamepad thing is never going to catch on. One button joysticks, For The Win!
(dramatic pause)
We've been here before. Several times, in fact. We'll be here again. The "hardcore" gamers will adapt, just as they always have.
The Wii is interesting at the moment, not just because of its controller. It's so much more than that. First, you can grab all the used Gamecube games you can handle. All for super-cheap if you know where to look. Which means that the Wii can be used to play all the cool titles you might have missed. (I highly recommend Donkey Kong Jungle Beat!)
:)
Secondly, the Virtual Console gives you all the classics under one roof. Whether you want to finally play Bonk, zip along with Sonic, relive Mario World or Mario 64, fly with StarFox, enter your favorite adventures with Zelda, or have a go at the hidden classics that you missed, the Virtual Console has a lot to offer.
Lastly, the free web browser is more than just a web browser. It's a portal to casual games, a television channel, and even a WiFi stereo system.
I won't even get into the fun you can have with hacking your Wii through the SD Cards and WiiMote. (If you're into that sort of thing.) Suffice it to say that you can transfer your Miis to the Internet, play your favorite SCUMMVM games, use your WiiMotes to play your computer games, and other fun hacking possibilities.
I hate to nitpick, but the 2600 didn't fail. It lived far beyond its intended lifetime. It was the followup (the 5200) that failed horribly thanks to Warner's mismanagement. If the 5200 hadn't failed, the 2600 wouldn't have been in the line of fire when the video game crash came'a'knocking.
:)
Of course, games were still produced for the 2600 until nearly 1990, so it still wasn't a failure.
If you want a bit of advice, don't waste your money on GT Pro. The Steering Wheel attachment might make it tempting, but I guarantee that you'll regret the purchase. Try one of Ubisoft's better games, like Rayman. I have not heard anything about Monster 4x4 World Circuit, but I recommend that you be wary of it. Nintendo really had to strain the quality in order to round out the Wii launch titles.
Nintendo usually has enough first-party titles in the pipeline to prevent that from happening. As a result, the third parties get a reputation for making nothing but half-assed ports to the Wii. Glad to see that not much has changed since the GameCube.
Sugarcoating: Developers are going to port their existing set of games to the Wii, but they're going to spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning the controls for the Wii Remote. The graphics won't matter because it will be so much fun playing on the Wii!
Real Answer: Developers are going to do a half-ass port of existing games to the Wii, and they're going to spend most of their time removing graphical features and figuring out how to read "waggle" from the controller. Since no one will actually optimize their games for the ArtX chip, the graphics will be substandard in comparison to the first-party Nintendo titles. Even worse, the games will have all the "fun" sapped out of them as the publishers don't yet "get" the Wii.
The end result? Miyamoto will need to yell louder.
What are you talking about? All I see are happy pictures of happy people hanging around China's grand Tiananmen Square. It sounds like you've been listening to too many American conspiracies! Would you like to visit our special hotel for American conspirists?
As for the building itself, I always have a bit of a struggle in deciding how to approach potential landmarks. The problem is that every time we reserve land as a "landmark", we reduce the ability of that particular area to advance. That land could be used for a larger, more modern building supporting new and exciting development. And yet, what would we lose to history if it was torn down?
In the end, I think there must be a balance struck. Unless the site is incredibly valuable to history, it should be thoroughly documented (including the transfer of any and all objects/materials related to the site to a historical society) and then allowed to be replaced or torn down.
Not really. You can do more with a stack of FPGAs for a lot less. Not to mention that real-time raytracing on desktop computers has been a hot topic of research for a while now. (Especially in the demo community.) Here's one of my favorites.
For having hooked up 3 Cell cores, I actually would have expected something slightly more impressive than a car on a pedastal. I hate to be negative, but this is really nothing more than a marketing stunt by IBM. Sega pulled the same stunt with the Dreamcast marketing 8 years ago, and look where it got them.
Unfortunately, no. Accenture would just charge you more for the same workers.
While you were there, did you learn a bit about career advancement inside Accenture? Theses junior coders (which are often billed as far more experienced) are not really expected to advance in technology. They're expected to learn how to become account representatives. i.e. Managers who's job it is to make powerpoint slides and tell the client how wonderfully the project is going. If you don't want to become an account representative, then they simply burn you out on crazy hours, then replace you in the next batch.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of humor to be derived from the nuttiness of it all, but the bigger picture is actually quite frightening. And now the "offshoring companies" have picked up the same business model. Only with less accountability.
Believe it or not, I'm actually very happy for you. It sounds like a few companies did some shopping around and found a GOOD outsourcing company. The fact that you're not located in the usual places lends credence to that fact. But trust me, from our perspective here in the states, outsourcing is rarely so rosey. I am not kidding when I say that American companies are being taken for a ride by outsourcing. This has been true since the idea of outsourcing to consultants really took off in 90's.
Suddenly, most companies stopped paying attention to the fact that they needed to show good value in their partnerships. They just heard "outsourcing == good" and ran with it. The fact that they were getting crap in return for their investments wasn't entirely lost on them. So they got the bright idea of (wait for it) offshoring the consulting for cheaper! That's right, rather than hiring talent and/or companies with a GOOD reputation, they can get even more crap work for less! W00T!
I really despise decisions like these, whether it's onshored or offshored. Unfortunately, the caliber of management these days is poor at best. There's no real attempt to foster management talent, which means that the new management has a disdain for talent in technology. Corporations are imploding on themselves, but they have so much capital that they can keep up an image that everything is fine and dandy. Yet we have strategic mergers and acquisitions of companies that used to be powerhouses unto themselves.
In reality, it will all work out in the end. Startups who know better will grow into their own megacorps, displacing those that have come before. Unfortunately, the process is going to be incredibly painful for all involved, not to mention counter-productive to the American economy.
Bullshit.
More bullshit.
I've been in this industry for well over a decade now, and I've seen some pretty interesting attempts at outsourcing. You know what? Nearly all of them fail. It doesn't matter if we're talking about local outsourcing inside the U.S. or foreign outsourcing of cheaper "talent". 95% of the time, outsourcing companies are leaches that slurp up many times the funds that companies could use to hire competent talent. All they do is hire warm bodies on a company's behalf, then charge 10x what those bodies are worth. The majority of them are fresh out of college (if even), have no real experience to draw on, and have no experienced leadership to direct them.
For a similar set of leaches, see Technology Recruiters.
The truly competitive companies have one thing in common: They eschew the idea of outsourcing/consulting in favor of direct-hiring a good mix of experienced talent and promising talent. Combined with good management (which is usually required to get the talent in the first place), these companies are able to produce far more than their competitors on far less capital.
What's this "practically"? I worked side by side with Accenture consultants at a previous job. (We embedded employees inside their organization. It was the only way to get the job done after management screwed up by hiring them in the first place.) The employees are good kids and all, but they are just people hired off the street. They learn most of what they do on the job. While they try very hard to get it done, they don't have the first clue what they're doing and end up making a massive, unmaintainable mess. The result is that the system gets so large and complex that you need more and more manpower to keep making progress. Eventually, it becomes too costly and the project gets canned.
Err... scratch that...
They're getting taken for a ride even worse than U.S. consulting companies (very few gems there, either) because there's even less accountability involved. As long as the foreign company can keep stringing along the U.S. company, they keep making money. It doesn't really matter if their "developers" are some guys they just pulled off the street. (Hey, that sounds a lot like Accenture!) They produce something, and the executives on the other side of the pond don't know the difference. For all they know, the entire source base could be: As long as something keeps coming in, and the PowerPoints show beautiful progress, then the project is on track, right?
* Note to self: Quote TFA next time, because no one reads it anyway.
Thus the basic issue is that you're giving up your best and your brightest who are ALREADY familiar with your business and the local marketplace, and you're replacing them with cheap "yes-men" who have no concept of your business, cultural barriers, aren't even in the same time zone, run effectively unchecked by the corporation, and have little chance of being India or China's "best and brightest". (As you say, those people are making their money elsewhere.)
For a good feel for what's happening with outsourcing, check out these horror stories:
http://img.worsethanfailure.com/Comments/Discount
http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Of_Course_We
While not every company sees results this bad, I've heard very few positive reports. And more of those were before the outsourcing "craze", when it was easier to find the competent developers overseas.
Shades of the tech bubble? Yeah. I'm glad we learned so much from that debacle.
Allow me summarize: "It's too expensive to be competitive, and we don't have a vision for being competitive anyway. So we're going to make our shareholders happy and shoot ourselves in the foot. Twice. Just to be certain. But hey, think of all the money we'll be saving!"
There used to be a huge disparity between what a high-end mainframe was capable of and what a home microcomputer was capable of. Is there a huge disparity between what a 64-way Sun machine is capable of and what a Personal Computer is capable ok? Yes. Does that mean that a Personal Computer cannot be used for anything non-trivial? No.
It's the same way with 3D printers. Eventually, they will cross a threshhold of usefulness, even if there is still a huge disparity between them and heavy industrial capabilities.
Actually, you can create it in any material supported by the printer. As the 3D Printers evolve, they're beginning to print other materials besides plastic. For example, that 3D House Printing story a few weeks ago was not done out of plastics and resins. It was done out of concrete materials designed to work well with the printer. Unsurprisingly, there are also metal printers available for many tasks. You only hear about plastic materials so much because they're easy to work with, cheap to produce, and are very versatile in creating different objects.
You're missing one other obvious use. Even though it may not be cheaper per se, it will one day be possible to design custom parts that are unavailable on the open market. For example, the first thing I'd do with a 3D printer is develop a holder for all my Atari 2600 carts. This would make sense for me, because there are very few such holders left on the market. The few that do exist are based on the economics of the 80's. (i.e. When everyone was only able to afford a dozen or so cartridges rather than the hundred or so cartridges I can cheaply purchase today.)
;)
While people have been making similar items out of wood for as long as man has been around, not everyone has the tools, the open space, and the skills to properly craft such items. 3D printers could offer the much easier method of crafting objects in a CAD program. And you can tweak the design in ways that are difficult or impossible with wood-working.
Speaking of cartridges, one of the designs I used to test the eMachineShop CAD program was a replica of an Atari 2600 cartridge. If there weren't already more economic ways of obtaining such replacement shells, I could have easily have had a 3D printed replica at my door for a hundred dollars or so. (Or so the program told me.) If it was just a bit cheaper, I'd probably would ship myself some custom cartridge holders.
I agree and yet I disagree at the same time. I agree that scanning is an imperfect process that isn't likely to improve sufficiently in the next few decades. However, when a modern engineer is developing a part, does he still use a pen and paper to design the diagram? Of course not! The object is designed in detail in a CAD program. Those CAD drawings are then used in manufacturing a mold to spec.
Now consider for a moment, what happens when you take that 3D model and feed it into a 3D Printer? In theory, at least, the printer will be able to reproduce the object with perfect quality. In reality, the printer will be limited by its design (as most manufacturing methods are), possibly requiring the 3D model to be tweaked for the printer. However, most parts are created with similar limitations in mind (e.g. a plastic part is likely to be in two pieces with open ends that fit together) making the models very easy to transfer over to 3D printing.
Now I don't disagree that there will continue to be significant differences between what someone can manufacture in the home and what can be manufactured in an industrial environment, but the gap will close. It has always closed and will continue to close in every industry in existence. Today, we can develop high-quality prints of photos from digital negatives with an in-store machine. We can print and bind nearly any book with an in-store machine. We can press a CD or DVD with a color label with a simple machine. We can quickly produce a custom PCB board with a simple machine. These things have come down to the consumer scale, even if machines that can do even better exist.
The same will happen with 3D printers. You're going to have everything from a home machine capable of printing toys, widgets, and useful household items; you're going have large machines capable of printing houses and ship hulls; and you're going to have everything in-between. I for one can't wait for the day when I can print my own customized CD shelf or cup holder.
This has been changing. Modern printers use much stronger materials based on resins similar to those used in Legos. So if you need a plastic part, you should be able to print one of reasonable strength. For example, I could see a huge market for toys on demand much in the way that books are slowly moving to print on demand.
It's fairly rare to be able to create a moveable part in a single mold. Usually, you create a variety of parts, then assemble them. When this starts to catch on with consumers, I imagine you'll first see products coming in many parts with "some assembly required". Later revisions of the technology might include robotic assemblers that construct devices in a manner similar to how PODs are now able to print and bind nearly any book. While the precise assembly options may not be comprehensive, model developers will know the limitations of the machines and attempt to modify their models so that they're more easily assembled by the robotics.
Also, there is an issue of scale that needs to be considered. There's nothing preventing a larger 3D printer from printing in concretes or metals. In fact, there was a story here a few weeks ago about a 3D printer that could construct a house in a few days. But why stop there? Ship hulls, car bodies, air foils, and many other items which are so large as to be difficult to mold could conceivably be printed instead. In many cases it may even be advantageous, as the part will be producable as a single object with no seams or rivets. This can potentially strengthen the object overall. Chemical agents can also be used to treat the object for better strength and endurance.
Obviously, the technology is just getting started. But it has been making great strides in the short time it's been available. Give it a decade or two more and the necessary material injection techniques and production methods will get most of the bugs worked out.