That's the obvious way to solve it. Another is to have the industry standardize on the parts. So instead of one company manufacturing 1M units of component X, you can have 100 companies each manufacturing 10,000 units of component X.
Beyond the basic manufacturing, product assembly is another thing. For example it should be trivial for a small shop to "build" a desktop computer out of parts sourced from "brand name" manufacturers. Here you achieve the same benefits that come from economies of scale.
For a more real life example, look at the "white box" manufacturers of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai). These are mostly small companies with employees numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands. They get their components from the bigger Chinese and foreign companies. Their "manufacturing" process basically involves the manual assembly of these components into the finished gadget like tablets and generic game console controllers.
You're recommending an Apple product for a small 3rd World business? The cost of a single Apple deskotp product is enough to buy a couple of low-spec PCs and the Windows licenses that come with it (no need to "pirate" the OS and basic office apps). If you want to be chained to proprietary solutions, a Windows PC is definitely the lesser evil, and easier to convert if you're a FOSS zealot.
You should have gotten rid of your wife's high heels. The simple explanation is that your daughter is taking after your wife. Now if your wife dresses like a coal miner, and your daughter still fancies Barbie, only then can we safely assume that "girly" things are indeed baked into some girls' DNA.
Whenever I hear somebody say the future is in Internet-worked computing, I remember the aliens that tried to conquer Earth in the movie Independence Day. One of the seemingly laughable premises in the movie is that uploading a virus into one of the alien mother ships could bring down the whole invasion force. Apparently the aliens had an extremely centralized comand-and-control infrastructure. And guess what, we're heading in that direction when a glitch in one "cloud" provider is going to bring down our whole computing infrastructure, if not our whole civilization.
"I don't think it's the confinement. Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild."
Through the process of artificial selection, dogs evolved into creatures that could tolerate dog houses. Could you say the same thing for the individual whales that were captured and confined. Maybe after a few hundred generations, we could breed domesticated whales that can wear collars and bark. But for now it's torture keeping them in virtual life imprisonment.
Hell, the Japanese who kill whales to eat them are much more merciful. At least they don't make them suffer for long.
"just like the post-script ecosystem didn't got taken over by HP."
Wrong analogy. Two things: 1. PostScript was developed by Adobe
2. HP never came close to dominating the PostScript printer market, prefering to sell printers that used its own Printer Command Language. Apple was for a time the dominant PostScript printer vendor with its Laserwriter series. PostScript printers now tend to be niche products favored mostly by manufacturers of high-end imagesetters used to produce the print-ready layouts of fashion magazines, art books and the like.
3. Adobe practically opensourced PostScript, allowing or tolerating "clones" like Ghostscript. The ocumentation was in any case easily available for the price of a trade paperback. Whatever one might say about the quality of its products, Adobe was certainly less evil than many vendors of proprietary solutions that would sue potential competitors to the ground.
Most people connect to cellphone networks via a cellphone. No surprise in that. So interpreting the stats to mean mobile rulez! might not be far from the truth. However the implication that every single person in the world has a cellphone is obviously false. The supposed 1:1 ratio could easily be reduced by people owning multiple cellphones or cellphone would multiple SIM slots. This also makes the highly unlikely assumption that babies have transmitters attached to their hi-tech cribs.
And video games, idols (pop stars) and other distractions!
Okay, I'm being half serious. There are other reasons for the fall in birth rates. But if the kids get bombarded with entertainment when they're not being forced through cram schools, etc, romantic relationships take a back seat. You're too busy studying, working or shutting yourself off in your room playing some online RPG or worse a visual novel where you get your choice of cute 2D girls.
Gnome Shell, in its default configuration, is good for neither desktop nor mobile. Proof the it's not the best UI for the desktop is the way RHEL 7.0 has Gnome Shell set up to look like a polished version of the Gnome 2 desktop.
So in terms of usability, even the chief financial backer of Gnome thinks Gnome Shell needs serious work to be a pleasant experience for users other than its core developers and designers.
"Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack stop the theft of our nationâ(TM)s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks."
I'm troubled by the mention of "intellectual property" in Daniel's post. I'd understand it if he restricted his description to theft of military or intelligence secrets, but does this vague term mean the US intelligence agencies are now in the service of the entertainment industry?
You're no longer paranoid. Being concerned about your privacy became just a wee bit more fashionable. Why surrender more data to Big Data that will only end up in the data dungeons of the three letter agencies?
It sounds good in principle. Pick the best and give them the best education possible. But in practice, we'd only be selecting for those who do well in timed exams. What about the "gifted" child who fails the exam because he or she has exam fright? Or what about the child who's very good in math but very poor in language that he can't understand those tricky word problems?
And what about the late-bloomers? Those who first show their genius when, say, they reach their teens?
For me, it's still better to improve education overall, rather than concentrate funds on presumably "gifted" children. This way, those chldren who don't get selected
"Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads."
LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. If you're going to rip your *future* AD collection, why bother? I'm sure there'll always be the usual pirate sources ready to download without the need for some DRM crack or whatnot.
Given Microsoft's name recognition among the masses this has the potential to wipe out Android and other free beer operating systems or at least seriously reduce their footprint. Are there any anti-trust implications here, given that Google is doing the same with Android? This would probably have little to zero impact on Apple or the users of "fringe" Linux distros (read: non-Ubuntu).
"The same question could be asked today, not in some vague future "when it becomes cheap." Why do people by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola cans, when the generic brand fizzy brown stuff (that performs equally well in blind tests) costs half as much? "
Not quite the comparison to make. The question should rather be phrased: Which would you rather drink, Coca-Cola or a beverage you juiced yourself from the fruits in your back yard?
You'd probably pick Coca-cola or some other store-bought drink if you don't have the time (you're to busy to operate and wash the blender). This besides the fact that it's really more expensive (even if more nutritious) to blend your own juice, rather than pop a bottle or can.
However, most people I suspect would trust the home-grown juice than Coca-cola. So when the time comes that home users can cheaply and realiably print their own generic copies of famous/expensive 3D object, I expect people to choose the stuff they themselves made. Convenience will trump brand loyalty.
"Manufacturing for public sale to make a profit is easy to track, but tracking private use is nearly impossible."
For now. When it becomes possible to actually print a Ferrari from your desktop, the "nearly impossible" tracking of everything we do would also become possible, with literally dirt cheap sensors installed everywhere.
That's unless we pass stringent privacy laws to protect against NSA/Big Data-style surveillance of random individuals. Or maybe it'll be a losing battle, and whether you're an exhibitionist or not you'll have your naked photos/sex videos archived somewhere in the 'Net.
But there are other bodily pleasures you can enjoy besides Food, and it also begins with the letter F. So I'm alll for a "post-food" diet if that would really make me feel younger and, uhm, sexier. As for this particular man's claims, I'm sticking to my fish and veggies.
Throw away copyright laws... at least as far as individual consumers are concerned. This is the future. Pretty soon we'd have recording gadgets so small and much more inconspicuous that only a TSA-style patdown/scanning will reveal them. So why bother imposing draconian copyright laws unless they're against those ripoff "artists" who try to sell other people's works for profit?
See? A "pirate" is the person or party accused of copyright infringment. A "patent troll" on the other hand is the person or party that accuses (somebody else) of patent infringement.
So a "pirate" is the alleged perpetrator of the copyright infringment, while the patent troll is the alleged "victim" of the patent infringement. You can't be called a patent troll if you don't use or abuse the legal system. A pirate on the other hand is presumed to be operating outside the legal system until he or she is brought to court.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the obvious way to solve it. Another is to have the industry standardize on the parts. So instead of one company manufacturing 1M units of component X, you can have 100 companies each manufacturing 10,000 units of component X.
Beyond the basic manufacturing, product assembly is another thing. For example it should be trivial for a small shop to "build" a desktop computer out of parts sourced from "brand name" manufacturers. Here you achieve the same benefits that come from economies of scale.
For a more real life example, look at the "white box" manufacturers of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai). These are mostly small companies with employees numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands. They get their components from the bigger Chinese and foreign companies. Their "manufacturing" process basically involves the manual assembly of these components into the finished gadget like tablets and generic game console controllers.
You're recommending an Apple product for a small 3rd World business? The cost of a single Apple deskotp product is enough to buy a couple of low-spec PCs and the Windows licenses that come with it (no need to "pirate" the OS and basic office apps). If you want to be chained to proprietary solutions, a Windows PC is definitely the lesser evil, and easier to convert if you're a FOSS zealot.
You should have gotten rid of your wife's high heels. The simple explanation is that your daughter is taking after your wife. Now if your wife dresses like a coal miner, and your daughter still fancies Barbie, only then can we safely assume that "girly" things are indeed baked into some girls' DNA.
Whenever I hear somebody say the future is in Internet-worked computing, I remember the aliens that tried to conquer Earth in the movie Independence Day. One of the seemingly laughable premises in the movie is that uploading a virus into one of the alien mother ships could bring down the whole invasion force. Apparently the aliens had an extremely centralized comand-and-control infrastructure. And guess what, we're heading in that direction when a glitch in one "cloud" provider is going to bring down our whole computing infrastructure, if not our whole civilization.
Corrected headline: Comcast predicts usage cap within 5 years
Story in a nutshell: Comcast exec PROMISES bandwith cap within 5 years.
When a vested interest "predicts" something, you can be sure they're working hard to get there.
"I don't think it's the confinement. Wolves which range hundreds of miles are kept in captivity by humans in small areas (dogs), and they live far longer with humans than in the wild."
Through the process of artificial selection, dogs evolved into creatures that could tolerate dog houses. Could you say the same thing for the individual whales that were captured and confined. Maybe after a few hundred generations, we could breed domesticated whales that can wear collars and bark. But for now it's torture keeping them in virtual life imprisonment.
Hell, the Japanese who kill whales to eat them are much more merciful. At least they don't make them suffer for long.
"just like the post-script ecosystem didn't got taken over by HP."
Wrong analogy. Two things:
1. PostScript was developed by Adobe
2. HP never came close to dominating the PostScript printer market, prefering to sell printers that used its own Printer Command Language. Apple was for a time the dominant PostScript printer vendor with its Laserwriter series. PostScript printers now tend to be niche products favored mostly by manufacturers of high-end imagesetters used to produce the print-ready layouts of fashion magazines, art books and the like.
3. Adobe practically opensourced PostScript, allowing or tolerating "clones" like Ghostscript. The ocumentation was in any case easily available for the price of a trade paperback. Whatever one might say about the quality of its products, Adobe was certainly less evil than many vendors of proprietary solutions that would sue potential competitors to the ground.
Most people connect to cellphone networks via a cellphone. No surprise in that. So interpreting the stats to mean mobile rulez! might not be far from the truth. However the implication that every single person in the world has a cellphone is obviously false. The supposed 1:1 ratio could easily be reduced by people owning multiple cellphones or cellphone would multiple SIM slots. This also makes the highly unlikely assumption that babies have transmitters attached to their hi-tech cribs.
Disclosure: I don't own a cellphone.
And video games, idols (pop stars) and other distractions!
Okay, I'm being half serious. There are other reasons for the fall in birth rates. But if the kids get bombarded with entertainment when they're not being forced through cram schools, etc, romantic relationships take a back seat. You're too busy studying, working or shutting yourself off in your room playing some online RPG or worse a visual novel where you get your choice of cute 2D girls.
"The entire OS installed in less than 2 minutes. Talk about *fast*. It it were not for the lack of decent software, I would make the move today."
Not surprised. Less software to install = faster time to install.
Gnome Shell, in its default configuration, is good for neither desktop nor mobile. Proof the it's not the best UI for the desktop is the way RHEL 7.0 has Gnome Shell set up to look like a polished version of the Gnome 2 desktop.
So in terms of usability, even the chief financial backer of Gnome thinks Gnome Shell needs serious work to be a pleasant experience for users other than its core developers and designers.
No, the biggest thing for me is the signed packages. For a security-focused distribution, the lack of signed packages seemed quite ironic.
"Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack stop the theft of our nationâ(TM)s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks."
I'm troubled by the mention of "intellectual property" in Daniel's post. I'd understand it if he restricted his description to theft of military or intelligence secrets, but does this vague term mean the US intelligence agencies are now in the service of the entertainment industry?
Somebody has already cooked up a term for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're no longer paranoid. Being concerned about your privacy became just a wee bit more fashionable. Why surrender more data to Big Data that will only end up in the data dungeons of the three letter agencies?
I typed Britney Spears and got only two results. Fail! I've had better luck with Pirate Bay.
Russia, land of the dashcam. Google can then market as a dashcam for the face.
...can also get a good education.
(Whoops, pressed the the enter key too quickly.)
It sounds good in principle. Pick the best and give them the best education possible. But in practice, we'd only be selecting for those who do well in timed exams. What about the "gifted" child who fails the exam because he or she has exam fright? Or what about the child who's very good in math but very poor in language that he can't understand those tricky word problems?
And what about the late-bloomers? Those who first show their genius when, say, they reach their teens?
For me, it's still better to improve education overall, rather than concentrate funds on presumably "gifted" children. This way, those chldren who don't get selected
"Some people still like to own their media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads."
LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads. If you're going to rip your *future* AD collection, why bother? I'm sure there'll always be the usual pirate sources ready to download without the need for some DRM crack or whatnot.
Given Microsoft's name recognition among the masses this has the potential to wipe out Android and other free beer operating systems or at least seriously reduce their footprint. Are there any anti-trust implications here, given that Google is doing the same with Android? This would probably have little to zero impact on Apple or the users of "fringe" Linux distros (read: non-Ubuntu).
"The same question could be asked today, not in some vague future "when it becomes cheap." Why do people by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola cans, when the generic brand fizzy brown stuff (that performs equally well in blind tests) costs half as much? "
Not quite the comparison to make. The question should rather be phrased: Which would you rather drink, Coca-Cola or a beverage you juiced yourself from the fruits in your back yard?
You'd probably pick Coca-cola or some other store-bought drink if you don't have the time (you're to busy to operate and wash the blender). This besides the fact that it's really more expensive (even if more nutritious) to blend your own juice, rather than pop a bottle or can.
However, most people I suspect would trust the home-grown juice than Coca-cola. So when the time comes that home users can cheaply and realiably print their own generic copies of famous/expensive 3D object, I expect people to choose the stuff they themselves made. Convenience will trump brand loyalty.
"Manufacturing for public sale to make a profit is easy to track, but tracking private use is nearly impossible."
For now. When it becomes possible to actually print a Ferrari from your desktop, the "nearly impossible" tracking of everything we do would also become possible, with literally dirt cheap sensors installed everywhere.
That's unless we pass stringent privacy laws to protect against NSA/Big Data-style surveillance of random individuals. Or maybe it'll be a losing battle, and whether you're an exhibitionist or not you'll have your naked photos/sex videos archived somewhere in the 'Net.
But there are other bodily pleasures you can enjoy besides Food, and it also begins with the letter F. So I'm alll for a "post-food" diet if that would really make me feel younger and, uhm, sexier. As for this particular man's claims, I'm sticking to my fish and veggies.
Throw away copyright laws ... at least as far as individual consumers are concerned. This is the future. Pretty soon we'd have recording gadgets so small and much more inconspicuous that only a TSA-style patdown/scanning will reveal them. So why bother imposing draconian copyright laws unless they're against those ripoff "artists" who try to sell other people's works for profit?
"Labelling your opponents "trolls" will be the new corporate propaganda term, just like labeling copyright infringement "pirates"
Nice try, but wrong comparison. Let me tabulate the terms you're comparing for clarity:
copyright infringement (alleged crime) : pirate (accused)
patent infringement (alleged crime) : patent troll (accuser)
See? A "pirate" is the person or party accused of copyright infringment. A "patent troll" on the other hand is the person or party that accuses (somebody else) of patent infringement.
So a "pirate" is the alleged perpetrator of the copyright infringment, while the patent troll is the alleged "victim" of the patent infringement. You can't be called a patent troll if you don't use or abuse the legal system. A pirate on the other hand is presumed to be operating outside the legal system until he or she is brought to court.