Agreed, however look at it as 17 lives out of just 555 people in space (wikipedia total for all nationalities). Scale that up with the arenas covered by the FDA and it would be like them choosing to ignore Mad Cow disease for a couple decades in terms of the order of magnitude of Fail.
All that said, the episode of management ignoring sound engineering advise has been a cautionary tale for many, likely saving many uncounted lives in desperate fields by helping to give engineers a little more backbone in the face of bone headed management.
Folks have been shouting these warnings from the rooftops for quite a while. First we sent the factory, now we are sending the associated engineering/science jobs over too. Other countries are investing more in education, while we have been busy making mocking of smart people an art form.
The goal should be that a high percentage learn the material. Folks that don't learn the material should get a failing grade, those that do should get a passing grade.
If a technique increases the number of people in a class that can learn the material, and increases the proficiency of those that would have learned it anyway this is a win/win.
So given that a pass should indicate that a student learned the material, yes it should be the goal of a university to have a high pass rate. We have advanced degrees and harder curricula for those that need softer classes to be able to pass (i.e. if an artsy type ends up in a hard physics class, the failure has already occurred elsewhere).
I cautiously agree to reducing lectures. I found that in getting my BSEE I learned much more doing hands on labs in small groups than I did in the lectures for the class. Further, what I learned in labs and doing student jobs on various programs stuck much better than the lecture material, and cemented the lecture material better.
Sadly, lab are less and less hands on these days, and most new engineering grads have never held a soldering iron and had pathetically little hands on lab work. I would argue that having good well funded labs is more important than changing the style of lectures.
Lab reports, at least the ones I did, were also overrated. Shorter reports, and few of them would be preferred if it allowed more hands on lab work.
Entertainment options have greatly expanded, salaries not so much. So with disposable income being shared with the likes of Angry Birds, movie theaters and other forms of entertainment will suffer (you don't hear the local orchestra whining about piracy despite their stagnant growth, now do you?).
However, the points made are all valid. It is hard to get a movies experience these days without feeling like your walled has been raped. We smuggle in all our snacks, even though I miss the slushy and popcorn part of the experience. I just don't miss it $5 worth (each). More and more the $8 matinee price irks me too much.
Long term I am guessing the industry is slitting its own throat. If you price it out of the reach of the younger set, they will grow up without movie going being a habit and part of their cultural view. Long term that will make it very hard to keep a loyal audience as time goes on.
I'd suggest:
1) Fairer concession pricing, about 1/3-1/2 off the current prices (still ridiculous, just not full on wallet rape). At least change out the jerky you call a "hot dog" now and then.
2) Variable movie pricing. Charge more for the blockbusters, but cut me some slack on the crap we all fully know is schlock that my wife or kids just have to see. Maybe we'd get less Micheal Bay crap if we got cut a discount on the flicks that spent less time CGI'ing things blowing up.
3) Beer and burgers. Seriously. I really like going to the local pub owned theaters that serve real food and real beer (no, your fermented rice water euro owned Bud Light is not beer). They charge just $3 a show for out of date movies in crap venues, but the experience is so much better (sadly the closest one is frustrating far away that I only partake occasionally).
4) 3D, and its surcharges. Yeah, just stop. Offer no-3D glasses for those of us who don't want to pay the price or get the headaches, but want to spend time with family members who not only tolerate it well, but actually still put value in the novelty. 3D creates more family rifts than you realize.
5) Cut down on the previews. If I want to spend 20% of my movie time watching ads, I could stay home. Heck, at home I can use my DVR and bloop through them all. So either I watch all your crap ads, or I show up late and get bad seats. What part of that makes me want to be a repeat customer again?
I still hear the most inverters are good for only about 5 years before their electrolytics dry up and you have to replace them. Still a fragile part of the whole system. Plan B would be to put route 3-phase to new construction to allow inverters that did not have to store power at the zero crossings (i.e. Biphase has power ripple, 3-phase does not).
My guess is that due to this that most systems will not actually pay for themselves, as after a few years when the inverter craps out most folks will shrug their shoulders and let the system rot.
What I didn't see was a good explanation of what the most common spare parts needed were? What exactly wears out? Can those broken pieces even be safely swapped out in the first place?
All that said, a CNC and a carefully picked set of raw chunks of aluminum should work. Sadly though, you'd have to wear out a lot of parts before you could justify the weight versus an equivalent weight of spare parts.
Lastly, given that the ISS is a manned station, it will see regular resupply every several months. I just don't see how any decently capable machine could really prove it's worth above and beyond the ability to toss spare parts onto the next resupply capsule.
Seriously, don't just keep blowing off the important user bugs for multiple release cycles. Once your bugs have been blown off for 6 months you stop submitting new ones.
These days you have to be a nomad to be a specialized tech worker, companies fold or re-org so often it is fairly foolish to buy a house without real reflection first.
Companies don't invest in their workers, so you better find ways to keep your skills sharp without appearing to be less productive than those who are "team players" and spending all their time slaving away on the daily crisis.
Meanwhile there are the rumblings that our birth rate has dropped, which is in part a response to ever decreasing job security and increasing financial fragility.
I can see not wanting to landfill things that are toxic, don't breakdown, etc. I do not see the point to putting extra effort into food scraps and such? It slows filling the landfill, but will result in the contents of the landfill being more concentrated with plastics, chemicals, etc.
How does composting actually help the planet? I'm honestly confused.
Onerous backups to a brain dead central system that constantly created havoc due to it's mixed local vs. checked in system. IT made this rather difficult, but we submitted and followed protocol. Later in the middle of a project we tried to recover from one engineer's hard drive crash. Utter failure, could not get a working copy of the main design archive to work. Numerous excuses due to [tech].
Case 2:
New company, mostly transparent backup (all network drives backed up, largely hands off from IT). Same situation, design got badly corrupted. IT was a hero, dug up a working archive from just 36 hours earlier. Still painful to recover, but we still taped out the design on schedule without a massive reset.
IT in my mind earns the reputation it gets. At the first company, it sucked and seemed to be one tentacle of galactic central, just another wierd edict spewing org. At the second company I walk by them daily, and they welcome you to drop into the help desk, and frankly do a decent job of knowing when they should not try to control things (i.e. let the engineers control their own machines). Backups are shady, and a more automagic solution is needed, but overall it works pretty good.
I've yet to be able to comprehend the crap people put up with from these outfits. I refuse to do a contract because I want to be able to drop bum service at the drop of a hat. The latest phone is a crummy Android phone I got for $85 (Optimus V), and am doing the $35/month non-contract gig with no data or SMS limits. Still more than I want to spend given how little I use it, but a hell of a lot better than the bottom tier $90/month iphone plans that lock you in for 2 YEARS.
POTUS has failed on so many bold promises already, why should I care how he responds to petitions? Sort of worry about whether the fertilizer a serial killer is using in his garden is organic or not.
Gitmo is still open.
The Patriot Act is just about as strong as ever.
Wars are multiplying, though he does get credit for winding down Iraq (way too slowly) and Libya (bonus credit for keeping boots off the ground, but loses them for getting us involved in the first place).
The economy is still a wreck, and his limp wristed efforts have done nothing but embolden his detractors and sully the chances of trying a truly bold stimulus plan.
So yeah, I got about what I expected from a bozo who has long ago lost my vote. Not that I voted for him the first time, as I saw through his grandiose speeches by looking up his voting record on things I cared about.
Good healthcare and birth control. Families that are pretty sure their kids will be healthy enough that backups are not needed will readily make use of contraceptives to limit their family size to far fewer kids. Such a trend has been shown to work over and over in many countries.
As usual the symptoms are blamed, not the cause. Colleges have had a breakdown in funding models (used to be heavily subsidized by state government), so now they are forced into passing the costs to the students. High tuition at state colleges has resulted in there being no low cost options, necessitating very large loans be offered.
Now, in general I'd argue our colleges are broken in many other fundamental ways (same price for a much needed engineering degree and an unneeded philosophy degree? WTF?), but that is a whole different rant.
I'd hardly say that Agilent is a good example to raise. They are seriously mismanaged, and simply are tied to a business with a much longer product cycle. It has taken more years for them to reach the same level of apparent rot, but only because instruments have a 10-20 product life, while computers have a 0.5-1 year product life. Agilent has had to resort to re-badging their PXI instruments from their rivals (i.e. they buy their PXI 26.5 GHz spectrum analyzer from Phase Matrix, who is now owned by National Instruments). The place has driven off or laid off most of its key talent. Agilent is a festering hulk, it it just not quite as bad as HP is.
Thanks, but you already wore off your charm. Our household already canceled a few months back. We're back to just buying a DVD now and then from the bargain rack. Your streaming service was weak, and frankly we'd reached the point where we really weren't watching the discs much anymore. I was particularly frustrated that weeding through the piles of crap selection to find last seasons blockbusters had become too tedious. New releases was too full of crap I had never heard of, and frankly never wanted to hear of.
Right after a layoff, that is what our head of engineering told those of us remaining standing. It has forever put my relationship with my employers in stark relief.
In this brutal capitalist world our loyalty is bought in 2 week increments. If the company decides to buy it longer, they can. But if they have not put stock options, retention bonuses, a corner office, a golden parachute, good vacation days per year, or a highly competitive salary on the table already, then it is your fiduciary responsibility to your tiny entrepreneurship (i.e. your household) to seriously consider all other options. Bear in mind that it is likely that if they chose to you would get 2 weeks pay and a boot print on your hindquarters, and your loyalty should be scaled appropriately.
At the same time, weigh any potential hit to your reputation within your field. If you are in a small industry be sure not to burn too many bridges that will hurt you in the future.
Frankly speaking, the quality of published papers out of academia is just awful. It is better to keep most of that badly written make-work grad student drivel out of search results for those of us with actual work to do. Our academic system has become so overrun with the need to simply output ever increasing amounts of paper, paper that NOBODY will ever read, and that NOBODY should even try to read.
The university system is sick, and stuck in the past. At least keep all these crap papers and crap thesis' out of the public's way, they are a net negative value more times than now. Better yet, keep all your puppy mill PhD's out of my lab. These morons can't even hold the soldering iron by the right end... Worse yet, management still hires and feels obligates to respect their opinion, leading to more messes for real engineers to fix.
Go into a lot of business like Target, Walmart, etc. Corporate central offices control the heating and AC. So even when there are cronic years long issues with sections of buildings being badly controlled (roasting temps at the checkout lanes) there is zero local control.
Scale this up to a city and...
1. Nothing like having to submit a bug report once basic functions get buried in million+ lines of code, like say a traffic light that keeps malfunctioning and causing crashes.
2. Utter chaos when the town Blue Screens.
3. Bad interaction with other systems, like train controls that the city does not have control over (there are already problems here, but at least they can be resolved with modest code bases between two local controllers, not with a mega OS sized chunk of software).
Basically, small local stuff might be less efficient, but by far it is more fault tolerant and robust to failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, however look at it as 17 lives out of just 555 people in space (wikipedia total for all nationalities). Scale that up with the arenas covered by the FDA and it would be like them choosing to ignore Mad Cow disease for a couple decades in terms of the order of magnitude of Fail.
All that said, the episode of management ignoring sound engineering advise has been a cautionary tale for many, likely saving many uncounted lives in desperate fields by helping to give engineers a little more backbone in the face of bone headed management.
150k mile lifetime:
25 MPG -> 6000 gallons
30 MPG -> 5000 gallons
$3-4k savings at $3-4/gallon
However, many of the hybrid luxury vehicles have better acceleration than their non-hybrid counterparts, and that is often the real draw.
Folks have been shouting these warnings from the rooftops for quite a while. First we sent the factory, now we are sending the associated engineering/science jobs over too. Other countries are investing more in education, while we have been busy making mocking of smart people an art form.
The goal should be that a high percentage learn the material. Folks that don't learn the material should get a failing grade, those that do should get a passing grade.
If a technique increases the number of people in a class that can learn the material, and increases the proficiency of those that would have learned it anyway this is a win/win.
So given that a pass should indicate that a student learned the material, yes it should be the goal of a university to have a high pass rate. We have advanced degrees and harder curricula for those that need softer classes to be able to pass (i.e. if an artsy type ends up in a hard physics class, the failure has already occurred elsewhere).
I cautiously agree to reducing lectures. I found that in getting my BSEE I learned much more doing hands on labs in small groups than I did in the lectures for the class. Further, what I learned in labs and doing student jobs on various programs stuck much better than the lecture material, and cemented the lecture material better.
Sadly, lab are less and less hands on these days, and most new engineering grads have never held a soldering iron and had pathetically little hands on lab work. I would argue that having good well funded labs is more important than changing the style of lectures.
Lab reports, at least the ones I did, were also overrated. Shorter reports, and few of them would be preferred if it allowed more hands on lab work.
Didn't we hear the same crap about the Zune over the iPod a few years back? Big hat, no cattle.
Entertainment options have greatly expanded, salaries not so much. So with disposable income being shared with the likes of Angry Birds, movie theaters and other forms of entertainment will suffer (you don't hear the local orchestra whining about piracy despite their stagnant growth, now do you?).
However, the points made are all valid. It is hard to get a movies experience these days without feeling like your walled has been raped. We smuggle in all our snacks, even though I miss the slushy and popcorn part of the experience. I just don't miss it $5 worth (each). More and more the $8 matinee price irks me too much.
Long term I am guessing the industry is slitting its own throat. If you price it out of the reach of the younger set, they will grow up without movie going being a habit and part of their cultural view. Long term that will make it very hard to keep a loyal audience as time goes on.
I'd suggest:
1) Fairer concession pricing, about 1/3-1/2 off the current prices (still ridiculous, just not full on wallet rape). At least change out the jerky you call a "hot dog" now and then.
2) Variable movie pricing. Charge more for the blockbusters, but cut me some slack on the crap we all fully know is schlock that my wife or kids just have to see. Maybe we'd get less Micheal Bay crap if we got cut a discount on the flicks that spent less time CGI'ing things blowing up.
3) Beer and burgers. Seriously. I really like going to the local pub owned theaters that serve real food and real beer (no, your fermented rice water euro owned Bud Light is not beer). They charge just $3 a show for out of date movies in crap venues, but the experience is so much better (sadly the closest one is frustrating far away that I only partake occasionally).
4) 3D, and its surcharges. Yeah, just stop. Offer no-3D glasses for those of us who don't want to pay the price or get the headaches, but want to spend time with family members who not only tolerate it well, but actually still put value in the novelty. 3D creates more family rifts than you realize.
5) Cut down on the previews. If I want to spend 20% of my movie time watching ads, I could stay home. Heck, at home I can use my DVR and bloop through them all. So either I watch all your crap ads, or I show up late and get bad seats. What part of that makes me want to be a repeat customer again?
I still hear the most inverters are good for only about 5 years before their electrolytics dry up and you have to replace them. Still a fragile part of the whole system. Plan B would be to put route 3-phase to new construction to allow inverters that did not have to store power at the zero crossings (i.e. Biphase has power ripple, 3-phase does not).
My guess is that due to this that most systems will not actually pay for themselves, as after a few years when the inverter craps out most folks will shrug their shoulders and let the system rot.
Phones are still sold with version 2.2 of android, 4.0 is now shipping. Faced with that, what could go wrong for developers?
What I didn't see was a good explanation of what the most common spare parts needed were? What exactly wears out? Can those broken pieces even be safely swapped out in the first place?
All that said, a CNC and a carefully picked set of raw chunks of aluminum should work. Sadly though, you'd have to wear out a lot of parts before you could justify the weight versus an equivalent weight of spare parts.
Lastly, given that the ISS is a manned station, it will see regular resupply every several months. I just don't see how any decently capable machine could really prove it's worth above and beyond the ability to toss spare parts onto the next resupply capsule.
Seriously, don't just keep blowing off the important user bugs for multiple release cycles. Once your bugs have been blown off for 6 months you stop submitting new ones.
These days you have to be a nomad to be a specialized tech worker, companies fold or re-org so often it is fairly foolish to buy a house without real reflection first.
Companies don't invest in their workers, so you better find ways to keep your skills sharp without appearing to be less productive than those who are "team players" and spending all their time slaving away on the daily crisis.
Meanwhile there are the rumblings that our birth rate has dropped, which is in part a response to ever decreasing job security and increasing financial fragility.
I can see not wanting to landfill things that are toxic, don't breakdown, etc. I do not see the point to putting extra effort into food scraps and such? It slows filling the landfill, but will result in the contents of the landfill being more concentrated with plastics, chemicals, etc.
How does composting actually help the planet? I'm honestly confused.
Case 1:
Onerous backups to a brain dead central system that constantly created havoc due to it's mixed local vs. checked in system. IT made this rather difficult, but we submitted and followed protocol. Later in the middle of a project we tried to recover from one engineer's hard drive crash. Utter failure, could not get a working copy of the main design archive to work. Numerous excuses due to [tech].
Case 2:
New company, mostly transparent backup (all network drives backed up, largely hands off from IT). Same situation, design got badly corrupted. IT was a hero, dug up a working archive from just 36 hours earlier. Still painful to recover, but we still taped out the design on schedule without a massive reset.
IT in my mind earns the reputation it gets. At the first company, it sucked and seemed to be one tentacle of galactic central, just another wierd edict spewing org. At the second company I walk by them daily, and they welcome you to drop into the help desk, and frankly do a decent job of knowing when they should not try to control things (i.e. let the engineers control their own machines). Backups are shady, and a more automagic solution is needed, but overall it works pretty good.
All that effort to make you urban "Green" life perfect, and now you have to go back to single pane windows to commune with the Bee's. Fail.
I've yet to be able to comprehend the crap people put up with from these outfits. I refuse to do a contract because I want to be able to drop bum service at the drop of a hat. The latest phone is a crummy Android phone I got for $85 (Optimus V), and am doing the $35/month non-contract gig with no data or SMS limits. Still more than I want to spend given how little I use it, but a hell of a lot better than the bottom tier $90/month iphone plans that lock you in for 2 YEARS.
Perish the thought that folks would find a way around highway robbery!
POTUS has failed on so many bold promises already, why should I care how he responds to petitions? Sort of worry about whether the fertilizer a serial killer is using in his garden is organic or not.
Gitmo is still open.
The Patriot Act is just about as strong as ever.
Wars are multiplying, though he does get credit for winding down Iraq (way too slowly) and Libya (bonus credit for keeping boots off the ground, but loses them for getting us involved in the first place).
The economy is still a wreck, and his limp wristed efforts have done nothing but embolden his detractors and sully the chances of trying a truly bold stimulus plan.
So yeah, I got about what I expected from a bozo who has long ago lost my vote. Not that I voted for him the first time, as I saw through his grandiose speeches by looking up his voting record on things I cared about.
Good healthcare and birth control. Families that are pretty sure their kids will be healthy enough that backups are not needed will readily make use of contraceptives to limit their family size to far fewer kids. Such a trend has been shown to work over and over in many countries.
As usual the symptoms are blamed, not the cause. Colleges have had a breakdown in funding models (used to be heavily subsidized by state government), so now they are forced into passing the costs to the students. High tuition at state colleges has resulted in there being no low cost options, necessitating very large loans be offered.
Now, in general I'd argue our colleges are broken in many other fundamental ways (same price for a much needed engineering degree and an unneeded philosophy degree? WTF?), but that is a whole different rant.
I'd hardly say that Agilent is a good example to raise. They are seriously mismanaged, and simply are tied to a business with a much longer product cycle. It has taken more years for them to reach the same level of apparent rot, but only because instruments have a 10-20 product life, while computers have a 0.5-1 year product life. Agilent has had to resort to re-badging their PXI instruments from their rivals (i.e. they buy their PXI 26.5 GHz spectrum analyzer from Phase Matrix, who is now owned by National Instruments). The place has driven off or laid off most of its key talent. Agilent is a festering hulk, it it just not quite as bad as HP is.
Thanks, but you already wore off your charm. Our household already canceled a few months back. We're back to just buying a DVD now and then from the bargain rack. Your streaming service was weak, and frankly we'd reached the point where we really weren't watching the discs much anymore. I was particularly frustrated that weeding through the piles of crap selection to find last seasons blockbusters had become too tedious. New releases was too full of crap I had never heard of, and frankly never wanted to hear of.
So long.
Right after a layoff, that is what our head of engineering told those of us remaining standing. It has forever put my relationship with my employers in stark relief.
In this brutal capitalist world our loyalty is bought in 2 week increments. If the company decides to buy it longer, they can. But if they have not put stock options, retention bonuses, a corner office, a golden parachute, good vacation days per year, or a highly competitive salary on the table already, then it is your fiduciary responsibility to your tiny entrepreneurship (i.e. your household) to seriously consider all other options. Bear in mind that it is likely that if they chose to you would get 2 weeks pay and a boot print on your hindquarters, and your loyalty should be scaled appropriately.
At the same time, weigh any potential hit to your reputation within your field. If you are in a small industry be sure not to burn too many bridges that will hurt you in the future.
Frankly speaking, the quality of published papers out of academia is just awful. It is better to keep most of that badly written make-work grad student drivel out of search results for those of us with actual work to do. Our academic system has become so overrun with the need to simply output ever increasing amounts of paper, paper that NOBODY will ever read, and that NOBODY should even try to read.
The university system is sick, and stuck in the past. At least keep all these crap papers and crap thesis' out of the public's way, they are a net negative value more times than now. Better yet, keep all your puppy mill PhD's out of my lab. These morons can't even hold the soldering iron by the right end... Worse yet, management still hires and feels obligates to respect their opinion, leading to more messes for real engineers to fix.
End rant...
Go into a lot of business like Target, Walmart, etc. Corporate central offices control the heating and AC. So even when there are cronic years long issues with sections of buildings being badly controlled (roasting temps at the checkout lanes) there is zero local control.
Scale this up to a city and...
1. Nothing like having to submit a bug report once basic functions get buried in million+ lines of code, like say a traffic light that keeps malfunctioning and causing crashes.
2. Utter chaos when the town Blue Screens.
3. Bad interaction with other systems, like train controls that the city does not have control over (there are already problems here, but at least they can be resolved with modest code bases between two local controllers, not with a mega OS sized chunk of software).
Basically, small local stuff might be less efficient, but by far it is more fault tolerant and robust to failure.