I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but at I/O during his Q&A Larry Page talked a fair bit about how he wants to see manufacturing get more streamlined, Maybe this could be related?
> Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.”
I manufacture things out of steel. Steel costs 50 cents a pound for sheet and $2 a pound for welding wire. The freight to ship it to my distributors is another 50 cents a pound, and the advertising and marketing cost is about $2 a pound.
So ultimately I agree with Page. The cost of manufacturing anything goes on along a 1/x curve over time, and approaches the raw material cost. Its the other costs that don't do that, like engineering talent, marketing spends, warehousing, shipping.
Really? As a Canadian who crosses that border fairly regularly, the iris & fingerprint records are only for the "Enhanced Drivers License" as far as I knew, I've crossed the border dozens of times with just my passport
I've always found that knowing the deficiencies of a language is the best way to know the language. Anything that works well should be pretty intuitive and comfortable, but knowing exactly where the trouble spots of a language are let you be aware when you approach them, and know how to handle them.
Has anyone ever read http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm or put it through any verification? It looks good but I'm no biologist, I've used it as my basis for years to avoid polyphasic schedules and embrace naps and biphasic sleep when my life allows for it.
There's a fair number of really good Postgres tools out there, or tools that support Postgres among other platforms, They're just pricey. The free tools are passable but not that good.
For me personally PostgreSQL makes up for the lack of good free graphical tools by providing an excellent command line client, psql, and good utility views and functions. I much prefer it to the CLIs of MySQL, Oracle and SQLite.
I think you misunderstand. You're right that to him "free === good, proprietary === bad" and since his software (GNU) is one of the few platforms that really qualifies as "free" he encourages people to use it, however he's made it perfectly clear what it takes to qualify something as "free" and many many other independent developers have released software that meets this qualification.
To consider Stallman a "dictator" is simply ludicrous, the entire point of his philosophy is that once software is released to the end user, that end user has almost all the rights to do anything they please with it, The only thing they can't do is take those rights away from others.
Id games have lot's of artwork, levels, etc. that is not released under GPL. In minecraft it's users that create the content.
Id can release their engines under GPL without harming their sales.
Ok, It's been a while since I read 4HWW, but how is there so much praise for this guy? That book was like a how-to on being an amoral, freeloading douchebag.
The Linux implementations of ZFS are dog slow, and for the last few weeks I've been evaluating btrfs as a possibility for my home storage server, and I've ruled it out completely.
btrfs has been "Close to a stable release" for years now, but if you follow their mailing list there are still people reporting total loss of large filesystems once or twice a week (This week I saw filesystem corruption from an unexpected power outtage, and last week there was a data loss/corruption bug caused by a pool of drives with different sector sizes), I desperately want btrfs to be mature but it's more than a few releases away from being stable.
> Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.”
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/15/google-c... (The first transcript I could find)