I don't believe they idled their factories. In fact, there was an article about how they had to find parking for all their newly assembled airplanes while they were grounded:
The NYT just did an article about how employers will skip over potential hires that have bad credit, especially in a time of high unemployment when they have the option of being choosey.
Parts were shot in Pittsburgh, LA, Manhattan, and London. The Freedom Tower under construction was obviously visible in some skyline shots.
In one scene Batman and Bane were fighting on the steps of Wall Street. From one angle the shot was filmed in front of the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and another angle was actually on Wall Street.
I flew yesterday and found a rifle bullet+cartridge on the "secure" side of the TSA checkpoint. Yet somehow the gift-wrapped paperbacks in my checked luggage were deemed suspicious and unwrapped. Useless fools.
You know, it's not entirely unreasonable that someone could package a bomb to look like a gift-wrapped paperback. So if their technology can't distinguish your book from a potential explosive via X-rays alone, it may have to get opened. Explosives detection results in false alarms, unfortunately, but as far as I know most countries do it and it rarely results in such inconvenience to passengers.
The rifle cartridge is obviously on their contraband list, so it should have been caught. Someone probably brought it through accidentally. .22 LR?
My SO once bought a small blender (less the blade) through in her hand luggage - I understand and respect why they asked to take a closer look at that. But if a bomb is indistinguishable from a paperback, then a bomb is indistinguishable from a bag full of clothes. Which means that the current level of security is woefully inadequate and only by opening up all luggage and carefully sifting through every one inch layer of material can we find hidden bombs.
Rather, this seems like a perfect example of the self-perpetuation suggested in the article. It takes a while, so there's a line, it look very meticulous and the victim isn't going to complain, or he might risk finding himself on a do-not-fly or do-harass list.
It was sitting on the ground at the end of the table where you collect your belongings and repack your laptop. I showed it to TSA agent and went on my way.
The jobs manufacturing iPhone/iPad/iPod aren't coming back, but I could see Apple bringing the manufacturing of computers (especially desktops) to the US.
For one, the computers have a higher BOM and price, so an increase in manufacturing costs takes a smaller share of the total profit. Plus they only make 5 million computers a quarter, compared to 41 million iPhones+iPads.
iDevices are released on an annual schedule, which means delays are extremely costly (especially if they are timed for the holidays). This requires a very tight supply chain. It isn't as big a deal if the iMac slips by a month.
Finally, the market for iDevices is extremely competitive compared to desktops. Execution matters way more for iDevices and a lot more money is on the line. It is easy to experiment with iMacs because there is much less pressure in that market segment.
It's not clear to me iPhone/iPad/iPod won't come back at some point. The news that Foxconn has started replacing workers with machinery means the labor cost portion of manufacturing is going to go down, regardless of geographical location. Robots in China aren't going to be any cheaper than Robots in the US, I don't think.
Of course, the number of people required will be a lot lower, so the number of jobs brought in likely won't be that large.
I've heard the supply chain argument a lot, so it might take a while, but the original reason for outsourcing, ie: low labor costs, is eventually going to go away.
all you sem to be saying is that "Apple can do it" though. Juat because they can doesn't mean they should. Given that they're a for-profit corporation, I'm betting on some kind of financial incentive.
Because most users have a relatively fixed base load, and buying reserved instances for that base load lets you save lots of money. The ideal setup would look like: reserved instances for base load, on-demand for natural daily curves, and spot instances for batch or price sensitive work.
Yeah, I used to demonstrate this my typing "Americ" and then touching down directly over the 's'. Even though I pressed the 's', it was the 'a' that appeared. You could clearly see I wasn't even touching 'a'.
I think they got rid of this feature a few versions ago because I haven't been able to reproduce it. I suspect (but have no evidence for) that this is related to the typing lag that was really bad in ios 2 or 3. From my perspective, it seems they weren't able to fix the realtime correction so they made it asynchronous and just fix up words after you hit space. This is how it seems to perform now (and let's them offer more features like multi word correction).
I worked on a project that implemented a task queue using a database table. Workers would SELECT FOR UPDATE a couple of rows, mark themselves as owners, commit the change, and then do the work outside of the transaction.
The workers were configured to fetch new tasks every 30 seconds. With 10 workers you'd expect tasks to get fetched from the queue every 3 seconds, but that is not what we were seeing. The tasks were only getting picked up on 30 second boundaries. What was going on?
It turns out that the tasks were piling up. As soon as one task tried to update at the same time as another it would get blocked on the database lock. Its own transaction would then run really quickly following the first transaction. However, since these two tasks were run in immediate succession, now they were synced for life. They both slept for exactly 30 seconds, the first one wakes up a few tens of milliseconds earlier and grabs the lock, the second one wakes up and blocks on the lock, and this happens in perpetuity. Eventually, due to small randomness, all tasks entered lockstep and would be a small thundering herd against the database.
This was noticed by a developer and fixed by introducing a small jitter in the sleep time. After the push our tasks were picked up in three seconds and our end-to-end workflow time got substantially shorter.
Humans are very easy to train compared to robots, and aren't that expensive. I'd imagine each facility is laid out slightly differently, with different generations of hardware. To make the robot work well you'd either have to program in each hardware variation or make the software sufficiently advanced to understand the differences itself and adapt. I imagine the cost/benefit wouldn't pan out when you look at how many datacenter techs you replace with how many software and hardware engineers.
Humans are great at adapting, so if you throw a new enclosure at them or a new motherboard design which has the CPU sockets in a different location, they'll be able to learn the new system in 30 minutes.
A former coworker of mine trained to work with factory robots, but he realized that there wasn't much of a current job market for it because humans are still way cheaper (and will be for some time). Instead he went into software.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/realestate/commercial/to-b...