An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#21

Post by cinquemb » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 3:39 AM UTC

sgeisler wrote: post #11

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal…

> But artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. I agree that this model of iterative improvement won't yield the next big technological breakthrough. But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. They might make a product a little bit flatter or give it another camera, but I can't think of a real game changer in the last five years. Once all the technology is there and just imp…

>But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either.

Yet they continue to attract global capital investment flows that crowd out funding for others (like those R&D labs, because they have their own in house labs with no real pressure to get anything novel to market) to explore something that might yield the next breakthrough.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#22

Post by ip26 » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

sgeisler wrote: post #11

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal…

> But artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. I agree that this model of iterative improvement won't yield the next big technological breakthrough. But the big consumer electronics manufacturers aren't really innovating either. They might make a product a little bit flatter or give it another camera, but I can't think of a real game changer in the last five years. Once all the technology is there and just imp…

They may not be innovating, but advancing the state of the art is a gradual process, and can by itself eventually open up new opportunity. Google's lauded Portrait mode probably flat out wouldn't have worked on the phones of ten years ago due to lacking computational power, and the steady advancement of x86 has ushered in software worlds beyond an i486, including things like entirely new programming languages that would not work well on 100MHz & 4MB of memory.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#23

Post by askvictor » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

gkanai wrote: post #10

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal…

> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia? Ruby Language is driven by Matz from Japan. I'm sure there are other projects from East Asia as well that I can't name at the moment. If you're using a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation, those are also developed by Japanese companies in East ASia. If you want to look at smartphone apps developed in East Asia, there are many that are very influential such as…

I suspect that by East Asia, the comment meant China (or hadn't really thought about it too hard).

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#24

Post by xt00 » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

One way to think about the current state of hardware design is that we are super reliant upon chip vendors. But in this case the parts are poorly documented or require lots of manual work to get the most out of them, or the documentation is only given to some people, and the interplay between these parts and other parts is unclear. So many people who are ignored by the mainstream companies want that same information and once they get it will share with others. Simultaneously the people who get good support from the companies still work very hard to get their idea working. So they are not motivated to give that away. Is there a huge amount of innovation happening? Sometimes, sometimes not.

So I would say having a culture within the HW community that helps support people who want to use chips that are inaccessible to most people because documentation and support is hard for a small company then that is great.

But advocating that somebody who figures out how to make a novel device that uses a complex set of parts that dramatically changes the paradigm and takes years to develop is then immediately copied then we need to protect that. 20 years for a patent? Maybe that’s too long for some areas.. maybe 5 years but then enforce patents more strongly for obvious copy cats?

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#25

Post by nordsieck » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 4:22 AM UTC

xt00 wrote: post #24

One way to think about the current state of hardware design is that we are super reliant upon chip vendors. But in this case the parts are poorly documented or require lots of manual work to get the most out of them, or the documentation is only given to some people, and the interplay between these parts and other parts is unclear. So many people who are ignored by the mainstream companies want that same information…

> enforce patents more strongly for obvious copy cats?

You're going to have to explain this in more detail; on its face, it doesn't make sense.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#26

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal…

[deleted]

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#27

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

It's great to see someone advocating for alternative points of view with respect to IP. It's a moot point though. Artisanal hardware is an intellectual dead end. Cost and IP and economics and whatever are a bunch of red herrings. Hardware standardization is pretty much always superior to fragmentation. I've never heard a hardware engineer advocate for fragmentation! Bunnie Huang should be advocating for the artisanal…

> why don't we use any software that comes out of east Asia?

I assume by "east Asia", you mean the People's Republic of China, and not, say, Japan or Korea.

And do you mean software that comes out of Chinese companies?

Certainly I use software developed in China, but usually by individual developers rather than a company.

But think about smart phone software - certainly there is plenty that comes out of China, Korea and Japan.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#28

Post by bsder » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

xt00 wrote: post #24

One way to think about the current state of hardware design is that we are super reliant upon chip vendors. But in this case the parts are poorly documented or require lots of manual work to get the most out of them, or the documentation is only given to some people, and the interplay between these parts and other parts is unclear. So many people who are ignored by the mainstream companies want that same information…

> But in this case the parts are poorly documented or require lots of manual work to get the most out of them, or the documentation is only given to some people, and the interplay between these parts and other parts is unclear.

Then I would tell you to quit doing business with such companies. There are lots of companies that are quite happy to give you information (I would cite TI, for example).

If you don't like these kinds of policies, then, for example, do your work on a Beaglebone (TI, with almost everything documented) instead of an RPi (Broadcom, good luck with that).

Now, I will say that sometimes documentation is just terrible. But, sadly, even big customers can't always avoid that.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#29

Post by alanbernstein » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

sgeisler wrote: post #8

This model is definitely better at serving niche markets. For example there are phone manufacturers in China that don't follow the silly trend of making phones slimmer, more fragile and with smaller batteries. Another example are mini notebooks like the GPD Pocket and its many clones which you can (could? haven't looked in a while) only get from china. I'm a happy user of both product categories and don't think any w…

First I've heard of that Pocket, it kinda reminds me of this https://habr.com/en/post/437912/.

Re: An Alternative to the American Way of Innovation [video]

#30

Post by sanketmehta » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC

30-40% Westerners/world uses electronic devices from east. Not because they are good, but because there is no alternative to Chinese products. They could easily pay 20-30% more for its west alternative IF AT ALL its available. I think apple and other alikes should hit this opportunity and start making replica (as they say improved version) of mi/oppo/hauwei products. Without compromising on security and quality which is easy thing to achieve. And powerfull apple/google ecosystem would always be plus. Now innovation could only come out of mess, by getting hands dirty.

Thats what Steve might have imagined....apple tooth brush, apple car, apple air/water coolers, apple shoes may be. Making phone bigger and edge to edge won't help. Every product, every domain needs to be explored. Current "WRITERS BLOCKS" of new fresh idea could only be crossed by just going with flow and just make better version of every chinese stuff...Who knows what product might strike the market.