Feb 13, 2013
Category: General
Posted by: mtoto
I've always been amused at the Micosoft Windows progress bar. It seems to go forward and back at random, as far as I've ever been able to tell. I've thought about making a joke animated gif about it doing just that. Well, I'm not alone in thinking these things.
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Feb 13, 2013
Category: General
Posted by: mtoto
Here's an old computer science joke: What's the difference between hardware and software? If you use hardware long enough, it breaks. If you use software long enough, it works. The truth behind that is the reason that so much decades-old COBOL code is out there still driving crucial applications at banks and other huge companies. Many attempts to replace COBOL applications flopped in the 1980s and '90s, and we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — but the Baby Boomers who wrote all that code are now retiring en masse.
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Sep 18, 2012
Category: General
Posted by: mtoto
"You can buy a reasonable Android phone for $100 retail, and I wanted to see if I could find a $150 tablet. This consultant pointed me to a mall filled with hundreds of stalls selling nothing but tablets. I walked into the middle of the scrum to a random stall... If this were a movie, the lights would have dimmed and all the activity in the room frozen. 300 renminbi is US $45. And that was the initial offer price given to a bewildered foreigner in China, no haggling. I felt a literal shock."
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Jan 27, 2012
Is that Blood on your iPad?
I've been reading a New York Times series about Apple's fiscal control of manufacturing with Foxconn in China. Here's the article:
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,
Category: General
Posted by: mtoto
It links to an earlier article on Apple as well: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work.
Well, since I'm working on developing media to run on a Kindle Fire and the iPad, I'm implicated as well.
China is undergoing an industrial revolution like America did 100 years ago. I recently watched a documentary on Andrew Carnegie, where they said steel workers commonly worked 12 hour days, 84 hours a week. So it doesn't seem there are any innocent parties in this process. Personally I want everybody-all-at-once to express more simple and human conditions for everyone so we don't destroy the planet or exploit the poor.
I'm also rooting for the $35 tablet, which will be sold in India, to jump-start mobile devices to the next billion internet users.