If those wages were paid in the US, more people could afford the device AT the higher price. It is the old Ford idea, if you want the people to buy your cars you got to pay them wages so they can afford to pay for them. The modern US has gone the other way, we take the salaries out of the US to make products cheaper and cheaper so the jobless can afford them and gosh, don't there just happen to be a lot of jobless around.
But then again, a lot of people believe you can run an entire economy as a service industry because money comes from trees and everyone selling everyone hamburgers and insurance is somehow viable.
Farmers get screwed all the time, the super markets set the price and the price always has to be lower and lower regardless on what the costs happen to be for say a liter of milk.
I agree that content producers get the shaft but who started out? Do you remember the horse armor Bethseda tried to sell? Or how about Turbine that went F2P but charged in points for their next digital expansion twice as much as the previous expansion cost in the stores?
Further down I have written a lengthy piece of why the 2nd hand game industry is such a bad thing, so I agree with you somewhat but the content industry hasn't exactly been blameless in getting a reputation as the enemy. I remember the days of Papyrus and Grand Prix Legends which got massive updates years after launch, they clearly loved their game and their customers. Nowadays games launch hopelessly broken and with patches that are just designed to screw the paying customer. Take Rage, broken on ATI cards and the first patch removes cheats from single player because paying customers suck.
The problem with gaming is that has become part of the internet and on the internet, feedback sucks. If your local store tried to pull crap, they would get told about it in their face from angry customers, so they don't. An issue a while back was dead sub-pixels. In Holland we got stricter laws then on the rest of the planet. The PSP had a lot of them but tried to claim that they weren't bad enough. Fuck that, went to the store with a draft letter from a dutch consumer show (KASSA) and got it replaced. Holland was the only country Sony did this. But that was because they got a shit storm over them.
How many consumer shows (real ones) do you know even deal with the game industry? Why are games like Rage not suited in court for being a broken product? Why can't I return a game if it doesn't work? I had my oven repaired recently, patched if you like, if they had removed the microwave function (a cheat for cooking) I would have.... wait a minute, that would NEVER happen. But Id removed the cheats from the game, want our fix, agree to removal of functionality.
And people have NOWHERE to go with their rage. Not buying doesn't help because there is always a new line of suckers. There are no legal options and forums are filtered of any negative content.
So the rage builds up and explodes on subjects like this. And the game industry better take note because when the music industry needed the support of its fans to deal with the difficult transition from analog to digital it found that it had none, years of screwing around had used up all goodwill (once people really were fans of a label) and so far, it has not succeeded in restoring it.
I am still pissed off about the fucking horse armor and Betsheda has so far has shown less then zero effort to win me back. They know they screwed up, took the money and expect us to bend over for the next load.
I agree the 2nd hand game market is bad for the industry and therefor bad for customers. But the bitter hatred you find in many of the posts on this subject shows just how badly the game industry has been at creating loyal customers. It wasn't always like this. But ever since expansions have made way for DLC... game companies have come to treat customers as an open wallet.
It is like the TV industry, once people actually bought products to support their shows. Then ads got shoved in anywhere they could and people started to HATE their TV station.
Want another example? I love anime, I don't buy any however because the sub titling tends to be horrendous and the dubbing is an insult. I do buy merchandise but am starting to get really pissed off with a lot of Japanese companies who seem to hate earning money. Can't use debit credit cards, can't ship, you can buy something for download but then it has to be downloaded through a proxy. Why hate a customer so much? It creates a situation where I like a product but hate the company making it and that is not something you can just let build up and never expect a back lash.
The game industry should organize itself, get a body to monitor conduct so that the antics of a few don't hurt the perception of an entire industry.
2nd hand games arrive on the market within days of the release... do you sell your car on within days or is that measured in years?
I bought 2nd hand cars for a long time when younger and yes they were cheaper then new cars but you were also a decade behind in tech and obtained a car that needed a hell of a lot more maintenance.
2nd hand cars also don't bought up for 5 bucks and sell for 45. Margins such as that are only found in the antique and art trade.
2nd hand games arrive on the market to fast with no loss in quality as other 2nd hand products do. It is foolish to compare them.
Some people talk about the first sales doctrine and how the car, book, art, furniture and even music industry deal with it just fine... but there is a difference. None of these tends to end up on the second hand market within DAYS of release. Nor at near the price of original release. Of course there is antique stuff whose price has gone up but that takes a long time. 2nd hand games on the other hand are sold for 5 dollar less then the original within the week of release.
To further cloud the issue, while the original game maybe 50 and the 2nd hand game 45, what the customer gets is a fraction of the value, often as low as a mere 5 bucks. It is clear why game stores love it, that is a very nifty profit margin for them with very little work involved but the game company itself doesn't get a penny for it?
Should they?
There is yet another difference, if I buy second hand books I often buy books that are years if not decades old and they show it. While it is debatable that a book that has swollen up, has its spine cracked and its cover has weathered contains any less of a reading experience, it is NOT the same book as is being sold for new. The prices are also different, a new book might cost 20 new and 2 used. The seller gets a far higher share of the 2nd hand price as well.
The proof for the difference is yet again simple, how many mainstream sellers of new books have a large section of 2nd hand books with the same titles on display for near new price? Exactly: NONE!
Same goes for the 2nd hand car trade. The moment your new car has been sold its price nose-dives (sports car sometimes the exception) and it will be a while before the first ones show up on the 2nd hand market. Buy a 2nd hand car and you buy a model several years out of date.
So... do traditional 2nd hand markets compete as directly with the new market as with games? Go check your local game store, check the new games, just out and what is available 2nd hand. It varies per game genre of course but for shooters especially, a lot of gamers must rush through games at astounding speeds. 1 weekend release, 2nd weekend available 2nd hand. And as said with a HUGE profit margin for the game store.
The first sale doctrine applies to physical products... are games physical products? If I buy a movie ticket, then I can't sell that movie ticket 2nd hand after having watched the movie. This is obvious. The same with a train ticket or indeed any kind of ticket. It is considered normal that you pay for a piece of content and then are done with it. Try to sell a 2nd hand cup of coffee and you would even be arrested.
I can see both points of view, if I bought a game at retail price, play it for 1-2 years, then sell it on for a fraction of the new price and it is sold for a fraction of the new price while the game is no longer released, then the 2nd hand game market might work.
But that is not the case.
The 2nd hand game market moves to fast, has to great a profit margin for game retailers, has no degradation of quality. It would be as if libraries could lend out an infinite number of items... the reasons libraries work is because the number of copies they have are limited, so a hot book you want to read NOW, might just not be available for months. A totally different experience then what a bookstore supplies. There is a reason ebook libraries are not as easily accepted. If everyone can get the same book at the same time, few are going to bother buying it.
If a game is available within days or at most a week of release for 5 bucks less, who is going to buy new? It is not even that you have to wait a week unless you are the type to camp out in front of a store, it often takes me a week to a month for a new game just to fit the shopping in my schedule.
As a customer, I don't much like the screwing around with DLC and such, I prefer to pay a simple price for my content. But if I read some of the comments here, I can certainly see the point of the game industry. A lot of people seem to think that game compa
If you want to talk about encoding, anime fan subbers are at the fore front. The latest is 10 bit encoding. It has a lot of benefits but what its main downside is that there is no hardware for it, you need to run it on the cpu. Someday hardware like a GPU might support it but that takes far to long to stay current.
That is the reason the general purpose CPU has won out so far, why mobile phones and tablet come with them as the main computing unit, because keeping up in hardware with the latest developments just is to slow.
You could in theory build a super computer that can run ONE task very fast. They existed, in fact the earliest computers WERE single task machines... and they lost out because the next task might be totally different and building a new machine for each task is slow and expensive.
The person below (Wierdy) talks about one bit of modern codecs... but this might change tomorrow, as indeed it has with 10bit encoding.
There is a reason DVD's suck donkey balls, open one up and look at what is inside and wonder why the fuck any of it was needed when any PC could easily have dealt with a better format (files max size, subtitle format etc)... because DVD players were purpose build devices and had to be designed ahead of current techonolgy to be widely supported. DVD players being purpose build single task hardware started out obsolete and couldn't change. Of course, the advantage was the they were relatively cheap and became cheaper BUT do you REALLY want your super computing to be this inflexible?
In many ways, the current GPU craze is nothing more then math co-processor of yesterday, or the windows chip on early video cards. They are useful but can't stay up with the rapid advances software can make.
The real money is in making generic hardware faster and more efficient because that is where the intresting stuff is happening. Profit wise as well. What would you rather be selling, DVD players or iPads?
KDE 3, not KDE 4 has that high usage rate... says a lot if you think about it. A lot about the usability of polls with a very niche audience. German readers of a linux mag that bother with online polls. Wouldn't suprise me if 43% is in reality 2 people in this sample group.
Okay, principles? How about NOT buying from China then? I try as much as possible... buying Cowon whenever possible as they tend to produce in their own country unlike most others.
Or are your opensource principles the same as my principles of not buying from a country that harvests the organs from executed political prisoners?
The idea of creating an opensource OS for a tablet is nice but you won't get anywhere if you don't go the whole hog. THAT is why Apple is so damned fucking succesful with their products. They don't compromise, don't say "ooh that would be difficult, lets go the cheap route".
You cannot promote linux by associating it with bargain basement obsolete tech. Some nerds might care that you can run it on a C64, the general public doesn't give a hoot, they want a shiny gadget and the productive nerds like me just want something that can doesn't take half an hour to boot just because it is open. I will just stick with following smarter nerds then me, and install linux on an android device with their howto guides.
There have been a few other linux tablets and so far they just don't compete on specs. They seem to think that going linux means going budget but I am a Linux user and have no interest whatsoever in going budget.
This thing seems to have a single core CPU... the new asus tablet transformer prime has 4.
A 800x480 resolution, my 2 year old MP3 player has that, on a far smaller screen. The tablet after the prime, the TF700T, will have a 1920x1200 resolution.
Yes, these are larger devices and cost three times as much but geez whiz, where are you more likely to find people who will appreciate having a full OS at their disposal with real desktop quality applications instead of fart apps, at the bottom budget market or at the high end cutting edge?
MS must be loving this, there tablets are not going to be underpowered rebrands of yesterday model, so if an average consumer is browsing for a tablet, they will see highend sexy devices as being Android/iOS/Windows8 and Linux in the bargain bin... and gosh, wanna bet that people who bargain hunt will still want Android/iOS/Windows8 and just get an older device?
Evidence? The total and complete failure of previous linux tablets that pulled such braindead stunts as using a resistive screen... Save a few pennies and make your device basically unsellable.
It is basic economy, niche markets exist at the high end not the bottom end. You can't sell handmade fiat panda's.
This kind of lobbying is about getting as many ideas up there as possible, as extreem as possible and then see what sticks. What slips through the cracks. The public can't catch every bill and with the US tendency to piggyback bills on other bills, something might get passed because people are for something else. It is entirely possible in the US (no other country has anything similar as far as I know) to discuss a piece of legislation dealing with war-brides that adds copyright laws as well.
Mind you, the EU did a similar thing with the EU constitution, the original needed a referendum and was voted down in several countries (the only ones who accepted were the leech countries who never contributed a single penny to the EU). So they renamed it and passed it without that pesky democracy thing getting in the way.
Articles about silly laws that get rejected obscure the just plain bad laws that do get passed without notice or without enough effective opposition to stop them.
Use google a lot and you can already see plenty of messages about forcibly removed results and they already rank and filter. All passed without you being fully aware of it. This is just another attempt to take it even further. Maybe it is stopped, maybe not but another 100 attempts are already in the making and ONE of them will make it.
Well, you are correct, IF you don't consider the US army base on Cuba as US soil, then you are correct.
And EU Muslims are just US blacks. During WW2 Brits refused to follow US army practices of discriminating against blacks, like for instance in Pubs by refusing to segregate them. The brits of the middle of the century as defenders of equal rights? HA! No, just that blacks were not on their hate list at the moment OR rather more accurate, American blacks.
And a Muslim complaining about racism? There is not a muslim country in the world that is not racist and puts severe restrictions on everyone else if they got a chance, for the latest example see Nigeria, everyone not muslim must leave the north.
A muslims complaing about racism in the world. Laughable.
If you want your pot of water anology, do it correctly and realize that those warm sees around hawaii and the freezing ones at the poles are a milimeter in your pot if you consider the depth of the ocean. And a half degree in the deep ocean will have an effect simply to enormous gigantic mass concerned, rather then your skinny dipping on beach with water 5 degrees higher or lower.
I HATE construction noises, all those people drilling holes in walls and cutting open ceilings for maintenance or some improvements. And those damn fire engines rushing to fires. So much easier to live in a world where a building is put up, some asbestos sheets are put inside and then never touched again until the end of time.
Somehow the idea that multi-tasking not only is necessary but a GOOD thing has become entwined in our society, especially under the influence of women who claim they are better at it then men and that men with their single task focus are obsolete...
Yet, the military STILL likes to put TWO people in charge of complex fighting machine. If not more? Why? Especially in fighter planes there is no technical need for it anymore. So why still two people or more to divide the tasks? Can highly intelligent, well trained and physically fit fighter pilots not focus on more then one task at a time? No, not as good as two or more people can. It isn't just direct control of the vehicle, it is dealing with all the information that is needed. Awacs aircraft don't just pipe their data straight to fighter pilots to sort out, it is processed so that task is taken away from the pilot. Radio communication is limitted to what a pilot needs to hear, not all the chatter around to avoid him being overloaded.
OVERLOAD, that is part but not all off the problem. Our brain is not an infinite machine, proof? Magicians. Our eyes take in the photons of the whole act, yet by waving a hand here, we move a hand there. Often quite close to each other. Even our amazing eyes and massive brain can be so easily overloaded that we miss what must obviously be happen (we know there is not such thing as real magic) and be fooled by the lie we know is happening right in front of us. Try it, most people even if they KNOW the trick is taking place have trouble actually spotting it. This is why red circles have been invented as overlays to draw our attention within a image to a specifc spot.
It would therefor make sense that setting a security guard to work watching a dozen monitors with each dozens of people is going to make it pretty damn hard to focus on all of them. And gosh, that is fact and why a lot of money is being put on AI systems that can do the looking instead.
But there is also another element to multi-tasking: avoiding spending your full attention to a single task. The bad students amongst us or those of us who know bad students are probably familiar with the ritual of finding the right music, the right snack, the right drink etc etc to make study easier... not it isn't, but because you hate the task of studying you add tasks to limit focussing on your study and voila, you only succeeded in making it harder for yourself and therefor will hate it even more. Meanwhile the good student just gets on with it in far less time by just focussing on the one task.
If you can only concentrate on one task at the time, then that is a mental handicap that is quite serious. But somehow the current fashion is to think of those who cannot concentrate on a single task at a time as natural multi-taskers. They might well be, but is that a good thing? It seems to taken for granted that because a person multi-tasks, they are automatically good at it and that none of their tasks suffer because of it.
There is a further problem, how you perform a task, matters. Sending an email to someone or a text is NOT the same as a face to face chat. And if you rather handle a dozen online conversations at the same time while avoiding your family downstairs... are you not just fleeing to your room to avoid a social situation you are unable to deal with? This is a nerd site, how many here posted on a friday night when they could have gone out and told themselves they choose to stay home alone? When you are a social misfit, at least have the courage to admit it.
I am not saying it is wrong but what would society look like if all PEOPLE were nerds? If I look fondly back on SWG memories rather then dates, that is just half a million people world wide. But if facebook users did the same, it might well affect the birth rate.
What I have noticed, as a MMO player is that more and more I am playing with young people who lack any awareness that if you group, you are grouping with other living human beings who have their own desires and goals and tho
What you fail to grasp is that just because someone multi-tasks, this doesn't mean they are any good at it OR that it is the right approach to take.
You seem to think that you are multi-tasking BUT are you doing any of the things you do as good as you could be doing them if you didn't have the attention span of a kitten? Don't even bother saying that when you try, it makes no difference, all that shows is that people who multi-task without being very good at it are just bad at single tasks as well.
I couldn't find that first supposed quote in the article. Adding your own quotes as fact to a piece of research? Gosh, let me add a bit of my own, when someone reacts so violently it is usually the case of the truth getting a bit to close.
It is well known that normal humans loose the capacity to fully focus on a individual task when more tasks are being added. You cannot just keep giving new tasks to a person and expect them to do them all equally well at the same time. Yet this is exactly what multi-taskers pride themselves on, they go against decades of research to make sure highly trained and focussed fighter pilots are not overloaded with tasks and claim they can do an endless variety of tasks without any loss in quality... makes sense, if you live in lala-land.
And being social DOES mean having to be social even if you don't always want to. Being a social person doesn't just mean only when you want to with who you want to but to be able to have as a normal human being even in less then ideal situations. Fleeing from a family gathering to check your email is the hallmark of a badly adjusted and anti-social person.
Trust me, you are talking on a nerd site, we know about these things.
A lot of/. kiddies posting that the Monty Python crew is to old when the same complainers whined for Futurama to come back just so we can have yet more episodes of Bender learning he cares and promptly forget it again. The same people who probably also think that Family Guy is funny. I heard that somewhere in the endless seasons they hide one joke, and that is the entire joke.
So, the old farts are at it again eh? Good for them, god knows we need some comedy that you know, has actual jokes in it, not just... I got no idea what Simpons of Family Guy has, they might be series like the A-team or Knight Rider, once you thought they were great, then you grew up and will kill to hide the fact you once liked them.
But Monty Python has survived that. Only the wannabe elite snobs who hate anything that is popular are against it because if everyone gets the joke, then they ain't special anymore.
The kind of customer who uses $1 dollar an hour coders is not the kind of customer you want to be working for. They have no idea about price vs quality or how an economy is supposed to work.
I have in the past had to deal with more then my fair share of companies and individuals who had let their software or website be developed by either outsourcing or paying some kid a below minimum wage rate. Eventually it turns out that this doesn't result in even good enough code and then they came searching for someone to fix it all. And geesh, often they had spend their entire budget and more on the promises of "it will be fixed in the next version if you pay me now" and now they had nothing left but an average and outdated idea, useless code and a lesson not learned. The lucky ones can loan some more money but now have to start in debt with a website that has to be rebuild from scratch and is now last to market.
I have seen everything from sites where order lines were overwritten with new orders by the same person, to simple exchange rate errors on the financial report which the IRS does NOT find half as amusing as you might think to programs that load everything from the database and then search through it in memory. Works perfect for a demo with 5 products, enter your 50.000 and you need a super computer.
BUT the customers using these rent-a-coder site still think you can rent a coder for a dollar and get quality because obviously quality coders have no other options. Region matters less then they think, if it is no problem getting a coder in a low wage region to work for you, then it is no problem for that worker to get work for higher wages from your region... open borders work both ways. Here is the sting with outsourcing, the capable people in outsourcing regions don't want to work for your wages AND will work on their OWN ideas so THEY get the big bucks.
If the customer is only interested in low price, then you are racing to the bottom trying to compete. There is currently a big market for anyone who can setup a Magento webshop. But there are a LOT of bidders out there thinking they can do it for less and less money. Sure, you might try to persuade that YOU can do it better, make it more efficient, not have pages load in under 1 minute and be proud of it but you would be surprised just how few companies that want to start a web shop have either the know-how or the budget to do it right. You are setting yourself up for despair.
In many ways, getting a cleaning job pays better. People might not appreciate the work of a web developer but they do appreciate the work of the person that stops their toilets from becoming alive. The bottom end of web development is not a place to look for an income. To many competitors, not enough employers who know that quality costs money. Hell, the OP is part of problem, someone who doesn't need to make a real living from it undercutting those who do. How can you make a wage if there are people doing it for tips? Plenty of university girls make a living as a hooker, not so many boys do. How can you sell what so many are willing to give away for free or the cost of a beer?
This guy was NOT just convicted for downloading bomb making instructions BUT for the COMBINATION of downloading bomb making instructions, compiling a price list for components, weapons and ammo AND a letter offering himself as a recruit for Jihad.
Granted, I can't see any proof in the full story he wrote the letter or made the list BUT it is the combination of these things that led to the prosecution and conviction. That he pleaded guilty also hints there is more going on.
To get the car anology out of the way, if you are arrested for being drunk behind the wheel of your parked car you CANNOT run a story claiming that you were arrested for buying beer. Nor were you arrested for being drunk, you were being arrested for being drunk in car behind the wheel (it being parked doesn't matter, you are not allowed in the driving seat drunk).
Nit picking? Yes because if you want to rage about civil rights you need to come up with a coherent story, not a story that will be picked apart in 2 seconds by your opponents.
Imagine for instance the case of Rosa Parks, you would make the racists case if you went to defend her and hinged your entire case that she was forced to go to the back of bus for being a woman...
IF you think this case is wrong, you need to fight the case, not some made up case by a slashdot editor with a grudge on his shoulder. It is the combination of documents that lead to the case NOT a single document on its own.
Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.
I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.
One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.
The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.
I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!
As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...
Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?
YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.
The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?
If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.
Patent trolls get their initial funding by going after the small fry that can't afford a lengthy court battle and so instead they buy a license for a "reasonable" fee and these fees are then used to fund the battle again the big companies.
This has been shown so many times, you would have to blind, stupid and... oh wait. I see... I am so sorry.
I have read some insane posts on the internet before, people totally disconnected from reality but this one is so far beyond insanity that it requires the invention of new words.
You think that a simple device that can spray ONE sort of plastic is going to change into a device that can make complex multi-compound materials EVEN FOOD in twenty years?
In twenty years we barely gone from spraying ink to spraying plastic. Or the other way around from devices cutting solid blocks into shapes to spraying materials into solid blocks.
And you think this is going to compete anytime soon with mass production? These maker bots are nice for some form of prototyping. Mass production turns out such plastic forms in mili-seconds, not hours.
If you wanted to make even a small lego set out of this you need days. And you want to use it for the production of a TV or even a car? What about clothes?
And even then, IF makers bots were being used, why would the location of these production machines needing an army of operators NOT be outsourced to china just as maker bots are right now?
This guy wants to trade all of manufacturing for a few software jobs? I don't know what koolaid he is drinking but it must a good one.
Software has the same problem as that other US product, entertainment content, it can be easily duplicated. 1 car designer == 100 factory workers making 101 jobs.
1 software developer == 1 job. Sure, that salary of that software developer might fund a hotdog stand but if you think that a pyramid with software developers at the top if going to have base of 360.000.000.000 people... you obviously haven't got a proper grasp of how much a software developer makes. MS is NOT going to safe the economy.
It ain't sex, in an Officer and a Gentleman, the steady (used to be) reliable job in a carton making factory is looked down upon, a place to escape through a husband with a dream job... BUT in reality THIS is what a NORMAL country economy runs on. Yes there are exceptions, oil nations can do quite well without any real economy. Not just the Arab nations, Scotland is doing very well for itself now it can keep the proceeds from its oil and gas industry and not fund the entire UK with it. Scotland would be in the drain IF it wasn't for oil and gas.
But the US isn't an oil or any other resource rich country, it like my own country Holland NEEDS a solid, boring, unsexy production base. England pre-WW2 thought it could shift farming away from its own land and outsource it completely. It worked... except it didn't. Many thought that it was the u-boats that stopped it but the basic economy also took a nosedive and it started the recession in England that has simply never stopped since, the country is a shadow of its former self with massive un-employment. The only reason figures aren't higher is because non-jobs such as burger flipper are used to keep people out of the official stats. There are entire cities where the norm has been for generations to not have a job.
Replace all of manufacturing with mere software developement? Software development that can be done anywhere and where 1 persons labour can be infinitely distributed?
It is as sane as basing the entire US economy on content production like movies and music... oh wait, some people actually suggest this is a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of money is made in these industries but the way the pyramid of supply and demand is structured simply means that it doesn't provide a pay check for an entire country.
Idiots that come up with ideas like this probably look at the food chain and think that if only lions learned to eat plants you can cut out the middle man... NOT HOW IT FUCKING WORKS.
Even the Nazi Ford understood that if you want the people to buy your cars they need to earn salaries that allow them to buy cars. It is not that complex. Who is going to buy all that software? Chinese workers working for slave wages? The box shifters at Walmart?
But iPads sell like hot cakes... no. they don't. iPads sell incredibly badly... gaming software is even worse... "what" you say?
Apple sold 14 million iPads during 2010, WORLD WIDE... that is a market of 6 billion. That isn't a very good market penetration at all compared to something as simple as carton boxes. How many boxes did you buy yourself? If you bought your iPad online, 2 at least. Of course the profit on that box was far lower but the number of US households fed through simple boxes is far far higher then that iPad that came in a box from china and was only handled for seconds at time by minimum wage box-shifters.
That is part of the problem, it ain't just the production of iPads that has gone to China, it is the box making, the plastic bag making, the packing into shipping containers... it doesn't leave much of the price of a iPad to be earned by US hands. When a factory for making carton boxes shift shores, the machine making jobs, the wood cutting jobs, that cafeteria fan in the parking lot, they all go to.
This ain't fantasy, Manchester has experienced what Detroit is going through now for decades AND NOTHI
Slashdot Mirror
If those wages were paid in the US, more people could afford the device AT the higher price. It is the old Ford idea, if you want the people to buy your cars you got to pay them wages so they can afford to pay for them. The modern US has gone the other way, we take the salaries out of the US to make products cheaper and cheaper so the jobless can afford them and gosh, don't there just happen to be a lot of jobless around.
But then again, a lot of people believe you can run an entire economy as a service industry because money comes from trees and everyone selling everyone hamburgers and insurance is somehow viable.
A bank is a support industry but according to the US it IS the economy. Weird but true.
Cowon has support it for a long time and I believe iRiver as well and I would be highly suprised if Archos doesn't either.
Farmers get screwed all the time, the super markets set the price and the price always has to be lower and lower regardless on what the costs happen to be for say a liter of milk.
I agree that content producers get the shaft but who started out? Do you remember the horse armor Bethseda tried to sell? Or how about Turbine that went F2P but charged in points for their next digital expansion twice as much as the previous expansion cost in the stores?
Further down I have written a lengthy piece of why the 2nd hand game industry is such a bad thing, so I agree with you somewhat but the content industry hasn't exactly been blameless in getting a reputation as the enemy. I remember the days of Papyrus and Grand Prix Legends which got massive updates years after launch, they clearly loved their game and their customers. Nowadays games launch hopelessly broken and with patches that are just designed to screw the paying customer. Take Rage, broken on ATI cards and the first patch removes cheats from single player because paying customers suck.
The problem with gaming is that has become part of the internet and on the internet, feedback sucks. If your local store tried to pull crap, they would get told about it in their face from angry customers, so they don't. An issue a while back was dead sub-pixels. In Holland we got stricter laws then on the rest of the planet. The PSP had a lot of them but tried to claim that they weren't bad enough. Fuck that, went to the store with a draft letter from a dutch consumer show (KASSA) and got it replaced. Holland was the only country Sony did this. But that was because they got a shit storm over them.
How many consumer shows (real ones) do you know even deal with the game industry? Why are games like Rage not suited in court for being a broken product? Why can't I return a game if it doesn't work? I had my oven repaired recently, patched if you like, if they had removed the microwave function (a cheat for cooking) I would have.... wait a minute, that would NEVER happen. But Id removed the cheats from the game, want our fix, agree to removal of functionality.
And people have NOWHERE to go with their rage. Not buying doesn't help because there is always a new line of suckers. There are no legal options and forums are filtered of any negative content.
So the rage builds up and explodes on subjects like this. And the game industry better take note because when the music industry needed the support of its fans to deal with the difficult transition from analog to digital it found that it had none, years of screwing around had used up all goodwill (once people really were fans of a label) and so far, it has not succeeded in restoring it.
I am still pissed off about the fucking horse armor and Betsheda has so far has shown less then zero effort to win me back. They know they screwed up, took the money and expect us to bend over for the next load.
I agree the 2nd hand game market is bad for the industry and therefor bad for customers. But the bitter hatred you find in many of the posts on this subject shows just how badly the game industry has been at creating loyal customers. It wasn't always like this. But ever since expansions have made way for DLC... game companies have come to treat customers as an open wallet.
It is like the TV industry, once people actually bought products to support their shows. Then ads got shoved in anywhere they could and people started to HATE their TV station.
Want another example? I love anime, I don't buy any however because the sub titling tends to be horrendous and the dubbing is an insult. I do buy merchandise but am starting to get really pissed off with a lot of Japanese companies who seem to hate earning money. Can't use debit credit cards, can't ship, you can buy something for download but then it has to be downloaded through a proxy. Why hate a customer so much? It creates a situation where I like a product but hate the company making it and that is not something you can just let build up and never expect a back lash.
The game industry should organize itself, get a body to monitor conduct so that the antics of a few don't hurt the perception of an entire industry.
2nd hand games arrive on the market within days of the release... do you sell your car on within days or is that measured in years?
I bought 2nd hand cars for a long time when younger and yes they were cheaper then new cars but you were also a decade behind in tech and obtained a car that needed a hell of a lot more maintenance.
2nd hand cars also don't bought up for 5 bucks and sell for 45. Margins such as that are only found in the antique and art trade.
2nd hand games arrive on the market to fast with no loss in quality as other 2nd hand products do. It is foolish to compare them.
Some people talk about the first sales doctrine and how the car, book, art, furniture and even music industry deal with it just fine... but there is a difference. None of these tends to end up on the second hand market within DAYS of release. Nor at near the price of original release. Of course there is antique stuff whose price has gone up but that takes a long time. 2nd hand games on the other hand are sold for 5 dollar less then the original within the week of release.
To further cloud the issue, while the original game maybe 50 and the 2nd hand game 45, what the customer gets is a fraction of the value, often as low as a mere 5 bucks. It is clear why game stores love it, that is a very nifty profit margin for them with very little work involved but the game company itself doesn't get a penny for it?
Should they?
There is yet another difference, if I buy second hand books I often buy books that are years if not decades old and they show it. While it is debatable that a book that has swollen up, has its spine cracked and its cover has weathered contains any less of a reading experience, it is NOT the same book as is being sold for new. The prices are also different, a new book might cost 20 new and 2 used. The seller gets a far higher share of the 2nd hand price as well.
The proof for the difference is yet again simple, how many mainstream sellers of new books have a large section of 2nd hand books with the same titles on display for near new price? Exactly: NONE!
Same goes for the 2nd hand car trade. The moment your new car has been sold its price nose-dives (sports car sometimes the exception) and it will be a while before the first ones show up on the 2nd hand market. Buy a 2nd hand car and you buy a model several years out of date.
So... do traditional 2nd hand markets compete as directly with the new market as with games? Go check your local game store, check the new games, just out and what is available 2nd hand. It varies per game genre of course but for shooters especially, a lot of gamers must rush through games at astounding speeds. 1 weekend release, 2nd weekend available 2nd hand. And as said with a HUGE profit margin for the game store.
The first sale doctrine applies to physical products... are games physical products? If I buy a movie ticket, then I can't sell that movie ticket 2nd hand after having watched the movie. This is obvious. The same with a train ticket or indeed any kind of ticket. It is considered normal that you pay for a piece of content and then are done with it. Try to sell a 2nd hand cup of coffee and you would even be arrested.
I can see both points of view, if I bought a game at retail price, play it for 1-2 years, then sell it on for a fraction of the new price and it is sold for a fraction of the new price while the game is no longer released, then the 2nd hand game market might work.
But that is not the case.
The 2nd hand game market moves to fast, has to great a profit margin for game retailers, has no degradation of quality. It would be as if libraries could lend out an infinite number of items... the reasons libraries work is because the number of copies they have are limited, so a hot book you want to read NOW, might just not be available for months. A totally different experience then what a bookstore supplies. There is a reason ebook libraries are not as easily accepted. If everyone can get the same book at the same time, few are going to bother buying it.
If a game is available within days or at most a week of release for 5 bucks less, who is going to buy new? It is not even that you have to wait a week unless you are the type to camp out in front of a store, it often takes me a week to a month for a new game just to fit the shopping in my schedule.
As a customer, I don't much like the screwing around with DLC and such, I prefer to pay a simple price for my content. But if I read some of the comments here, I can certainly see the point of the game industry. A lot of people seem to think that game compa
If you want to talk about encoding, anime fan subbers are at the fore front. The latest is 10 bit encoding. It has a lot of benefits but what its main downside is that there is no hardware for it, you need to run it on the cpu. Someday hardware like a GPU might support it but that takes far to long to stay current.
That is the reason the general purpose CPU has won out so far, why mobile phones and tablet come with them as the main computing unit, because keeping up in hardware with the latest developments just is to slow.
You could in theory build a super computer that can run ONE task very fast. They existed, in fact the earliest computers WERE single task machines... and they lost out because the next task might be totally different and building a new machine for each task is slow and expensive.
The person below (Wierdy) talks about one bit of modern codecs... but this might change tomorrow, as indeed it has with 10bit encoding.
There is a reason DVD's suck donkey balls, open one up and look at what is inside and wonder why the fuck any of it was needed when any PC could easily have dealt with a better format (files max size, subtitle format etc)... because DVD players were purpose build devices and had to be designed ahead of current techonolgy to be widely supported. DVD players being purpose build single task hardware started out obsolete and couldn't change. Of course, the advantage was the they were relatively cheap and became cheaper BUT do you REALLY want your super computing to be this inflexible?
In many ways, the current GPU craze is nothing more then math co-processor of yesterday, or the windows chip on early video cards. They are useful but can't stay up with the rapid advances software can make.
The real money is in making generic hardware faster and more efficient because that is where the intresting stuff is happening. Profit wise as well. What would you rather be selling, DVD players or iPads?
Who are we going to believe? A 20 year old boy or Google?
The Google has judged, welcome to the male gender. It is much like the dark side without the cookies.
KDE 3, not KDE 4 has that high usage rate... says a lot if you think about it. A lot about the usability of polls with a very niche audience. German readers of a linux mag that bother with online polls. Wouldn't suprise me if 43% is in reality 2 people in this sample group.
Okay, principles? How about NOT buying from China then? I try as much as possible... buying Cowon whenever possible as they tend to produce in their own country unlike most others.
Or are your opensource principles the same as my principles of not buying from a country that harvests the organs from executed political prisoners?
The idea of creating an opensource OS for a tablet is nice but you won't get anywhere if you don't go the whole hog. THAT is why Apple is so damned fucking succesful with their products. They don't compromise, don't say "ooh that would be difficult, lets go the cheap route".
You cannot promote linux by associating it with bargain basement obsolete tech. Some nerds might care that you can run it on a C64, the general public doesn't give a hoot, they want a shiny gadget and the productive nerds like me just want something that can doesn't take half an hour to boot just because it is open. I will just stick with following smarter nerds then me, and install linux on an android device with their howto guides.
There have been a few other linux tablets and so far they just don't compete on specs. They seem to think that going linux means going budget but I am a Linux user and have no interest whatsoever in going budget.
This thing seems to have a single core CPU... the new asus tablet transformer prime has 4.
A 800x480 resolution, my 2 year old MP3 player has that, on a far smaller screen. The tablet after the prime, the TF700T, will have a 1920x1200 resolution.
Yes, these are larger devices and cost three times as much but geez whiz, where are you more likely to find people who will appreciate having a full OS at their disposal with real desktop quality applications instead of fart apps, at the bottom budget market or at the high end cutting edge?
MS must be loving this, there tablets are not going to be underpowered rebrands of yesterday model, so if an average consumer is browsing for a tablet, they will see highend sexy devices as being Android/iOS/Windows8 and Linux in the bargain bin... and gosh, wanna bet that people who bargain hunt will still want Android/iOS/Windows8 and just get an older device?
Evidence? The total and complete failure of previous linux tablets that pulled such braindead stunts as using a resistive screen... Save a few pennies and make your device basically unsellable.
It is basic economy, niche markets exist at the high end not the bottom end. You can't sell handmade fiat panda's.
This kind of lobbying is about getting as many ideas up there as possible, as extreem as possible and then see what sticks. What slips through the cracks. The public can't catch every bill and with the US tendency to piggyback bills on other bills, something might get passed because people are for something else. It is entirely possible in the US (no other country has anything similar as far as I know) to discuss a piece of legislation dealing with war-brides that adds copyright laws as well.
Mind you, the EU did a similar thing with the EU constitution, the original needed a referendum and was voted down in several countries (the only ones who accepted were the leech countries who never contributed a single penny to the EU). So they renamed it and passed it without that pesky democracy thing getting in the way.
Articles about silly laws that get rejected obscure the just plain bad laws that do get passed without notice or without enough effective opposition to stop them.
Use google a lot and you can already see plenty of messages about forcibly removed results and they already rank and filter. All passed without you being fully aware of it. This is just another attempt to take it even further. Maybe it is stopped, maybe not but another 100 attempts are already in the making and ONE of them will make it.
Well, you are correct, IF you don't consider the US army base on Cuba as US soil, then you are correct.
And EU Muslims are just US blacks. During WW2 Brits refused to follow US army practices of discriminating against blacks, like for instance in Pubs by refusing to segregate them. The brits of the middle of the century as defenders of equal rights? HA! No, just that blacks were not on their hate list at the moment OR rather more accurate, American blacks.
And a Muslim complaining about racism? There is not a muslim country in the world that is not racist and puts severe restrictions on everyone else if they got a chance, for the latest example see Nigeria, everyone not muslim must leave the north.
A muslims complaing about racism in the world. Laughable.
If you want your pot of water anology, do it correctly and realize that those warm sees around hawaii and the freezing ones at the poles are a milimeter in your pot if you consider the depth of the ocean. And a half degree in the deep ocean will have an effect simply to enormous gigantic mass concerned, rather then your skinny dipping on beach with water 5 degrees higher or lower.
I HATE construction noises, all those people drilling holes in walls and cutting open ceilings for maintenance or some improvements. And those damn fire engines rushing to fires. So much easier to live in a world where a building is put up, some asbestos sheets are put inside and then never touched again until the end of time.
Somehow the idea that multi-tasking not only is necessary but a GOOD thing has become entwined in our society, especially under the influence of women who claim they are better at it then men and that men with their single task focus are obsolete...
Yet, the military STILL likes to put TWO people in charge of complex fighting machine. If not more? Why? Especially in fighter planes there is no technical need for it anymore. So why still two people or more to divide the tasks? Can highly intelligent, well trained and physically fit fighter pilots not focus on more then one task at a time? No, not as good as two or more people can. It isn't just direct control of the vehicle, it is dealing with all the information that is needed. Awacs aircraft don't just pipe their data straight to fighter pilots to sort out, it is processed so that task is taken away from the pilot. Radio communication is limitted to what a pilot needs to hear, not all the chatter around to avoid him being overloaded.
OVERLOAD, that is part but not all off the problem. Our brain is not an infinite machine, proof? Magicians. Our eyes take in the photons of the whole act, yet by waving a hand here, we move a hand there. Often quite close to each other. Even our amazing eyes and massive brain can be so easily overloaded that we miss what must obviously be happen (we know there is not such thing as real magic) and be fooled by the lie we know is happening right in front of us. Try it, most people even if they KNOW the trick is taking place have trouble actually spotting it. This is why red circles have been invented as overlays to draw our attention within a image to a specifc spot.
It would therefor make sense that setting a security guard to work watching a dozen monitors with each dozens of people is going to make it pretty damn hard to focus on all of them. And gosh, that is fact and why a lot of money is being put on AI systems that can do the looking instead.
But there is also another element to multi-tasking: avoiding spending your full attention to a single task. The bad students amongst us or those of us who know bad students are probably familiar with the ritual of finding the right music, the right snack, the right drink etc etc to make study easier... not it isn't, but because you hate the task of studying you add tasks to limit focussing on your study and voila, you only succeeded in making it harder for yourself and therefor will hate it even more. Meanwhile the good student just gets on with it in far less time by just focussing on the one task.
If you can only concentrate on one task at the time, then that is a mental handicap that is quite serious. But somehow the current fashion is to think of those who cannot concentrate on a single task at a time as natural multi-taskers. They might well be, but is that a good thing? It seems to taken for granted that because a person multi-tasks, they are automatically good at it and that none of their tasks suffer because of it.
There is a further problem, how you perform a task, matters. Sending an email to someone or a text is NOT the same as a face to face chat. And if you rather handle a dozen online conversations at the same time while avoiding your family downstairs... are you not just fleeing to your room to avoid a social situation you are unable to deal with? This is a nerd site, how many here posted on a friday night when they could have gone out and told themselves they choose to stay home alone? When you are a social misfit, at least have the courage to admit it.
I am not saying it is wrong but what would society look like if all PEOPLE were nerds? If I look fondly back on SWG memories rather then dates, that is just half a million people world wide. But if facebook users did the same, it might well affect the birth rate.
What I have noticed, as a MMO player is that more and more I am playing with young people who lack any awareness that if you group, you are grouping with other living human beings who have their own desires and goals and tho
What you fail to grasp is that just because someone multi-tasks, this doesn't mean they are any good at it OR that it is the right approach to take.
You seem to think that you are multi-tasking BUT are you doing any of the things you do as good as you could be doing them if you didn't have the attention span of a kitten? Don't even bother saying that when you try, it makes no difference, all that shows is that people who multi-task without being very good at it are just bad at single tasks as well.
I couldn't find that first supposed quote in the article. Adding your own quotes as fact to a piece of research? Gosh, let me add a bit of my own, when someone reacts so violently it is usually the case of the truth getting a bit to close.
It is well known that normal humans loose the capacity to fully focus on a individual task when more tasks are being added. You cannot just keep giving new tasks to a person and expect them to do them all equally well at the same time. Yet this is exactly what multi-taskers pride themselves on, they go against decades of research to make sure highly trained and focussed fighter pilots are not overloaded with tasks and claim they can do an endless variety of tasks without any loss in quality... makes sense, if you live in lala-land.
And being social DOES mean having to be social even if you don't always want to. Being a social person doesn't just mean only when you want to with who you want to but to be able to have as a normal human being even in less then ideal situations. Fleeing from a family gathering to check your email is the hallmark of a badly adjusted and anti-social person.
Trust me, you are talking on a nerd site, we know about these things.
A lot of /. kiddies posting that the Monty Python crew is to old when the same complainers whined for Futurama to come back just so we can have yet more episodes of Bender learning he cares and promptly forget it again. The same people who probably also think that Family Guy is funny. I heard that somewhere in the endless seasons they hide one joke, and that is the entire joke.
So, the old farts are at it again eh? Good for them, god knows we need some comedy that you know, has actual jokes in it, not just... I got no idea what Simpons of Family Guy has, they might be series like the A-team or Knight Rider, once you thought they were great, then you grew up and will kill to hide the fact you once liked them.
But Monty Python has survived that. Only the wannabe elite snobs who hate anything that is popular are against it because if everyone gets the joke, then they ain't special anymore.
The kind of customer who uses $1 dollar an hour coders is not the kind of customer you want to be working for. They have no idea about price vs quality or how an economy is supposed to work.
I have in the past had to deal with more then my fair share of companies and individuals who had let their software or website be developed by either outsourcing or paying some kid a below minimum wage rate. Eventually it turns out that this doesn't result in even good enough code and then they came searching for someone to fix it all. And geesh, often they had spend their entire budget and more on the promises of "it will be fixed in the next version if you pay me now" and now they had nothing left but an average and outdated idea, useless code and a lesson not learned. The lucky ones can loan some more money but now have to start in debt with a website that has to be rebuild from scratch and is now last to market.
I have seen everything from sites where order lines were overwritten with new orders by the same person, to simple exchange rate errors on the financial report which the IRS does NOT find half as amusing as you might think to programs that load everything from the database and then search through it in memory. Works perfect for a demo with 5 products, enter your 50.000 and you need a super computer.
BUT the customers using these rent-a-coder site still think you can rent a coder for a dollar and get quality because obviously quality coders have no other options. Region matters less then they think, if it is no problem getting a coder in a low wage region to work for you, then it is no problem for that worker to get work for higher wages from your region... open borders work both ways. Here is the sting with outsourcing, the capable people in outsourcing regions don't want to work for your wages AND will work on their OWN ideas so THEY get the big bucks.
If the customer is only interested in low price, then you are racing to the bottom trying to compete. There is currently a big market for anyone who can setup a Magento webshop. But there are a LOT of bidders out there thinking they can do it for less and less money. Sure, you might try to persuade that YOU can do it better, make it more efficient, not have pages load in under 1 minute and be proud of it but you would be surprised just how few companies that want to start a web shop have either the know-how or the budget to do it right. You are setting yourself up for despair.
In many ways, getting a cleaning job pays better. People might not appreciate the work of a web developer but they do appreciate the work of the person that stops their toilets from becoming alive. The bottom end of web development is not a place to look for an income. To many competitors, not enough employers who know that quality costs money. Hell, the OP is part of problem, someone who doesn't need to make a real living from it undercutting those who do. How can you make a wage if there are people doing it for tips? Plenty of university girls make a living as a hooker, not so many boys do. How can you sell what so many are willing to give away for free or the cost of a beer?
Same deal.
This guy was NOT just convicted for downloading bomb making instructions BUT for the COMBINATION of downloading bomb making instructions, compiling a price list for components, weapons and ammo AND a letter offering himself as a recruit for Jihad.
Granted, I can't see any proof in the full story he wrote the letter or made the list BUT it is the combination of these things that led to the prosecution and conviction. That he pleaded guilty also hints there is more going on.
To get the car anology out of the way, if you are arrested for being drunk behind the wheel of your parked car you CANNOT run a story claiming that you were arrested for buying beer. Nor were you arrested for being drunk, you were being arrested for being drunk in car behind the wheel (it being parked doesn't matter, you are not allowed in the driving seat drunk).
Nit picking? Yes because if you want to rage about civil rights you need to come up with a coherent story, not a story that will be picked apart in 2 seconds by your opponents.
Imagine for instance the case of Rosa Parks, you would make the racists case if you went to defend her and hinged your entire case that she was forced to go to the back of bus for being a woman...
IF you think this case is wrong, you need to fight the case, not some made up case by a slashdot editor with a grudge on his shoulder. It is the combination of documents that lead to the case NOT a single document on its own.
Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.
I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.
One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.
The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.
I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!
As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...
Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?
YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.
The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?
If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.
Because 97% of the people of the world do not have an iPad...
In 2010, Apple sold 14 million iPad's. To an audience of 6+ billion.
Patent trolls get their initial funding by going after the small fry that can't afford a lengthy court battle and so instead they buy a license for a "reasonable" fee and these fees are then used to fund the battle again the big companies.
This has been shown so many times, you would have to blind, stupid and... oh wait. I see... I am so sorry.
I have read some insane posts on the internet before, people totally disconnected from reality but this one is so far beyond insanity that it requires the invention of new words.
You think that a simple device that can spray ONE sort of plastic is going to change into a device that can make complex multi-compound materials EVEN FOOD in twenty years?
In twenty years we barely gone from spraying ink to spraying plastic. Or the other way around from devices cutting solid blocks into shapes to spraying materials into solid blocks.
And you think this is going to compete anytime soon with mass production? These maker bots are nice for some form of prototyping. Mass production turns out such plastic forms in mili-seconds, not hours.
If you wanted to make even a small lego set out of this you need days. And you want to use it for the production of a TV or even a car? What about clothes?
And even then, IF makers bots were being used, why would the location of these production machines needing an army of operators NOT be outsourced to china just as maker bots are right now?
Seriously kid, get medical help.
This guy wants to trade all of manufacturing for a few software jobs? I don't know what koolaid he is drinking but it must a good one.
Software has the same problem as that other US product, entertainment content, it can be easily duplicated. 1 car designer == 100 factory workers making 101 jobs.
1 software developer == 1 job. Sure, that salary of that software developer might fund a hotdog stand but if you think that a pyramid with software developers at the top if going to have base of 360.000.000.000 people... you obviously haven't got a proper grasp of how much a software developer makes. MS is NOT going to safe the economy.
It ain't sex, in an Officer and a Gentleman, the steady (used to be) reliable job in a carton making factory is looked down upon, a place to escape through a husband with a dream job... BUT in reality THIS is what a NORMAL country economy runs on. Yes there are exceptions, oil nations can do quite well without any real economy. Not just the Arab nations, Scotland is doing very well for itself now it can keep the proceeds from its oil and gas industry and not fund the entire UK with it. Scotland would be in the drain IF it wasn't for oil and gas.
But the US isn't an oil or any other resource rich country, it like my own country Holland NEEDS a solid, boring, unsexy production base. England pre-WW2 thought it could shift farming away from its own land and outsource it completely. It worked... except it didn't. Many thought that it was the u-boats that stopped it but the basic economy also took a nosedive and it started the recession in England that has simply never stopped since, the country is a shadow of its former self with massive un-employment. The only reason figures aren't higher is because non-jobs such as burger flipper are used to keep people out of the official stats. There are entire cities where the norm has been for generations to not have a job.
Replace all of manufacturing with mere software developement? Software development that can be done anywhere and where 1 persons labour can be infinitely distributed?
It is as sane as basing the entire US economy on content production like movies and music... oh wait, some people actually suggest this is a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of money is made in these industries but the way the pyramid of supply and demand is structured simply means that it doesn't provide a pay check for an entire country.
Idiots that come up with ideas like this probably look at the food chain and think that if only lions learned to eat plants you can cut out the middle man... NOT HOW IT FUCKING WORKS.
Even the Nazi Ford understood that if you want the people to buy your cars they need to earn salaries that allow them to buy cars. It is not that complex. Who is going to buy all that software? Chinese workers working for slave wages? The box shifters at Walmart?
But iPads sell like hot cakes... no. they don't. iPads sell incredibly badly... gaming software is even worse... "what" you say?
Apple sold 14 million iPads during 2010, WORLD WIDE... that is a market of 6 billion. That isn't a very good market penetration at all compared to something as simple as carton boxes. How many boxes did you buy yourself? If you bought your iPad online, 2 at least. Of course the profit on that box was far lower but the number of US households fed through simple boxes is far far higher then that iPad that came in a box from china and was only handled for seconds at time by minimum wage box-shifters.
That is part of the problem, it ain't just the production of iPads that has gone to China, it is the box making, the plastic bag making, the packing into shipping containers... it doesn't leave much of the price of a iPad to be earned by US hands. When a factory for making carton boxes shift shores, the machine making jobs, the wood cutting jobs, that cafeteria fan in the parking lot, they all go to.
This ain't fantasy, Manchester has experienced what Detroit is going through now for decades AND NOTHI