I suspect all this fiddling with the keyboard to make it ultra-thin, ultra-low movement is all about smoothing the transition to a fully haptic keyboard. This would allow Ives to make the MacBook slightly thinner again, and possibly it could be a second screen (Apple recently filed a patent for this concept).
I don't know what the point of this would be, but I guess they need to keep 'innovating'. In my view, anyone who just wants to consume media is already using a tablet, and now that Apple has accepted stylus input as not an affront to Jobs' legacy, that opens up tablets for many more low-intensity data creation scenarios. The remaining customers who need to enter large amounts of text ultimately want a machine that does that well. And critical to that is having a decent keyboard. So why you would want to compromise what was once an decent keyboard any further on a machine that is only really required by people who have a lot of text to enter is beyond me.
We need another Steve. Tim Cook seems rudderless product wise, and business wise seems to be trying to turn Apple into an LVMH brand. Ives seems to just be on 'thinner and remove ports' autopilot and it is getting ridiculous. I get that a portless-buttonless flat piece of glass might have some kind of intellectual purity, but that doesn't make it a nice product to use. There are plenty of beautiful post-modern architectural masterpieces that I would not like to live inside.
Only an investment banker would think like that. If you take the same technological infrastructure, pull it out of one company and shove it into another while distributing the new shareholding pro-rata, why exactly is there an expectation that suddenly this 'huge windfall' of new value has been created?
No new value has been created. If anything there will be higher costs from duplicated overheads. The fact that despite this the claim is probably correct and shareholders will get a big bump if this happens (just like when a company does a share split) is testament to how screwed up the economy's idea of 'value' is right now.
I mean, what a mockery this makes of all the work the engineering teams have to put in to add new capacity and services. Why don't we retrain all our engineers as financial innovators. Then our society can become really rich right?
Comparing this with AMD and Intel offerings is silly, because you cannot buy a chip from ARM. They simply design the cores (and many manufacturers don't even use their reference implementations - only the ISA). There is nothing really magical about ARM except that if you are wanting to build your own processor you might as well use them because licenses are pretty cheap, there is a large range of support tools available for them, and they incorporate many of the latest features in their designs with little historical cruft attached. It also helps to have a licensor who will happily work with you on your design to reach what ever objectives you're after rather than unleash the lawyers on you.
In other words, they are an excellent place to start, the alternatives aren't that great, and there is little point rolling your own ISA unless you've discovered something pretty incredible.
I think Macron is just posturing here. They won't shut down the plants if renewables have not gained sufficient capacity by that point. More than likely he has seen a report which shows the continuing cost reductions in renewables and storage mean they will be able to shut down those plants in the future anyway, so he has seized this information as a big policy win for himself.
For me the big advantage solar has is that it is not dependent on government or big business. As panel costs and storage keep falling in cost (due to rising economies of scale and improved technology), more and more home owners become incentivised to stick a system on their roof. It will just keep accelerating as this virtuous cycle feeds on itself. The world will move to renewable whether governments do anything about it or not. Just like how the world moved from horse and cart to motor vehicle all by itself (and at a phenomenal pace). Macron is really just stating that fact, and trying to associate himself with the good news.
Indeed. Macron only won 24% of the turned out vote in the first round of the elections (it's difficult to know how much he gained in the second as he was against Le Pen, so potentially a lot of protest/fear votes involved). He certainly does not have the majority of the country behind him, not by a long shot.
It's really this weird English idea where you just 'keep calm and carry on' as the Tory's destroy you country, despite them not winning the popular vote in a semi-democratic First-Past-The-Post system. I don't really get it, but it seems to be ingrained into their culture of civil obedience to those with power (and money).
If your daughter has any Chinese blood in her, I'd be very careful about these statements. China treats all people with ethnic Han roots like Chinese citizens when they're in China, which includes all of the relevant responsibilities.
Not quite true. If you have any foreign blood in you, you are considered 100% foreigner. I am 1/2 Chinese, I can assure you of this fact. It applies from how you are treated by government officials to street scammers (unfortunately).
Also, if you look Chinese and cannot speak Chinese, it simply does not compute for your average Chinese person. My friend has a malaysian Chinese wife and they lived in China for a while (he is half Chinese). He spoke Chinese but his wife didn't. He said even after telling people his wife didn't speak Chinese (and they had recovered from the shock) they would continue to address his wife for the rest of the conversation because such a possibility did not compute for them.
The problem with HR for tech companies, is that there is a LOT of money involved in the employment of tech people. So the industry, at all levels, from HR to recruiters, attracts shiny sales people who want to leech off the money fountain. It is exactly the same reason why there are no decent restaurants in popular tourist spots. All the legitimate restauranteurs get forced out by those with big promises and no moral integrity.
The whole tech HR landscape is a mess but I don't imagine it will get better until the bubble bursts and the money flows elsewhere.
I think it is more fundamental than that: The Android business model depends on harvesting your data, while Apple's does not (yet).
Google can't really change that, since their whole existence depends on watching you on the internet, and Tim Cook has decided to make privacy a key product differentiator for Apple. So Google is fundamentally aligned with Facebook's business model, while Apple is becoming fundamentally opposed. Is there any surprise then that Zuckerberg would rather the world move towards Android?
While I'm no fan of Tim Cook, I do think he is on the right path with the privacy thing. It is one of the main reasons I have little interest in moving over to Android. Google already has so much info on me, it just feels creepy to give them pretty much everything. I also hope he ties Apple up with enough promises to ensure that, like the 'stylus' thing, it becomes very hard for them to back track when (not if) they figure out they can make lots more money by harvesting data.
I think Elon just has this magical view about computers. He seems to have a pretty decent at understanding the limitations of mechanical systems. He hasn't proposed anything rocket based that was not compliant with existing technology. And while the hyperloop has many, many details issues, it is not fundamentally unachievable. It's just that when he starts talking computers he seems to think the x86 in your desktop is a couple iterations away from being a monkey brain or something.
I've seen managers like this before. The problem is, if YOU are the one who decides to cut tests and take shortcuts, and then you send up 50 satellites and they don't work because of those cuts, you career is over. But if the boss is the one who makes that decision and the decision turns out to be a bad one, the issue gets filled under 'well, we had to try' and everyone moves on.
It's really just a product of having a boss with a ginormous ego - you're sorta screwed if you don't and screwed if you do. Eventually if you are the type who can be controlled by bullying and remain a faithful servant (i.e. much like Tim Cook - compliant and not a threat to the alpha), you will become protected by the boss as a useful asset and then life is much easier.
Now Musk has made the risky decision, everyone will be able to move forward knowing their necks are not so exposed if the gamble doesn't work out.
In being the "IT country doctor" in a high-end retirement area, everyone's biggest IT problem I encounter here is keeping track of passwords. If an implanted read-only chip full of large random numbers were offered as an alternative to the whole password mess, 95% of this town would be on it like stink on skunk. No more lists of passwords in spidery handwriting taped onto monitors, no more having to come up with online identifiers cobbled up to satisfy increasingly arcane security rules and then forgotten. To log onto anything from your system, just place the palm of your hand on a USB-connected reader and the app, operating system or website would use the I'th random number on the chip as your password.
For our seasoned citizens, an authentication chip would be the greatest thing since Medicare.
Maybe we could tattoo some kind of unique mark on the skin of our fingers instead? This would be less invasive a procedure. We could call the mark a 'print' that goes on our 'finger'. Nah, would probably never work.
I don't think you can fight this sort of human nature though. I have a cheap espresso machine at home. To make a coffee, I put two scoops into the portafilter, press it down, stick it into the machine and turn the knob to push the water through. 30s later I have espresso. To clean, I take the portafilter off and smack it on the top of the rubbish bin.
How on earth it is considered better or easier to use a capsule machine is beyond me, yet millions of consumers choose to become enslaved to those expensive little non-biodegradable pods every year. It is just the way humans work. If anything it is the scourge of middle class apathy - the same thing that is causing many of the problems with our politics right now.
It always intrigues me how the job market is considered to have 'shortfalls'. There is no shortfall of genetics councillors. There is a shortage of genetics councilors at the current market price for them.
It's also funny how this sort of thing only applies to the little guys. I'm yet to hear a politician or business leader suggest that rising CEO/banker wages are a sign of a lack of competition for executive jobs, and that policies should be taken to increase supply in those professions.
The problem with Mars is there is nothing for us to go to war over on it. Until that problem is solved, Musk is going to have a hard time convincing taxpayers to part with their money for his hippy peace love space mission.
It doesn't even need to be something logical. If the crypto bubble was still in play, he could have launched a USB drive full of bitcoin there, and we would have had BFR by Christmas.
I used to work for a medical device manufacturer. While having to deal with a lot of regulations was certainly annoying (mostly because they are written by lawyers and you need to be a lawyer to really understand them), the great thing about them was that once you complied, you didn't have to worry nearly as much about liability. If there were no regulations (basically a form of self-regulation), then how exactly do you prove that you were not negligent? Maybe you think all the tests you did were enough. Maybe the lawyers you hired for advice thought so too. But you'll never know until it is tested in court. With regulations it is more-or-less black and white as to whether you have done enough to absolve yourself of responsibility for unforeseen events.
Another important point is that regulation creates a powerful barrier to entry in a market. The infrastructure required (in terms of processes and procedures) is immense, and large companies can gain economies of scale for these work. While the tech is enough of a barrier to entry right now, as time goes on this will change for driverless vehicles as well.
Are you being serious? Literally half my EE class just does software development now. The other half are in management. I don't think I know anyone who is doing anything requiring a soldering iron any more.
CS people are not magic. There are good ones around but plenty of extremely rubbish ones as well. The benefit of EE grads tends to be that the course is quite hard (at my university it was the hardest engineering discipline to get into) so it tends to self-select for slightly better candidates.
My guess is that you are not padding out your CV correctly. C++ is really not that hard if you can do embedded C, but you do have to learn a bunch of BS terms for things that you will consider rather trivial. For example, almost all the useful design patterns are just things that you will already know inside out if you have developed any sort of decent sized application. But you still need to know the buzzword for them to get through the CV filter. Also you need to learn a bunch of basic algorithms (know your sorts and a use case for a binary tree). This is like CS bingo. EE has the same. I mean, when was the last time any EE ever derived the BER equation for amplitude modulation in the real world? But you do need to know some of this junk off the top of your head to make the box tickers happy.
Also, why bother with C++? Most companies that advertise for 'C++' are really just using it as a code word for 'we want senior google level candidates' because it is a hard language to bluff your way through. I know people who got C++ jobs and never actually wrote code in C++. If you lack software experience outside of embedded, then pick up Python or JavaScript (you can learn those in a couple of weeks if you know C) and apply for some entry/mid level jobs in those languages. You'll likely find being an EE in those roles makes your application stand out from all the degree mill grads applying.
I wonder how much of this supply crunch is suppliers building inventory into their supply chains to give a little room to maneuver in case tariffs or other trade barriers get put in place? I know being in the UK, I am building up more inventory than normal to hopefully give everything time to calm down if there is a cliff-edge brexit in six months time. Multiply this sort of behavior by all the businesses with international supply chains and you have shortages and an economic boom.
It will be quite interesting to see whether this boom morphs into something more sustainable (perhaps it is the confidence kick we have all needed?) or everything goes ugly in a few months time. I really cannot remember a period of time where the two possible economic outcomes were so dramatically different. Normally it is a little more growth or a little less, not 'end of lost decade' or 'global financial crisis round two'.
trouble with letting these companies hold onto so much cash
Why do you think other people's resources somehow belong to you and you should have a say in what they do with it?
Well, in principle I agree with you, until enough of those people come for your stuff with pitch-forks, and don't seem to be particularly interested in your protestations that they are breaking a sacred moral code.
This is going to end up like everything else that is wrong with our economy: This hype train about how AI is going to destroy us all will force governments around the world to setup expensive AI policy advisory groups and think tanks. Law and business schools will start offering graduate courses in 'AI ethics and policy implementation', which will become mandatory if you want a job in management (these courses will have guest speakers by retired tech company C-Suites who have now magically become 'AI policy experts'). Companies will have to setup 'AI ethics committees', stuffed full of expensive experts, political cronies and media influencers.
Eventually there will be so much money in AI policy consulting that the smartest engineers in AI will go work for McKinsey or Accenture, offering to print your business a copy of the big AI policy document their interns wrote in exchange for a few million dollars. Or they will write you an 'AI survival strategy' that will outline how your business can survive when the killer robots and sentient internet turn up.
Meanwhile there will be a few remaining researches (probably the same ones who have always done it before there was big money involved) slowing advancing the state of the art at around the same rate we were doing before, and every year the camera on your smart phone will get better at being able to tell you what type of dog is in the picture you've taken etc, and we might make progress towards a lawyer bot that can trawl through case law.
So a whole lot of lawyers and consultants getting fat at the top, and roughly the same bunch of actual tech workers solving real world problems.
What I want is somewhere to live. My problem is that buying a house in any major western city has become a giant leveraged speculative investment where you bet your lifetime earnings that central banks will continue to reduce interest rates so that the next generation of young people can buy your dumpy house in ten years time using an even bigger mortgage, thus allowing you to scale up your leverage into an even bigger speculative investment somewhere less stabby than you were before. And if I rent, I have a landlord who doesn't give a stuff about maintaining or improving the property because they are making so much capital gains from their massively leveraged portfolio that a potential small increase in rental yield is irrelevant and not worth the effort.
The whole thing is really stupid. Even worse, it is hedge funds and portfolio investors who are making out like bandits, while actual owner-occupiers just see a paper gain that they can never really realize (if they still want somewhere to live in their city).
I would like to believe it will all 'correct' one day, but I fear the real correction is a return to feudalism - arguably the default state for human civilization.
They are focusing on the wrong problem. Chartering a helicopter with pilot costs around $400-600 (depends a lot on location and type of helicopter). Yet if you search for helicopter pilot wages, it comes out at about $40-60 per hour. So even if their expensive autonomous box completely replaces the need for a pilot it would only reduce the cost of helicopter travel by around 10%. I doubt that is going to cause a sudden explosion in helicopter travel.
The real cost is in the helicopter, which is an expensive machine to start with that has to be regularly maintained and inspected to ensure it doesn't decide to fall out of the sky.
At least electric helicopter startups offer some ideas on how they might reduce maintenance costs (by having fewer moving parts) but even then, I think these people just do not understand how much extra cost and effort separates the buggy, cobbled together PHP code they used in their last insta cat book website startup, and safety critical software/hardware that cannot be allowed to kill people.
No, it's most definitely not common. Almost every country I know off prevents this sort of retail price control by a manufacturer - it is a key part of competition law. That's why when you see the manufacturer list a price it always qualifies it with 'recommended'. They cannot force a retailer to sell it at that price.
I totally understand why these manufacturers were engaging in this activity though. I had the same issue with a specialists electronics company I ran a few years back. Basically, our retailers all started on about 40% margin because they provided a lot of sales effort and after-sales support for the product. They would pay attention to common problems, allocate a staff member to understand the product deeply so they could help the customer, translate guides, hold spare parts etc. We had a network of geographically separate dealers that served us and the customers well. Then online turned up, followed by the GFC, and some of the more desperate dealers started to target customers in other dealer's areas by cutting price. This basically created a blood bath, where dealer margins fell to about 20-25%.
The problem is that along with these price reductions, all the dealers basically became really rubbish at supporting the customer. We had to take over a lot of that support work, and eventually had to push our own prices to cover it (as did our competitors). It was quite frustrating really, because in the end the customer didn't really get a discount, nor each participant more profit. All that happened is we had to take over the distribution and support services ourselves and the retailers become nothing more than online store fronts.
The next inevitable step would have been direct sales from the manufacturer, but I left the business before we got to that.
In the end, I'm not sure customers got a better 'deal' out of the whole thing, but it sure made running what started as a design and manufacturing business a lot more complicated.
That's not true, my first MPB in 2007 killed any other laptop at the time. I was more than willing to pay the $2k+ for it.
I agree. I bought a 2013 MBP after a succession of Thinkpads. At the time I bought it you couldn't get another laptop with the hidef screen, aluminium chassis, battery life, weight and SSD for a comparable price. It was expensive, but you got a lot of stuff you couldn't get otherwise for that price.
In the time since, other laptops have caught up on those features, but Apple prices kept their premium. For me the value is not there now, but I guess they have decided that appealing to pro users just isn't worth their time anymore.
If this company had the actual autonomous driving bit of the problem sorted, it wouldn't matter whether their vision for the product involved climbing into a 20 year old corolla through the sunroof. They don't seem to be offering any new breakthrough with regards to delivering a reliable and affordable self-driving solution.
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
I agree a crash is coming, but I'm not so sure about the burn. Why would governments and central banks refuse to continue propping up junk assets with quantitative easing money all of a sudden? The predicted downside of QE - high inflation - never materialized, so as far as they are concerned there are no election cycle down sides to the money printing policy.
The real problem is that bankers have so successfully conflated paper wealth and real wealth, that the real economy is dying a slow death from poor resource allocation without anyone noticing.
My prediction is that the next phase of this madness will be talented young people ceasing to engage in the formal economy in larger and larger numbers. The whole 'deal' of student loan debt, unaffordable housing and constant career reinvention looks far too obviously like a trap now. As the generations ahead keep piling up on the job scrap heap, many young people will conclude it is a waste of their time.
Western countries, which can no longer even build enough basic housing for their populations, are in long term decline. It's just the same old story - greed, incompetence, selfishness. I don't think we will head to another war or revolution, but I think that poverty like we haven't seen in the west for almost 70 years is going to make a massive comeback, and people will just shrug their shoulders and say there is nothing that can be done.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect all this fiddling with the keyboard to make it ultra-thin, ultra-low movement is all about smoothing the transition to a fully haptic keyboard. This would allow Ives to make the MacBook slightly thinner again, and possibly it could be a second screen (Apple recently filed a patent for this concept).
I don't know what the point of this would be, but I guess they need to keep 'innovating'. In my view, anyone who just wants to consume media is already using a tablet, and now that Apple has accepted stylus input as not an affront to Jobs' legacy, that opens up tablets for many more low-intensity data creation scenarios. The remaining customers who need to enter large amounts of text ultimately want a machine that does that well. And critical to that is having a decent keyboard. So why you would want to compromise what was once an decent keyboard any further on a machine that is only really required by people who have a lot of text to enter is beyond me.
We need another Steve. Tim Cook seems rudderless product wise, and business wise seems to be trying to turn Apple into an LVMH brand. Ives seems to just be on 'thinner and remove ports' autopilot and it is getting ridiculous. I get that a portless-buttonless flat piece of glass might have some kind of intellectual purity, but that doesn't make it a nice product to use. There are plenty of beautiful post-modern architectural masterpieces that I would not like to live inside.
Only an investment banker would think like that. If you take the same technological infrastructure, pull it out of one company and shove it into another while distributing the new shareholding pro-rata, why exactly is there an expectation that suddenly this 'huge windfall' of new value has been created?
No new value has been created. If anything there will be higher costs from duplicated overheads. The fact that despite this the claim is probably correct and shareholders will get a big bump if this happens (just like when a company does a share split) is testament to how screwed up the economy's idea of 'value' is right now.
I mean, what a mockery this makes of all the work the engineering teams have to put in to add new capacity and services. Why don't we retrain all our engineers as financial innovators. Then our society can become really rich right?
Comparing this with AMD and Intel offerings is silly, because you cannot buy a chip from ARM. They simply design the cores (and many manufacturers don't even use their reference implementations - only the ISA). There is nothing really magical about ARM except that if you are wanting to build your own processor you might as well use them because licenses are pretty cheap, there is a large range of support tools available for them, and they incorporate many of the latest features in their designs with little historical cruft attached. It also helps to have a licensor who will happily work with you on your design to reach what ever objectives you're after rather than unleash the lawyers on you.
In other words, they are an excellent place to start, the alternatives aren't that great, and there is little point rolling your own ISA unless you've discovered something pretty incredible.
I think Macron is just posturing here. They won't shut down the plants if renewables have not gained sufficient capacity by that point. More than likely he has seen a report which shows the continuing cost reductions in renewables and storage mean they will be able to shut down those plants in the future anyway, so he has seized this information as a big policy win for himself.
For me the big advantage solar has is that it is not dependent on government or big business. As panel costs and storage keep falling in cost (due to rising economies of scale and improved technology), more and more home owners become incentivised to stick a system on their roof. It will just keep accelerating as this virtuous cycle feeds on itself. The world will move to renewable whether governments do anything about it or not. Just like how the world moved from horse and cart to motor vehicle all by itself (and at a phenomenal pace). Macron is really just stating that fact, and trying to associate himself with the good news.
Indeed. Macron only won 24% of the turned out vote in the first round of the elections (it's difficult to know how much he gained in the second as he was against Le Pen, so potentially a lot of protest/fear votes involved). He certainly does not have the majority of the country behind him, not by a long shot.
It's really this weird English idea where you just 'keep calm and carry on' as the Tory's destroy you country, despite them not winning the popular vote in a semi-democratic First-Past-The-Post system. I don't really get it, but it seems to be ingrained into their culture of civil obedience to those with power (and money).
If your daughter has any Chinese blood in her, I'd be very careful about these statements. China treats all people with ethnic Han roots like Chinese citizens when they're in China, which includes all of the relevant responsibilities.
Not quite true. If you have any foreign blood in you, you are considered 100% foreigner. I am 1/2 Chinese, I can assure you of this fact. It applies from how you are treated by government officials to street scammers (unfortunately).
Also, if you look Chinese and cannot speak Chinese, it simply does not compute for your average Chinese person. My friend has a malaysian Chinese wife and they lived in China for a while (he is half Chinese). He spoke Chinese but his wife didn't. He said even after telling people his wife didn't speak Chinese (and they had recovered from the shock) they would continue to address his wife for the rest of the conversation because such a possibility did not compute for them.
The problem with HR for tech companies, is that there is a LOT of money involved in the employment of tech people. So the industry, at all levels, from HR to recruiters, attracts shiny sales people who want to leech off the money fountain. It is exactly the same reason why there are no decent restaurants in popular tourist spots. All the legitimate restauranteurs get forced out by those with big promises and no moral integrity.
The whole tech HR landscape is a mess but I don't imagine it will get better until the bubble bursts and the money flows elsewhere.
I think it is more fundamental than that: The Android business model depends on harvesting your data, while Apple's does not (yet).
Google can't really change that, since their whole existence depends on watching you on the internet, and Tim Cook has decided to make privacy a key product differentiator for Apple. So Google is fundamentally aligned with Facebook's business model, while Apple is becoming fundamentally opposed. Is there any surprise then that Zuckerberg would rather the world move towards Android?
While I'm no fan of Tim Cook, I do think he is on the right path with the privacy thing. It is one of the main reasons I have little interest in moving over to Android. Google already has so much info on me, it just feels creepy to give them pretty much everything. I also hope he ties Apple up with enough promises to ensure that, like the 'stylus' thing, it becomes very hard for them to back track when (not if) they figure out they can make lots more money by harvesting data.
I think Elon just has this magical view about computers. He seems to have a pretty decent at understanding the limitations of mechanical systems. He hasn't proposed anything rocket based that was not compliant with existing technology. And while the hyperloop has many, many details issues, it is not fundamentally unachievable. It's just that when he starts talking computers he seems to think the x86 in your desktop is a couple iterations away from being a monkey brain or something.
I've seen managers like this before. The problem is, if YOU are the one who decides to cut tests and take shortcuts, and then you send up 50 satellites and they don't work because of those cuts, you career is over. But if the boss is the one who makes that decision and the decision turns out to be a bad one, the issue gets filled under 'well, we had to try' and everyone moves on.
It's really just a product of having a boss with a ginormous ego - you're sorta screwed if you don't and screwed if you do. Eventually if you are the type who can be controlled by bullying and remain a faithful servant (i.e. much like Tim Cook - compliant and not a threat to the alpha), you will become protected by the boss as a useful asset and then life is much easier.
Now Musk has made the risky decision, everyone will be able to move forward knowing their necks are not so exposed if the gamble doesn't work out.
In being the "IT country doctor" in a high-end retirement area, everyone's biggest IT problem I encounter here is keeping track of passwords. If an implanted read-only chip full of large random numbers were offered as an alternative to the whole password mess, 95% of this town would be on it like stink on skunk. No more lists of passwords in spidery handwriting taped onto monitors, no more having to come up with online identifiers cobbled up to satisfy increasingly arcane security rules and then forgotten. To log onto anything from your system, just place the palm of your hand on a USB-connected reader and the app, operating system or website would use the I'th random number on the chip as your password.
For our seasoned citizens, an authentication chip would be the greatest thing since Medicare.
Maybe we could tattoo some kind of unique mark on the skin of our fingers instead? This would be less invasive a procedure. We could call the mark a 'print' that goes on our 'finger'. Nah, would probably never work.
I don't think you can fight this sort of human nature though. I have a cheap espresso machine at home. To make a coffee, I put two scoops into the portafilter, press it down, stick it into the machine and turn the knob to push the water through. 30s later I have espresso. To clean, I take the portafilter off and smack it on the top of the rubbish bin.
How on earth it is considered better or easier to use a capsule machine is beyond me, yet millions of consumers choose to become enslaved to those expensive little non-biodegradable pods every year. It is just the way humans work. If anything it is the scourge of middle class apathy - the same thing that is causing many of the problems with our politics right now.
It always intrigues me how the job market is considered to have 'shortfalls'. There is no shortfall of genetics councillors. There is a shortage of genetics councilors at the current market price for them.
It's also funny how this sort of thing only applies to the little guys. I'm yet to hear a politician or business leader suggest that rising CEO/banker wages are a sign of a lack of competition for executive jobs, and that policies should be taken to increase supply in those professions.
The problem with Mars is there is nothing for us to go to war over on it. Until that problem is solved, Musk is going to have a hard time convincing taxpayers to part with their money for his hippy peace love space mission.
It doesn't even need to be something logical. If the crypto bubble was still in play, he could have launched a USB drive full of bitcoin there, and we would have had BFR by Christmas.
I used to work for a medical device manufacturer. While having to deal with a lot of regulations was certainly annoying (mostly because they are written by lawyers and you need to be a lawyer to really understand them), the great thing about them was that once you complied, you didn't have to worry nearly as much about liability. If there were no regulations (basically a form of self-regulation), then how exactly do you prove that you were not negligent? Maybe you think all the tests you did were enough. Maybe the lawyers you hired for advice thought so too. But you'll never know until it is tested in court. With regulations it is more-or-less black and white as to whether you have done enough to absolve yourself of responsibility for unforeseen events.
Another important point is that regulation creates a powerful barrier to entry in a market. The infrastructure required (in terms of processes and procedures) is immense, and large companies can gain economies of scale for these work. While the tech is enough of a barrier to entry right now, as time goes on this will change for driverless vehicles as well.
Are you being serious? Literally half my EE class just does software development now. The other half are in management. I don't think I know anyone who is doing anything requiring a soldering iron any more.
CS people are not magic. There are good ones around but plenty of extremely rubbish ones as well. The benefit of EE grads tends to be that the course is quite hard (at my university it was the hardest engineering discipline to get into) so it tends to self-select for slightly better candidates.
My guess is that you are not padding out your CV correctly. C++ is really not that hard if you can do embedded C, but you do have to learn a bunch of BS terms for things that you will consider rather trivial. For example, almost all the useful design patterns are just things that you will already know inside out if you have developed any sort of decent sized application. But you still need to know the buzzword for them to get through the CV filter. Also you need to learn a bunch of basic algorithms (know your sorts and a use case for a binary tree). This is like CS bingo. EE has the same. I mean, when was the last time any EE ever derived the BER equation for amplitude modulation in the real world? But you do need to know some of this junk off the top of your head to make the box tickers happy.
Also, why bother with C++? Most companies that advertise for 'C++' are really just using it as a code word for 'we want senior google level candidates' because it is a hard language to bluff your way through. I know people who got C++ jobs and never actually wrote code in C++. If you lack software experience outside of embedded, then pick up Python or JavaScript (you can learn those in a couple of weeks if you know C) and apply for some entry/mid level jobs in those languages. You'll likely find being an EE in those roles makes your application stand out from all the degree mill grads applying.
I wonder how much of this supply crunch is suppliers building inventory into their supply chains to give a little room to maneuver in case tariffs or other trade barriers get put in place? I know being in the UK, I am building up more inventory than normal to hopefully give everything time to calm down if there is a cliff-edge brexit in six months time. Multiply this sort of behavior by all the businesses with international supply chains and you have shortages and an economic boom.
It will be quite interesting to see whether this boom morphs into something more sustainable (perhaps it is the confidence kick we have all needed?) or everything goes ugly in a few months time. I really cannot remember a period of time where the two possible economic outcomes were so dramatically different. Normally it is a little more growth or a little less, not 'end of lost decade' or 'global financial crisis round two'.
Why do you think other people's resources somehow belong to you and you should have a say in what they do with it?
Well, in principle I agree with you, until enough of those people come for your stuff with pitch-forks, and don't seem to be particularly interested in your protestations that they are breaking a sacred moral code.
This is going to end up like everything else that is wrong with our economy: This hype train about how AI is going to destroy us all will force governments around the world to setup expensive AI policy advisory groups and think tanks. Law and business schools will start offering graduate courses in 'AI ethics and policy implementation', which will become mandatory if you want a job in management (these courses will have guest speakers by retired tech company C-Suites who have now magically become 'AI policy experts'). Companies will have to setup 'AI ethics committees', stuffed full of expensive experts, political cronies and media influencers.
Eventually there will be so much money in AI policy consulting that the smartest engineers in AI will go work for McKinsey or Accenture, offering to print your business a copy of the big AI policy document their interns wrote in exchange for a few million dollars. Or they will write you an 'AI survival strategy' that will outline how your business can survive when the killer robots and sentient internet turn up.
Meanwhile there will be a few remaining researches (probably the same ones who have always done it before there was big money involved) slowing advancing the state of the art at around the same rate we were doing before, and every year the camera on your smart phone will get better at being able to tell you what type of dog is in the picture you've taken etc, and we might make progress towards a lawyer bot that can trawl through case law.
So a whole lot of lawyers and consultants getting fat at the top, and roughly the same bunch of actual tech workers solving real world problems.
What I want is somewhere to live. My problem is that buying a house in any major western city has become a giant leveraged speculative investment where you bet your lifetime earnings that central banks will continue to reduce interest rates so that the next generation of young people can buy your dumpy house in ten years time using an even bigger mortgage, thus allowing you to scale up your leverage into an even bigger speculative investment somewhere less stabby than you were before. And if I rent, I have a landlord who doesn't give a stuff about maintaining or improving the property because they are making so much capital gains from their massively leveraged portfolio that a potential small increase in rental yield is irrelevant and not worth the effort.
The whole thing is really stupid. Even worse, it is hedge funds and portfolio investors who are making out like bandits, while actual owner-occupiers just see a paper gain that they can never really realize (if they still want somewhere to live in their city).
I would like to believe it will all 'correct' one day, but I fear the real correction is a return to feudalism - arguably the default state for human civilization.
They are focusing on the wrong problem. Chartering a helicopter with pilot costs around $400-600 (depends a lot on location and type of helicopter). Yet if you search for helicopter pilot wages, it comes out at about $40-60 per hour. So even if their expensive autonomous box completely replaces the need for a pilot it would only reduce the cost of helicopter travel by around 10%. I doubt that is going to cause a sudden explosion in helicopter travel.
The real cost is in the helicopter, which is an expensive machine to start with that has to be regularly maintained and inspected to ensure it doesn't decide to fall out of the sky.
At least electric helicopter startups offer some ideas on how they might reduce maintenance costs (by having fewer moving parts) but even then, I think these people just do not understand how much extra cost and effort separates the buggy, cobbled together PHP code they used in their last insta cat book website startup, and safety critical software/hardware that cannot be allowed to kill people.
No, it's most definitely not common. Almost every country I know off prevents this sort of retail price control by a manufacturer - it is a key part of competition law. That's why when you see the manufacturer list a price it always qualifies it with 'recommended'. They cannot force a retailer to sell it at that price.
I totally understand why these manufacturers were engaging in this activity though. I had the same issue with a specialists electronics company I ran a few years back. Basically, our retailers all started on about 40% margin because they provided a lot of sales effort and after-sales support for the product. They would pay attention to common problems, allocate a staff member to understand the product deeply so they could help the customer, translate guides, hold spare parts etc. We had a network of geographically separate dealers that served us and the customers well. Then online turned up, followed by the GFC, and some of the more desperate dealers started to target customers in other dealer's areas by cutting price. This basically created a blood bath, where dealer margins fell to about 20-25%.
The problem is that along with these price reductions, all the dealers basically became really rubbish at supporting the customer. We had to take over a lot of that support work, and eventually had to push our own prices to cover it (as did our competitors). It was quite frustrating really, because in the end the customer didn't really get a discount, nor each participant more profit. All that happened is we had to take over the distribution and support services ourselves and the retailers become nothing more than online store fronts.
The next inevitable step would have been direct sales from the manufacturer, but I left the business before we got to that.
In the end, I'm not sure customers got a better 'deal' out of the whole thing, but it sure made running what started as a design and manufacturing business a lot more complicated.
That's not true, my first MPB in 2007 killed any other laptop at the time. I was more than willing to pay the $2k+ for it.
I agree. I bought a 2013 MBP after a succession of Thinkpads. At the time I bought it you couldn't get another laptop with the hidef screen, aluminium chassis, battery life, weight and SSD for a comparable price. It was expensive, but you got a lot of stuff you couldn't get otherwise for that price.
In the time since, other laptops have caught up on those features, but Apple prices kept their premium. For me the value is not there now, but I guess they have decided that appealing to pro users just isn't worth their time anymore.
If this company had the actual autonomous driving bit of the problem sorted, it wouldn't matter whether their vision for the product involved climbing into a 20 year old corolla through the sunroof. They don't seem to be offering any new breakthrough with regards to delivering a reliable and affordable self-driving solution.
I always wondered what it would have been like to live through the first dot com bubble. Now I realise that is involves real engineering getting pushed aside to make way for the hype merchants.
I agree a crash is coming, but I'm not so sure about the burn. Why would governments and central banks refuse to continue propping up junk assets with quantitative easing money all of a sudden? The predicted downside of QE - high inflation - never materialized, so as far as they are concerned there are no election cycle down sides to the money printing policy.
The real problem is that bankers have so successfully conflated paper wealth and real wealth, that the real economy is dying a slow death from poor resource allocation without anyone noticing.
My prediction is that the next phase of this madness will be talented young people ceasing to engage in the formal economy in larger and larger numbers. The whole 'deal' of student loan debt, unaffordable housing and constant career reinvention looks far too obviously like a trap now. As the generations ahead keep piling up on the job scrap heap, many young people will conclude it is a waste of their time.
Western countries, which can no longer even build enough basic housing for their populations, are in long term decline. It's just the same old story - greed, incompetence, selfishness. I don't think we will head to another war or revolution, but I think that poverty like we haven't seen in the west for almost 70 years is going to make a massive comeback, and people will just shrug their shoulders and say there is nothing that can be done.