This. I bought a first run book by a big name author with Harper Collins. There was an entire chapter where the author had transposed the wrong character name through the whole thing, making a later chapter make no fucking sense.
It very possibly was an error introduced by the publisher at some point during production. A close friend recently had a textbook published through a major textbook publisher and the proofing process was terrible. They tried to go straight from manuscript to page proofs using an offshore typesetting company that did simulatenous "copyediting" and layout. They introduced enormous numbers of terrible technical errors that she then had to fight to fix before they rushed it into print.
What's happening in the publishing industry is that the big publishers are cutting costs so much that they're driving their own quality down and distinguishing themselves less and less from the self-publishing industry. At the same time, self-publishing is slowly (painfully slowly right now) improving to where the difference in many cases will just be the available marketing budget. Eventually self-published works will be as good as or better than stuff from big publishers. The music industry has been that way for a long time-- artists have been able to self produce and release material with production values that are as good as what comes from major labels for a long time.
You know, All of this is kind of silly. We all know what's going to happen here. The printers raise their rates to handle the reduced amount of printing they are doing. In order to cope, they publishers have to raise their rates. If they raise the price on the paperbacks, no one will buy them, so they raise the price of the ebooks, driving folks to buy more paperback books cause they are cheaper. As people make the switch back to paperbacks, the cost of the ebook will go down for the same reason.
Nearly everything will go POD. For paperbacks, a big publisher might pay about $1/copy for a big print run, but somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of those will likely end up getting pulped. So the cost per book sold is ~$3. I can get nice quality one-at-a-time POD copies for around that price, and not have to deal with pallets full of books to distribute, or a bunch of sunk cost paper copies of a book that people may or may not want. Print runs are dangerous for small publishers, but POD is rapidly getting to where it's very competitive, and small publishers can get paper to people who really want it at a reasonable cost.
A small publisher doesn't need a best seller, but then do need 10-20 books a year that sell 50k copies with reasonable margin.
Even the big publishers don't sell that many of most titles. They want to see a title do about 10K copies in the first 2 months or so, and after that its sales drop off sharply.
Indie publishers have to find future best sellers and make them visible to readers. Some of us are working on that, but the existing publishing industry goes to a lot of trouble to set up barriers. Want a review in a major newspaper or website? Many of them only accept print copies (which we can do, there's some really good quality low cost POD out there). It's kind of amusing, as most of those same papers are bleeding money with their print editions.
Getting decent books as an indie, though, is less hard than we expected. We do get our share of "we had to resmelt the hard drive for the safety of our eyes" submissions, but there's quite a lot of good stuff that comes in that the big publishers won't bother with. It all needs editing, some more than others, but that's part of the normal book process anyway.
People have to find your books online and go buy them. Nearly everyone with an e-reader just shops at the store dedicated to that e-reader.
I just started a small independent e-publishing house (mostly fiction oriented toward the geek crowd, with some popular science, and probably the occasional textbook), and we have our first books coming out this fall. We also are in the process of taking over the catalog of another independent e-publisher who started in *1994*. Yeah, for real. They have about 140 books out (fiction and non-fiction), that are so far good stories and well edited, and available in virtually every format. We haven't gotten through all of them yet, but so far they all seem pretty good. They're currently DRM'd, though our new stuff will come out without DRM and we're looking at removing DRM from more after the transition (it's actually a lot of work once they're up on the various sites). We can sell non-DRM stuff through our own sites (we're maintaining separate imprints) easily, but that depends on getting the traffic to the site. A large fraction of the books are priced at $2.99, though some go up to the $9.99 or so range. Some of the more expensive ones are actually better sellers.
About 1/3 of the catalog is also available in POD (there are maintenance fees at the distributors to keep them available, so when sales drop, they get removed from the POD catalog), and the print books are uniformly more expensive than their electronic counterparts. It really does cost more to make and distribute print-- there's a whole lot of moving stuff around, and keeping track of inventory, and people having to touch stuff, and that all has to get paid for. E-books can be priced much lower and still get a comparable return.
The thing I think Wall Street is missing is that people tune those ads out or block them. Maybe Facebook has come up with some new methods to lock people into getting the message but if they make it too onerous, people will simply quit Facebook.
I tune them out so well that I still can't picture where the ads are on facebook.
That probably explains why they don't seem to have a "save as previous version's file format". I needed to try out indesign and got the 30 day free trial. Aside from being buggy and fragile, it also doesn't have a "save as indesign for cs4" so when I was trying to work with someone who was on CS4 and send files back and forth, it was a one-way process-- once it's in the CS5.5 version the CS4 version can't read it.
When I was in grad school in Minnesota in the 1990's there was a huge flood in the Mississippi-- Iowa seemed to be turned into a great lake, and even as far upstream as the Twin Cities there were houses underwater up to their eaves.
There was a story in the newspaper about a family in Iowa who were the seed dealers for their region. They had already received a lot of or all their seed for the season, and weren't in a position to ship it anywhere to keep it safe from the floodwaters. They moved it into the highest spot they could (which apparently wasn't high) and sandbagged all around, and got generators and sump pumps. As the waters rose, other people in the area would give up and evacuate. As they did so, they'd row over to the seed family and drop off their own generators, fuel, and pumps to help protect the seed that they all needed. IIRC, they basically stood watch for a week or two, pumping away and maintaining all the equipment really well, and eventually the waters receded and the seeds were saved.
Eliminate lightspeed communication that lets people inside the flooded area know that the flood is relatively localized, and give the story a few hundred years, and you'll probably get a story similar to the Noah's Ark.
Printing *is* a significant cost. And shipping, and dealing with a bunch of printed stuff, especially if you're a small publisher. Hardcopy takes way more work to set up to look nice, and way more effort to distribute. There's a lot of friction in the distribution channels so you have to schedule things almost a year in advance as far as getting orders from distributors who get orders from bookshops, and it can take a year after a book sells to get paid. And if you're a small publisher you've got a bunch of money sunk in the paper copies that may or may not sell, and a good fraction of them end up getting pulped anyway because it's cheaper than returning them (mass market paperback).
E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills. If you're an expert at setting type with lead, then yes, it might be harder to set up an ebook. But for anyone born in the latter quarter of the 20th century, electronic books are much easier to set up.
Selling is a different story, because you need someone to actually find your book and decide to buy it. So if they spend the difference in the cost of setup and distribution on marketing, then yes, they can claim it costs as much to sell an ebook as a print book. But it's pretty artificial.
I've bought books e-books from both O'Reilly and Pragmatic as well and really like the way they do it-- the PDF has some custom printing on each page that identifies the purchaser and notes the copyright: "this e-book was printed for blah blah blah. copyight some year etc..."
I recently became an e-publisher (see my homepage) and will likely set up a similar DRM-free way for people to buy ebooks if that's their preferred format. The goal is to make it possible for the reader to read what they want, when they want, using the reader they want.
Large ground-based observatory development has also had significant private funding for much of history, and especially in the last century. The two large telescopes that are being developed now by US-led organizations (TMT and GMT) both have significant private participation.
High energy physics largely has been driven by the DOE in the US and has been generally government funded.
Condensed matter research in the US is sort of in between -- fundamental physics tends to be academic, but the semiconductor industry drives a lot of applied research.
In large print quantities, that's true. In smaller print quantities for books from independent publishers the printing and distribution can be a significant expense, and it's also sunk cost. E-book avoids tying up a bunch of your money in printed copies that may or may not move.
No, superconductors are poor conductors of heat. It's actually one of the properties of superconductors, there's a distinct swing in thermal conductivity near the transition temp, before dropping with temperature.
It's a feature that's commonly used as a heat switch in low temperature physics experiments-- a piece of superconductor can be driven normal (so it conducts heat) using a small magnet, then the field is removed and the superconductor is allowed to cool to its superconducting (thermally insulating) state. It works well at very low temperatures, but at higher temperatures (e.g. like high Tc superconductors) there's a lot of phonon transport anyway.
I work with a guy who's 60-something who does all that and more. Probably a pretty similar background to you. He's a great analog designer, can write firmware, can write software, and can do serious optics. And he's a great guy to work with. It will be a bummer when he finally decides to retire.
On the other side another field that is sorely in need of this is the medical field. A simple example would be that we have built machines to take blood pressure and heart rate automatically. But why aren't they in homes? We brush our teeth everyday, why can't we take blood pressure? Why can't we get a daily or even real-time heart rate? We carry smart phones. We have wireless networks. Why not advocate daily blood pressure readings tied to a wireless network that would log and analyze your blood pressure and heart rate over time so you could see trends on a daily basis rather than behaving in a reactive manner by going to the doctor when you do start to have severe symptoms.
It's become trivial to get a few basic medical parameters on demand cheaply. A pulse oximeter (heart rate and blood oxygen saturation) costs from $10-$50 for a home version, a blood sugar testing kit is $20+$1/test strip, and an automatic blood pressure cuff system is about $50. They all work well, they usually have storage, and if you're willing to spend more you can probably get a USB version. Heart rate monitors with a lot of memory have been used by athletes for decades. Fully networked versions of all this that give information to your doctor are not far off-- given that the baby boomers are getting older and it will cost too much to have live people monitor them as much as they want. The military is also developing such things so that someone can sit in a dark room in florida and play FPS using live people halfway around the planet, seeing what they see and what their health status is. If you watch high level bicycle racing, the team directors can often get real time data like heart rate and power output of riders.
and disks weren't much faster than printers in those days-- for some reason I decided to print a wordlist of all the 4 or 5 letter words or something, and figured I should generate them all in advance and write them to disk. IIRC, the time difference between writing them all to disk and printing them on a few hundred dollar dot matrix printer (without descenders!) wasn't very large.
If you had money you had 300 baud in 1983. As a poor undergrad in 1985 I was in a house full of engineers and we had one 110 baud acousticoupler between 6 of us. And if you had a couple people sitting around reading something and someone laughed too loud it would show up as line noise. If I wanted speed I'd go to work or one of the computer labs where there were hardwired terminals.
Prices dropped fast though. I spent the 86-87 academic year in europe, just as things were speeding up in the US. It was still about $600 for an acousticoupler in germany when I got back, but they were in the junk bins in the US for about $5.
Another interesting note on the speed of transition is that the computing people published an article where that said they ran something like 3 million punchcards in 1984, and about 1000 in 1988.
Hub.org has plans that have 10 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for $30/month, and 20GB/5TB for $60, and they offer discounts if you pay a bunch of months up front (might start at quarterly, I do annual). You'd have to pay a bit extra for more storage, but they're pretty reasonable. For higher reliability you might have to pay for multiple instances or something, but it's still pretty reasonable. They've been doing a lot of upgrades lately-- ping them and see if they'll meet your needs.
Simple, take a "snap shot" of the brain, but down at the level of makes each neuron fire. then copy the information on solid state hard drive of about 4 Pita Bytes. The Pita Byte drives will be in full production in about 15 years. Taking the snap shot of someones neural pattern has yet to begin.
a) there's no imaging system in the foreseeable future that has that type of resolution and capacity (and there are many people working on functional imaging of mammalian neurons)-- you have to do it at the synapse level, and petabytes will only just get you the beginnings of storing a synaptic map. b) Pita Byte drives probably taste great with hummus.
Some of that was covered in TFA. Originally Corning made all the glass in the US, but once it hit the street and every cell manufacturer wanted some they added the additional capacity closer to the rest of the manufacturing chain. That way they don't ship it across the Pacific twice (as glass to china and as part of a phone on the way back). And being closer to the assembly means that they can be more responses to changes in demand-- cheap shipping by boat takes weeks, air freight adds $$. Many other components are similarly available near the assembly plant. The article goes into a lot of detail as to how assembly labor is only a very small part of the cost, and that the primary reason for assembly in China is that the whole supply chain is there. What the article doesn't say is what the cost impact would be of moving the whole supply chain back to the US, so that the labor cost of each part would go up. It could probably be done, even at nearly the same price, but then the huge profits wouldn't be there.
As I was reading it, it doesn't sound all that different from how Detroit was back when cars were all made there. The assembly plants were there, and all the suppliers grew up in the area, too. Instead of dorms they had huge tracts of affordable housing, but they ran 3 shifts, and I suspect if they were running 2 and needed to add a 3rd could have done that in a matter of hours as well. Detroit used to have quite a lot of 24 hour services, much more than anyplace I've lived since. Lots of restaurants were 24 hours, and there was even a 24 hour drugstore/discount auto supply (for real!), all developed around supporting work that happened around the clock.
When I was finally getting around to hooking up my surround speakers, a friend of mine who works post for TV (some of the most popular shows on) and the occasional movie said "don't bother with 7.1, we mix for 5.1, and your receiver is just inventing the other two channels". And even for 5.1 they're pretty sparing about using the surround channels in a lot of cases. For music, almost nobody mixes for more than stereo for a variety of reasons.
Those things are awesome! I've been using one for years and keep meaning to modify it to be shaped like a lightsaber-- in a room with a few mosquitos in it it's a lot like the "luke learns the lightsaber" scene in Star Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
This. I bought a first run book by a big name author with Harper Collins. There was an entire chapter where the author had transposed the wrong character name through the whole thing, making a later chapter make no fucking sense.
It very possibly was an error introduced by the publisher at some point during production. A close friend recently had a textbook published through a major textbook publisher and the proofing process was terrible. They tried to go straight from manuscript to page proofs using an offshore typesetting company that did simulatenous "copyediting" and layout. They introduced enormous numbers of terrible technical errors that she then had to fight to fix before they rushed it into print.
What's happening in the publishing industry is that the big publishers are cutting costs so much that they're driving their own quality down and distinguishing themselves less and less from the self-publishing industry. At the same time, self-publishing is slowly (painfully slowly right now) improving to where the difference in many cases will just be the available marketing budget. Eventually self-published works will be as good as or better than stuff from big publishers. The music industry has been that way for a long time-- artists have been able to self produce and release material with production values that are as good as what comes from major labels for a long time.
You know, All of this is kind of silly. We all know what's going to happen here. The printers raise their rates to handle the reduced amount of printing they are doing. In order to cope, they publishers have to raise their rates. If they raise the price on the paperbacks, no one will buy them, so they raise the price of the ebooks, driving folks to buy more paperback books cause they are cheaper. As people make the switch back to paperbacks, the cost of the ebook will go down for the same reason.
Nearly everything will go POD. For paperbacks, a big publisher might pay about $1/copy for a big print run, but somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of those will likely end up getting pulped. So the cost per book sold is ~$3. I can get nice quality one-at-a-time POD copies for around that price, and not have to deal with pallets full of books to distribute, or a bunch of sunk cost paper copies of a book that people may or may not want. Print runs are dangerous for small publishers, but POD is rapidly getting to where it's very competitive, and small publishers can get paper to people who really want it at a reasonable cost.
A small publisher doesn't need a best seller, but then do need 10-20 books a year that sell 50k copies with reasonable margin.
Even the big publishers don't sell that many of most titles. They want to see a title do about 10K copies in the first 2 months or so, and after that its sales drop off sharply.
Indie publishers have to find future best sellers and make them visible to readers. Some of us are working on that, but the existing publishing industry goes to a lot of trouble to set up barriers. Want a review in a major newspaper or website? Many of them only accept print copies (which we can do, there's some really good quality low cost POD out there). It's kind of amusing, as most of those same papers are bleeding money with their print editions.
Getting decent books as an indie, though, is less hard than we expected. We do get our share of "we had to resmelt the hard drive for the safety of our eyes" submissions, but there's quite a lot of good stuff that comes in that the big publishers won't bother with. It all needs editing, some more than others, but that's part of the normal book process anyway.
People have to find your books online and go buy them. Nearly everyone with an e-reader just shops at the store dedicated to that e-reader.
I just started a small independent e-publishing house (mostly fiction oriented toward the geek crowd, with some popular science, and probably the occasional textbook), and we have our first books coming out this fall. We also are in the process of taking over the catalog of another independent e-publisher who started in *1994*. Yeah, for real. They have about 140 books out (fiction and non-fiction), that are so far good stories and well edited, and available in virtually every format. We haven't gotten through all of them yet, but so far they all seem pretty good. They're currently DRM'd, though our new stuff will come out without DRM and we're looking at removing DRM from more after the transition (it's actually a lot of work once they're up on the various sites). We can sell non-DRM stuff through our own sites (we're maintaining separate imprints) easily, but that depends on getting the traffic to the site. A large fraction of the books are priced at $2.99, though some go up to the $9.99 or so range. Some of the more expensive ones are actually better sellers.
About 1/3 of the catalog is also available in POD (there are maintenance fees at the distributors to keep them available, so when sales drop, they get removed from the POD catalog), and the print books are uniformly more expensive than their electronic counterparts. It really does cost more to make and distribute print-- there's a whole lot of moving stuff around, and keeping track of inventory, and people having to touch stuff, and that all has to get paid for. E-books can be priced much lower and still get a comparable return.
The thing I think Wall Street is missing is that people tune those ads out or block them. Maybe Facebook has come up with some new methods to lock people into getting the message but if they make it too onerous, people will simply quit Facebook.
I tune them out so well that I still can't picture where the ads are on facebook.
That probably explains why they don't seem to have a "save as previous version's file format". I needed to try out indesign and got the 30 day free trial. Aside from being buggy and fragile, it also doesn't have a "save as indesign for cs4" so when I was trying to work with someone who was on CS4 and send files back and forth, it was a one-way process-- once it's in the CS5.5 version the CS4 version can't read it.
When I was in grad school in Minnesota in the 1990's there was a huge flood in the Mississippi-- Iowa seemed to be turned into a great lake, and even as far upstream as the Twin Cities there were houses underwater up to their eaves.
There was a story in the newspaper about a family in Iowa who were the seed dealers for their region. They had already received a lot of or all their seed for the season, and weren't in a position to ship it anywhere to keep it safe from the floodwaters. They moved it into the highest spot they could (which apparently wasn't high) and sandbagged all around, and got generators and sump pumps. As the waters rose, other people in the area would give up and evacuate. As they did so, they'd row over to the seed family and drop off their own generators, fuel, and pumps to help protect the seed that they all needed. IIRC, they basically stood watch for a week or two, pumping away and maintaining all the equipment really well, and eventually the waters receded and the seeds were saved.
Eliminate lightspeed communication that lets people inside the flooded area know that the flood is relatively localized, and give the story a few hundred years, and you'll probably get a story similar to the Noah's Ark.
Printing *is* a significant cost. And shipping, and dealing with a bunch of printed stuff, especially if you're a small publisher. Hardcopy takes way more work to set up to look nice, and way more effort to distribute. There's a lot of friction in the distribution channels so you have to schedule things almost a year in advance as far as getting orders from distributors who get orders from bookshops, and it can take a year after a book sells to get paid. And if you're a small publisher you've got a bunch of money sunk in the paper copies that may or may not sell, and a good fraction of them end up getting pulped anyway because it's cheaper than returning them (mass market paperback).
E-book layout and structure is trivial compared to print if you have even minimal computer skills. If you're an expert at setting type with lead, then yes, it might be harder to set up an ebook. But for anyone born in the latter quarter of the 20th century, electronic books are much easier to set up.
Selling is a different story, because you need someone to actually find your book and decide to buy it. So if they spend the difference in the cost of setup and distribution on marketing, then yes, they can claim it costs as much to sell an ebook as a print book. But it's pretty artificial.
I've bought books e-books from both O'Reilly and Pragmatic as well and really like the way they do it-- the PDF has some custom printing on each page that identifies the purchaser and notes the copyright: "this e-book was printed for blah blah blah. copyight some year etc..."
I recently became an e-publisher (see my homepage) and will likely set up a similar DRM-free way for people to buy ebooks if that's their preferred format. The goal is to make it possible for the reader to read what they want, when they want, using the reader they want.
Large ground-based observatory development has also had significant private funding for much of history, and especially in the last century. The two large telescopes that are being developed now by US-led organizations (TMT and GMT) both have significant private participation.
High energy physics largely has been driven by the DOE in the US and has been generally government funded.
Condensed matter research in the US is sort of in between -- fundamental physics tends to be academic, but the semiconductor industry drives a lot of applied research.
In large print quantities, that's true. In smaller print quantities for books from independent publishers the printing and distribution can be a significant expense, and it's also sunk cost. E-book avoids tying up a bunch of your money in printed copies that may or may not move.
No, superconductors are poor conductors of heat. It's actually one of the properties of superconductors, there's a distinct swing in thermal conductivity near the transition temp, before dropping with temperature.
It's a feature that's commonly used as a heat switch in low temperature physics experiments-- a piece of superconductor can be driven normal (so it conducts heat) using a small magnet, then the field is removed and the superconductor is allowed to cool to its superconducting (thermally insulating) state. It works well at very low temperatures, but at higher temperatures (e.g. like high Tc superconductors) there's a lot of phonon transport anyway.
I work with a guy who's 60-something who does all that and more. Probably a pretty similar background to you. He's a great analog designer, can write firmware, can write software, and can do serious optics. And he's a great guy to work with. It will be a bummer when he finally decides to retire.
On the other side another field that is sorely in need of this is the medical field. A simple example would be that we have built machines to take blood pressure and heart rate automatically. But why aren't they in homes? We brush our teeth everyday, why can't we take blood pressure? Why can't we get a daily or even real-time heart rate? We carry smart phones. We have wireless networks. Why not advocate daily blood pressure readings tied to a wireless network that would log and analyze your blood pressure and heart rate over time so you could see trends on a daily basis rather than behaving in a reactive manner by going to the doctor when you do start to have severe symptoms.
It's become trivial to get a few basic medical parameters on demand cheaply. A pulse oximeter (heart rate and blood oxygen saturation) costs from $10-$50 for a home version, a blood sugar testing kit is $20+$1/test strip, and an automatic blood pressure cuff system is about $50. They all work well, they usually have storage, and if you're willing to spend more you can probably get a USB version. Heart rate monitors with a lot of memory have been used by athletes for decades. Fully networked versions of all this that give information to your doctor are not far off-- given that the baby boomers are getting older and it will cost too much to have live people monitor them as much as they want. The military is also developing such things so that someone can sit in a dark room in florida and play FPS using live people halfway around the planet, seeing what they see and what their health status is. If you watch high level bicycle racing, the team directors can often get real time data like heart rate and power output of riders.
And while we're at it, would DuckDuckGo's "small following on Slashdot" please enter and sign in with a few posts?
I use it, for probably obvious reasons... (no, I'm not affiliated with it).
and disks weren't much faster than printers in those days-- for some reason I decided to print a wordlist of all the 4 or 5 letter words or something, and figured I should generate them all in advance and write them to disk. IIRC, the time difference between writing them all to disk and printing them on a few hundred dollar dot matrix printer (without descenders!) wasn't very large.
If you had money you had 300 baud in 1983. As a poor undergrad in 1985 I was in a house full of engineers and we had one 110 baud acousticoupler between 6 of us. And if you had a couple people sitting around reading something and someone laughed too loud it would show up as line noise. If I wanted speed I'd go to work or one of the computer labs where there were hardwired terminals.
Prices dropped fast though. I spent the 86-87 academic year in europe, just as things were speeding up in the US. It was still about $600 for an acousticoupler in germany when I got back, but they were in the junk bins in the US for about $5.
Another interesting note on the speed of transition is that the computing people published an article where that said they ran something like 3 million punchcards in 1984, and about 1000 in 1988.
Hub.org has plans that have 10 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for $30/month, and 20GB/5TB for $60, and they offer discounts if you pay a bunch of months up front (might start at quarterly, I do annual). You'd have to pay a bit extra for more storage, but they're pretty reasonable. For higher reliability you might have to pay for multiple instances or something, but it's still pretty reasonable. They've been doing a lot of upgrades lately-- ping them and see if they'll meet your needs.
I installed Siri on my 3G (not even a 3GS) before Apple adopted it. I never found it particularly useful.
Only if you seal him in a box.
Simple, take a "snap shot" of the brain, but down at the level of makes each neuron fire. then copy the information on solid state hard drive of about 4 Pita Bytes. The Pita Byte drives will be in full production in about 15 years. Taking the snap shot of someones neural pattern has yet to begin.
a) there's no imaging system in the foreseeable future that has that type of resolution and capacity (and there are many people working on functional imaging of mammalian neurons)-- you have to do it at the synapse level, and petabytes will only just get you the beginnings of storing a synaptic map.
b) Pita Byte drives probably taste great with hummus.
Some of that was covered in TFA. Originally Corning made all the glass in the US, but once it hit the street and every cell manufacturer wanted some they added the additional capacity closer to the rest of the manufacturing chain. That way they don't ship it across the Pacific twice (as glass to china and as part of a phone on the way back). And being closer to the assembly means that they can be more responses to changes in demand-- cheap shipping by boat takes weeks, air freight adds $$. Many other components are similarly available near the assembly plant. The article goes into a lot of detail as to how assembly labor is only a very small part of the cost, and that the primary reason for assembly in China is that the whole supply chain is there. What the article doesn't say is what the cost impact would be of moving the whole supply chain back to the US, so that the labor cost of each part would go up. It could probably be done, even at nearly the same price, but then the huge profits wouldn't be there.
As I was reading it, it doesn't sound all that different from how Detroit was back when cars were all made there. The assembly plants were there, and all the suppliers grew up in the area, too. Instead of dorms they had huge tracts of affordable housing, but they ran 3 shifts, and I suspect if they were running 2 and needed to add a 3rd could have done that in a matter of hours as well. Detroit used to have quite a lot of 24 hour services, much more than anyplace I've lived since. Lots of restaurants were 24 hours, and there was even a 24 hour drugstore/discount auto supply (for real!), all developed around supporting work that happened around the clock.
When I was finally getting around to hooking up my surround speakers, a friend of mine who works post for TV (some of the most popular shows on) and the occasional movie said "don't bother with 7.1, we mix for 5.1, and your receiver is just inventing the other two channels". And even for 5.1 they're pretty sparing about using the surround channels in a lot of cases. For music, almost nobody mixes for more than stereo for a variety of reasons.
Gee, $1M could sure buy a lot of these: http://www.amazon.com/Battery-Operated-Tennis-Racket-Shaped/dp/B003U55W6Y
Those things are awesome! I've been using one for years and keep meaning to modify it to be shaped like a lightsaber-- in a room with a few mosquitos in it it's a lot like the "luke learns the lightsaber" scene in Star Wars.