re: Sharing schematics. I see what you were getting at, regarding building a system out of multiple boards designed using different EDA packages. The Good News is that you can get viewers for OrCAD, Altium Designer and PADS, so you don't need a license to install the full-up software just to view schematics or PCB artwork. The viewers are important, because the symbols on professional schematics include lots of metadata that are needed to actually build the board. There's a part number of some sort (either direct vendor part number or company-standard part number) used for the bill of materials, and of course a PCB footprint reference.
Interconnects between boards need to be defined fully and documented in some standard way.
What definitely doesn't happen is that Group A does a board in Altium Designer and passes the design files off to Group B who use OrCAD and want to import the design into that package. Such translations fail more often than not. There are library translation problems, database problems, all sorts of issues that make such translations problematic. If Group B really needs to work on the design in OrCAD, then need to make sure that their library has all of the symbols, all of the footprints, all of the other data to make it happen, and oftentimes it's easier to simply recapture the schematic in the other tool that to expect the translated schematic to generate a netlist that the translated PCB design won't choke on.
Anyways, my point is, I guess, that as long as the source files are available, as well as a viewer, then that's the best thing for schematic sharing when the friends' only need is to look at schematics and PCB artwork. If you need to actually modify the designs, you need the proper design software and probably the original library.
Actually, there are some hacks published on how to get Leopard onto "too slow" G4 machines. It has to do with making tweaks to the Open Firmware thing by setting variables to indicate the speed of the processor is high enough to install. It's not that complicated and it works... did it myself a few times.
Yeah, I did some looking around to see how to make it go, but honestly, the G4 tower and the eMac haven't been turned on in over a year, so there's no point. The G4 mini is in a corner, working well as a subversion server (using apache) and general home-network DNS and stuff.
If you have a 5 year old macbook pro for sale, let me know! You might have a buyer here.
Hah, thanks, but I think I'm going to keep it running until it literally breaks. I don't know if Lion brings anything special to the game that I'll miss on the laptop. Anyways, I don't have the two large for a new 17" MBP.
They also try to force upgrades by making their stuff "obsolete" too soon which angers Apple users a great deal so they can't push that too hard either.
I've run into this in a couple of cases... Leopard won't install on my 400 MHz gray G4 tower because it's "too slow," and of course Snow Leopard is Intel only, so it's not on my G4 mini or eMac. And it looks like my Core Duo MacBook Pro won't get Lionized. But still -- that 400 MHz G4 (which still works) is from, when, 2000? The MacBook Pro is over five years old. So while they do deprecate old machines in this way, one could reasonably assume that a five-year-old laptop is probably due for replacement anyway.
I'm sure I could try and force a Windows 7 install on my Pentium 4 ThinkPad G40, but the performance will suck, if it works at all.
Apple are more interested in selling products with a short (2-3 year) upgrade cycle, and televisions certainly don't fall into that category. Where is the profit coming from? iTunes? Would it be worth it for iTunes alone?
Except that the loyal Apple customer tends to keep using a product long after Windows users have replaced their machines. I'm still using my 2006 Core Duo MacBoo Pro. It still works fine with Snow Leopard, although it could use more RAM and the FireWire port is all beat up. All of my Windows-using friends have bought three laptops in this five-year time period. I don't know how they do it, but their machines seem to break a lot.
dell sells the exact same monitor as the apple cinema display. i think it's a rebranded LG. dell also charges $900 or so.
Exactly. A friend asked me why the Apple monitor was so much more money than some random monitor she saw in an ad, and I did some simple research -- the Apple monitor resolution was significantly higher than the Samsung or whatever. And I came across that same 2560x1440 Dell monitor, which costs the same as the Apple monitor.
So once again, it's not that Apple is overpriced, it's just that they choose to not offer a lower-priced option.
They have less than 30% of the smartphone market (and a tiny portion of all phones worldwide) and around 70% of the portable music players. It's different because there's actual competition in those markets.
Also worth noting is that up until very recently, iPhone was available for just one carrier in the US, and the least-liked carrier to boot. iPhone is now available on only two carriers. Android is available on all of the carriers. Of course, there's always the problem of trying to figure out exactly which Android phone to buy, and which carrier to use, and which version of the Android OS to you're allowed by the carrier to install on your phone...
The stupid thing with glossy screens is that they're completely unusable in the sun. Every year I spend half of the year in Thailand and want to get some work done by the pool...
You know...as I was reading your post, my first thought was "who the hell works outside in the sun with a computer?", then, I read the next part about you wanting to work by the pool.
You're work habits, it sounds like, are definitely one of the far outlier scenarios if you were to look at the general pool of those that do work on a computer.
Perhaps my example here is also an outlier, but a lot of us live sound engineers who mix outside on digital consoles complain about how it's impossible to see the screens in sunlight. Even with a tent or shade structure at mix position, the usual screens are simply not bright enough. We also need to use our laptops in conjunction with the console (loading configurations, running audio-measurement software, etc).
So, yeah, there are people using computers outside in the sun...
Holy crap, AMEN to that! Vertical resolution was fine until HDTVs became popular. At which point everybody regressed and went to max 1080 high displays just so they could coin that they were "true HD" in marketing. All my pre-HDTV monitors are 1200px high. I consider that to be absolutely necessary. All my post-HDTV monitors are at most 1080 high, if even that (1050 is common). It's near impossible to find anything with 1200px high display with a reasonable price tag anymore.
AMEN! I've got a pair of Dell 2007FPs, which are 1600x1200 and literally twice as expensive as anything else in Dell's portfolio of 20"-class monitors (which are all so-called HD at 1920x1080). The whole wide-screen thing drives me nuts. Vertical space is where it's at for writing code, trying to look at a whole bunch of waveforms in ModelSim, etc. I sorta inherited a 24" HD monitor with a test-bed computer, and it takes up more space on my desk and has less usable resolution.
I tried rotating the 24" 90 degrees to get back the vertical resolution but it's way too tall that way.
Very funny post - but in seriousness, not likely because (eventual) utter lack of optical drives will herd all the Apple drones into purchasing all of their apps via the App Store.
Or people could just simply continue to do online purchases directly from a vendor's website.
>>>BD-ROM is the spinny disk format for Movies. it's not for software.
With the exception of the millions of Software discs sold for ~50 million playstation owners. But that's such a tiny, small, insignificant market, so I can see why you ignored it.
And if you have a Mac, those Playstation discs are the equivalent of a coaster for your drink.
So you think that it would be as stupid for Intel to worry about the low end mobile market as it would have been for DEC to worry about the low end microcomputer market.
After all DEC was making big money selling PDP-11s and VAXes. If they had come out with an inexpensive PDP-11 or even a 16 bit version of the VAX it could have cost them sales of the more expensive mini-line.
I guess you forget the Pro350. Don't worry, most people do.
Not if the jackbooted fed shitheads and their Christian lapdogs in the lobbying groups^W^W churches keep trying to fight against what states voted for.
Remember, we fought a war over this before and the federal government won.
Wrong.
The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool who doesn't know history, or a racist pining for the Good Old Days when blacks knew their place.
Most teachers get pensions. That often means half pay for the rest of your life after working 20 years. That is a huge savings.
Play with this spreadsheet. Assume a teacher earns $40k/year from age 25 to 45 and pulls $20k/year in pension from age 45 to 80. What salary and savings rate would be required for someone to have the same standard of living in the private sector without a pension?
First of all, starting teacher salaries are nowhere near $40K.
Second, where do you get this idea that teachers are retiring at 45 and living the high life?
Most important, you have to realize that contributions to the pension plans are deferred benefits paid in lieu of immediate salary. In other words, when the retiree collects a pension, he is collecting from the money that was put aside for him. The total compensation package is cash salary plus pension contribution.
The other option, of course, is for the employee to be given the pension money in cash up front and then he can invest it how he wants (or spend it, or whatever). Or, more likely, the employee will be told, "We are no longer contributing to your pension, and we are not giving you the pension contribution to you in cash," which is, no matter how you slice it, a significant reduction in compensation.
As for your BOM argument, the standard 20% only is component costs and does not include assembly which adds to overall manufacturing costs.
Assembly costs absolutely ARE included in the bill-of-materials cost.
And not every product is "standard.". Companies want their products to have 20% BOM and 30% margin but it doesn't always happen.
While there may be special cases, increasing the BOM cost -- read: reducing margin -- is frowned upon, and doesn't happen unless there's a compelling reason.
I am not an Apple historian. But from what I've seen, Apple marks their product up 100% from what it costs them to make.
And you have no idea about how consumer products are priced. The standard is that the bill of materials cost -- what it actually costs for the parts, PCB, enclosure, display, everything to build a product and put it in the shrink-wrapped box, ready for retail sale -- is 20% to 25% of retail list price. Which means that the $500 Widget -- made by any vendor -- costs $100 to build. So, in effect, the profit when sold at retail is, what, do the math, 250%? But don't forget that the manufacturer PAYS FOR EVERYTHING out of the difference between wholesale price and bill of materials cost: salaries, benefits, facilities, everything.
Did you even do a basic google search on the cost of an ipad? I just did, and it came up with cost estimates between 219$ to 350$.
And the iSuppli estimate is way too high. Don't believe it.
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re: Sharing schematics. I see what you were getting at, regarding building a system out of multiple boards designed using different EDA packages. The Good News is that you can get viewers for OrCAD, Altium Designer and PADS, so you don't need a license to install the full-up software just to view schematics or PCB artwork. The viewers are important, because the symbols on professional schematics include lots of metadata that are needed to actually build the board. There's a part number of some sort (either direct vendor part number or company-standard part number) used for the bill of materials, and of course a PCB footprint reference.
Interconnects between boards need to be defined fully and documented in some standard way.
What definitely doesn't happen is that Group A does a board in Altium Designer and passes the design files off to Group B who use OrCAD and want to import the design into that package. Such translations fail more often than not. There are library translation problems, database problems, all sorts of issues that make such translations problematic. If Group B really needs to work on the design in OrCAD, then need to make sure that their library has all of the symbols, all of the footprints, all of the other data to make it happen, and oftentimes it's easier to simply recapture the schematic in the other tool that to expect the translated schematic to generate a netlist that the translated PCB design won't choke on.
Anyways, my point is, I guess, that as long as the source files are available, as well as a viewer, then that's the best thing for schematic sharing when the friends' only need is to look at schematics and PCB artwork. If you need to actually modify the designs, you need the proper design software and probably the original library.
Actually, there are some hacks published on how to get Leopard onto "too slow" G4 machines. It has to do with making tweaks to the Open Firmware thing by setting variables to indicate the speed of the processor is high enough to install. It's not that complicated and it works... did it myself a few times.
Yeah, I did some looking around to see how to make it go, but honestly, the G4 tower and the eMac haven't been turned on in over a year, so there's no point. The G4 mini is in a corner, working well as a subversion server (using apache) and general home-network DNS and stuff.
If you have a 5 year old macbook pro for sale, let me know! You might have a buyer here.
Hah, thanks, but I think I'm going to keep it running until it literally breaks. I don't know if Lion brings anything special to the game that I'll miss on the laptop. Anyways, I don't have the two large for a new 17" MBP.
They also try to force upgrades by making their stuff "obsolete" too soon which angers Apple users a great deal so they can't push that too hard either.
I've run into this in a couple of cases ... Leopard won't install on my 400 MHz gray G4 tower because it's "too slow," and of course Snow Leopard is Intel only, so it's not on my G4 mini or eMac. And it looks like my Core Duo MacBook Pro won't get Lionized. But still -- that 400 MHz G4 (which still works) is from, when, 2000? The MacBook Pro is over five years old. So while they do deprecate old machines in this way, one could reasonably assume that a five-year-old laptop is probably due for replacement anyway.
I'm sure I could try and force a Windows 7 install on my Pentium 4 ThinkPad G40, but the performance will suck, if it works at all.
Apple are more interested in selling products with a short (2-3 year) upgrade cycle, and televisions certainly don't fall into that category. Where is the profit coming from? iTunes? Would it be worth it for iTunes alone?
Except that the loyal Apple customer tends to keep using a product long after Windows users have replaced their machines. I'm still using my 2006 Core Duo MacBoo Pro. It still works fine with Snow Leopard, although it could use more RAM and the FireWire port is all beat up. All of my Windows-using friends have bought three laptops in this five-year time period. I don't know how they do it, but their machines seem to break a lot.
dell sells the exact same monitor as the apple cinema display. i think it's a rebranded LG. dell also charges $900 or so.
Exactly. A friend asked me why the Apple monitor was so much more money than some random monitor she saw in an ad, and I did some simple research -- the Apple monitor resolution was significantly higher than the Samsung or whatever. And I came across that same 2560x1440 Dell monitor, which costs the same as the Apple monitor.
So once again, it's not that Apple is overpriced, it's just that they choose to not offer a lower-priced option.
And that 27" Cinema Display sure is nice.
They have less than 30% of the smartphone market (and a tiny portion of all phones worldwide) and around 70% of the portable music players. It's different because there's actual competition in those markets.
Also worth noting is that up until very recently, iPhone was available for just one carrier in the US, and the least-liked carrier to boot. iPhone is now available on only two carriers. Android is available on all of the carriers. Of course, there's always the problem of trying to figure out exactly which Android phone to buy, and which carrier to use, and which version of the Android OS to you're allowed by the carrier to install on your phone ...
Most people think of Jack Welch more as a psychopath.
Absolutely.
Without that pretentious little apple logo and the "Designed in California" placard I'm not entirely sure how a consumer would be confused.
Clearly, you have not met many consumers. Most of them are as dumb as rocks.
Well presumably they are only going to copy the good ideas, not the stupid ones.
Not so. Apple's claim shows that Samsung have copied Apple's dock connector design too.
Damn, I wish I had mod points ...
You know...as I was reading your post, my first thought was "who the hell works outside in the sun with a computer?", then, I read the next part about you wanting to work by the pool.
You're work habits, it sounds like, are definitely one of the far outlier scenarios if you were to look at the general pool of those that do work on a computer.
Perhaps my example here is also an outlier, but a lot of us live sound engineers who mix outside on digital consoles complain about how it's impossible to see the screens in sunlight. Even with a tent or shade structure at mix position, the usual screens are simply not bright enough. We also need to use our laptops in conjunction with the console (loading configurations, running audio-measurement software, etc).
So, yeah, there are people using computers outside in the sun ...
Why in the world anyone would choose a 1920x1080 monitor over 1920x1200 is beyond me. I can't wait until the day those bastard TV "monitors" die.
AMEN.
...but we had an app that faked it so we wouldn't loose all the work
Clearly, you failed spelling.
Holy crap, AMEN to that! Vertical resolution was fine until HDTVs became popular. At which point everybody regressed and went to max 1080 high displays just so they could coin that they were "true HD" in marketing. All my pre-HDTV monitors are 1200px high. I consider that to be absolutely necessary. All my post-HDTV monitors are at most 1080 high, if even that (1050 is common). It's near impossible to find anything with 1200px high display with a reasonable price tag anymore.
AMEN! I've got a pair of Dell 2007FPs, which are 1600x1200 and literally twice as expensive as anything else in Dell's portfolio of 20"-class monitors (which are all so-called HD at 1920x1080). The whole wide-screen thing drives me nuts. Vertical space is where it's at for writing code, trying to look at a whole bunch of waveforms in ModelSim, etc. I sorta inherited a 24" HD monitor with a test-bed computer, and it takes up more space on my desk and has less usable resolution.
I tried rotating the 24" 90 degrees to get back the vertical resolution but it's way too tall that way.
Bring back 4x3 monitors!
"Implement a porting?"
Sheesh.
Very funny post - but in seriousness, not likely because (eventual) utter lack of optical drives will herd all the Apple drones into purchasing all of their apps via the App Store.
Or people could just simply continue to do online purchases directly from a vendor's website.
>>>BD-ROM is the spinny disk format for Movies. it's not for software.
With the exception of the millions of Software discs sold for ~50 million playstation owners. But that's such a tiny, small, insignificant market, so I can see why you ignored it.
And if you have a Mac, those Playstation discs are the equivalent of a coaster for your drink.
So you think that it would be as stupid for Intel to worry about the low end mobile market as it would have been for DEC to worry about the low end microcomputer market. After all DEC was making big money selling PDP-11s and VAXes. If they had come out with an inexpensive PDP-11 or even a 16 bit version of the VAX it could have cost them sales of the more expensive mini-line.
I guess you forget the Pro350. Don't worry, most people do.
Not sure what the motivation for making this up would be. There are likely going to be reprisals for this act.
What was the motivation for making up the Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman stories?
Simple home-front moral building, in light of dwindling support for a war that had (and still has) no end in sight.
Not if the jackbooted fed shitheads and their Christian lapdogs in the lobbying groups^W^W churches keep trying to fight against what states voted for.
Remember, we fought a war over this before and the federal government won.
Wrong.
The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool who doesn't know history, or a racist pining for the Good Old Days when blacks knew their place.
If I'm unsatisfied with the offerings made available I have the option to either start my own business or find another industry to work in.
Now is that something you've actually done, or is this just an example of mental masturbation?
Spoken like a non-parent.
Man, I wish I hadn't used up all of my mod points yesterday.
Well, the sources I'm finding are people who estimate costs as part of their jobs.
You give no reason for me to believe what you say, and no method on how you got your estimates. You're literally, "some guy on the Internet who said."
So, do you work in the electronics/consumer-products manufacturing business, or are you just some guy who surfs websites?
Most teachers get pensions. That often means half pay for the rest of your life after working 20 years. That is a huge savings.
Play with this spreadsheet. Assume a teacher earns $40k/year from age 25 to 45 and pulls $20k/year in pension from age 45 to 80. What salary and savings rate would be required for someone to have the same standard of living in the private sector without a pension?
First of all, starting teacher salaries are nowhere near $40K.
Second, where do you get this idea that teachers are retiring at 45 and living the high life?
Most important, you have to realize that contributions to the pension plans are deferred benefits paid in lieu of immediate salary. In other words, when the retiree collects a pension, he is collecting from the money that was put aside for him. The total compensation package is cash salary plus pension contribution.
The other option, of course, is for the employee to be given the pension money in cash up front and then he can invest it how he wants (or spend it, or whatever). Or, more likely, the employee will be told, "We are no longer contributing to your pension, and we are not giving you the pension contribution to you in cash," which is, no matter how you slice it, a significant reduction in compensation.
As for your BOM argument, the standard 20% only is component costs and does not include assembly which adds to overall manufacturing costs.
Assembly costs absolutely ARE included in the bill-of-materials cost.
And not every product is "standard.". Companies want their products to have 20% BOM and 30% margin but it doesn't always happen.
While there may be special cases, increasing the BOM cost -- read: reducing margin -- is frowned upon, and doesn't happen unless there's a compelling reason.
I am not an Apple historian. But from what I've seen, Apple marks their product up 100% from what it costs them to make.
And you have no idea about how consumer products are priced. The standard is that the bill of materials cost -- what it actually costs for the parts, PCB, enclosure, display, everything to build a product and put it in the shrink-wrapped box, ready for retail sale -- is 20% to 25% of retail list price. Which means that the $500 Widget -- made by any vendor -- costs $100 to build. So, in effect, the profit when sold at retail is, what, do the math, 250%? But don't forget that the manufacturer PAYS FOR EVERYTHING out of the difference between wholesale price and bill of materials cost: salaries, benefits, facilities, everything.
Did you even do a basic google search on the cost of an ipad? I just did, and it came up with cost estimates between 219$ to 350$.
And the iSuppli estimate is way too high. Don't believe it.