Posts by thenitz 17 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2017
It's 2025. India's been doing a lot of outsoucing since the '90s, on top of that there are many people of Indian origin who previously worked in the US and returned home. We need to admit that there are people in Bangalore with 30 years of experience in almost any domain you can imagine.
No, Boeing was actually the first on the market with commercial jets. Douglas followed after a delay, and for a while those two had the market between themselves. Then Airbus showed up in the '70s as a third plane maker, with heavy European government backing; they caught momentum in the '80s with the A320, and eventually Douglas disappeared.
Now we have again two major manufacturers - and a third one shows up, now with heavy Chinese government backing. Not too dissimilar.
Intel had to take a painful decision for both the company and the employees. They had some very smart people in Nizhny Novgorod, and their product knowledge and math skills are hard to replace.
Really sad to see what Russia has become and so much of their potential wasted because of Putin and his cronies.
This is the message I've been waiting for .... I guess for the past 10 years or so?
In early 2010's my team was working on the profile function for a well known brand. The validation guys kept coming with more and more improbable scenarios and the devs' reaction was along the lines of "who would even care about such things?" Now they are vindicated!
To be honest I don't recall any good solution to that problem. One could disable profile save if the car door had been opened mechanically - but then other people would be upset. We ended up implementing an "undo" feature of sorts by doing automated profile backups in the car maker's app on the phone. Sadly no iCloud.
Funny enough, it works both ways; there's little point for many of us in Bucharest, Romania to come to an office, when your job means you work with the people in Cambridge and Bangalore... or even in a little Romanian village in the middle of nowhere.
One of my customers has a production line for professional vacuum cleaners. In the past few years they managed to automate most of it, now the only steps done by people are driving the forklifts with parts from the warehouse, unloading them on the line, and packing the vacuums in the cardboard boxes.
There are still plenty of people in the factory but most of them are tending to the machines when they fail, and handle exceptions and all sorts of unforeseen problems.
Overall the management is happy with the result and they'll move towards even more automation, the next step is to use automated forklifts. The job positions are more attractive and easier to fill, it seems nowadays people aren't really keen to do long repetitive work on production lines and they have a hard time hiring. While, at the same time, the factory gets to be cost competitive with less expensive countries.
Your numbers match - at least as order of magnitude - the state of the art in vehicle charging today
"A new 1MW power cabinet with a similar design to our utility-scale products supports peak rates of up to 250kW per car. At this rate, a Model 3 Long Range operating at peak efficiency can recover up to 75 miles of charge in 5 minutes "
[ https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging ]
Vodafone did try to bring MPesa to Eastern Europe a few years ago, they launched the service and made a big advertising campaign. It failed to get any meaningful traction, since most people already had smartphones, bank accounts and cards. They killed it eventually.
Nowadays I see that services like Revolut, where you can transfer money to someone in your address book without knowing the IBAN, are getting more popular.
This. The scenario that everyone talks about, where your car can drive you to work, then come back by itself, picks the kids from school, and maybe moonlights as a taxi afterwards - that's the famous Level 5 - is not going to happen soon.
What is going to happen is twofold. You'll get better and better driving aids to the point where the car can essentially let you check Facebook on the phone during most of your commute on motorways and main roads, with plenty of time for warnings when it needs a handover. That's Level 3. Of course we'll hear stories of people asleep at the wheel, their cars stopped in the middle of the road with warning lights on and horn blaring - but it will work for most of us.
This will be sold the same way cars are sold now, just another option package when you buy the car. The thing is there's only so much people are willing to pay for such a feature so you can't afford expensive hardware like lidars, and at least initially it will be limited to easy tasks like motorway driving and maybe fully automated valet parking in selected, participating parking lots.
The second scenario that will happen is the revolution - where you make money and create new kinds of services by getting read of the human driver. The famous Level 4. It will first only be used by businesses and fleets - because it is very expensive and you need a clear ROI to break even over that big initial investment.
Think taxi fleets on big streets in well mapped areas, big trucks going motorway-only between warehouses, smarter buses and shuttles restricted to well-known routes but with a more flexible schedule. These will be soon feasible with the current tech. It won't replace all cases where a driver is needed, and services may shut down in heavy snow, but sometimes trains get canceled too in bad weather, if you think about it. The company that owns the cars will still hire a handful of people to service the cars, wash and refuel (recharge?) and operate them, perhaps remotely, if something goes bad. But not as many as before.
Even a very restricted Level 4 has the potential to change whole industries. The fact that the book says "it's not possible to make 100% perfect self driving cars" doesn't mean that people won't make lots of money using lesser vehicles that are good enough.
Well, the plug-in versions of the Mercedes S-Klasse and BMW 7-series are not on the list. Neither is the Porsche Cayenne or Panamera. The 5 series and the E-Klasse are the most expensive cars on that list.
It makes sense, if you have that much money to pay for a car, the subsidy won't affect your choice much.
There's nothing stopping Tesla to sell their vehicle in Europe in 2 or 3 years when production of the semi starts. But they had to launch the vehicle in the US because that's the best place to create hype.
Their priority is now gathering funds to sustain their growth. They can't get those funds by selling cars and trucks because they aren't able to produce them on a large scale. So they keep announcing products even if they know very well they can't build them in the near future. Hype helps increase or at least maintain the stock price and make funding easier.
Eventually, if the gamble pays out, they'll get to build those trucks and sell them to whoever is willing to pay. If Europe is a better market, they'll sell a lot of them there. Same as they do now with their Model S and Model X.
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