Posts by Don Jefe

Re: EoS

If you're getting discounts on component cost it'll be on generic OTS stuff like caps, resistors and diodes and the quantities you order have to be extremely large to save more than a few pennies per 10,000.

If you're getting custom parts packed on tape reels for the PnP machines it's going to cost you fairly big bucks and completely offset, and more, any savings you made on generic components.

Economies of scale generally don't result in direct line item cost savings so much as they create a situation in which the costs of producing 1 unit are the same as producing 10 but producing 2-9 units actually costs you money. It's really counterintuitive and gets into really complex analysis where assembly line speeds, standard quantity of parts in a package, warehousing and shipping capacities and all sorts of weird things that make no sense on their own but when they are combined you can really crank out products at little to no additional costs.

Re: I thought everyone knew that's how they make their money.

For what it's worth, development (or experiment and analysis kits) are nearly always fairly expensive, no matter what the industry. For most companies it's one of the few revenue streams that gets applied to R&D. You're basically helping underwrite other ongoing R&D efforts within the company.

Re: Both Sony and MSFT lose money on the hardware

Product cost, in this case, is the cost of building the console, the box it comes in and any accessories in the box. You never count R&D against unit cost and everything else from marketing to logistics to support are split out and applied to the books of the various departments that handle that activity. Spares and replacements are built in to the wholesale price of the unit.

Doing it that way stabilizes the costs across the companies catalog (for example heavily marketed products carry the financial load for less heavily marketed, but nonetheless important products). It also puts the eventual retail price within the reach of the consumer. If the individual activity costs related to a product were used in calculating unit break even the costs would be astronomically high, far beyond the reach of most people.

Re: "multilateralism"?

I bet the agricultural subsidies I get on my cattle and pasture land exceed the amount given to the poor, on a head-by-head basis. We treat our cattle better than our poor and the cattle have life and health insurance... It's royally fucked up.

Re: The wonders of having a metal phone body

That's not how insulators or touchscreen phones work. Firstly 220V at mains amperage will jump right across a plastic phone case, there simply isn't enough insulator there. Calculate it yourself, it isn't hard. Besides, charging socket has nothing to do with the case anyway, that's all board.

Secondly, that big ass conductive screen you've got stuck to the side of your head is the quickest way out of the phone, not the case, regardless of its composition. In an oversupply situation the entire touchscreen is going to carry that load straight to your head in a very consumer unfriendly high surface area kind of way.

Re: Heathrow wouldn't be the same ...

Many long times ago I worked for a company that opened some airport retail shops. It's the most insanely screwed up model in retail. Everybody from the airline who owns the concourse, the actual airport, the local agencies that manage the airport as well as state and Federal agencies all have their fingers in the pie.

I'm probably the last person to support competition based on price, but the airport model is simply wasteful and stupid. After about a year they closed those stores after final cost analysis showed the sq/ft price to be slightly above what we would pay in downtown Manhattan. If airport retail shops were reasonably priced they'd actually do a lot more business.

Re: Lithium Metal...

The amount of lithium in a battery is so small as to be insignificant for anything but aiding a micro scale chemical reaction. There are a variety of chemistries, but to the best of my knowledge none contain pure lithium. You can calculate lithium equivalent and it's still a tiny amount, but there isn't any 'plain vanilla lithium' in a battery.

The reason they're hazardous is due to a (very low) risk of ignition from thermal runaway due to the battery's overall construction, not simply because it contains some lithium. It's a risk that, while very low, is basically non-existent in most other types of consumer batteries unless they are in a dead short or set on fire.

Re: No shortcuts with AI

Humans require supervision in their learning too. Very few of us come from the factory associating the receptacle your PC is plugged into with a fissile material fueled steam plant 90 miles away.

Pick any two things and the associations you form between them are the result of supervised learning that begins the moment you hatch. Even mother-child associations are taught, that's why you can swap out regular babies for changelings and nobody notices.

Without supervision the volume of available data in an uncontrolled environment is simply overwhelming. Making useful sense of the data requires someone to assist you (either through direct person to person teaching or through books/Internet) or the associations you form will be royally fucked up.

Re: The biggest problem with flying cars

The R22 & R44 aren't mini helicopters. They are rather small, and yes some not quite wealthy people buy them in misguided attempts to show off, but they're the most popular commercial helicopter on the planet. The big fancy Sea Kings and stuff they show in the movies are extremely rare. Most short hop business flights, many police forces and news agencies choose the R44 because it's cheap and very reliable (for a helicopter).

Mini helicopters are an entirely different thing. Kind of like how ultralights and airplanes both use propellers and fixed wings, but aren't really comparable beyond that.

But I agree completely, the public shouldn't be allowed access to flying cars.

Re: Ledswinger Owls fly really slow

Right? There is absolutely no comparison in the methods of flight between an owl an a helicopter. Though I suppose if you dropped a helicopter it would fall rather silently, like an owl does when it strikes, using that gravity stuff everybody keeps going on about. If a helicopter isn't making any rotor noise that's because it's stopped generating lift and you are about to fall.

It really makes you wonder if these scientists have ever seen an owl, or a helicopter...

In the great game of consumer electronics unit volume Apple is quite nearly a non-entity. They do make scads of cash, but the total numbers of units shifted is almost a rounding error in comparison to the other big names.

If it weren't for Apples high margins they would have died years ago as they don't have the volume required to make it in the middle or low end markets. Those models for those markets are cash flow based. Essentially they take a tiny percentage of each sale and pass the rest of the money back up the chain. The model is comparable to a currency exchange business where you get paid for touching the money. The product isn't relevant, it's the financial logistics that people are paying for and as long as volume is very high you can make a lot of money.

The non-Apples aren't making big bucks on tablets and such simply because there isn't enough volume to offset the business logistics costs.

Evil/bad things have never really been the problem in anything. It is apathy that allows those things to happen and continue.

The 'it doesn't impact me' argument has always been rather lame, but in the past it was a far more justifiable attitude to have. Chances were things 'over there' didn't impact you and there was nothing you could do anyway. But that's changing.

It is hypocritical in the extreme to benefit from the 'low, low prices' from globalization and not improve the lives of those who make such prices possible. It's also dangerous. Getting cheap oil from Iran then sending them back plastics at enormous margins is what led to the oil embargo and the ongoing unstable situation over there.

Shit. Slavery is alive and well and even costs less than it did in the 19th century. Yay for zero upfront cost, corporate barracks and clothing and meal salary deductions!

Bad working conditions are a very real problem and it's a global thing. It isn't just underdeveloped countries. But what really pisses me off is that it's always the big brand name products/companies that catch all the heat. The big time places that get singled out are generally orders of magnitude better than the places that turn out low end or commodity products.

It's really easy for people to target Apple or Samsung all the while willfully ignoring the truly horrendous working conditions of the people who harvested the wool and silk in their clothes, picked the banana they had for breakfast and gathered the beans they used for their coffee.

Hell, the apple sauce and apple juice their kids are drinking were made from products harvested in some of the worst conditions imaginable. I will bet $1000 that at least 50% of the El Reg readership can't lift a bushel crate of apples, much less scamper up and down a 6" wide fruit ladder carrying a full crate with one arm. I bet $5000 less than 5% can do it with a broken arm. We expect immigrant workers in the US to do that and far worse every day. All so Jr can have cheap juice. In one just county in Virginia almost 30,000 transient migrants are brought in every year to harvest apples. There was only one fatality this year too! So safety is up...

People will light into a consumer electronics manufacturer and everybody applauds. It sure wouldn't be that way if people started bitching about apples. Even legal temporary visa holders get screwed. They're paid a minimum wage equivalent (production + the difference to meet minimum wage) but their shelter, transportation, food and clothing are deducted. It comes out to ~$40 day for non-stop sunup to sundown labor. Nobody gives a shit though, their juice is cheap.

Re: So what?

Vaginas are great things when there's a woman attached to them. A vagina without a woman is terribly out of context and doesn't make any sense. If you were walking down the street and saw a vagina just sitting there, by itself, on the sidewalk it would be really disturbing. I mean, what would you do with it? Is it ambulatory? Did someone drop it? Is it sentient? If I touch with my boot will my charge card be billed the regular fee plus a fetish charge?

The implications of a giant disembodied vagina are even worse. What if a giant alien flies by and sees it but notices it is crawling with what appears to be thousands of tiny critters will the space giant attempt to eliminate the infestation? It's already shaved, will it try to bleach the entire planet? Will all of mankind be killed by due to a vagina? I always figured vaginas would be our downfall.

Re: For every sane judge . . .

Let's ignore the fact the patent is for software. The patent is far too broad to be defensible. Most successfully defended/enforced patents have an extremely narrow focus. It is a terrible misunderstanding of the value of a patent that leads to these overly broad things. Had the patent narrowly defined a specific 'thing' to protect it would probably not have been overturned.

A patent for an entire system is very rare. A patent for part of a system is normal and that's what people don't understand about prior art. In this example they were basically trying to define any computer based characteristics matching as their innovation. That's just dumb and has prior art all over it. If however their patent was for using a computer to find appropriate matches based on say, systolic blood pressure, that probably could get a defensible patent. The previous existence of computer based matching isn't patentable, but individual aspects of computer based matchmaking are patentable.

Re: Bizarre

Every industry requires competition. Legislative issues aside, without competition there is no justification for continued product development. No good businessman and no Board of Directors is going to approve R&D spend when there's no other option for the consumers. That's insanely bad business.

Without external pressure to improve the only way to continue revenue growth is by reducing production costs. Revenue remains ~stable, but margins increase. That's fine for a while but in short order you've exhausted all your options and stagnate. Then, and only then, a 'disruptive' force can enter from left field and completely drain your stagnated pond. You have no ability to counter because you've eliminated R&D and the new option will succeed simply through novelty. It doesn't even need to be superior, just different. (Incidentally, 'disruptive' products usually fail because they entered the market before real stagnation has begun to occur. Different is a bad thing while people are still buying the old thing. It's why Apple doesn't have to put out new products all the time. People still want the old things).

Competition is good for everyone and most businesses (even MS) do not plan for a monopoly situation. They happen organically due to innumerable random factors beyond any one groups control. But mostly, nobody wants a monopoly because the situation permanently caps revenue growth and for Capitalism to function there must be, in theory at least, the potential for infinite growth.

Re: Utter nonsense

Look here you toolbelt. Whether or not you believe the Bible is a personal decision. But you'd have to be crazy as well as totally ignorant of its past to ascribe any mysterious attributes to the book.

It's thousands of years of the history of ruling class of one poor middle eastern tribe combined with 1600 years of hand selected literature and mythology that's been translated, edited, reinterpreted and politicized. The rest of the material was destroyed, publicly, by the Church. The first 1200 years of the Church were spent destroying all the works they chose not to include in the abridged version. There is no such thing as 'One Bible to Rule Them All'.

You could, and still can, out and create your very own edition of the Bible and claim it to be the one true word of God. No editorial board is going to censure you for doing so. It was never intended to act as the verbatim word of God. That's a fairly recent development. The priestly class has always been the final word on God, the Bible was simply a summarized reference manual for keeping the message consistent and for good quotes.

There's some good stuff in the Bible for sure, but it's fucking insane to say it is somehow magical or contains powers. That's just stupid. It really doesn't help anyone's case when nutters like you are roaming the land and spewing garbage like that.