Recommended as well. They cost more but if you ever need to help from a real person it is totally worth the money. Fastmail use them and have a story about a rather crazy attempt to steal their domains on their blog. Being able to talk to a real person at gandi and put a stop to things saved their bacon.
As for the comment about their DNS, to be fair to them, they are really just a domain registrar. If you want a full service provider with hosting etc then they aren't the people for you (this focus is one of the reasons I like them). I run AWS anyway so I just want my domain to not be in the hands of a giant mega corporation stuffed full of marketing goons.
Oh, BTW, I got on to them because they are the registrar Amazon uses if you register a domain through AWS.
Also, if you aren't running a really popular site, and haven't paid much for you domain, to be fair it doesn't really matter and enom or godaddy should be fine. I paid about $2k for one of my domains (damn you hugedomains), and just wanted to get out of the cesspool of marketing and ripoff merchants that is the domain name world.
No, but normally the sociopath does not surround himself with other sociopaths - compliant co-dependents work best because you can scream at them and they will do whatever you want. After a bit of screaming they are so eager to please you that they will spend their lives pre-emptively trying to keep you happy. It's pretty much how the corporate world works.
Even if someone higher up at Hertz had a devious plan to install these cameras into every vehicle and covertly film all their customers, there is no way in hell that any rental car company I know of could implement such a system. Most of the time they can barely get you the car you supposedly booked for the price you were quoted. I once got stuck in a huge mismanaged queue at Avis for an hour and when I finally got to the front they told me a car was not available. When I said I had booked one so how could this be, the customer service person informed me that I was half an hour late so if I wanted to ensure I got a car I should turn up on time.
I also have no idea why my collecting a car I have booked requires so much typing on their behalf. It is like they are writing a short dissertation on me, every time I rent a car. Surely if I rent another car the same month the amount of typing can be reduced. I have caught a glimpse of their green character based IT terminals and I am pretty certain there is no secret skunk works at Hertz HQ working on anything other than more confusing ways to charge collision damage waivers.
Yeah, this seems a bit weird. They are claiming the benefit of LiDAR is that it can penetrate vegetation, yet I can't really see how that works. The issue with high frequency EM is that it is easily absorbed/reflected by pretty much anything. I would have thought since they are just doing terrain mapping (as far as I can tell from the very vague article) that something like mm wave radar would be a better choice.
It reminds me of the 'sting' operation a newspaper did on the occupy protesters, where they claimed that a thermal camera showed there was nobody inside their tents at night. Most people just assume thermal camera means x-ray vision. Some scientists tried to explain that a thin piece of material is just as capable of blocking IR light as visible light but most people have watched too much hollywood science to care about such factual information.
I held out for quite a few years, but eventually realised most of my time (and job security) came from my C abilities. In the end I bit the bullet and just became a software dev. It pays a whole lot better, is much easier, and there seems to be plenty of demand for good devs for the foreseeable future. Most of my classmates either moved over long ago, or are doing management now.
Still really miss EE. Was some good times. Personally I blame Apple for killing hardware with their one product to rule them all.
I seriously doubt this is going to have applications in people's smart phones. The limiting factor to pretty much all mobile performance issues is battery capacity, and being able to put more power through a certain mm^2 of silicon isn't going to help if you can't supply that power in the first place. This looks like a PR stunt by a component maker. These sorts of efficient heat pipes certainly have their place in many types of electronics products, most certainly in laptops and maybe even the next line of crossover tablet devices. But for smartphones I think we will need to wait for a significant improvement in battery tech before we have enough heat to waste that these things become any more useful than just sticking the chip to a big aluminium case like Apple does.
Since Steve Jobs came back Apple has only introduced proprietary connectors when there was a really good reason for them to do so. Lightning was introduced because Micro USB was considered sub-par by Apple. And let's face it: There is some truth to that. Lightning is sturdier, easyer to handle, has more data throughput and IIRC more relyable electrical specs. Say about Apple what you want, but unlike quite a few other tech companies they actually know what they are doing and why and they don't short-change hardware design decisions. Their market evaluation seems to prove them right.
In a nutshell: If Apple decides that USB C is worthwhile and offers upsides vis-a-vis lightning, it could be that this actually is the case, and Lightning actually is on the way out.
As for Thunderbolt: Unlike what quite a few tech experts think, it is *not* an Apple specific spec, but a standardised port. It's only that Apple likes to use it more than any other vendor.
One issue is that this has much higher performance than lightning - it's essentially thunderbolt performance in a lightning style reversible, high power and robust connector package. I think they just jumped the gun with lightning. Peripheral manufacturers weren't ready and even with it going into every Macbook it gained little traction. With USB-C manufacturers can move to it immediately and quite cheaply by just doing a connector change. Later on if they need the new high speed capabilities they can do the work to implement it while continuing to be backwards compatible. This should speed its adoption and I think Apple saw the writing on the wall (i.e. nobody was going to bother making thunderbolt peripherals once USB-C was here). Interestingly, Apple kinda secured the standard's demise by showing the value of a more robust physical connector in Lighting. If they hadn't done that USB-C might not look that different from the thunderbolt port.
It's because they have no deemed economic value. Until you have been made unemployed you really can not understand how brutally our system is geared towards assessing a human being's total value solely on their economic utility. I think in the end we will look back on this time and see this pervasive thinking as truly barbaric, and generally only suitable for sociopaths and narcissists.
I really encourage people to read more about negotiation and understanding people. Also read up on political ideology and try to really get a sense for understanding how others could have believed stuff that we now so obviously know is wrong now (such as eugenics or the flat earth).
The reality is as a technical person you have an incredible capacity to walk around and all over anyone you really want, because most people cannot think more than one step ahead or in a strategic way. It really is true. MBAs are even worse, as you can get the steps they are going to take out of whatever was popular in last year's Harvard Business Review. The trouble with most smart people is they see this sort of game playing as pointless and want to believe the world is rational and logical. This produces all these complaints about a broken system. You're not going to be able to change the system, and even if you could, you're not going to to dedicate your life to improving HR processes for other people.
I spent a decade as a smart but ignorant tech person, wondering why the world didn't work like a big rational machine. When I finally found out that the world never has and never will work in such a way, I could finally start to learn out what irrational forces move people around. Oddly, these are actually quite logical.
Realise you're in a big game. Learn how to play it, and then you can ponder what the whole meaning of life is anyway once you have conquered the money side of things.
Interesting project, and some of their samples look quite cool. Only issue I see is that it is EL tech, which requires a rather annoying high voltage step up inverter to drive (around 200V). You used to be able to buy EL sheets that you could cut holes and stuff in to create custom displays, which was quite cool, so this is sort of just a variation of that. EL fell out of favour once LED took over as it was harder to drive and not particularly efficient. Anyway looks like it could be quite a cool system for getting people enthused about engineering/electronics if they can make the print system cheap enough.
Looks like the current situation is they are classified as model aircraft - so limits to where they can operate, must have human operator and line of site.
Personally I think this cautious approach is a good way forward. Done right drones have a lot of potential, done badly it could really hold back the industry. Entrepreneurs need to be aware that it's not just about having a good idea, its about selling it to everyone else, including the wider society in which the idea survives. Otherwise you end up with Google Glass.
My god slashdot seems to have no technical people left.
Who said anything about GPS receivers transmitting signals? We are talking about the actual satellite constellation here - the bit in the sky - and the capabilities it might have, not the receivers on the ground. Assuming that a military designed system of medium orbit satellites that provides continuous line of sight coverage over the entire surface of the earth, does nothing more than send out L1/L2 navigation chip codes is probably quite insulting to the US/Russian/Chinese military industrial complexes.
Also, Iridium didn't track the plane by having a bunch of guys watching it on a big TV screen. They just used data from standard comms logs generated by their network. I don't think it is inconceivable that a section of a military system somewhere tracks ground to space comms events and logs some data about them. It's not even that much data in the civilian arena. My point really was that from a technical feasibility point of view, it seems quite plausible that a military somewhere does know more about the location of those Iridium handshakes, but then again, like with Malaysia not caring about the radar returns, maybe we are just totally overestimating the world's military capabilities.
BTW, does anyone know a site where people actually have technical conversations rather than these endless 'I didn't read your post properly, but you're wrong because blah blah blah' rants. It would be nice to believe there are still some engineers etc out there interested in discussing the tech aspect of these sorts of events.
One thing I wondered about is whether some country's military has a better fix on where the plane went down (the last partial handshake). Iridium only have a very sparse satellite array and hence could only generate very rough ranging information. But it seems inconceivable to me that many of the military constellations (e.g. GPS, GLONASS) do not have the capability to triangulate a well defined Iridium signal. I would have thought doing this would be bread and butter for them.
I wouldn't expect anyone to step up and talk about this 'capability', but I would have thought someone could have quietly nudged things towards a set of coordinates earlier on. I guess there is a lot of game playing when it comes to acknowledging any sort of military capability but it intrigues me to think that somewhere there could be people who have an accurate plot of that aircraft's journey.
Having said that, one of the revelations of the whole event is that you can fly an unidentified jumbo jet across the Malaysian peninsula, have it detected by expensive military radar, and then have the military do precisely nothing about it.
The article seems to be full of PR, but from what it describes I'm guessing this is a delta sigma front end and they are selecting off a suitably placed alias to do the modulation. If they have managed to get the noise shaping right then conceivably a standard antenna could suffice as the aliasing filter, which would be quite an achievement. Also getting the timing and jitter performance right are tricky issues they would have to be solved in a low cost product.
I can't imagine what else they could mean by all digital, and if they've built this then it is actually quite an exciting development for low power radio. Definitely could bring the cost of systems down by a lot.
not sure how packet injection breaks into my computer.
It's not about hacking into your computer. It's about the fact that the govt spy agencies had quite sophisticated spying infrastructure installed into key parts of the internet. Why this is a surprise to anybody is beyond me. Other than the negative PR value (which I'm sure some 'we're protecting you from pedophiles rhetoric' would fix I don't even know why the govt particularly cared if people found out.
As someone who has done a hardware startup, I really respect these guys for getting to where they did. It is a tough world out there, and getting your idea out there and into a form people want is a lot of work.
However, and this is very specific to the UK, it appears that the trouble they had is that they just didn’t hire any engineers. I mean proper degree educated EEs (to be fair, they only really needed one). This is a chronic issue in the UK and I believe seems to have stemmed from the Thatcher era attacks on anybody who did something practical.
For example, their website keeps talking about Arduino. I’m all for Arduino, in its ability to encourage more people to learn about hardware, but in the context of a serious company, asking for Arduino people is like trying to hire a car designer by advertising for someone who likes to drive cars. They also talk about eventually hiring a hardware product manager. I’m sorry, but that is a very simple product. They don’t need another manager, they just needed an EE who could get the thing going.
Anyway I don’t really know how the UK can solve this problem, which is why I do software development these days.
that U2 live in the past. Joshua Tree, Boy, and even Zooropa were great albums, because they spoke to a specific time and place. I'm not a huge fan of their music, but I can certainly appreciate what they brought to pop music at the time. For that reason I'll listen to them every now and again.
But this latest Apple album is just an attempt to re-do Joshua Tree. I mean, if the Edge started playing the Keytar and succeeded in making it cool, or Bono stopped writing songs with abstract lyrics, that could be new and interesting. But if people want to listen to Joshua tree, everyone can listen to Joshua tree.
The best classics are classics because they encompass a specific time and place. U2 had their time and place, did it really well, and now they either need to do something completely new (at the risk of their legacy), or go enjoy their royalty cheques for the rest of their lives, doing reunion shows whenever Bono needs a new private jet.
It is just a display model, but this is actually one of the applications of 3D printing worth getting excited about.
Jet engines are a good candidate because they are low volume, high margin, and the current designs are compromised somewhat by the existing manufacturing technologies available. The ability to make more complex aerodynamic forms, create single parts with variations in material composition throughout, and the potential to speed up development and testing of different designs is huge for this industry.
However there are still a lot of issues to work through, and I’m not sure how they are ever going to produce a sintered turbine blade that can perform as well as an existing one. I would imagine much of their research is going into this area but these are tough problems to solve.
Make sense. Chinese wages and standards of living have been increasing rapidly over the last few years, while the political systems/economies in parts of South East Asia are becoming developed enough to provide confidence to foreign investment.
Will be interesting to see how China deals with this shift. Hopefully not in the western way, with all the bosses patting themselves on the back for lowering costs while the consumer economy falls apart around them.
Where your argument breaks down is that while robots have the potential to significantly increase economic output, the IP used to build the robots, the raw material source they consume, and land humans live on are all limited resources.
As the cost of produced goods and services falls, the relative cost of anything naturally limited increases (you could say it is staying the same but everything else is deflating around it). This makes it harder and harder for those involved in the production side of things to acquire any capital of their own, causing a massive inequality problem. My observation is that the economy deals with this by spitting people out and creating an underclass that cannot engage in the otherwise rapidly growing economy. We call most of these people 'poor' and say they just need to work harder.
I used to agree with you on the basic income, but now I'm not so sure. The mistake a lot of socialists tend to make is assuming that humans will go do some thing useful with their time if they have no need to work to survive. I think this is not a valid general assumption, and if it isn't then socialism eats itself (interestingly in the same way capitalism eats itself due to greed), not due to an inability to supply the needs of the population, but due to social breakdown.
These days I'm starting to think the best solution is to democratise knowledge on a grand scale. In the end the real driver of growth is not a guy who knows how to make houses but only accepts a limited few 'apprentices' into the guild that produces them. It is when the knowledge required to make houses is distributed to everyone. It is bizarre to me that while our technology economy is based on the body of knowledge put together over centuries by others that we use for free, it has now become almost dominated by this notion that if I come up with an idea nobody else in the entire world should be able to use it but me for the next twenty years.
I remember reading about how Jonny Ives felt Samsung had stolen time he could have spent with his family by infringing Apple patents. I just find this level of arrogance amazing. Sure, say they 'stole' billions of dollars from you and moan about that, but trying to elevate your ability to make rounded rectangles into some kind of Herculean sacrifice that can never be sufficiently rewarded, even with $100million in your bank account, just shows the problems our economy is going to face as technology becomes more important and those who own the rights to it become more intoxicated with their own egos.
The heart of the equality argument in the face of automation is the ownership of knowledge. That is where we need to be looking for solutions.
Swinging your head around to shoot at the zombie behind you with that contraption stuck to your head is probably not going to be quite the immersive experience this article makes it out to be...
Slashdot Mirror
Recommended as well. They cost more but if you ever need to help from a real person it is totally worth the money. Fastmail use them and have a story about a rather crazy attempt to steal their domains on their blog. Being able to talk to a real person at gandi and put a stop to things saved their bacon.
As for the comment about their DNS, to be fair to them, they are really just a domain registrar. If you want a full service provider with hosting etc then they aren't the people for you (this focus is one of the reasons I like them). I run AWS anyway so I just want my domain to not be in the hands of a giant mega corporation stuffed full of marketing goons.
Oh, BTW, I got on to them because they are the registrar Amazon uses if you register a domain through AWS.
Also, if you aren't running a really popular site, and haven't paid much for you domain, to be fair it doesn't really matter and enom or godaddy should be fine. I paid about $2k for one of my domains (damn you hugedomains), and just wanted to get out of the cesspool of marketing and ripoff merchants that is the domain name world.
No, but normally the sociopath does not surround himself with other sociopaths - compliant co-dependents work best because you can scream at them and they will do whatever you want. After a bit of screaming they are so eager to please you that they will spend their lives pre-emptively trying to keep you happy. It's pretty much how the corporate world works.
Even if someone higher up at Hertz had a devious plan to install these cameras into every vehicle and covertly film all their customers, there is no way in hell that any rental car company I know of could implement such a system. Most of the time they can barely get you the car you supposedly booked for the price you were quoted. I once got stuck in a huge mismanaged queue at Avis for an hour and when I finally got to the front they told me a car was not available. When I said I had booked one so how could this be, the customer service person informed me that I was half an hour late so if I wanted to ensure I got a car I should turn up on time.
I also have no idea why my collecting a car I have booked requires so much typing on their behalf. It is like they are writing a short dissertation on me, every time I rent a car. Surely if I rent another car the same month the amount of typing can be reduced. I have caught a glimpse of their green character based IT terminals and I am pretty certain there is no secret skunk works at Hertz HQ working on anything other than more confusing ways to charge collision damage waivers.
Yeah, this seems a bit weird. They are claiming the benefit of LiDAR is that it can penetrate vegetation, yet I can't really see how that works. The issue with high frequency EM is that it is easily absorbed/reflected by pretty much anything. I would have thought since they are just doing terrain mapping (as far as I can tell from the very vague article) that something like mm wave radar would be a better choice.
It reminds me of the 'sting' operation a newspaper did on the occupy protesters, where they claimed that a thermal camera showed there was nobody inside their tents at night. Most people just assume thermal camera means x-ray vision. Some scientists tried to explain that a thin piece of material is just as capable of blocking IR light as visible light but most people have watched too much hollywood science to care about such factual information.
I held out for quite a few years, but eventually realised most of my time (and job security) came from my C abilities. In the end I bit the bullet and just became a software dev. It pays a whole lot better, is much easier, and there seems to be plenty of demand for good devs for the foreseeable future. Most of my classmates either moved over long ago, or are doing management now. Still really miss EE. Was some good times. Personally I blame Apple for killing hardware with their one product to rule them all.
I seriously doubt this is going to have applications in people's smart phones. The limiting factor to pretty much all mobile performance issues is battery capacity, and being able to put more power through a certain mm^2 of silicon isn't going to help if you can't supply that power in the first place. This looks like a PR stunt by a component maker. These sorts of efficient heat pipes certainly have their place in many types of electronics products, most certainly in laptops and maybe even the next line of crossover tablet devices. But for smartphones I think we will need to wait for a significant improvement in battery tech before we have enough heat to waste that these things become any more useful than just sticking the chip to a big aluminium case like Apple does.
Correction - jumped the gun with Thunderbolt.
Since Steve Jobs came back Apple has only introduced proprietary connectors when there was a really good reason for them to do so. Lightning was introduced because Micro USB was considered sub-par by Apple. And let's face it: There is some truth to that. Lightning is sturdier, easyer to handle, has more data throughput and IIRC more relyable electrical specs. Say about Apple what you want, but unlike quite a few other tech companies they actually know what they are doing and why and they don't short-change hardware design decisions. Their market evaluation seems to prove them right.
In a nutshell: If Apple decides that USB C is worthwhile and offers upsides vis-a-vis lightning, it could be that this actually is the case, and Lightning actually is on the way out.
As for Thunderbolt: Unlike what quite a few tech experts think, it is *not* an Apple specific spec, but a standardised port. It's only that Apple likes to use it more than any other vendor.
One issue is that this has much higher performance than lightning - it's essentially thunderbolt performance in a lightning style reversible, high power and robust connector package. I think they just jumped the gun with lightning. Peripheral manufacturers weren't ready and even with it going into every Macbook it gained little traction. With USB-C manufacturers can move to it immediately and quite cheaply by just doing a connector change. Later on if they need the new high speed capabilities they can do the work to implement it while continuing to be backwards compatible. This should speed its adoption and I think Apple saw the writing on the wall (i.e. nobody was going to bother making thunderbolt peripherals once USB-C was here). Interestingly, Apple kinda secured the standard's demise by showing the value of a more robust physical connector in Lighting. If they hadn't done that USB-C might not look that different from the thunderbolt port.
It's because they have no deemed economic value. Until you have been made unemployed you really can not understand how brutally our system is geared towards assessing a human being's total value solely on their economic utility. I think in the end we will look back on this time and see this pervasive thinking as truly barbaric, and generally only suitable for sociopaths and narcissists.
I really encourage people to read more about negotiation and understanding people. Also read up on political ideology and try to really get a sense for understanding how others could have believed stuff that we now so obviously know is wrong now (such as eugenics or the flat earth).
The reality is as a technical person you have an incredible capacity to walk around and all over anyone you really want, because most people cannot think more than one step ahead or in a strategic way. It really is true. MBAs are even worse, as you can get the steps they are going to take out of whatever was popular in last year's Harvard Business Review. The trouble with most smart people is they see this sort of game playing as pointless and want to believe the world is rational and logical. This produces all these complaints about a broken system. You're not going to be able to change the system, and even if you could, you're not going to to dedicate your life to improving HR processes for other people.
I spent a decade as a smart but ignorant tech person, wondering why the world didn't work like a big rational machine. When I finally found out that the world never has and never will work in such a way, I could finally start to learn out what irrational forces move people around. Oddly, these are actually quite logical.
Realise you're in a big game. Learn how to play it, and then you can ponder what the whole meaning of life is anyway once you have conquered the money side of things.
From the paper.
Interesting project, and some of their samples look quite cool. Only issue I see is that it is EL tech, which requires a rather annoying high voltage step up inverter to drive (around 200V). You used to be able to buy EL sheets that you could cut holes and stuff in to create custom displays, which was quite cool, so this is sort of just a variation of that. EL fell out of favour once LED took over as it was harder to drive and not particularly efficient. Anyway looks like it could be quite a cool system for getting people enthused about engineering/electronics if they can make the print system cheap enough.
Looks like the current situation is they are classified as model aircraft - so limits to where they can operate, must have human operator and line of site.
Personally I think this cautious approach is a good way forward. Done right drones have a lot of potential, done badly it could really hold back the industry. Entrepreneurs need to be aware that it's not just about having a good idea, its about selling it to everyone else, including the wider society in which the idea survives. Otherwise you end up with Google Glass.
Correction - Imarsat.
My god slashdot seems to have no technical people left.
Who said anything about GPS receivers transmitting signals? We are talking about the actual satellite constellation here - the bit in the sky - and the capabilities it might have, not the receivers on the ground. Assuming that a military designed system of medium orbit satellites that provides continuous line of sight coverage over the entire surface of the earth, does nothing more than send out L1/L2 navigation chip codes is probably quite insulting to the US/Russian/Chinese military industrial complexes.
Also, Iridium didn't track the plane by having a bunch of guys watching it on a big TV screen. They just used data from standard comms logs generated by their network. I don't think it is inconceivable that a section of a military system somewhere tracks ground to space comms events and logs some data about them. It's not even that much data in the civilian arena. My point really was that from a technical feasibility point of view, it seems quite plausible that a military somewhere does know more about the location of those Iridium handshakes, but then again, like with Malaysia not caring about the radar returns, maybe we are just totally overestimating the world's military capabilities.
BTW, does anyone know a site where people actually have technical conversations rather than these endless 'I didn't read your post properly, but you're wrong because blah blah blah' rants. It would be nice to believe there are still some engineers etc out there interested in discussing the tech aspect of these sorts of events.
One thing I wondered about is whether some country's military has a better fix on where the plane went down (the last partial handshake). Iridium only have a very sparse satellite array and hence could only generate very rough ranging information. But it seems inconceivable to me that many of the military constellations (e.g. GPS, GLONASS) do not have the capability to triangulate a well defined Iridium signal. I would have thought doing this would be bread and butter for them.
I wouldn't expect anyone to step up and talk about this 'capability', but I would have thought someone could have quietly nudged things towards a set of coordinates earlier on. I guess there is a lot of game playing when it comes to acknowledging any sort of military capability but it intrigues me to think that somewhere there could be people who have an accurate plot of that aircraft's journey.
Having said that, one of the revelations of the whole event is that you can fly an unidentified jumbo jet across the Malaysian peninsula, have it detected by expensive military radar, and then have the military do precisely nothing about it.
The article seems to be full of PR, but from what it describes I'm guessing this is a delta sigma front end and they are selecting off a suitably placed alias to do the modulation. If they have managed to get the noise shaping right then conceivably a standard antenna could suffice as the aliasing filter, which would be quite an achievement. Also getting the timing and jitter performance right are tricky issues they would have to be solved in a low cost product. I can't imagine what else they could mean by all digital, and if they've built this then it is actually quite an exciting development for low power radio. Definitely could bring the cost of systems down by a lot.
not sure how packet injection breaks into my computer.
It's not about hacking into your computer. It's about the fact that the govt spy agencies had quite sophisticated spying infrastructure installed into key parts of the internet. Why this is a surprise to anybody is beyond me. Other than the negative PR value (which I'm sure some 'we're protecting you from pedophiles rhetoric' would fix I don't even know why the govt particularly cared if people found out.
As someone who has done a hardware startup, I really respect these guys for getting to where they did. It is a tough world out there, and getting your idea out there and into a form people want is a lot of work.
However, and this is very specific to the UK, it appears that the trouble they had is that they just didn’t hire any engineers. I mean proper degree educated EEs (to be fair, they only really needed one). This is a chronic issue in the UK and I believe seems to have stemmed from the Thatcher era attacks on anybody who did something practical.
For example, their website keeps talking about Arduino. I’m all for Arduino, in its ability to encourage more people to learn about hardware, but in the context of a serious company, asking for Arduino people is like trying to hire a car designer by advertising for someone who likes to drive cars. They also talk about eventually hiring a hardware product manager. I’m sorry, but that is a very simple product. They don’t need another manager, they just needed an EE who could get the thing going.
Anyway I don’t really know how the UK can solve this problem, which is why I do software development these days.
that U2 live in the past. Joshua Tree, Boy, and even Zooropa were great albums, because they spoke to a specific time and place. I'm not a huge fan of their music, but I can certainly appreciate what they brought to pop music at the time. For that reason I'll listen to them every now and again.
But this latest Apple album is just an attempt to re-do Joshua Tree. I mean, if the Edge started playing the Keytar and succeeded in making it cool, or Bono stopped writing songs with abstract lyrics, that could be new and interesting. But if people want to listen to Joshua tree, everyone can listen to Joshua tree.
The best classics are classics because they encompass a specific time and place. U2 had their time and place, did it really well, and now they either need to do something completely new (at the risk of their legacy), or go enjoy their royalty cheques for the rest of their lives, doing reunion shows whenever Bono needs a new private jet.
It is just a display model, but this is actually one of the applications of 3D printing worth getting excited about.
Jet engines are a good candidate because they are low volume, high margin, and the current designs are compromised somewhat by the existing manufacturing technologies available. The ability to make more complex aerodynamic forms, create single parts with variations in material composition throughout, and the potential to speed up development and testing of different designs is huge for this industry.
However there are still a lot of issues to work through, and I’m not sure how they are ever going to produce a sintered turbine blade that can perform as well as an existing one. I would imagine much of their research is going into this area but these are tough problems to solve.
Make sense. Chinese wages and standards of living have been increasing rapidly over the last few years, while the political systems/economies in parts of South East Asia are becoming developed enough to provide confidence to foreign investment. Will be interesting to see how China deals with this shift. Hopefully not in the western way, with all the bosses patting themselves on the back for lowering costs while the consumer economy falls apart around them.
Where your argument breaks down is that while robots have the potential to significantly increase economic output, the IP used to build the robots, the raw material source they consume, and land humans live on are all limited resources. As the cost of produced goods and services falls, the relative cost of anything naturally limited increases (you could say it is staying the same but everything else is deflating around it). This makes it harder and harder for those involved in the production side of things to acquire any capital of their own, causing a massive inequality problem. My observation is that the economy deals with this by spitting people out and creating an underclass that cannot engage in the otherwise rapidly growing economy. We call most of these people 'poor' and say they just need to work harder.
I used to agree with you on the basic income, but now I'm not so sure. The mistake a lot of socialists tend to make is assuming that humans will go do some thing useful with their time if they have no need to work to survive. I think this is not a valid general assumption, and if it isn't then socialism eats itself (interestingly in the same way capitalism eats itself due to greed), not due to an inability to supply the needs of the population, but due to social breakdown. These days I'm starting to think the best solution is to democratise knowledge on a grand scale. In the end the real driver of growth is not a guy who knows how to make houses but only accepts a limited few 'apprentices' into the guild that produces them. It is when the knowledge required to make houses is distributed to everyone. It is bizarre to me that while our technology economy is based on the body of knowledge put together over centuries by others that we use for free, it has now become almost dominated by this notion that if I come up with an idea nobody else in the entire world should be able to use it but me for the next twenty years. I remember reading about how Jonny Ives felt Samsung had stolen time he could have spent with his family by infringing Apple patents. I just find this level of arrogance amazing. Sure, say they 'stole' billions of dollars from you and moan about that, but trying to elevate your ability to make rounded rectangles into some kind of Herculean sacrifice that can never be sufficiently rewarded, even with $100million in your bank account, just shows the problems our economy is going to face as technology becomes more important and those who own the rights to it become more intoxicated with their own egos. The heart of the equality argument in the face of automation is the ownership of knowledge. That is where we need to be looking for solutions.
Swinging your head around to shoot at the zombie behind you with that contraption stuck to your head is probably not going to be quite the immersive experience this article makes it out to be...