Good article describing a boilerplate framework & techniques for (web) backend systems architecture implemented with off-the-shelf components. But like every systems architect I have ever met, it does not even put a thought into security or data governance (a priori).
I like the approach taken by several authors from Asimov in "The End of Eternity" to Star Trek or Loki on TV: Time travel is not allowed except for entities that live outside of time in a way that is not meaningfully perceived by anyone else; When unsanctioned travel happens, it is easy to detect and retroactively suppress by these entities. Of course this can all be refuted or at least declared a transient state at most by the mess Time Cop is; Or how things end up in any of the other stories.
F9 produces such a consistently and ridiculously good, cool, fun, and educational *social media content*; that it is installed permanently as a cognitive dissonance in the back of my mind.
Agree. I'm not into motorcycles and never plan to own one, but I still follow their videos because of the mix between intriguing and entertainment. Kind of why I used to watch top gear back when I was in school even though I didn't own a car.
Why are they so bad? They want you to keep using them, so they have to be bad enough.
Why hasn't anybody made a good one? Maybe they have, but they are not around for long. It is not a good business: Little growth potential, no recurring revenue.
I wouldn't ask this question to other people. Not about a specific company. I would look for core values and culture that align with mine, and the kind of impact I can have or the position sets me up for. Large renowned companies look better on your CV; startups often assign you more significant tasks, so don't dismiss them lightly. Also when I say core values I do not mean the HR corporate propaganda that every company puts out. Listen to the interviewers, check out the actual product(s) or service(s) they put out: it's about what they do and how they do it, not what they say; if the interview is transparent enough, you'll get to know at least part of the team you are going to work with: use that opportunity to find out what they are really about. A company is a community: it is not politics, religion, gender, age, race, friendship or family; but the collective planning and execution of ideas and goals through means every person in the organization should support or at least feel comfortable with.
Apple was going to sell hundreds of millions of AirPods with or without a headphone jack. We may never really know what the final straw was, but I’d be willing to bet that Jony Ive & Co. were looking for a suitable excuse to drop it for years.
It’s one more component that limits how thin the device can be, it’s an ingress point for water (Apple was never going to add a flap), and if you’re the kind of person who digs symmetry then a giant hole on one side looks ugly.
Luckily for them, the market came their way. Bluetooth headphones were massively outselling wired headphones by that point, and it’s one of those areas Apple loves to work in - a space where they can add some proprietary magic (H-series chips, instant pairing, auto source switching) that makes what would otherwise be a relatively ordinary product into a remarkable one.
I don't know whether wireless earphones sold like now what if Apple didn't remove 3.5mm hole. There were many phones 3.5mm jack and waterproof without a flap.
My first computer was a Sinclair clone hooked up to the only TV we had at home. So was the case for so many people in my country in the 80s who couldn't afford the disproportionately more expensive machines. Kudos to this genius for bringing inexpensive computer access to the layman. He could have patented the shit out of his company's systems, charge whatever he wanted for them, and spend a ton of money on an army of lawyers defending his patents and making him a shit ton more. Instead he gave so many of us early access to the tools we would use to make our living, so we weren't in a huge disadvantage any more. I couldn't be more grateful.
This. If only every other country with oil managed their wealth with such good intentions and for the common good the whole world would most certainly be way far ahead in getting rid of much of our dependency on it. So no, I do not think that selling oil to oil dependent countries is the same as selling opium. They have the same knowledge, means and even more motivation (no freaking oil) to get their shite together and follow the same conversion Norway has been undergoing for almost half a century now. What, do you think their fight is that they just grew a conscience yesterday and decided to replace all their petrodollars with Teslas? They freaking groomed generations of environmentally conscious citizens with all around free access to the best education to become great scientists and engineers to fight off this dependency. In and out of their country. They imported some of our best research scientists which were struggling to make a living out of their work and did not even care about it (At least until they reached their mid 30s and tried to start a family). They now own and live in literally million dollar mansions because their research efforts paid off by a country acknowledging their value. As they should. They were even able to monetize this fight for the environment, making good bucks from it. The fight for our freaking oxygen and clean water. Which shouldn't need any monetary incentive by the way, in case that is not obvious enough. In my mind they are the best kind of society you can get nowadays. I do appreciate the point of view comparing them with freaking vicious enslaving East India trading company and I am sure there is people with that mentality in their numbers but... Bitch, please.
You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors. Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F the consumer.
When I see a broad statement like this, it seems interesting to dig a little further.
The article itself doesn’t provide much detail to back up its claims. And specifically it would be interesting to understand the patent issue better.
The patent they cite says claims “ A silicon single crystal produced according to Czochralski method using a melt in contact with a quartz crucible, to which Ga (gallium) is added as a dopant that controls resistivity of the crystal in a range of 5Ω.cm to 0.1Ω.cm, wherein a diameter of the single crystal is 4 inches or more, and the single crystal is used for a solar cell.”
Which seems pretty broad. Would that really have held up in court if it was tested? Was this patent really blocking fabrication of gallium doped silicon?
A text from 2015 suggests there were open issues around fabricating gallium doped silicon:
So it seems likely that there were open issues around fabrication until at least 2015. Have there been other process developments that have made Gallium doping viable in recent years?
The patent largely covers the fabrication process, and was recently licensed to a Chinese fabrication company. Is it likely that this IP was really blocking them? I.e. given that they may not publicly disclose their fabrication process, how would you know they were infringing.
If this IP was of such fundamental importance why was it not challenged? This is rare in my experience (outside of semiconductors at least).
So, it doesn’t seem clear cut to me. And it would be interesting to understand the issues better.
Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.
TL;DR: (Without providing any hard data to back it up)
- Design bugs are (more) expensive to fix after implementation.
(I really don't want to be an asshole here. The piece is well written. Particularly the part where it criticizes how a lot of CS research is done nowadays. But so many words for such a remarkably obvious platitude!)
