>(Ford)'s amazing success with low R&D expenditure (they had one engine design that ran from the 70's to the 90's with no modification or improvement despite the industry ballooning with different technologies during that time) shows how small the relationship between R&D and great products is.
And no-one ever accused Ford of making shoddy cars that fall apart the second they leave the floor... for many decades solid...
The reason I dived into Android with so much relish was because it was so much like my Asus WinMo PDA. The TOMTOM maps on that was brilliant. GPS was way more accurate than Google Maps, both as in "determining what road you're on" and "pinpoint accuracy in the middle of nowhere".
>I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated.
I live in Australia, one of the best examples of how government handouts can ruin a race, and I'm saying this as someone coming from a low-income family with poor education and working+educating myself to a $100k/y job before I'm 30.
>I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line.
I think completely supporting them would be a bad idea, but as said in my original post, assistance in re-education should be partially paid for. I am always of the opinion that education should be at least partially subsidised - full subsidy encourages a poorer quality of education.
Example: You're 26 and have just spent $80k and 8 years of toil studying furiously for a degree, and the market for your chosen field evaporates. Sure, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you, but now you're significantly in debt because of something you had no control over.
This is a difficult analogy to compare with taxi drivers, but I hope you see the point - and over the next 10-40 years we will see this happen more and more as machine intelligence replaces more and more jobs.
Maybe it's because I'm Australian and have got used to the free ride of healthcare and education, but I'd gladly take a minor tax increase if it means a significant portion of the population gets into an entirely new career quicker, instead of remaining unemployed and being MORE of a strain on the economy.
Career is a strong word, though. The sorts of people we're talking about usually have no other option, and education can change that.
Averages are nice, but I'll be interested to see what happens to the workforce that depends upon them entirely, as mentioned above: truckies, taxis, FedEx, etc.
I say, leave it for a year to lull the companies into a false sense of security, then tax the hell out of companies using them for a few years to pay for some re-education for the old employees.
>Australia could chase edge by becoming a low-tax or low-red-tape capital.
Although our country was founded and grew up with a "low red-tape" mentality, the last 30 years of global-scale mining boom has forever removed that possibility from our environment. Combining socialised welfare, healthcare and (finally!) decent network infrastructure with the Western selfish love of toys, there's not a chance we are ever going to return to a low-tax, low-red-tape society.
They are legal on private property and (since 2012-06) in our capital city, Canberra, but not on any other roads/pathways.
Side note: in New Zealand they're classified the same as mobility scooters and motorised wheelchairs, and as such are fine, bust stick to walkways when possible.
All very interesting, thanks for the detailed response. I'm pretty interested in setting up a fully-automated custom brewery/distillery so I've been looking into making a lot of custom fittings for piping and heat-exchanging. Thanks again
I like the photos of the solidoodle2 and the price tag. How is the end product? Some dudes in a local hackerspace built a reprap a while ago but that thing is nothing but disappointment... Head drift, ooze problems, constant maintenance. What's the most complex thing you've printed, if you don't mind me asking?
I feel the same way about iPhones. I can never find a damn thing on them. Though, got a new GS3 recently and agree with all you've said.
I could harp on with Cyanogenmod, Cyanogenmod, Cyanogenmod... but really the issue is that they try to sell high-end phones to non-technical people, which you can't really blame them for.
The big phone manufacturers really need to figure out a way to have two versions of their products: one marketed to technical people and one marketed to non-technical people.
Hell, make the contract on the technical one come without a warranty for software so that people can flash whatever ROM on there with impunity. I've never given a crap about warranty's because I know that my intended use of pretty much every electronic device I've ever owned will break the warranty but not the device...
Everything too complicated to fit into any one single person's head is going to have problems. That's how it works. There is a tradeoff of functionality vs expense-of-time for any given task, and if you polish the functionality to a mirror-shine but don't receive any economic benefit for doing so, then your software won't make much money.
For a couple of weeks my wife bought me chocolate-coated coffee beans once a week. These lasted about 5min once I remembered about them at work, due to (a) yumminess, (b) tendency just to mindlessly eat at the desk.
After that, because chocolate-coated coffee beans are expensive, I figured I'd cut out the middleman and I bought a 5kg bag of coffee beans and just munched my way through that.
DO NOT DO THIS, even though it sounds cool.
After a couple of hours the increased caffeine made me jittery, my heart rate was up, my head hurt and my skin was dry and scratchy.
After a few weeks I quit that. It was hard. I'm a water addict now.
>Cyanogenmod is fine
Yes it is.
> but what about all the others?
You don't need to venture beyond CM if you don't want to, but really, CM brings the whole "land of milk and honey" thing to the table.
If you get kicks out of flashing "edge" ROM's (I do) then you can go nuts, but if you're looking for fast, reliable and full-featured (of which stock ROM's are almost universally are not), then just flash CM and enjoy the phone as it was meant to be before marketing and lawyers fucked it up.
>By the time CM has stable builds for J, my phone will be on K.
Going to take issue with this as well. I'm on a SGS3 and CM10 (JB), and they just changed the status of the rom from "EXPERIMENTAL" to "NIGHTLY", yet I have not seen a single problem so far.
Everything works except for TV-out, which I couldn't get to work with either of my TV's with the stock rom anyway.
If the software company is large enough to afford a marketing team to fill Google up with ads then there's a good chance the software will also have big dollars spent on it.
Contrariwise, if the software you're looking for is already large and complex (driven by the nature of what it needs to do), then ads will mean nothing because they will be expected.
While on the other end of the scale with small purpose-built apps you will deliberately ignore ads since you won't want any bulky bloatware that can afford adspace.