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Makey Makey has been around forever: https://makeymakey.com/
Background: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18303012
The problem with Chinese EVs is that they show it’s possible to innovate, keep prices down, and mass produce.
Ford, GM, even Tesla, are spending all their time whining about how it’s just not possible to compete. They point the finger at worker wages, instead of improving engineering and design, materials, manufacturing processes, and not chasing stock-market gains.
Stop making $70K SUVs and start making $20K Taurus and Escort EVs. You did it once. You can do it again.
“Team-based shooter eight years in the making had just 25,000 estimated sales.”
There has been a lot of work done in the unix universe to reduce boot times: https://www.e-consystems.com/articles/Product-Design/Linux-Boot-Time-Optimization-Techniques.asp
A lot of it has to do with deferring services not needed immediately till later. The same could be done for Android.
Most products should validate their assumptions before they even start laying down designs, code, or hardware. If it’s super cutting edge (like this one) there is a temptation to question the feedback and get into ‘build it and they will come’ mode.
But most of the time, testing with real users and validating the revenue model is the prudent path. Hopium is not a currency.
Wife: I don’t remember my {service} password.
Me: Did you put it in {password manager}? We have a family plan.
Wife: groans I never remember it. What’s the password?
Me: How would I know? It’s your password.
Wife: ruffles through desk, picks up tattered handwritten note. Aha! Here’s the {service} password. Same as {30 other sites}.
Me: slowly bangs head on table
[ Repeat once a month]
The cloud isn’t just for storage or compute. There are a number of managed services that let you build a full application by snapping together lego building blocks.
For example, pop together a REST API handler, an auth service, a few functions-as-a-service, a database, and a storage service. Then add a static website server. Throw a CDN in front. You got yourself a dynamic application service that can be accessed globally for a few pennies and can scale up and down without you doing anything. Add multi-zone support and auto-DNS failover and you’ve got a production quality scalable, resilient back-end, for both web and mobile. When it’s not being used, it costs very little and when it goes big, hopefully it means you’re doing well. Wrap it all in an infrastructures-as-code script and you can bring all this up in 30m.
To host all that in-house, you would have to buy a lot of equipment, stage it, manage it, add cooling, electricity, security patches, upgrades, security, etc. Now you have part of your business just doing all this instead of focusing on what you do best. I won’t bother going into the tax implications of capex vs opex.
This, is what the cloud sales people call ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting.’ There are reasons to have on-prem hardware. For a lot of applications though, it makes more sense to let someone else take care of all that infrastructure cruft.
Makes no sense.