I think this story also shows the problems with patents. If Takata was allowed to use the mixture that was "invented" by other airbag makers, would they have used their dangerous ammonium nitrate mixture?
It also shows the dangers of the drive for lower costs in companies like this. The current system is doomed to reintroduce the same problems all over again, regulation and more control will not change this.
The other side of that question is: if other airbag makers weren't able to patent the better mixture, would they ever have bothered to invent it?
I'm not implying that the answer is necessarily "no," but the mere fact that patents discouraged the use of a safer mixture in one case doesn't tell the whole story.
> If Takata was allowed to use the mixture that was "invented" by other airbag makers
It doesn't invalidate the question as a whole, but they would have been allowed to if they licensed the solution but that may have cost them more than developing their own (now known to be badly floored) solution. An active choice was made there.
I was wondering if GitLab provides a Markdown editor that could be used by non-technical users directly from the web interface? Something like Prose[1], Dillinger[2] or StackEdit[3].
Of course you could argue if it's in scope for a project like GitLab, but it means that I could use static site generators for projects where non-technical users need to edit the content without ever thinking about a CMS.
Would be nice:
- if it would also provide an easy upload/commit of images to some configurable directory from that Markdown editor;
- configure a content-editor user that's restricted to a subset of directories;
- allow the user to preview the full website without pushing to the live environment;
- use a tag or branch to mark the version that can be pushed to the live environment.
It would probably be the most flexible CMS that's available right now.
Fixed costs aren't totally fixed, it's just that they won't change for every unit produced. But it may be the case that they will change when you produce say an additional 100 units (or 1,000 or 10,000 units).
So if you ramp up production and you need for example an additional factory, that means your fixed costs will go up.
I think that the gist of the article is that you can be more creative (i.e. come up with ideas that hardly anyone thought of before), if you have more distance from culture. In other words, people that are deeply entrenched in culture, can only think of doing things in the way that the culture is doing it now.
Alan Kay tries to express this concept in his talk "Normal considered harmful", it may give a different perspective on the same concept.
I think it's very good to point this out in relation to immigration right now. However, it's just one of the reasons we should be open to immigration: humanness (brotherhood); a better outcome for both parties ("immigrants" and "natives") in the long run if we give immigrants a possibility to start a "normal" life as fast as possible; we can share the workload and may alleviate the problem of ageing western societies; etc.
This is really a problem I think. Maybe GitLab could reconsider to adopt a licensing model[1] for the Enterprise Edition that would make it more Free Software friendly?
[1] I.e. a licensing model based on GPL and selling services that Red Hat uses for RHEL, instead of a licensing model like they, and a minority of the "open source" companies, use.
When we introduced the Enterprise Edition we had it under MIT license. This caused much confusion with our customers. Maybe the situation is better now with companies like Hortonworks educating the market. But unlike others we want to make our open source edition as simple to install and maintain as the paid version.
My understanding from taking a Red Hat sysadmin course is that what you get from a RHEL subscription is firstly access to their repos from which to download updates and additional packages. The other, perhaps bigger, portion of a RHEL subscription is the support; I think they will answer the phone and provide you fixes for any bugs in RHEL-provided software relatively quickly. This is nice for companies, for whom uptime and stability are often superior to most other concerns, like staying close in feature parity to upstream.
This reminds me of one of my first programming jobs as external consultant for the Baggage Handling System at Schiphol in 2000/2001, I was 17 years old.
My employer at that time was using MS Excel to parse the log files of all sensors of the predecessor/older part of the system that is shown in this video. I told her that I could probably do it 10,000 times faster by creating a simple program in Visual Basic.
Visual Basic was way too slow on our "high-end" Pentium laptop to parse that many 1MB log files, so I rewrote it in C++ (learned it on the job)[1]. The managers got insight in the performance of the various components of the system which they never dreamed of having (they were hardly aware that the system was creating this detailed log messages).
By the way, the system is developed (at least partly) by Vanderlande [2].
[1] Took me a couple of days, probably even weeks back then. I would write the code in 1 or 2 hours now.
(Which is available now, while the GUI will be available at a later time.)