I would choose somewhere with some combination of relative prosperity, underpopulation, and social democratic values: Scandinavia, Canada, New Zealand.
Developing countries, and to some extent the US, are like the Wild West - they're fantastic as long as you're wealthy to buy your way out of the inherent instability.
Is there a race to the bottom in the sense that if all handset makers abandon the low-end market to focus on higher-margin smartphones, competition will increasingly erode those margins?
FWIW if I were making smartphones, the overriding lesson I would take from the iPhone is "make just one model". It's high risk, but selling phones seems to be about marketing first and technology second, so putting all your marketing muscle behind one model doesn't seem like a bad idea.
This article isn't about GMO, but stuff like this is one of the reasons I think we should hold off GMO for the moment. It seems to me we keep discovering things that surprise us -- epigenetics, and the unexpected extent of horizontal gene transfer, to name two recent ones -- which would suggest to me that we ought to limit ourselves to more research rather than large scale exploitation, for a while at least. (There are larger, non-scientific concerns that are the main reason I'm wary of GMO, but this is one.)
Brother, your indignation is most righteous! However, you must remind yourself of the Scripture!
Genesis 1:6 -- 'And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7 And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.'
Let us not be the ones to disrupt the wisdom of His divine order by moving the waters from one side of the firmament to another!
I use Linux mainly to play SW:TOR under Wine. It all works reasonably well, with the exception of sound. I either get full glorious sound, or no sound at all. At first I thought it might relate to me alt-tabbing to something else while the game is loading, but after trying to reproduce it, it seems entirely unpredictable. So for me at least, Linux audio doesn't work just fine.
I think I've been reading too much Oracle/Java hate on slashdot. I misread the first sentence to mean, "Raspberry Pi manages to run Java properly. Oracle seem to be concerned and are working on the problem."
Just for the record... I've used an Ubuntu box for a 5+ years of WoW and now SWTOR, under wine. The proprietary nvidia drivers are easy to install and work well under Linux, and have coped with my moves from 7600 to 9600GT to 460.
Is it masochism? Yes, a bit, but I've not really got much use for a Windows box aside from gaming, so I thought I'd give it a go.
1. Remove the penny, save $11m. 2. All prices now a multiple of 0.02, so divide by two 3. Reintroduce penny - lose $11m but all prices are now half what they were!
(Firstly - thanks for an interesting discussion, even if no one but us is going to read it!)
I hadn't considered (and generally sympathise with) your libertarian approach to trade between people. But I think you've perhaps taken things to extremes.
Firstly, protectionism takes many forms; you seem to be implying an outright ban on the trade of some good, with stiff penalties (coercive force) for breaking the ban, but there are other less coercive forms of protectionism. For example, Brazil imposes something like a 30% tariff on vehicles imported from the Far East, because it has a free trade agreement for vehicles with Mexico and they want to foster those industries. So, any individual Brazilian can still buy a Far Eastern car, and will suffer no threat or punishment from doing so, unless you consider the 30% tax coercive force (in which case presumably you'd apply the same logic to all taxation -- as some in fact do). Subsidies and grants are also generally considered forms of protectionism, but to condemn them universally as morally wrong seems at the very least hasty to me.
Secondly, you seem to be saying that preventing voluntary trade is not just immoral, but trumps all other moral considerations. Suppose you have a thriving, competitive nuclear power industry. But after a few decades it turns out that letting them dump spent fuel into rivers isn't so good, so you regulate its disposal. Suddenly the industry is faced with disposal and decommissioning costs which, being good social democrats horrified by what they've done, they gladly take on. Nevertheless they have to pass on the cost or stop producing, so their kwh become that much more expensive, astronomically so, perhaps. Suppose the cost is such that it is now more economical to buy your kwh from your neighbouring country, who has no such meddlesome regulation, and whose nuclear industry happily continues to pump their waste somewhere out back. Now - should you stand in the way of your citizen who wishes to buy their kwh from your neighbour? If you don't, your industry becomes uncompetitive and vanishes, your neighbour's environment is degraded all the more from supplying the increased demand, and eventually they have you by the balls and can charge what they like for their kwh. Were the few months or years of cheap kwh morally justified?
Maybe you don't like my hypothetical scenario. Consider then the current spat between Taiwan and the US. Taiwan, like several dozen countries around the world, has decided that a certain meat additive is dangerous enough to ban for the sake of its citizens' health. The US (or rather their farming lobby) wants Taiwan to repeal the ban and replace it with a maximum safe value, and is using this as a condition on other trade. If some importer wants to import the meat and sell it, does that trump the value Taiwan places on its citizens' health?
To say protectionism is inherently morally wrong strikes me as a black and white stance that may apply to some theoretical model of trade, but is not particularly useful in the real world.
Protectionism is not "wrong" in any moral sense, just "wrong" according to economic theory.
Protectionism has the short-term effect of increasing prices for local consumers and funneling their money into the pockets of those who own the protected industries. (But if you consider that transfer "wrong", then your problem is with capitalism, not protectionism.) On the other hand, the protected industries provide jobs and livelihoods for their workers which would otherwise vanish, and need to be replaced. Comparative advantage would suggest that other industries would make up the shortfall, but in the real world it's not instantaneous, and workers cannot magically acquire new skills.
In the longer term, protectionism coupled with a locally-competitive market can produce an industry that can then compete on the global market. This is to the benefit of everyone, at home and abroad.
While all the attempts to work around proprietary obstacles (rooting, homebrew, emulation etc) undoubtedly have their merits and utility, I think the real focus ought to be on getting hold of open, documented, standards-based, royalty-free hardware.
Maybe it's a pipe dream, but thousands of man-hours will be spunked off trying to reverse engineer radio chipsets or whatever, which could more fruitfully be spent writing or improving software.
I appreciate that folks are free to spend their time however they like, pursuing whatever floats their boat, that's not the point I'm making. Just that getting one vendor to make one decent fully-open handset would represent such a huge step forwards compared to coercing stuff to half run on the handset of some company whose goals are diametrically opposed to yours.
I agree that they shouldn't, but not for any hardware reason.
Apple no longer need to rely on killer apps like they used to in the days when PageMaker, Photoshop, Protools etc were what sold Macs. They've sidelined the companies that once made those killer apps, and even introduced competing Apple products. I don't think it's controversial to assert that their priorities are clearly Apple and its shareholders first, customers second, developers and other third party ecosystem content and service providers third.
For Microsoft, releasing Office into that environment would give the iPad (i.e. Apple) a not insignificant boost and dent Windows 8 sales. (If you can get Office on either, and that's what you care about, why would you plump for an unproven Windows tablet over an iPad?) Furthermore, they'd be in the awkward position of not wanting it to be too successful, because Apple could pull the plug at any moment, and could therefore make demands (say, for arguments' sake, require that 40% of the price of Office go to Apple rather than the usual 30%).
I can't see that it would make any sense for Microsoft to get itself mired in that swamp. Unlike other developers, they don't have to grit their teeth and bear it because Apple apps are the safest way to make proper money from mobile development -- they make plenty of money from other sources, and can invest in competing with Apple in general instead (via their own mobile OS, tablet hardware etc).
As always of course they probably wouldn't be in this position if they had invested in a culture of open standards and platforms decades ago... but winner takes all seems to be the only game anyone relishes these days.
The Economist ran an article about China's balance of trade last week which included a breakdown of the value (price) of an iPad. Just over 50% was costs, the rest was profit, of which 30% to Apple (the rest to others in the supply chain). Chinese labour costs were minimal at 2%. They could perhaps reduce their profits to redistribute wealth from their execs/shareholders to the workers.
One of the primary uses for my Android phone turns out to be as a streaming music player when I'm lounging in bed. I use the 2player app, which sees the music on my LAN, served via DLNA from a NAS (an iomega box). All of this "just worked" with just about zero setup cost (I had to turn on the "media server" on the NAS and tell it where the music was). At a stroke it rendered the CD player and stack of CDs I used to keep on hand obsolete, doesn't require me to do any syncing to my phone, and gives me access to a library of 2000+ albums.
I'd long ago sold my stereo as I found I listened to music mainly in bed or at my PC, and couldn't really justify a pile of gear in the front room. I do have an AV receiver and "home cinema" speakers (a simple 2.1 setup). Somewhere down the line it turned out that my PVR was also a DLNA client, and I can now listen to all my music in glorious high fidelity in my living room while reading, washing up etc.
Almost by accident, using equipment from three different vendors, it's given me access from various locations round the house to a central library of my stuff. So for me at least, DLNA is not at all a stupid concept. It is exactly what we should all want - someone defining a standard that everyone can implement, instead of requiring us to buy all our hardware and software from one vendor. It may be that the DLNA standard is crappy, but the principle is IMHO completely sound.
I wonder whether the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will use discs at all. Perhaps we are not yet at the point where it is practical to download 30GB of game data, but with incremental background downloads it might be feasible in the 720's timeframe.
Ultimately the OnLive model is clearly what we will all be using, but it'll be a while yet before low-latency broadband is ubiquitous.
I too am a senior developer for a small UK company. For me it is most definitely not the case - our company is run more like a cooperative, with profit sharing etc. However the OP mentions that work has been outsourced; I think this says everything he needs to know about his company's loyalty towards staff (i.e. cheap employee trumps loyal employee).
I can understand that economies of scale may apply, i.e. that shipping many millions of units from China to the USA is more economical than few millions to the UK. It may even be that the cost of red tape, rents, staff etc are higher in the UK than the US average.
However, at the above markup, I could fly to Atlanta return with BA, pop 20 or 30 Apple TVs into a suitcase, and the trip would have paid for itself even after paying import duty. I've no idea why there isn't a booming market in grey Apple imports - presumably it's illegal in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
Those non-Christians aren't going to last long in hell... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslin
Oddly, that's the one place I've always wanted to put Windows.
The last time I investigated, they have a points based system where certain jobs gave a lot of points; IT was one of them.
I would choose somewhere with some combination of relative prosperity, underpopulation, and social democratic values: Scandinavia, Canada, New Zealand.
Developing countries, and to some extent the US, are like the Wild West - they're fantastic as long as you're wealthy to buy your way out of the inherent instability.
Surely this novel method of encrypting data has been patented, can't we discover the culprits from the patent filing?
Is there a race to the bottom in the sense that if all handset makers abandon the low-end market to focus on higher-margin smartphones, competition will increasingly erode those margins?
FWIW if I were making smartphones, the overriding lesson I would take from the iPhone is "make just one model". It's high risk, but selling phones seems to be about marketing first and technology second, so putting all your marketing muscle behind one model doesn't seem like a bad idea.
This article isn't about GMO, but stuff like this is one of the reasons I think we should hold off GMO for the moment. It seems to me we keep discovering things that surprise us -- epigenetics, and the unexpected extent of horizontal gene transfer, to name two recent ones -- which would suggest to me that we ought to limit ourselves to more research rather than large scale exploitation, for a while at least. (There are larger, non-scientific concerns that are the main reason I'm wary of GMO, but this is one.)
Brother, your indignation is most righteous! However, you must remind yourself of the Scripture!
Genesis 1:6 -- 'And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7 And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.'
Let us not be the ones to disrupt the wisdom of His divine order by moving the waters from one side of the firmament to another!
(I'll work on a Raëlian interpretation next.)
I use Linux mainly to play SW:TOR under Wine. It all works reasonably well, with the exception of sound. I either get full glorious sound, or no sound at all. At first I thought it might relate to me alt-tabbing to something else while the game is loading, but after trying to reproduce it, it seems entirely unpredictable. So for me at least, Linux audio doesn't work just fine.
I think I've been reading too much Oracle/Java hate on slashdot. I misread the first sentence to mean, "Raspberry Pi manages to run Java properly. Oracle seem to be concerned and are working on the problem."
Just for the record... I've used an Ubuntu box for a 5+ years of WoW and now SWTOR, under wine. The proprietary nvidia drivers are easy to install and work well under Linux, and have coped with my moves from 7600 to 9600GT to 460.
Is it masochism? Yes, a bit, but I've not really got much use for a Windows box aside from gaming, so I thought I'd give it a go.
1. Remove the penny, save $11m.
2. All prices now a multiple of 0.02, so divide by two
3. Reintroduce penny - lose $11m but all prices are now half what they were!
Here you go: http://bit.ly/GNCkXg
Does "dirty region rendering" de-pixellate Japanese porn or something?
(Firstly - thanks for an interesting discussion, even if no one but us is going to read it!)
I hadn't considered (and generally sympathise with) your libertarian approach to trade between people. But I think you've perhaps taken things to extremes.
Firstly, protectionism takes many forms; you seem to be implying an outright ban on the trade of some good, with stiff penalties (coercive force) for breaking the ban, but there are other less coercive forms of protectionism. For example, Brazil imposes something like a 30% tariff on vehicles imported from the Far East, because it has a free trade agreement for vehicles with Mexico and they want to foster those industries. So, any individual Brazilian can still buy a Far Eastern car, and will suffer no threat or punishment from doing so, unless you consider the 30% tax coercive force (in which case presumably you'd apply the same logic to all taxation -- as some in fact do). Subsidies and grants are also generally considered forms of protectionism, but to condemn them universally as morally wrong seems at the very least hasty to me.
Secondly, you seem to be saying that preventing voluntary trade is not just immoral, but trumps all other moral considerations. Suppose you have a thriving, competitive nuclear power industry. But after a few decades it turns out that letting them dump spent fuel into rivers isn't so good, so you regulate its disposal. Suddenly the industry is faced with disposal and decommissioning costs which, being good social democrats horrified by what they've done, they gladly take on. Nevertheless they have to pass on the cost or stop producing, so their kwh become that much more expensive, astronomically so, perhaps. Suppose the cost is such that it is now more economical to buy your kwh from your neighbouring country, who has no such meddlesome regulation, and whose nuclear industry happily continues to pump their waste somewhere out back. Now - should you stand in the way of your citizen who wishes to buy their kwh from your neighbour? If you don't, your industry becomes uncompetitive and vanishes, your neighbour's environment is degraded all the more from supplying the increased demand, and eventually they have you by the balls and can charge what they like for their kwh. Were the few months or years of cheap kwh morally justified?
Maybe you don't like my hypothetical scenario. Consider then the current spat between Taiwan and the US. Taiwan, like several dozen countries around the world, has decided that a certain meat additive is dangerous enough to ban for the sake of its citizens' health. The US (or rather their farming lobby) wants Taiwan to repeal the ban and replace it with a maximum safe value, and is using this as a condition on other trade. If some importer wants to import the meat and sell it, does that trump the value Taiwan places on its citizens' health?
To say protectionism is inherently morally wrong strikes me as a black and white stance that may apply to some theoretical model of trade, but is not particularly useful in the real world.
Protectionism is not "wrong" in any moral sense, just "wrong" according to economic theory.
Protectionism has the short-term effect of increasing prices for local consumers and funneling their money into the pockets of those who own the protected industries. (But if you consider that transfer "wrong", then your problem is with capitalism, not protectionism.) On the other hand, the protected industries provide jobs and livelihoods for their workers which would otherwise vanish, and need to be replaced. Comparative advantage would suggest that other industries would make up the shortfall, but in the real world it's not instantaneous, and workers cannot magically acquire new skills.
In the longer term, protectionism coupled with a locally-competitive market can produce an industry that can then compete on the global market. This is to the benefit of everyone, at home and abroad.
Of course, he is correct. Most slashdot users only RTFA, right?
While all the attempts to work around proprietary obstacles (rooting, homebrew, emulation etc) undoubtedly have their merits and utility, I think the real focus ought to be on getting hold of open, documented, standards-based, royalty-free hardware.
Maybe it's a pipe dream, but thousands of man-hours will be spunked off trying to reverse engineer radio chipsets or whatever, which could more fruitfully be spent writing or improving software.
I appreciate that folks are free to spend their time however they like, pursuing whatever floats their boat, that's not the point I'm making. Just that getting one vendor to make one decent fully-open handset would represent such a huge step forwards compared to coercing stuff to half run on the handset of some company whose goals are diametrically opposed to yours.
I agree that they shouldn't, but not for any hardware reason.
Apple no longer need to rely on killer apps like they used to in the days when PageMaker, Photoshop, Protools etc were what sold Macs. They've sidelined the companies that once made those killer apps, and even introduced competing Apple products. I don't think it's controversial to assert that their priorities are clearly Apple and its shareholders first, customers second, developers and other third party ecosystem content and service providers third.
For Microsoft, releasing Office into that environment would give the iPad (i.e. Apple) a not insignificant boost and dent Windows 8 sales. (If you can get Office on either, and that's what you care about, why would you plump for an unproven Windows tablet over an iPad?) Furthermore, they'd be in the awkward position of not wanting it to be too successful, because Apple could pull the plug at any moment, and could therefore make demands (say, for arguments' sake, require that 40% of the price of Office go to Apple rather than the usual 30%).
I can't see that it would make any sense for Microsoft to get itself mired in that swamp. Unlike other developers, they don't have to grit their teeth and bear it because Apple apps are the safest way to make proper money from mobile development -- they make plenty of money from other sources, and can invest in competing with Apple in general instead (via their own mobile OS, tablet hardware etc).
As always of course they probably wouldn't be in this position if they had invested in a culture of open standards and platforms decades ago... but winner takes all seems to be the only game anyone relishes these days.
Do we really have to liszt all the puns?
The Economist ran an article about China's balance of trade last week which included a breakdown of the value (price) of an iPad. Just over 50% was costs, the rest was profit, of which 30% to Apple (the rest to others in the supply chain). Chinese labour costs were minimal at 2%. They could perhaps reduce their profits to redistribute wealth from their execs/shareholders to the workers.
http://www.economist.com/node/21543174
One of the primary uses for my Android phone turns out to be as a streaming music player when I'm lounging in bed. I use the 2player app, which sees the music on my LAN, served via DLNA from a NAS (an iomega box). All of this "just worked" with just about zero setup cost (I had to turn on the "media server" on the NAS and tell it where the music was). At a stroke it rendered the CD player and stack of CDs I used to keep on hand obsolete, doesn't require me to do any syncing to my phone, and gives me access to a library of 2000+ albums.
I'd long ago sold my stereo as I found I listened to music mainly in bed or at my PC, and couldn't really justify a pile of gear in the front room. I do have an AV receiver and "home cinema" speakers (a simple 2.1 setup). Somewhere down the line it turned out that my PVR was also a DLNA client, and I can now listen to all my music in glorious high fidelity in my living room while reading, washing up etc.
Almost by accident, using equipment from three different vendors, it's given me access from various locations round the house to a central library of my stuff. So for me at least, DLNA is not at all a stupid concept. It is exactly what we should all want - someone defining a standard that everyone can implement, instead of requiring us to buy all our hardware and software from one vendor. It may be that the DLNA standard is crappy, but the principle is IMHO completely sound.
I wonder whether the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will use discs at all. Perhaps we are not yet at the point where it is practical to download 30GB of game data, but with incremental background downloads it might be feasible in the 720's timeframe.
Ultimately the OnLive model is clearly what we will all be using, but it'll be a while yet before low-latency broadband is ubiquitous.
I too am a senior developer for a small UK company. For me it is most definitely not the case - our company is run more like a cooperative, with profit sharing etc. However the OP mentions that work has been outsourced; I think this says everything he needs to know about his company's loyalty towards staff (i.e. cheap employee trumps loyal employee).
Prices without sales tax/VAT
Mac Mini
US: $599
UK: $728
markup: ~22%
Apple TV:
US: $99
UK: $139
markup: ~39%
I can understand that economies of scale may apply, i.e. that shipping many millions of units from China to the USA is more economical than few millions to the UK. It may even be that the cost of red tape, rents, staff etc are higher in the UK than the US average.
However, at the above markup, I could fly to Atlanta return with BA, pop 20 or 30 Apple TVs into a suitcase, and the trip would have paid for itself even after paying import duty. I've no idea why there isn't a booming market in grey Apple imports - presumably it's illegal in some way.