If you're trying to start a business around apps, you better have a business plan in place, and that would typically include your marketing activities.
If you don't know the basics of even how to email thousands of media sites to get them to publicize and review your app, then you shouldn't be in the business.
The app store isn't broken. Your business plan is.
There should be far fewer "apps". Any "app" that just displays content should be a web site. Once you get rid of the appcrap, there probably is no need for more apps than there were boxed software products.
Having conducted many tech interviews over the past 17 years, in high demand markets, I can say that the number of qualified candidates in the US is abysmally low compared to the open positions. There are lots of people with degrees in CS or a similar field, but the ones who can actually do the job at the level required is very low. If we find someone who can code well enough to do the work, we don't care how much pigmentation it has, what it's genitals look like, what gods it reveres (if any), or any of that other crap.
The imports are absolutely necessary to keep American companies competitive in a global market. Otherwise the 21st century tech centers will be in south or east Asia, along with all the profits, high paying jobs, and resulting tax revenue.
And what Jesse wants is money for his group, or to be on the news. He's a person who used to have power, and is now completely irrelevant. He's desperately clinging to anything he can.
That's a nice result. It's in accord with theory. It doesn't match human intuition based on large-scale objects, but it's the way the universe really works. The theory in this area is well understood; Feynman's "QED" has a good overview.
Ever since the double-slit experiment, it's been clear that this stuff is real. Over the last few decades, more of the weirder predictions of quantum electrodynamic theory have been confirmed experimentally. This is another predicted event confirmed. Nice work.
I guess you're supposed to stencil the paste in first and the put it in a heat oven as if you had done the pick and placing by hand.
Their FAQ contains:
That's what would make the machine useful for prototyping. Printing a solder paste stencil can be done on a laser cutter, but you need access to one, or you must send the job out. Laying down solder paste by hand with a little syringe on each pad (probably under a microscope) takes longer than manually placing parts and is Not Fun.
Printing solder paste with an ink-jet printer type head has been done. If they can make that work, that will be a big win.
I was SAC, and that statement is laughable.
I was USN SSBN missile systems and have talked with many SAC (Minuteman) launch crews over the years, and it's the dead simple truth. Your systems are much simpler than ours (even without figuring that we had sixteen tubes that we operated individually while you mostly just watched lights) and you didn't (couldn't) operate them or intervene in their operations to the level we did.
The examples of the complexities that you didn't have to deal with are legion (off the top of my head and in no particular order):
Etc... etc...
So yeah, the jobs of the prairie dogs waiting in their holes (which is the subject of this discussion) were (are) pretty dammed simple. You punch buttons and swap drawers. If a tube goes down, and it's not at your end, you're screwed because there's f all you can do about it except to wait for a repair crew to be dispatched. (The liquid fuel guys? Yeah, I'll agree they were the real deal. But they're long gone.)
The problem is that promotions were based on the grades. So, people were not cheating to pass but instead to be "perfect" in order to look better for promotion.
This is the key point that everyone seems to be missing in the discussions I've seen here and elsewhere on the 'net, so it bears emphasizing and repeating.
It's interesting that they've shifted to using simulator performance (which is virtually impossible to cheat in) for promotion eligibility... because their jobs are basically so damn simple it's going to be very hard to realistically rate one crew as being notably better than another. On reaction time maybe? Or "procedures theater" (I.E. making a great show of doing everything by the letter of the book)? Since, AIUI, they swap at the drawer level rather than the circuit card level it'll be hard to evaluate and their troubleshooting and corrective maintenance skills.
Disclaimer - BTDT on both sides of the instructors console and of the evaluators clipboard. In a former life I was a Fire Control Technician (Ballistic Missile), USN Submarine Service, USS Henry L. Stimson SSBN 655B and Trident Training Facility - Bangor.
In the graded half of Team Trainer, we were scored fairly simply: "Pass", "Pass with comments (I.E. needs specific improvements)*, and "Fail". (And basically the only ways to actually fail were to have a gross violation of procedures, violation of safety regulations, or the simple inability to launch birds.) You could fail individual countdowns, but so long as there wasn't a pattern of failure you could pass the week "with comments". Outright failures of a countdown were very uncommon, and outright failure of the week very rare.
I can see how they could assign grades to specific tasks or objectives to create a spectrum from the top of "Pass" to the bottom of "Pass with comments", but the problem there is it's all too easy for the instructor/evaluator to start shading towards being subjective in their evaluation.
*You could also get "style" comments, but these didn't lead to a "Pass with comments". Operating an FBM weapons systems was a complex task and no two crews did it exactly the same. We didn't push standardization to the level that the USAF did, so "style" comments were a way for the instructors and evaluators to pass on what they'd seen work or not work with other crews or to highlight potential problem areas.
It's being used by, and trying to be hacked by, many groups.
University researchers, governments, MPAA/RIAA, computer security companies, etc.
Seems the project should encourage as many people as possible attempting to hack it -- because that increases the odds that when people finds a hack, at least some of them will report the weakness back to the project.
On the other hand, if the project discourages hacking attempts, only malicious groups will find the hacks.
Their presentation for investors quotes a sale price of $1000, not $300. At that price they might be able to do it. How well they'll do it remains to be seen.
Their presentation is all about their XY positioning mechanism. But that's not the problem. The hard problem is dispensing solder paste reliably and precisely, sticking the component down, and using hot air to solder it into place. As with low-end 3D printers, most of the problems are where the weld/soldering action takes place. They don't say much about how that's done.
The important thing is doing a consistently good soldering job. Nobody needs a machine that produces lots of reject boards.
I think they want to keep it in the United States for tax reasons. And not paying protection money to the drug cartels.
According to Tesla, it will have as much production capacity as all current li-ion battery factories combined.
So, are there currently a billion factories?
Yes, but is it 1000 times bigger or 1024 times bigger? That's the important part!
Thats what I keep telling the USB standards committee.
A micro-B connector should be 15 nanometres wide. But they whine that this would cause mechanical problems.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
