There is definitely some room for reputation in the enthusiast/direct-to-consumer market.
Crucial had one of the best marketing positions in the business:
- They had a captive supply chain. There was no risk they'd switch from Samsung to Hynix chips but keep the same SKU, so you could buy a second set later and expect it to have similar timings.
- They had a reputation for being conservative about their offerings. There's a lot of RAM out there that meets rated timings only with a voltage right on the edge of what the memory controllers will start to burn out at.
- They were on a lot of mainboard manufacturer's qualification lists, and yet were easily obtained (at least in the US). There are a fair number of brands and ranges that simply aren't widely distributed.
So they were in a place to say "we can charge 10% more for confidence", and considering enthusiasts willingly pay 30% more for RGB and fancy heatspreaders, that's not a bad message. I mean, I've had competent results with plenty of other brands (I have a Team set in my main rig, and it replaced a G.Skill one before the RAMpocalypse), but I always thought of Crucial as a brand you'd use if you were building a machine for work or a family member and didn't want to deal with surprises.
System integrity also ends at the border of the system. The entire ecosystem of ATM skimmers demonstrates this-- the software and hardware are still 100% sanctioned, they're just hidden beneath a shim in the card slot and a stick-on keypad module.
I generally agree with the concept of "if you want me to use a pre-approved terminal, you supply it." I'd think this opens up a world of better possibilities. Right now, the app-centric bank/media company/whatever has to build apps that are compatible with 82 bazillion different devices, and then deal with the attestation tech support issues. Conversely, if they provide a custom terminal, it might only need to deal with a handful of devices, and they could design it to function optimally for the single use case.
Humanoid robots are a lot of sizzle-- they promise all sorts of flexibility, at the cost of hugely higher cost/complexity/unreliability.
If you can scope your problem to some degree, you can probably make some purpose-built automation that won't look like a human, but will do the job competently and cheaply.
I see the demos with the robots carrying boxes and think "okay, why not just use a conveyer belt?"
Because, again, for home use we don't want a laundry robot, a dish washing robot, a cleaning robot, etc. We kind of have those (laundry machine, dishwasher, Roomba-types) but they all have big limitations. What people want is something that can do everything a human can do, so it can put away those dishes, wash a pan, clean the table, counters, etc. We've already scoped the problem and a humanoid-ish robot is probably the best option to do those things.
Well for home use you probably also want a robot that won’t accidentally murder your pet, injure your children, break itself and/or your prized possessions by doing the wrong thing, etc etc etc.
These are unsolved problems for robotics. There is a reason that most industrial robots work behind guards or in very constrained areas with use cases that are 100% on rails and stringently tested.
The idea that if you just make a robot in a human shape all these cease to be problems is magical thinking. We are fare from knowing that a humanoid-ish robot is the best option to do any of these things because we have no idea what it would take for it to do these things safely other than to say it would take technology that we currently don’t have.
Hehe. Yeah exactly. At the moment I have to prep the room for my roomba so it doesn't eat my rug and commit suicide by cable. I can't imagine a humanoid, presumably strong, robot let loose in my home and I am for sure a tech enthusast.
The laundry bot would probably be a box with some some 6DOF chopstick like positioners doing “cloth origami” to fold clothes. No need for an overkill 2kW humanoid.
We're missing a part of the case though: why do you need to be a car-maker to be the vanguard for self-driving taxis?
The best case scenario for a self-driving company would be to target software and sensor solution packages that they can sell or license to other manufacturers. Such a vendor can focus on the self-driving problem and not have to bother with things like "we found a surprisingly big market niche for a 11-passenger minibus, but no platform for it" or "to sell it in the EU we need the headlights to be 5cm lower". I'd expect the margins are also a hell of a lot higher if they don't have to include two tonnes of steel with each auto-driver license they sell.
Maybe they build a small number of test mules, or just chop-shop a few off-the-shelf cars as a R&D fleet, but they hardly need to be a seven-figures-per-year manufacturer to be supplying those needs.
That's even assuming they come out green in the competition to deliver robotaxis. Right now the leading player in the US market is a company who is neither Tesla nor a legacy vehicle manufacturer. It's an adtech who started gluing the contents of a Radio Shack onto the worst cars you could possibly think of (Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar i-Paces? Really?) and turned it into something that's an everyday thing in several major cities.
Tesla FSD story reminds me of the fracas that was early OS/2. IBM sold people 286 hardware on the promise of it running OS/2, so they had to waste a lot of effort building a 286-capable OS/2 that was clunky and almost immediately obsolete. No matter how talented Tesla's R&D team are, they're walled in by design choices made on existing vehicles (i. e. relying on cameras instead of lidar). I wonder if they'd be better off being ran as an arm's length startup to address the problem more generically, and then they can sell it to other firms if it turns out that the best solution won't work on existing Tesla hardware.
Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.
I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.
It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years.
Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".
The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")
The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:
* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.
* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
Crypto is arguably among the worst assets for that threat model though.
When they called in the physical gold, people could squirrel away their $10 and $20 coins in wallsafes and shoeboxes to trade with trusted partners later. Declaring the coins illegal didn't cause them to disappear from people's hands directly.
Crypto doesn't have that physical anchor. If a major world government declared it illegal tomorrow, how would you, as a resident of that country, access the value in your favourite blockchain wallet?
Law enforcement could monitor the remnants of the network and trying to trigger transactions is obvious probable cause. That assumes the remnants still function-- they aren't being blocked by DPI/filtering, or just the functional destabilization caused by a large number of participants being unplugged from the network.
At best, you'd have to go off-ledger and trade talismans (handing over a document with the private keys for an existing wallet like a bearer instrument and hoping they didn't run off multiple copies, or just trying to keep records of transactions and balances elsewhere and hoping to resynch eventually)
This is also why the paper dollar is so important to its reserve-currency status. An enterprising bank in the developing world might say "we offer USD-denominated accounts, all digital, it's 20xx" for customers who don't trust the local currency, but those are a lot easier for the local government to deactivate than a coffee can full of greenbacks buried in their backyard.
1. PHP and C.
2. I wish C had PHP's native "associative array as junk drawer" data structure. Conversely, I wish PHP had more support for a "long lifetime" task that wasn't expected to vanish at the end of a page load.
3. Am I trying to target the web? Then PHP.
There's also
4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)
5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.
Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)
I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.
This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.
For that kind of scam, all you really need the cooler, which are often parted out for legit reasons (watercooling, replacements, probably some specialized high-density and rackmount plays) and may be available as a spare or "second-shift" offering.
It would probably be easy to produce a PCB that's the right size to fit a 4090 cooler, but just contains 90 cents worth of random SMD parts. And you can produce them in quantity when you want them rather than relying on an erratic supply of stripped "real" PCBs.
Crucial had one of the best marketing positions in the business:
- They had a captive supply chain. There was no risk they'd switch from Samsung to Hynix chips but keep the same SKU, so you could buy a second set later and expect it to have similar timings.
- They had a reputation for being conservative about their offerings. There's a lot of RAM out there that meets rated timings only with a voltage right on the edge of what the memory controllers will start to burn out at.
- They were on a lot of mainboard manufacturer's qualification lists, and yet were easily obtained (at least in the US). There are a fair number of brands and ranges that simply aren't widely distributed.
So they were in a place to say "we can charge 10% more for confidence", and considering enthusiasts willingly pay 30% more for RGB and fancy heatspreaders, that's not a bad message. I mean, I've had competent results with plenty of other brands (I have a Team set in my main rig, and it replaced a G.Skill one before the RAMpocalypse), but I always thought of Crucial as a brand you'd use if you were building a machine for work or a family member and didn't want to deal with surprises.
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