I hope Costar treats their workers better!
Not exactly "our" keyboards - but yeah it's an interesting read. Quite shocking yet not surprising.Show Image(http://t.oomuch.info/src/1251807382206.png)
http://www.nlcnet.org/admin/media/document/China/2009_meitai/HIGHTECH_MISERY_CHINA_WEB.pdf
I hope Costar treats their workers better!
Wow, that's disgusting!
If they know all this about what's going on, why haven't they been shut down yet?
Obvious answer being politics and money of course....
The simple is the average consumer does not want to have to pay a cent more than possible for a computer, and that computer must include a keyboard, so the manufacturer obliges in the best way that they can.
I certainly don't agree with it, but that seems to be what's going on.
And the trend has already been started. Even if consumers are prepared to pay more today, manufacturers will still use cheap labour to keep cost as low as possible.
When I look at the quality of the construction of, say a Model F keyboard compared to a Model M keyboard, its already sad the deterioration in quality of manufacturing.
When you get down to modern rubber dome keyboards, it's downright inexcusable to see the lack of quality.
When the consumer is at the point where a low feature, older product is good enough, something's got to be wrong with what you are selling.
[Some good stuff]
Now I think of it, lowpoly should team up with Stallman to declare his board the official Stallman/GNU keyboard. Stallman would love it, small and with quality switches and no Windows keys. And then all the GNU/GPL lemmings will just have to buy the official keyboard, otherwise they lose their nerd license. And slashdot will cover it and set fire to the server. And then after selling a million, lowpoly and Stallman will retire in the Caribbeans, where they will live happily ever after.
At least this dehumanization is limited only to workers making keyboards...
At least this dehumanization is limited only to workers making keyboards...
This is another reason to get a clicky keyboard: They're made in America!
Have you seen videos about Chinese fur farming showing animals being skinned alive? (*) I'd have to be terribly desperate to take a job like that. Sadly many Chinese workers are that needy.
(*) I won't link the videos. 1. They are horrific. 2. They are filmed by a very biased group who may have actually encouraged the brutal treatment.
It's really sad that the world has degraded to the point where people actually have to consider taking jobs like that
This fits in well into part of the picture as explained in a video I watch from time to time when I feel like wanting to blame someone for the tangible problems of the world.
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
The style of presentation set my teeth on edge (starting when she described use of raw materials as "exploitation" - don't you just love loaded terminology?) I bet they lose 90% of viewers before she gets around to mentioning the few facts that were relevant and interesting. (*)
Ironic that they are planning to print a book version, too.
EDIT>(*) Hmmm. Even the Victor Lebow quote (http://www.whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2007/12/victor-lebows-complete-original-1955.html) was ... out of context, to say the least.
I did like it in general, but it did seem like something was just off the whole time.
You can't support a memory controller on a CPU and have only 775 pins. It just doesn't work, then thing would melt. Thus comes 1336 and Core i7.
Err... Socket 754 Athlon 64s had an integrated memory controller.
But had quite the lower clockspeeds and needed much less throughput than say a 3 Ghz Quad-core CPU(socket 775)
I'm talking about current technology here folks.
Funny how AMD consistently is able to use less pins in a just-as-effective manner as Intel.
But had quite the lower clockspeeds and needed much less throughput than say a 3 Ghz Quad-core CPU(socket 775)
I'm talking about current technology here folks.
But then again, take a look at the performance differences clock-for-clock. Intel has been way ahead for quite a while now.(Since the Core 2 Arch.)
I don't have any respect for a company that has deliberately gone backwards on performance to get ahead in speed. (Pentium 4)
But had quite the lower clockspeeds and needed much less throughput than say a 3 Ghz Quad-core CPU(socket 775)I'm no electrical engineer, but is there really such a close relationship between throughput and number of pins?! I could understand that more pins means greater bus width, but clock rate should be unaffected. For instance, SATA (8 contacts) is much faster than PATA (40 contacts).
Funny how AMD consistently is able to use less pins in a just-as-effective manner as Intel.Not to mention that the Phenom II uses 940 pins, whereas the Core 2 uses 775 while being more efficient!
Except the idea doesn't work. Benchmark after benchmark after benchmark shows the 1.5 GHz Pentium chip running slower than a 900 MHz Athlon, and in some cases slower than a 533 MHz Celeron, even as slow as a 200 MHz Pentium in rare cases.
I'm no electrical engineer, but is there really such a close relationship between throughput and number of pins?! I could understand that more pins means greater bus width, but clock rate should be unaffected. For instance, SATA (8 contacts) is much faster than PATA (40 contacts).
Not to mention that the Phenom II uses 940 pins, whereas the Core 2 uses 775 while being more efficient!
Ah yes, happy times poking fun at the Pentium 4.
http://www.emulators.com/docs/pentium_1.htm
Well, if you want to use a computer for word processing and web surfing, Windows 3.11 will do that. If you want to watch DVDs, Windows 98 will handle that. So people are buying all these brand new CPUs, using up metal and creating pollution, because of a sinister conspiracy to get people to buy things they don't really need.
And the solution is obvious; Microsoft should have to get permission before it brings out a new operating system, and it should have to show why it is really needed - and, especially, any increase in hardware requirements would have to be justified. This would allow our old computers to be useful in running the latest software for decades. But, of course, there are reasons, and valid ones, for not doing that.
Gamers are probably the only "home" consumers that regularly use their hardware capabilities.
Err... Socket 754 Athlon 64s had an integrated memory controller.
Funny how AMD consistently is able to use less pins in a just-as-effective manner as Intel.
I'm no electrical engineer, but is there really such a close relationship between throughput and number of pins?! I could understand that more pins means greater bus width, but clock rate should be unaffected. For instance, SATA (8 contacts) is much faster than PATA (40 contacts).
Not to mention that the Phenom II uses 940 pins, whereas the Core 2 uses 775 while being more efficient!
I totally agree with you that people buy stuff that they are never going to need.
Just to be clear, though, that's not really what I was claiming. Because while in principle they don't need more than Windows 98, and a computer that can run it, to do what they want to do, the choice of using such a computer isn't really open to them. Because some of the things they will be using the computer for do require them to be able to buy currently available software.
And the software that you can get for your computer requires a reasonably contemporary system on which to run. So the problem, in my opinion, isn't people buying excessively powerful computers (given the costs of a monitor, keyboard, and power supply, it makes sense not to skimp on the CPU) but the industry, particularly Microsoft, creating circumstances which pressure people into doing this.
If cloud computing is successful
the mainframe/terminal/workstation model