To be a supercar, it needs to cost at least $500k, be handmade with carbon fiber, and have at least 500hp? Am I doing it right?

Never thought the day would come when slashdot becomes reddit, and reddit becomes slashdot.

(just poking fun at ourselves, don't take offense)

A "price point" is a specific price that you target as a manufacturer. $79.99 for example. Or $19.99. These price points are psychological, in the sense that people tend to buy more of your products if they happen to be in these "price points".

It is quite common for manufacturers to target these price points. They will then work backwards and figure out what features they need to skip, what engineering tradeoffs they need to make, so that they can hit these price points.

You must be from Australia.

Nobody's forcing you to use the Intel compiler though. Use the other well established standard compilers.

I have to say that webOS is an absolute delight to use. Simple, snappy, very easy to use on a TV along with a remote. The optional cursor with the remote working as an "air mouse" is a fairly unconventional notion but actually works quite well too. In fact, i would say that the webOS interfaces found on LG TVs is one of the best user interfaces I have used in a long time. And a very fresh approach to user design. If Liron was the one who conceptualized and designed and implemented this user interface, then more power to him!

Everybody loves a doomsday scenario and articles that are apocalyptic. Heck, politicians routinely use this strategy to win elections.

The reality is unsexy and mundane middle-ground. The Indian IT industry is not going to disappear overnight, nor is the US industry is not going collapse overnight because of China and India. Also, everyone loves the stereotype stories of Indian offshoring horror stories but again, the answer is a lot more complicated.

The unfortunate reality is that a lot of the headcount that was offshored and outsourced has to do with work that is relatively lower skilled, and involved repetitive activites and "following processes". It therefore mattered little if the work was done in one country or another, except offshoring the work to some countries also meant significant cost savings and headcount reduction.

However, that is not all to it. Work that is off-shored is often a complex package of business processes, software tools, infrastructure, support etc. While a lot of the work is indeed process based, a critical part of it also requires very high levels of solution and software architecture skills, deep business process knowledge, deep domain knowledge etc. Indian companies did not merely win projects because they could tout "low cost" competitive advantages, but also because they could staff enough people with the deep levels of expertise and experience required to make these projects a success. It is a numbers game. If there are hundreds of thousands of mediocre or even sub-standard workers, there are also tens of thousands of employees who are top notch and highly skilled.

And these are exactly the nuances that get lost when the pitchforks come out about the poor quality of offshoring. Projects and contracts of a certain scale require certain headcount numbers and contracting companies to prove that they can handle work at this scale. This kind of capability and reputation is very hard earned and often takes decades. It doesn't just disappear overnight. For large consulting companies, this reputation and scale capability is their identity, their "moat".

And if you're going to get into racial or ethnic stereotypes, then it is to be noted that the same Indians who are frustratingly incompetent in offshored contracts are also the ones that are thought leaders and actual leaders in a lot of the flagship high-tech companies and software companies. So like i said, it is a numbers game.

Try Google Fi which uses VOIP but is integrated with your phone and you get a phone number just like a conventional phone. They still charge you $20 a month for voice and $10 for 1GB but you do get the benefits of VOIP such as national/international roaming for free, very low priced international calling rates etc.

But yes, this is all made possible because Jio has its own backhaul network that is entirely IP packet based. This is what telecoms will become in the future. ISPs.

Why would it be reverse anything? It would just be outsourcing.

The real question is - do you have VOIP integrated with your cellphone and your phone number? To my knowledge, every single cellphone service provider charges separately for voice, and this is always a mandatory charge. Even Google Fi which uses VOIP for voice calls charges $20 a month for voice, and then $10 a month for every 1GB used (which rolls over).

Nobody offers a cellphone with a phone number where you are only charged for data usage and for nothing else. At least to my knowledge. As such, what Jio is doing in India is what all wireless telecom companies will be doing in the future. Especially since the entire backhaul is IP based anyway. They will all become ISPs.

I was looking for a Squeezebox replacement since my device died and they stopped making it. I really didn't want to build out a dedicated PC or Raspberry solution just for audio, so was making do with Roku for audio (it acutally has a surprisingly large number of audio streaming services - it even covers my local FM radio channels).

Tried the first Chromecast - and it was largely a "meh" experience. Video was grainy and choppy and audio sounded quite substandard. For example the same youtube audio or internet audio would sound much better when streamed from the Roku channel than when casted from Chromecast.

Took another gamble at the new Chromecast Audio - and it is a phenomenal device. It actually plays as well as my Squeezebox. For $35, you get really high quality audio, and it has digital out so you can connect it to a DAC, or optionally use its inbuilt DAC which is not bad at all. Some people are even using it to drive moderately hard to drive headphones. It also supports high res audio up to 24/96. The really neat thing is that if you cast Spotify or Pandora from your phone to the CCA device, it will stream directly from Spotify after the initial handshake and will not stream through your phone. All in all, I can't imagine how they pulled off this quality of audio output and features for $35.

$10 a month is indeed expensive when compared to Ooma. Ooma is free - all you have to do is pay for the device, which admittedly is $100. But it works well, and I have been using it for over a year without any complaints or issues. And international call rates are very reasonable too - about 6-8 cents a minute. And while $100 is a bit high, the device itself is quite sleek and well implemented. It has voicemail and recording facility, and is really easy to use and setup (took me all of 2 minutes to setup).

I do pay tax for the landline service (everyone has to) but it only amounts to about 3-4 bucks a month. I would imagine that one would have to pay the same rate or possibly higher for the Google landline service.

But yes, Vonage (which I replaced with Ooma) is indeed overpriced and not at all worth the money.

What makes you think OP was talking about a Christian god?

The kind of generation upon generation endemic poverty exists because of lack of access, lack of communication, lack of transport, lack of awareness of employment options, lack of information. Take a subsistence farmer or a contract farmer for example. He is completely dependent on rain and weather conditions to get a reasonably successful crop that will give his family just about enough calories to last the rest of the year, and a little bit of money for other survival needs. One bad crop, one bad season means that he has to take a loan from a loanshark / local moneylender at interest rates of 3-5% a week. Inevitably he will become indebted for life, and if another bad season follows, his children with either die of malnutrition or he will commit suicide by drinking pesticide. Or often both. Not necessarily in the same order.

The other big category of poverty stricken people in India are the ones that are less tied to the land. Part time laborers, the ones who work in construction sites, brick kilns, mines, public or private construction projects, etc.

In many of these categories of people, there is a very real benefit to having a cell phone and having rudimentary internet access. Even if not the internet or even wikipedia, to mesaging apps like whatsapp, weather forecasting apps, apps that display job opportunities for temp workers, daily wage laborers etc.

A subsistence farmer or a daily wage laborer could benefit enormously from access to job opportunities, access to better information about the weather, commodity prices, prices of pesticides, grains etc. Or even just the ability to message relatives and be better networked and better informed. Consider the fact that a daily wage laborer in a big city makes 10x the money than a daily wage worker in a remote inaccessible village. Not only that, the big city laborer is also employed many more days in a year.

So why does the poverty stricken villager not move to the big city? Why does the villager let his children become matchsticks? Why does the villager commit suicide even when he knows it also means a death sentence for his family? Why is he, for lack of a better word, so *dumb*? You think a charity organization that will visit his village once a decade and will give him a sack of rice will help him in any way in the long run??

The main source of opposition by the way is ordinary users, not corporations or telcos. The reason for the opposition is not that facebook will become a monopoly ISP. The reason is that facebook's service breaks net neutrality.

Ordinary users everywhere are fighting to preserve net neutrality, while corporations are fighting against it (for it gives them a chance to strong-arm websites and services and extort money from them).

Basic services need to be neutral. If toll roads started charging differently depending on the brand of car you are driving (because they get kickbacks from certain car manufacturers), there would be a shit-storm of controversy. And when it comes to basic services being monopolies, the irony is that the US has far worse monopolies when it comes to services like internet, cable, etc.

India has a rapidly growing startup culture, and a lot of these startups are heavily dependent on the internet for either service delivery or communication. However, if net neutrality breaks, the entry barrier for startups would be so high and cumbersome and expensive, that most of them would die.

You can talk about net neutrality being obsolete in a post internet world, etc. But the reality is that it only works in countries that have very very strong protection against monopoly abuse, so that they can guarantee that the free market works truly like a free market with a chance for everyone to try and succeed. However, this situation is already massively distorted because the big companies have become so big and rich and monopolized that small fry startups essentially pose no competition.

But heck, even in the US, with all the protection, monopolies basically do what they want.

A country like India *needs* its basic services to be open and neutral so the nascent growing companies have half a chance to succeed.