Posts by rainjay 17 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2014
I've been using cheapo A7-powered quad and octacore Android phones for two years now and for most daily usage - web browsing, emails, chats and calls - they're perfectly sufficient. A more efficient yet powerful successor would be icing on the cake. A power sipping 4+4 A35 design would be the best for web browsing, with 4 low speed cores handling scrolling and background work and 4 faster cores doing initial rendering.
I remember reinstalling WFWG from multiple *floppies*! The horror...
In-app purchases are fine if you get a license app that stays on the phone, for example, and doesn't need to keep polling an authentication server to keep working. For content, I'd rather go for simple streaming off established platforms like Amazon or Netflix or (gasp) shiny plastic discs or (ducks) The Bay for geolocked stuff.
Make it easy for people to part with their money and people will part with their money. That's the simple secret of online content delivery but only Apple and Netflix have understood it.
I thought they mentioned having multiple controller cards per array, instead of having controllers on each flash card. How would this compare to an in-memory database system? Speed looks a bit slower but data integrity is a lot better. As for security, are there OSes that run security checks on any PCIe hardware or is anything on that bus considered trusted?
It's funny that Android runs perfectly fine on Atom x86 but WinPhone doesn't. Windows 10 Mobile should technically have no issues running on either ARM or x86 architectures because the underlying kernel and system libs are from Windows 10.
Anyway, Ubuntu tried making a desktop-capable superphone but couldn't get the funding. Maybe Microsoft are doing it from another angle - those Universal apps don't care about the underlying architecture and if most office drone types don't use desktop programs, then Mobile Office is all they'll need.
They could have put an Atom x86 chip on this thing to make it into a true PC in a pocket that can run universal and desktop apps. After all, Asus Zenfones have shown that Atom on mobile is a viable choice. My cheap Windows 10 tablet does a decent job running old Win32 programs and can even run Linux virtual machines, imagine having the same capability in a phone.
And an ethical minefield, to put it mildly. The scientists involved sidestepped the dilemma of using fetal cells by using adult-derived IPSC but the whole idea makes me slightly queasy. Even if I use my own cells to make a brain, does that brain have a separate right to existence and does it warrant different treatment than a mere cloned body part?
On the tech side, imagine integrating this brain with electronic circuitry from the moment of cell differentiation. You'd have a real neural network in a bottle... To make things slightly less nightmarish, you could use mouse or lobster brains instead.
Sadly I agree with you on that, only the Pebble Time uses a color e-paper display whereas Apple and Android Wear smartwatches use OLED. E-paper looks great outdoors but the colors look muted with a backlight. OLED screens look fantastic indoors but they're useless outdoors in bright sunlight; the average Apple Watch buyer probably doesn't care about that or the dismal battery life.
When a Dell Venue 8 Pro or Lenovo Mix 2 runs for $300, it doesn't make sense for consumers to go for this Toughpad. Those models run on slower Intel Atom chips but they can run desktop programs fine, not like that neutered beast called Windows RT, and still get 8 hours of battery life. No IP-whatever protection and I haven't seen a toughened case like an Otterbox or a full water/shock-proof case for these models either.
Too bad Dell and Lenovo don't see a market for small, light, tough and cheap Windows tablets. Even pricing them at $500 would make them a better value than most Android tablets or iPads.
So let's hire high school students for an "internship" program that turns out to be a few weeks' introduction to mindnumbingly rote labour on production lines, without pay to boot. And let's cram workers in dormitories and get them to work long hours without breaks while assembling the latest iShiny.
All great ideas, Mr. Shareholder, for making sure we hit that 10% profit growth year-on-year.
Surely there has to be a better, more humane way of manufacting electronics?
Bitcoin isn't legal tender in most parts of the world, unfortunately... the starting point for all this will be open source ERP and CRM platforms to get SMEs wired up. The next step is to create a trading wiki to absorb all that data and process it into something that can be used by the end consumer.
It would be interesting to see a bunch of sites based on these open platforms perform the work of Amazon and Google. It'll be chaotic in the beginning but if the data can be shared between them, why not?
"Understand how to make a more efficient connection between product creators and consumers, and your free market evolution will make their middle-man tax an inefficiency - and eventually make them an expensive irrelevance."
Bezos' trading background emphasises utmost secrecy for the most profit. One way to compete with Amazon/Ebay/Taobao/Tmall is to create an open platform with no profit motive. I think you'd end up creating a new kind of economy by removing the middleman entirely and linking buyers and sellers directly, no matter where they are in the world. Post-capitalism anyone? :)
I've been working on deploying OpenERP for SMEs who can't afford or see no need to go for Microsoft Dynamics or SAP. It's possible to link up OpenERP, ERPNext or other FOSS ERP systems for suppliers to talk to each other for manufacturing requirements.
The next step is to get that product data out there into a Wiki-style global trading platform, a mashup of all these:
- Amazon's product database
- Unique global IDs for each product, like GS1's GTIN synced to a GDSN
- Production info from FOSS ERP platforms
- Google's search and analytics capabilities
- List of suppliers for each product
- Each supplier has some kind of CRM portal
- Consumer reviews
- An open source e-payment processor would be icing on the cake
Other than mediate transactions between buyers and sellers, it could also analyze existing demand trends and extrapolate for the future. As an open platform, buyers should be able to see how and where the product was made, in addition to who sells it. Sellers can see the highest trending products at any particular time and adjust production accordingly. The platform itself won't compete with sellers because it won't be stocking any products, unlike Amazon.
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