Amazing, because that's about exactly when the decision was made!
If you use off-the-shelf, general-purpose yet proprietary single-vendor machine vision library for industrial control, you are doing it seriously wrong.
Why? Everything involves compromises. This vendor was particularly good at our specific application.
To be fair, if the decision was made today, it might be Linux. More people use the library with Linux now, and Linux seems to work with USB keys of all flavors. We may even go that route eventually as a unit cost reduction if hardware support can be consistently found.
For the love of God, WHY THE HELL would you EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER consider using ANY product even REMOTELY related to Windows for Industrial Control Systems??????
In our case, two reasons: 1. USB sticks. These things are a serious nightmare. Customer requirements are to be able to load programs via USB, and yet some USB sticks give trouble to some non-Windows systems. Our pre-Windows solution was to provide a list of known-working USB sticks. This was a nightmare, since the available sticks part numbers seemed to change from week to week. We stocked sticks and even gave out working ones, but it took an amazing amount of effort. Virtually every stick on the market has been tested against Windows. 2. Machine vision libraries. Our vendor is awesome and was willing to port their libraries to anything we wanted. However, the warning was that we would be the only users (or one of only a handful) on a non-Windows system. We were not willing to take that risk.
However China does have trade deficit with Germany,
Which they fill with "useless fiat". They use the dollars and euros to pay Germany. They also have deficits with numerous other countries who export raw materials such as petroleum. Since they won't trade yuan, they pay with "useless fiat".
I agree that currency is a bad investment, and I agree that China is becoming a more developed market very quickly - but they simply could not function without exports (and imports!) right now. They aren't even food-independent anymore. They have made the decision to fast-track their industrial growth at the expense of a trade imbalance, which is pretty common. The route they are using is to artificially keep their currency low, which is good for exports, but terrible for inflation. Either way, it is impossible to keep up forever, and it will be rather interesting to see if a soft landing is possible, or if they will hit a prolonged period of stagnation like Japan.
As an aside, India is right next door with a population almost as large, it has a very weak government by comparison. and none of the same kind of market interference. It will be interesting to see which country does better economically in the long run.
There wasn't much of a post to read. The first part is a commentary on not being able to run the latest and greatest on older hardware. I directly addressed this point. The second part is talking about a keyboard comparison, and I didn't address that.
I'm sorry sir. Please forgive me. I'm happy to junk the G5 and upgrade to the current model.
As the happy owner of a G5, I'm not sure what you are going on about. The thing is at least 5 years old now (mine is going on 7), and they kept selling updated software for it for several years, and they continue to update 10.5 - the last version to run on it. I'd love it if they would support old hardware forever, but let's be realistic. Even Mozilla and Adobe have abandoned G5, which to me is far worse.
In any case, I'm a counter to you I guess - I am generally quite happy if I can get 7 useful years out of a computer. And I'm not going to "junk" it until it doesn't work anymore. It is actually more useful than when I bought it. I won't be loading Windows 7 on my 2005 Athlon either.
They will tell you that the price increases are a terrible burden, and it will be clear just by looking at them that the electronic do-dad they just assembled is a month's salary. They don't want inflation, but they want that factory job. The smartphone-in-their-Gucci-toting urbanites that you see on TV are not the ones building these products. There is a growing middle and upper class in China, and someday their economy may not be dependent on exports. But that day has not yet come - loss of the US would be devastating. Loss of the US and EU would be unfathomable.
With a billion people and massive natural resources, China has the ability to become mostly self sufficient in a way that the USA never can.
I think you'll find that the natural resources available per person are much smaller in China than in the US. Just as one example, look at their oil reserves. The US has something like 210 billion barrels in proven reserves. China has 16 billion barrels. That means they will be even less "self-sufficient" than the US in terms of petroleum - which is not just used as fuel in cars. It is used for fertilizer and in plastics. Another example is food. China is not food-independent now, and their food imports will rise as their population gets richer.
No country is self-sufficient anymore. Maybe you'll see less trade as oil increases in price, but I doubt we'll ever be back where it is particularly important to be "self-sufficient". I mean, if you are some country in Europe, are you going to forgo high-tech manufacturing just because you have no native source of titanium or some rare-earth metal?
There is not a single reason for the Chinese people in China to want to build products so that those products then could be exported to other countries, who give them back..... printed paper.
Ask the factory workers if they would like to go back to subsistence farming. The printed paper that they get buys food and shelter, albeit at a lower exchange rate than they should be getting if their currency could float. Then again, they might not be at the factory if their currency could float, so... that's the quandary their government finds itself in.
However I see this as currency war and whoever wins that type of a war, wins misery for their people, who won't be able to buy anything with their worthless currency.
Indeed - I don't see how the current status quo can work out in the long run. All that borrowing leads to inflation. Right now it is in China, but that can't go on forever.
In the mean time, I would absolutely love to see MS start charging a 30% commission on every sale made through the Windows version of iTunes.
Wouldn't Windows have to levy the same tax on everyone? Unlike Apple, they really do have a monopoly so targeting a single competitor would really rankle regulators.
That aside, I think the difference is that Apple can charge 30% and people will still buy their products. If MS pulled that, it is not clear to me that Win 8 would enjoy the same success as Win 7. Hell, I don't even think Apple could get away with it on Mac. It's just that the nature of phones is not "little PCs", even if that's what they seem like to us geeks.
Smells like capitalism to me. Your business failed. C'est la vie.
Agreed. How many layers of pretend did this business have to depend on? They made one product that is very much a commodity: an ebook reader. Everything else depended on either a government-granted monopoly or the land of Apple never changing the rules in it's own little corner of the copyright universe. Nothing wrong with building a business around copyright law, but it's kind of funny to hear him complain how the rules of imagination land have changed.
They will consume the stuff they produce themselves, because they have over a fifth of the planet's human population.
Maybe they will someday be able to consume the stuff the produce, but today that is not realistic. They need the US and Europe as markets for their goods right now. If the US were to tank economically, so would Europe. With the US and Europe down, the Chinese would find themselves in possession of the worlds largest collection of idle factories.
So let's stop with all of the nationalistic bravado and just admit that any economic war between the US and China would bring everyone pain and misery.
IMHO, the current relationship is not sustainable, but can be salvaged. Eventually, the Chinese public will tire of absorbing the US's inflation. When that happens, the Chinese will have to stop propping up the dollar and the US will get it's inflation back. At that point, I'm not sure what will happen because of the uncertain US political landscape. I certainly hope the yahoos in DC can balance the books.
Sure, China will lose that debt. But it's going to lose that debt ANYWAY!
That's not the point. All those "cheap" products that China produces aren't actually so cheap. Without buying huge numbers of debt with imported US dollars, the dollar would fall in value.
What do you think the Chinese would do with all of that "production" if they couldn't sell it overseas?
The US and China are linked economically. There's no shame in that. China placates their population with jobs and develops their country and the US is happy to get physical goods in exchange for otherwise worthless paper. If not for the whole crushing debt and runaway inflation nightmare, it would be win-win.
Are people who are incapable of socializing without a federally provided post-office counted among the clinically sane now? I'm sorry. I must have missed the memo.
I didn't do a very good job of elaborating. People are generally very social animals. If rural life sucks, and is devoid of human interaction, not very many people will want to be farmers. This means having at least some livable rural population, complete with places to socialize, and where both women and men might want to live and raise a family. Electricity, phone service, internet, and mail service all factor in here.
We need to have a food surplus, so that means a depressed food price. That means we need to either buy and destroy food to get the prices back up, or we need to subsidize and/or create incentives for people to stay farmers.
Oh, and by the way - the reason for all of the rural subsidies is the Great Depression. FDR was facing the very real threat of a rural insurrection and needed to do something fast.
I'm not saying they shouldn't get mail service, I'm saying that a closer post office is unnecessary. If they need to travel a few extra miles, that is not huge as long as they still have mail service. Perhaps I should have been more clear on that point.
Okay I think we agree:) Certainly postal service isn't as important as it once was, and I'm all for downsizing the infrastructure.
but what does keeping costs low have to do with oversupply.
Well, on a typical demand curve, an increase in supply results in a lower price. The only way for the "market" to increase price is to decrease supply. Since I advocate always "forcing" an over-supply, the price will always be lower than it would be if the market weren't being monkeyed with. The only way to bring the price back up is to buy the excess and either warehouse it or plow it back into the ground. Sometimes, the government pays the farmers to plow it into the ground to save the government some money, but the idea is the same.
But at the end of the day, you either have to subsidize the farmers or buy and destroy food.
The post office does get money from the general public in the sense that prices everywhere are higher to support the uneconomic deliveries - the effect if the same as a tax even if the mechanism is different.
Just to make an important distinction - it is the same effect as a tax on postage, not a general tax. The "tax" only effects the users of the postal system. I've been on the same book of stamps for about 6 months, so I don't pay much "tax". By the look of the mail that I get, most of the "tax" is paid by marketers.
then food prices are too low and will increase to a sustainable level if subsidies are removed.
We WANT food prices to be too low. Or, rather, we want constant over-supply, which results in low prices. We certainly don't want food production to be subject to free market cycles of over and under-supply! Maybe a postal "tax" isn't the best way to subsidize the farmers, but some kind of subsidy is necessary. The government could buy the excess food, but that would drive prices up and squeeze the poor.
Where do you draw the line on what should or shouldn't be provided.
I don't "draw a line" - I make a (hopefully) intelligent choice based on the situation.
Fire company? Those are mostly for containing fires. If a farm house catches fire, there isn't really anything else to catch fire - so no, it's not worth having a nearby fire company. If a suburban house catches fire, you'd better get there quick or the whole sub-development could go up.
But mail is a very basic service that farmers depend on. In general I agree with your arguments, but I do NOT want food production subject to normal economic forces. I want constant over-supply. That means depressed prices so you have to help the farmers out artificially. There are a number of ways to do this: you could buy the excess to keep the prices high, you could subsidize them directly, etc. One form of subsidy is power/communications/mail. If farmers can reasonably expect to live well without mail, then I might re-think my opinion - but I'm still under the impression that it is essential.
TMI is not a boiling water reactor. It has the massive containment structure of a PWR. There is a BWR in New Jersey with a PWR-style containment vessel - I think so that the plant could be built near heavily populated areas - but it's not common.
Step 2 is easy: 1. Sell 600 billion dollars in bonds to the Chinese. 2. Pay Chinese 600 billion dollars for moon rocket. 3. Quantitative ease those bonds right out of existence.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you CAN install it... but why? The license costs more than the junk you are installing it on :)
Not true for at least half a decade.
Amazing, because that's about exactly when the decision was made!
If you use off-the-shelf, general-purpose yet proprietary single-vendor machine vision library for industrial control, you are doing it seriously wrong.
Why? Everything involves compromises. This vendor was particularly good at our specific application.
To be fair, if the decision was made today, it might be Linux. More people use the library with Linux now, and Linux seems to work with USB keys of all flavors. We may even go that route eventually as a unit cost reduction if hardware support can be consistently found.
My favorite is one of their server packages has this item:
"DMCA and copyright claims will be ignored"
LOL.
For the love of God, WHY THE HELL would you EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER consider using ANY product even REMOTELY related to Windows for Industrial Control Systems??????
In our case, two reasons:
1. USB sticks. These things are a serious nightmare. Customer requirements are to be able to load programs via USB, and yet some USB sticks give trouble to some non-Windows systems. Our pre-Windows solution was to provide a list of known-working USB sticks. This was a nightmare, since the available sticks part numbers seemed to change from week to week. We stocked sticks and even gave out working ones, but it took an amazing amount of effort. Virtually every stick on the market has been tested against Windows.
2. Machine vision libraries. Our vendor is awesome and was willing to port their libraries to anything we wanted. However, the warning was that we would be the only users (or one of only a handful) on a non-Windows system. We were not willing to take that risk.
However China does have trade deficit with Germany,
Which they fill with "useless fiat". They use the dollars and euros to pay Germany. They also have deficits with numerous other countries who export raw materials such as petroleum. Since they won't trade yuan, they pay with "useless fiat".
I agree that currency is a bad investment, and I agree that China is becoming a more developed market very quickly - but they simply could not function without exports (and imports!) right now. They aren't even food-independent anymore. They have made the decision to fast-track their industrial growth at the expense of a trade imbalance, which is pretty common. The route they are using is to artificially keep their currency low, which is good for exports, but terrible for inflation. Either way, it is impossible to keep up forever, and it will be rather interesting to see if a soft landing is possible, or if they will hit a prolonged period of stagnation like Japan.
As an aside, India is right next door with a population almost as large, it has a very weak government by comparison. and none of the same kind of market interference. It will be interesting to see which country does better economically in the long run.
There wasn't much of a post to read. The first part is a commentary on not being able to run the latest and greatest on older hardware. I directly addressed this point. The second part is talking about a keyboard comparison, and I didn't address that.
Are you sure YOU read the posts?
I'm sorry sir. Please forgive me. I'm happy to junk the G5 and upgrade to the current model.
As the happy owner of a G5, I'm not sure what you are going on about. The thing is at least 5 years old now (mine is going on 7), and they kept selling updated software for it for several years, and they continue to update 10.5 - the last version to run on it. I'd love it if they would support old hardware forever, but let's be realistic. Even Mozilla and Adobe have abandoned G5, which to me is far worse.
In any case, I'm a counter to you I guess - I am generally quite happy if I can get 7 useful years out of a computer. And I'm not going to "junk" it until it doesn't work anymore. It is actually more useful than when I bought it. I won't be loading Windows 7 on my 2005 Athlon either.
What do you think they would tell you?
They will tell you that the price increases are a terrible burden, and it will be clear just by looking at them that the electronic do-dad they just assembled is a month's salary. They don't want inflation, but they want that factory job. The smartphone-in-their-Gucci-toting urbanites that you see on TV are not the ones building these products. There is a growing middle and upper class in China, and someday their economy may not be dependent on exports. But that day has not yet come - loss of the US would be devastating. Loss of the US and EU would be unfathomable.
With a billion people and massive natural resources, China has the ability to become mostly self sufficient in a way that the USA never can.
I think you'll find that the natural resources available per person are much smaller in China than in the US. Just as one example, look at their oil reserves. The US has something like 210 billion barrels in proven reserves. China has 16 billion barrels. That means they will be even less "self-sufficient" than the US in terms of petroleum - which is not just used as fuel in cars. It is used for fertilizer and in plastics. Another example is food. China is not food-independent now, and their food imports will rise as their population gets richer.
No country is self-sufficient anymore. Maybe you'll see less trade as oil increases in price, but I doubt we'll ever be back where it is particularly important to be "self-sufficient". I mean, if you are some country in Europe, are you going to forgo high-tech manufacturing just because you have no native source of titanium or some rare-earth metal?
There is not a single reason for the Chinese people in China to want to build products so that those products then could be exported to other countries, who give them back..... printed paper.
Ask the factory workers if they would like to go back to subsistence farming. The printed paper that they get buys food and shelter, albeit at a lower exchange rate than they should be getting if their currency could float. Then again, they might not be at the factory if their currency could float, so... that's the quandary their government finds itself in.
However I see this as currency war and whoever wins that type of a war, wins misery for their people, who won't be able to buy anything with their worthless currency.
Indeed - I don't see how the current status quo can work out in the long run. All that borrowing leads to inflation. Right now it is in China, but that can't go on forever.
In the mean time, I would absolutely love to see MS start charging a 30% commission on every sale made through the Windows version of iTunes.
Wouldn't Windows have to levy the same tax on everyone? Unlike Apple, they really do have a monopoly so targeting a single competitor would really rankle regulators.
That aside, I think the difference is that Apple can charge 30% and people will still buy their products. If MS pulled that, it is not clear to me that Win 8 would enjoy the same success as Win 7. Hell, I don't even think Apple could get away with it on Mac. It's just that the nature of phones is not "little PCs", even if that's what they seem like to us geeks.
Smells like capitalism to me.
Your business failed.
C'est la vie.
Agreed. How many layers of pretend did this business have to depend on? They made one product that is very much a commodity: an ebook reader. Everything else depended on either a government-granted monopoly or the land of Apple never changing the rules in it's own little corner of the copyright universe. Nothing wrong with building a business around copyright law, but it's kind of funny to hear him complain how the rules of imagination land have changed.
They will consume the stuff they produce themselves, because they have over a fifth of the planet's human population.
Maybe they will someday be able to consume the stuff the produce, but today that is not realistic. They need the US and Europe as markets for their goods right now. If the US were to tank economically, so would Europe. With the US and Europe down, the Chinese would find themselves in possession of the worlds largest collection of idle factories.
So let's stop with all of the nationalistic bravado and just admit that any economic war between the US and China would bring everyone pain and misery.
IMHO, the current relationship is not sustainable, but can be salvaged. Eventually, the Chinese public will tire of absorbing the US's inflation. When that happens, the Chinese will have to stop propping up the dollar and the US will get it's inflation back. At that point, I'm not sure what will happen because of the uncertain US political landscape. I certainly hope the yahoos in DC can balance the books.
Sure, China will lose that debt. But it's going to lose that debt ANYWAY!
That's not the point. All those "cheap" products that China produces aren't actually so cheap. Without buying huge numbers of debt with imported US dollars, the dollar would fall in value.
What do you think the Chinese would do with all of that "production" if they couldn't sell it overseas?
The US and China are linked economically. There's no shame in that. China placates their population with jobs and develops their country and the US is happy to get physical goods in exchange for otherwise worthless paper. If not for the whole crushing debt and runaway inflation nightmare, it would be win-win.
I'm sure they won't spy on us with those satellites...
No kidding... I just farted and got a call from Osama Bin Laden and Elvis.
Are people who are incapable of socializing without a federally provided post-office counted among the clinically sane now? I'm sorry. I must have missed the memo.
I didn't do a very good job of elaborating. People are generally very social animals. If rural life sucks, and is devoid of human interaction, not very many people will want to be farmers. This means having at least some livable rural population, complete with places to socialize, and where both women and men might want to live and raise a family. Electricity, phone service, internet, and mail service all factor in here.
We need to have a food surplus, so that means a depressed food price. That means we need to either buy and destroy food to get the prices back up, or we need to subsidize and/or create incentives for people to stay farmers.
Oh, and by the way - the reason for all of the rural subsidies is the Great Depression. FDR was facing the very real threat of a rural insurrection and needed to do something fast.
The same effect of encouraging over-supply could be gotten by directly subsidizing all food production.
True. And it would be easier to explain politically.
But I guess we don't really have a "national" government, and we have a block of powerful rural states.
I'm not saying they shouldn't get mail service, I'm saying that a closer post office is unnecessary. If they need to travel a few extra miles, that is not huge as long as they still have mail service. Perhaps I should have been more clear on that point.
Okay I think we agree :) Certainly postal service isn't as important as it once was, and I'm all for downsizing the infrastructure.
but what does keeping costs low have to do with oversupply.
Well, on a typical demand curve, an increase in supply results in a lower price. The only way for the "market" to increase price is to decrease supply. Since I advocate always "forcing" an over-supply, the price will always be lower than it would be if the market weren't being monkeyed with. The only way to bring the price back up is to buy the excess and either warehouse it or plow it back into the ground. Sometimes, the government pays the farmers to plow it into the ground to save the government some money, but the idea is the same.
But at the end of the day, you either have to subsidize the farmers or buy and destroy food.
The post office does get money from the general public in the sense that prices everywhere are higher to support the uneconomic deliveries - the effect if the same as a tax even if the mechanism is different.
Just to make an important distinction - it is the same effect as a tax on postage, not a general tax. The "tax" only effects the users of the postal system. I've been on the same book of stamps for about 6 months, so I don't pay much "tax". By the look of the mail that I get, most of the "tax" is paid by marketers.
then food prices are too low and will increase to a sustainable level if subsidies are removed.
We WANT food prices to be too low. Or, rather, we want constant over-supply, which results in low prices. We certainly don't want food production to be subject to free market cycles of over and under-supply! Maybe a postal "tax" isn't the best way to subsidize the farmers, but some kind of subsidy is necessary. The government could buy the excess food, but that would drive prices up and squeeze the poor.
Where do you draw the line on what should or shouldn't be provided.
I don't "draw a line" - I make a (hopefully) intelligent choice based on the situation.
Fire company? Those are mostly for containing fires. If a farm house catches fire, there isn't really anything else to catch fire - so no, it's not worth having a nearby fire company. If a suburban house catches fire, you'd better get there quick or the whole sub-development could go up.
But mail is a very basic service that farmers depend on. In general I agree with your arguments, but I do NOT want food production subject to normal economic forces. I want constant over-supply. That means depressed prices so you have to help the farmers out artificially. There are a number of ways to do this: you could buy the excess to keep the prices high, you could subsidize them directly, etc. One form of subsidy is power/communications/mail. If farmers can reasonably expect to live well without mail, then I might re-think my opinion - but I'm still under the impression that it is essential.
if you really want social contact, then perhaps living in the middle of nowhere isn't ideal
Perhaps it's in us urban-dwellers' interest that at least some sane people be encouraged to grow our food?
The post office doesn't generally get any money from the general fund.
Also, nothing that runs Mathematica will get battery life measured in years.
TMI is not a boiling water reactor. It has the massive containment structure of a PWR. There is a BWR in New Jersey with a PWR-style containment vessel - I think so that the plant could be built near heavily populated areas - but it's not common.
Step 2 is easy:
1. Sell 600 billion dollars in bonds to the Chinese.
2. Pay Chinese 600 billion dollars for moon rocket.
3. Quantitative ease those bonds right out of existence.