Of course. I don't suggest my experience is typical. But I hear the same thing from other places. My wife is a freelancer, so we have a fax machine at home, but again, it is almost never used any longer. She only has it in case some client still want to use it over email. I suspect - and this is of course just my own supposition, nothing else - that people now buy fax machines only to be covered for the rare case of doing business with a technical laggard, not as a daily office tool.
Stamping documents is seen as a way to say "I have checked this" or "I endorse this", and because you can't stamp an email or text message they print, stamp and fax documents.
I'm working in Japan, and while I almost never get or send a fax any more (it must be years now), it's decently common to send and receive PDF scans over email. In fact, sometimes you need to print out the scan, add your stamp, re-scan and send it back. I do - want to print a reference copy for myself anyhow - but I suspect some people simply add their stamp graphic to the document directly.
Just tried it a little. And it really seems to work flawlessly. Smooth graphics and gameplay, and music and sound effects come through just fine. And it's a very nice abstract game too; reminds me more than a little of Osmos in both style and pacing.
Given the premises of this thread (the costs and salaries of work immigration need to be controlled by the state), here a half-serious suggestion:
Have work immigrants be employed by your federal govermnent, not by the company they work for. The immigrant reports their working hours and conditions to the government, and they get their salary paid out from there. The government dispatches the worker to the company, and get the salary and other costs paid back from them.
The great benefit is that the worker is no longer there at the mercy of the company, and has no incentive to accept bad conditions or missing pay checks from them. And in any labour dispute they have the backing of a major legal and administrative organization. The government gets a clear view of exactly who the work immigrants are and what they do for their employers. The companies are relieved of some of the responsibility for these workers. Everybody has a common, single point of focus where they can turn in case of problems.
I like the idea in principle. I do think it's really useful to customize a few specific parts - one person might want a high-performance (and large, and expensive)) camera module both front anb back; another prefers just a minimal camera and gets a larger battery instead; a third has a job where cameras are banned and opts to get none at all. A fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, or an SD card slot are other options people may want to add or skip.
But I do not think upgradeable phones are meaningful. After 2-3 years with a phone, it's pretty beat up. Screen is scratched and dimming, the case is scuffed and creaky, buttons don't quite work, connectors are getting glitchy, the battery is dying and both CPU and memory are getting old. I'd want to upgrade all of it - I want a new phone, not throw money at the old one.
Basically, they measure the retinal reflection from lights coming from a number of different angles to map the lens aberration (just a linear approximation, but with a grid of lights that's plenty close enough). Then they use that to map shorter, more focused laser pulses to reshape the cornea appropriately.
If I understand it right, you normally get rid of all primary and secondary astigmatism (such as coma), but you can still have a small bit of residual astigmatism afterwards. In practice it's night and day; once my eyes stabilized (it took two months) I don't have double vision or any of the other annoying effects of astigmatism any longer.
I'm 45 and I've had presbyopia for five years, bad enough that I always need separate glasses when reading or working in front of a screen, or even using my phone. I still went ahead with surgery last winter. And I'm very happy I did.
I had pronounced astigmatism in addition to nearsightedness. When you add presbyopia it becomes almost impossible to get a pair of lenses that will correct all of it anywhere but right in the center of vision. In practice I had to movemy head instead of my eyes when reading, playing games, programming... It was frustrating and gave me increasingly common headaches.
With LASIK (a fairly new type that maps the eye and removes the stigmatism) I now have 15/15 and only need glasses for presbyopia. I have one pair for close-up work, that now lets me see in my entire field of vision; and my old favourite pair has no correction at all except at the bottom, where mild close-up power lets me see my phone, read labels and stuff like that when I'm out and about.
It may not sound like much of a difference since I still often wear glasses. But it's night and day - headaches are gone, I really see much better now (I actually see towards the sides again!) and for many activitites such as snorkeling or photography I need no eye correction at all.
But an assembly line manned by robots? Why should that be cheaper in China? Is capital that much cheaper?
Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.
That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.
OpenPGP was right in all ways except one: you can't even explain what it does to your grandma, let alone get her to use it.
Never mind grandma, I can't use it. Decided I'd try it this spring. Spent an afternoon reading manuals, blog posts and howto's, until I realized this is complicated and brittle enough that I'm likely to mess things up and compromise any security as a result. Better to avoid it, and behave under the assumption that people are bulk scanning and analyzing everything i send or receive.
People make mistakes. Everybody makes them, everybody does it all the time, and they do it even when they should know better, when the consequences are high, and when they've received training specifically aimed at avoiding those particular mistakes.
Aviation, process and other industries know this by now, after many, many hard-earned lessons. They know you have to design your interfaces under the assumption that people will screw up, push the wrong button, or misread the situation. The general software industry, on the other hand, seems amazingly resilient against accepting this simple fact.
It's easy to say we want to make the rural areas as attractive as the big cities. Notably, I've yet to see any credible ideas for actually achieving it.
Big cities are amazing. Because of network effects and the efficiencies of small distances and dense accumulation of resources, competing directly is extremely difficult. It's like deciding you want to make a new, fledging social network as attractive to users as the current big ones. The only thing you could feasibly do in both cases is to push it as a niche for special interests.
"I don't know anyone who just has a serial converter just lying around unless they're an engineer"
This is not a first project for anybody. Chances are high that you've already played with Arduino a fair bit, and built your own on breadboard as well. In which case you most likely have a USB-serial cable or board already, in order to program them.
"Which platforms were Java and Obj-C specific to again?"
The wording was unclear on my part; you pretty much need to use Java to develop for Android, and Objective-C to develop for IOS. Those platforms use those languages specifically, not that they are used only on those platforms. You can use a few other languages to develop Android or IOS apps if you insist, but with more pain, less support, and you'll normally still have to write minor parts in these languages to make it a complete application.
"I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things."
That sounds on the low side to me. One low-level, hardware-linked language (C or C++); one dynamic language (Python, Ruby); a functional language (Scala, Scheme, Haskell); one for numerics (R, Matlab/Octave); one embedded language (Scheme, Lua); client-side web (javascript); database access (SQL); and of course the platform-specific major languages you can't get around: Java, C# and Objective-C. I'm sure you can add other categories to the list as well.
The endowment is there to serve the university. And the university is plenty sensitive to its public perception; that affects both enrollment as well as donations. It's not a stretch to say that a fairly large proportion of both current and former students and faculty view global warming as a threat and coal as a bad choice for producing power.
Making these people happy is vital for the universitys bottom line - not to mention that "the university" consists of people that themselves share many of these values. So yes, they are acting in the best interest of those the endowments are there to serve.
It's worth noting that while many open access journals charge for publication, so do many closed access journals. I can't find the link now, but a comparison a few years ago found that the average cost was actually higher across closed journals than open access ones. And of course, they "double-dip" by also charging libraries and readers high fees for carrying the journals.
Have you ever seen a stupid driver try to merge onto a freeway with their turn signal on and their foot on the brake? Or see three cars bumper-to-bumper trying to merge onto a busy freeway as a pack?
The beautiful thing is, self-driving cars will see this, due to their extensive sensor coverage. And they will have recordings available of the whole incident for later examination. It will be completely clear who was following all the regulations and exercizing judgement (the self-driving car) and who was driving irresponsibly or dangerously (the human driver).
Once self-driving cars hit the road in any numbers, it will become really, really expensive to try to be a jerk in traffic. No speeding. No lane cutting. No tailgating. No weaving. No nothing - just follow the traffic flow and the law to the letter and spirit or you will get reported. And of course your insurance rate will like go up, simply by being a human driver.
At which point there's of course little point in driving yourself any longer; you drive in exactly the same way as the self-driving cars, and you get there at the exact same time. But you have to sit there and drive, while the people around you are busy reading the morning news or throwing irate fowl at pigs.
I did some research, and in order to pick up a TV level signal 100 light years away, we could built an antenna the size of Rhode Island in space.
You make my point:) 100 light years is still really in the neighbourhood. The vast majority of detected planets lie outside that range - that new possibly earth-like planet if five times longer away.
It assumes that you actually have an island-sized structure in space, and it assumes that any civilization is currently blasting radio signals in the same wasteful way as terrestrial TV. We don't have anything approaching your detector, so even at 100 light years we'd miss it, and, as I argue, civilizations are unlikely to beam out strong radio waves in that manner.
I would like to see what kind of detector we'd need for a more realistic scenario. Say, detect things within 1000 light years, and when radio use looks more like our digital low-power and directed radio devices.
A civilization would be quite hard to detect. The best chance is probably radio emissions, but even that has a fairly short practical limit. And it's noteworthy that our emissions are dropping today, as we increasinly use the spectrum for low-power digital systems rather than analogue "scream at the top of your lungs" broadcasts. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine that we'd be effectively silent in another couple of generations, as we push toward more effective transmission technologies.
We could probably have dozens of other civilizations in this sector of the milky way and we'd never know it.
The problem with building really tall buildings is how to transport enough people up and down without using up the floor space on elevators rather than rentable area. Silly fast elevators may well be worth the money if it results in more silly expensive top-floor rent income.
A free but limited version and a full, paid one is completely reasonable. There's several ways to do it too, but I think perhaps the best division is between the casual and the dedicated user. Casual users are unlikely to pay if forced, but they can still be good advocates for the app, so it may be worth it making sure they still have something to use.
The Aedict Japanees dictionary, for instance, is one of my most used apps. It has a free version that is really the full old (pre-Android 4) version of the app; and a paid version that is newer, better, more polished and with lots of added funcitonality. You can use the core functionality in the old app, but you really want all the improvements in the new one.
Games could have just the first few levels. Productivity apps could limit the document size or number of simultaneous documents. But I do think that making the free version usable for the occasional user likely pays off over time. Casual users advocate the app, and they may become dedicated users over time.
[...] but getting a fake hand for the sake of a fake hand is just being vain IMHO.
People are vain. People do care what other people think of them, and people do want to make a good impression on others. And it's completely rational; we are being judged by how we look, what we wear, how we behave. What we think of that is besides the point.
So yes, it turns out most people care about what their prostheses look like as much or more than how well they function. Any maker that disregards that is setting themselves up to become a niche within a niche; and most likely a long-term failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. I don't suggest my experience is typical. But I hear the same thing from other places. My wife is a freelancer, so we have a fax machine at home, but again, it is almost never used any longer. She only has it in case some client still want to use it over email. I suspect - and this is of course just my own supposition, nothing else - that people now buy fax machines only to be covered for the rare case of doing business with a technical laggard, not as a daily office tool.
I'm working in Japan, and while I almost never get or send a fax any more (it must be years now), it's decently common to send and receive PDF scans over email. In fact, sometimes you need to print out the scan, add your stamp, re-scan and send it back. I do - want to print a reference copy for myself anyhow - but I suspect some people simply add their stamp graphic to the document directly.
Just tried it a little. And it really seems to work flawlessly. Smooth graphics and gameplay, and music and sound effects come through just fine. And it's a very nice abstract game too; reminds me more than a little of Osmos in both style and pacing.
Given the premises of this thread (the costs and salaries of work immigration need to be controlled by the state), here a half-serious suggestion:
Have work immigrants be employed by your federal govermnent, not by the company they work for. The immigrant reports their working hours and conditions to the government, and they get their salary paid out from there. The government dispatches the worker to the company, and get the salary and other costs paid back from them.
The great benefit is that the worker is no longer there at the mercy of the company, and has no incentive to accept bad conditions or missing pay checks from them. And in any labour dispute they have the backing of a major legal and administrative organization. The government gets a clear view of exactly who the work immigrants are and what they do for their employers. The companies are relieved of some of the responsibility for these workers. Everybody has a common, single point of focus where they can turn in case of problems.
I like the idea in principle. I do think it's really useful to customize a few specific parts - one person might want a high-performance (and large, and expensive)) camera module both front anb back; another prefers just a minimal camera and gets a larger battery instead; a third has a job where cameras are banned and opts to get none at all. A fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, or an SD card slot are other options people may want to add or skip.
But I do not think upgradeable phones are meaningful. After 2-3 years with a phone, it's pretty beat up. Screen is scratched and dimming, the case is scuffed and creaky, buttons don't quite work, connectors are getting glitchy, the battery is dying and both CPU and memory are getting old. I'd want to upgrade all of it - I want a new phone, not throw money at the old one.
Cheaper than zero?
Bribes would effectively create a negative cost, at least for the peoplereceiving them.
Yes. Here's the Wikipedia entry (though it feels written by a proponent): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Basically, they measure the retinal reflection from lights coming from a number of different angles to map the lens aberration (just a linear approximation, but with a grid of lights that's plenty close enough). Then they use that to map shorter, more focused laser pulses to reshape the cornea appropriately.
If I understand it right, you normally get rid of all primary and secondary astigmatism (such as coma), but you can still have a small bit of residual astigmatism afterwards. In practice it's night and day; once my eyes stabilized (it took two months) I don't have double vision or any of the other annoying effects of astigmatism any longer.
I'm 45 and I've had presbyopia for five years, bad enough that I always need separate glasses when reading or working in front of a screen, or even using my phone. I still went ahead with surgery last winter. And I'm very happy I did.
I had pronounced astigmatism in addition to nearsightedness. When you add presbyopia it becomes almost impossible to get a pair of lenses that will correct all of it anywhere but right in the center of vision. In practice I had to movemy head instead of my eyes when reading, playing games, programming... It was frustrating and gave me increasingly common headaches.
With LASIK (a fairly new type that maps the eye and removes the stigmatism) I now have 15/15 and only need glasses for presbyopia. I have one pair for close-up work, that now lets me see in my entire field of vision; and my old favourite pair has no correction at all except at the bottom, where mild close-up power lets me see my phone, read labels and stuff like that when I'm out and about.
It may not sound like much of a difference since I still often wear glasses. But it's night and day - headaches are gone, I really see much better now (I actually see towards the sides again!) and for many activitites such as snorkeling or photography I need no eye correction at all.
Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.
That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.
You can use the exact same arguments against fly-by-wire technology. Yet, that is now the norm, with not a mechanical linkage in sight.
Well, at least Linnaeus existed; that's a major strike in his favour right there.
Never mind grandma, I can't use it. Decided I'd try it this spring. Spent an afternoon reading manuals, blog posts and howto's, until I realized this is complicated and brittle enough that I'm likely to mess things up and compromise any security as a result. Better to avoid it, and behave under the assumption that people are bulk scanning and analyzing everything i send or receive.
People make mistakes. Everybody makes them, everybody does it all the time, and they do it even when they should know better, when the consequences are high, and when they've received training specifically aimed at avoiding those particular mistakes.
Aviation, process and other industries know this by now, after many, many hard-earned lessons. They know you have to design your interfaces under the assumption that people will screw up, push the wrong button, or misread the situation. The general software industry, on the other hand, seems amazingly resilient against accepting this simple fact.
It's easy to say we want to make the rural areas as attractive as the big cities. Notably, I've yet to see any credible ideas for actually achieving it.
Big cities are amazing. Because of network effects and the efficiencies of small distances and dense accumulation of resources, competing directly is extremely difficult. It's like deciding you want to make a new, fledging social network as attractive to users as the current big ones. The only thing you could feasibly do in both cases is to push it as a niche for special interests.
"I don't know anyone who just has a serial converter just lying around unless they're an engineer"
This is not a first project for anybody. Chances are high that you've already played with Arduino a fair bit, and built your own on breadboard as well. In which case you most likely have a USB-serial cable or board already, in order to program them.
"Which platforms were Java and Obj-C specific to again?"
The wording was unclear on my part; you pretty much need to use Java to develop for Android, and Objective-C to develop for IOS. Those platforms use those languages specifically, not that they are used only on those platforms. You can use a few other languages to develop Android or IOS apps if you insist, but with more pain, less support, and you'll normally still have to write minor parts in these languages to make it a complete application.
"I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things."
That sounds on the low side to me. One low-level, hardware-linked language (C or C++); one dynamic language (Python, Ruby); a functional language (Scala, Scheme, Haskell); one for numerics (R, Matlab/Octave); one embedded language (Scheme, Lua); client-side web (javascript); database access (SQL); and of course the platform-specific major languages you can't get around: Java, C# and Objective-C. I'm sure you can add other categories to the list as well.
The endowment is there to serve the university. And the university is plenty sensitive to its public perception; that affects both enrollment as well as donations. It's not a stretch to say that a fairly large proportion of both current and former students and faculty view global warming as a threat and coal as a bad choice for producing power.
Making these people happy is vital for the universitys bottom line - not to mention that "the university" consists of people that themselves share many of these values. So yes, they are acting in the best interest of those the endowments are there to serve.
It's worth noting that while many open access journals charge for publication, so do many closed access journals. I can't find the link now, but a comparison a few years ago found that the average cost was actually higher across closed journals than open access ones. And of course, they "double-dip" by also charging libraries and readers high fees for carrying the journals.
The beautiful thing is, self-driving cars will see this, due to their extensive sensor coverage. And they will have recordings available of the whole incident for later examination. It will be completely clear who was following all the regulations and exercizing judgement (the self-driving car) and who was driving irresponsibly or dangerously (the human driver).
Once self-driving cars hit the road in any numbers, it will become really, really expensive to try to be a jerk in traffic. No speeding. No lane cutting. No tailgating. No weaving. No nothing - just follow the traffic flow and the law to the letter and spirit or you will get reported. And of course your insurance rate will like go up, simply by being a human driver.
At which point there's of course little point in driving yourself any longer; you drive in exactly the same way as the self-driving cars, and you get there at the exact same time. But you have to sit there and drive, while the people around you are busy reading the morning news or throwing irate fowl at pigs.
You make my point :) 100 light years is still really in the neighbourhood. The vast majority of detected planets lie outside that range - that new possibly earth-like planet if five times longer away.
It assumes that you actually have an island-sized structure in space, and it assumes that any civilization is currently blasting radio signals in the same wasteful way as terrestrial TV. We don't have anything approaching your detector, so even at 100 light years we'd miss it, and, as I argue, civilizations are unlikely to beam out strong radio waves in that manner.
I would like to see what kind of detector we'd need for a more realistic scenario. Say, detect things within 1000 light years, and when radio use looks more like our digital low-power and directed radio devices.
A civilization would be quite hard to detect. The best chance is probably radio emissions, but even that has a fairly short practical limit. And it's noteworthy that our emissions are dropping today, as we increasinly use the spectrum for low-power digital systems rather than analogue "scream at the top of your lungs" broadcasts. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine that we'd be effectively silent in another couple of generations, as we push toward more effective transmission technologies.
We could probably have dozens of other civilizations in this sector of the milky way and we'd never know it.
The problem with building really tall buildings is how to transport enough people up and down without using up the floor space on elevators rather than rentable area. Silly fast elevators may well be worth the money if it results in more silly expensive top-floor rent income.
A free but limited version and a full, paid one is completely reasonable. There's several ways to do it too, but I think perhaps the best division is between the casual and the dedicated user. Casual users are unlikely to pay if forced, but they can still be good advocates for the app, so it may be worth it making sure they still have something to use.
The Aedict Japanees dictionary, for instance, is one of my most used apps. It has a free version that is really the full old (pre-Android 4) version of the app; and a paid version that is newer, better, more polished and with lots of added funcitonality. You can use the core functionality in the old app, but you really want all the improvements in the new one.
Games could have just the first few levels. Productivity apps could limit the document size or number of simultaneous documents. But I do think that making the free version usable for the occasional user likely pays off over time. Casual users advocate the app, and they may become dedicated users over time.
People are vain. People do care what other people think of them, and people do want to make a good impression on others. And it's completely rational; we are being judged by how we look, what we wear, how we behave. What we think of that is besides the point.
So yes, it turns out most people care about what their prostheses look like as much or more than how well they function. Any maker that disregards that is setting themselves up to become a niche within a niche; and most likely a long-term failure.