Advertising using blatant falsehoods is likely more of a damper than liability losses.
The level of lies about the functionality and usability of most software (and most other things) boggles the mind. The lost time and effort for folks trying to dig into the truth is immense, and if anything it should be easier to take these companies to task for wild claims that are only farcically supported by reality at best.
As a design engineer I marvel was the crap Dell sold our IT department as an engineering workstation. My beast has Xeon family processors, which jack up the price, but are no faster than an i7 processor. Meanwhile the thing has a terrible video card that chokes on complex 3D models more than my home machine. So Dell sold our IT department on standardizing on a machine that twice as much as my home machine, but has sucky graphics and is no faster for simulations.
So yes, for the 5-10% of folks who really use their machines, and know how to use them, I would love the option of getting a budget to use as I see fit for my computer needs. I do see that for all the clerical drones that it would be more hassle than needed for all involved.
I was the third heretic in a row at my last job. All three of us (overlapping stays) still can't believe just how idiotic the place was. I was not a heretic before that place, and my current place is pretty well run (rarity I've learned).
My conclusion is not that it was us, but rather that the place really was run by idiots, and was loathsome to change to get into the new market space they wanted to (i.e. the reason for hiring us three from the outside). Writing off heretics as malcontented prima donnas does have the potential for an "emperor has no clothes" situation, where in those who are telling you the hard truths are consistently alienated and ostracized.
The place in question still has not been able to hire a replacement for me after a year or the guy who left 3 years ago, as they have earned an very ugly reputation for being stuck in the 80's/90's, being slow, not listening to their experts,etc. Networking in niche specialties can bitch once you've earned a bad rap. So as they tout their brilliant move into new areas of microwave test equipment, they are down to a single microwave design engineer, who is only stuck their due to being underwater on his house. Meanwhile they have a handful of junior woodchuck engineers trying to apply RF solutions to microwave designs and doing abysmally (they didn't heed our advice on who not to hire either...).
I guess my perspective is one of a fairly well established field (microwave circuits) where the number of papers VASTLY outstrips the number of innovations.
I run into things like "A Novel Broadband Bandpass Filter" only to find that it is more of a notch than a bandpass. I find that too many of the things published are ONLY published for the sake of publishing. There is no added value. There is actually negative value, as it adds to the already high level of noise present when searching for relevant papers and patents.
I'm 100% OK with new fields having a lot of redundant crap (well not 100%). But in relatively mature fields, for God's sake we don't need every master's and PhD getting a poorly written summary of their make-work "research" making it into journals just to appease their wet nurse of an adviser. I ended my IEEE membership because of how wrong headed the journal content was.
Agreed. Way too many papers from academia are ZERO value added. Most are a response to "publish or perish" realities.
Cases in point: One of my less favorite profs published approximately 20 papers on a single project, mostly written by his grad students. Most are redundant papers taking the most recent few months data and producing fresh statistical numbers. He became department head, then dean of engineering.
As a design engineer I find it maddening that 95% of the journals in the areas I specialize in are:
1. Impossible to read (academia style writing and non-standard vocabulary).
2. Redundant. Substrate integrated waveguide papers for example are all rehashes of original waveguide work done in the 50's and 60's, but of generally lower value. Sadly the academics have botched a lot of it, and for example have "invented" "novel" waveguide to microstrip transitions that stink compared to well known techniques from 60's papers.
3. Useless. Most, once I decipher them, end up describing a widget that sucks at the intended purpose. New and "novel" filters should actually filter, and be in some way as good or better than the current state of the art, or should not be bothered to be published.
4. Incomplete. Many interesting papers report on results, but don't describe the techniques and methods used. So while I can see that University of Dillweed has something of interest, I can't actually utilize it.
So as a result when I try to use the vast number of published papers and journals in my field, and in niches of my field to which I am darn near an expert, I cannot find the wheat from the chaff. Searches yield time wasting useless results, many of which require laborious decyphering before I can figure that they are stupid or incomplete. Maybe only 10% of the time does a day long literature search yield something of utility. Ugh.
Agreed. I remember that part of the brainwashing i got as a child was to describe how the USSR treated its prisoners using sleep deprivation, secret hidden prisons, etc. It readily dehumanized them to me as a young child. Now our own government readily admits (proudly at times) to doing worse. I can't help but fail to be proud of my country any more. Our leaders are no better than the soviet scum I was raised to hate, except their now us.
Nor waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, "black" prisons/detention facilities, Abu Ghraib, drone targeting of a US citizen, Cheney's still largely hidden secret activities, etc, etc.
Lots of stuff shouldn't have happened. The more we find out about how our government is behaving itself, the better WE THE PEOPLE can have a chance at reigning in our governments behavior. Way too much really bad stuff has gone down in the name of national security, and I for one am sick and tired of the ruling elite using the cry of national security to get away with everythign from civil rights trampling to outright war crimes. The mroe is released the merrier, the US government has very little credibility left in almost any arena.
Seriously, right after Legos, a big heap of good old fashioned woods blocks were the best. Building towers, cities, etc is the best.
Giant refrigerator sized cardboard boxes too.
Get them a playhouse, and not a plastic one. Draw up plans, precut the pieces, and have them help you assemble it. Playhouses are a blank slate for childhood adventure to paint upon.
"The actual antenna is at the focal point of the dish and it's length IS frequency-critical."
The dish is a simple parabola, it's focal point is not frequency dependent. Its gain IS frequency dependent however. Achieving the same gain at half the frequency requires double the dish size (or, double the frequency and you can halve the dish size for the same gain).
As long as the dish is smooth enough its focal point is not frequency dependent. At the extreme low end things fall apart (i.e. the dish becomes on the order of a wavelength in size).
Mathematicians berate and scold engineers who use the concept of time=0+ or 0- to denote you are referring to just before or just after an event, now it appears they've come up with a proof that we're wrong...
Jokes on them, I still make more money using my disproven notion than most of them ever will. Hah!
in a cardboard box simply marked "Please Return to FBI". Wait and watch from a distance as they call the bomb squad and blow up their own tracker as a potential bomb.
I guess in my opinion CTA is the one in the wrong. CTA broke a contract, not Vernor. I could agree with CTA getting sued for the ~3k/seat for their ill gotten copies (plus punitive, etc). As I see it, the sold software was not illegal for Vernor to buy and resell, but was illegal for CTA to sell.
I'm curious to know if the same rules should apply as to passing on endorsed checks as software, where no matter the interim steps a legally signed check is still valid by whoever cashes it in (i.e. interim illegal activities don't make the check null and void).
While the bits are surely ambivalent to how they are transmitted, perhaps there is more going on...
We've all hear a cell phone make our speakers pop, hiss, and beep. Perhaps he's getting EMI leakage that these spiffier cables do a better job shielding? An audiophile's ear is a lousy check (unless in a properly double blinded test, and even then...). Measuring the signal to noise and distortion (SINAD) of a known test file with traceable test equipment would be the proper method to see if there is any difference at all.
If there is a measurable improvement in the SINAD, I would go thrash whoever designed the DAC board and electronics for improperly grounding and/or inadequately shielding things to keep EMI from making its way into the audio base band.
My gut feel however is that this poor bastard is deluding himself, and might as well waste his money on gold plated 10 gauge power strips, because "Audio quality starts at the wall socket."
All my hardware designs are required to have all sorts of hardware protection to guarantee that no matter what, it cannot harm itself.
For example ALL amplifiers in an REF chain are configured such that they cannot overpower the max input power range of subsequent stages.
Power supplies have thermal shutdowns (and over current foldback protection).
All devices controlled by FPGA's have appropriate pullups/downs to assure that they are in known stages if the FPGA is loaded with bogus data and leaves the outputs high-Z.
Sounds to me like the cards had grossly under-designed cooling, and that some dipshit forgot to pay $0.02 for a temperature monitor with proper interlocks to shutdown and self protect. Lame.
Downloaded Wii games live on the console, and can't get moved off to a new one. So while the Wii will play old Game Cube games, all your downloaded content will not be forward compatible to the Wii 2 (or whatever they come out with next). Physical media likely will have some sort of path forward if history is any lesson.
Our US thuggery is fairly predictable. I'm sure the CIA or equivalent has already been given hit orders. It will be made to look like an accident (small plane crash, car crash, mystery disease, etc). Such is necessary for plausible deniability.
It is one part of a process, and if you focus on the polygraph machine itself you'll miss out on the very intentional steps taken to get you to overreact if you lie. Basically the machine is half prop, and most of what is going on is a manipulation to get you to respond in a such a manner that the operator can feel some confidence in the the wiggles coming out of the POS.
I was not impressed, and put very little faith in their outcome, positive or negative.
However, if we mandated posting the estimated cost of gas over 100,000 the first miles along the lines of how appliances list cost per year for electricity, I think it would help a great deal. Putting mileage in $$$, so that it is in the same units as the car price would help. Quick math can then be done by even the moderately drooling masses as to how many years (or decades) their dream Prius will take to break even with the other options.
An alarming number of folks suck at everyday math, and the worst part is that most don't even realize it. Instead we see them taken in by false sales, and easy to see through misinformation all the time.
I'm not sure if I should call them fools, or try to sell them something?
BS like this keeps me from graduating from my pay-as-you-go phone where I average ~$10/mo to something snazzier that would immediately jump to ~$100/mo. The plans don't scale well at all to really light users like me who would enjoy the niftier phones, but had the gang rape every month when my 30 minutes of calls and couple email checks would still cost me ~$100.
Sadly sooner or later AT&T and the like will eventually find a quiet way to collude and make pay-as-you-go suck bad enough, or drive the prices up enough to ruin even that little haven of wireless bargains.
Actually the generators don't run all the time. There is great complexity involved to optimize the grid throughout the day. Natural gas turbines, for example, are expensive to run, but very easy/fast to bring online and offline so they get used during peak hours. Other plants (oil, coal, gas) reduce fuel usage and output during non-peak hours just as your engine uses less fuel idling than accelerating. Generally speaking you want those plants at 100% usage if possible, hence load leveling techniques like gas turbine generators, etc.
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Advertising using blatant falsehoods is likely more of a damper than liability losses.
The level of lies about the functionality and usability of most software (and most other things) boggles the mind. The lost time and effort for folks trying to dig into the truth is immense, and if anything it should be easier to take these companies to task for wild claims that are only farcically supported by reality at best.
As a design engineer I marvel was the crap Dell sold our IT department as an engineering workstation. My beast has Xeon family processors, which jack up the price, but are no faster than an i7 processor. Meanwhile the thing has a terrible video card that chokes on complex 3D models more than my home machine. So Dell sold our IT department on standardizing on a machine that twice as much as my home machine, but has sucky graphics and is no faster for simulations.
So yes, for the 5-10% of folks who really use their machines, and know how to use them, I would love the option of getting a budget to use as I see fit for my computer needs. I do see that for all the clerical drones that it would be more hassle than needed for all involved.
I was the third heretic in a row at my last job. All three of us (overlapping stays) still can't believe just how idiotic the place was. I was not a heretic before that place, and my current place is pretty well run (rarity I've learned).
My conclusion is not that it was us, but rather that the place really was run by idiots, and was loathsome to change to get into the new market space they wanted to (i.e. the reason for hiring us three from the outside). Writing off heretics as malcontented prima donnas does have the potential for an "emperor has no clothes" situation, where in those who are telling you the hard truths are consistently alienated and ostracized.
The place in question still has not been able to hire a replacement for me after a year or the guy who left 3 years ago, as they have earned an very ugly reputation for being stuck in the 80's/90's, being slow, not listening to their experts,etc. Networking in niche specialties can bitch once you've earned a bad rap. So as they tout their brilliant move into new areas of microwave test equipment, they are down to a single microwave design engineer, who is only stuck their due to being underwater on his house. Meanwhile they have a handful of junior woodchuck engineers trying to apply RF solutions to microwave designs and doing abysmally (they didn't heed our advice on who not to hire either...).
I guess my perspective is one of a fairly well established field (microwave circuits) where the number of papers VASTLY outstrips the number of innovations.
I run into things like "A Novel Broadband Bandpass Filter" only to find that it is more of a notch than a bandpass. I find that too many of the things published are ONLY published for the sake of publishing. There is no added value. There is actually negative value, as it adds to the already high level of noise present when searching for relevant papers and patents.
I'm 100% OK with new fields having a lot of redundant crap (well not 100%). But in relatively mature fields, for God's sake we don't need every master's and PhD getting a poorly written summary of their make-work "research" making it into journals just to appease their wet nurse of an adviser. I ended my IEEE membership because of how wrong headed the journal content was.
Agreed. Way too many papers from academia are ZERO value added. Most are a response to "publish or perish" realities.
Cases in point: One of my less favorite profs published approximately 20 papers on a single project, mostly written by his grad students. Most are redundant papers taking the most recent few months data and producing fresh statistical numbers. He became department head, then dean of engineering.
As a design engineer I find it maddening that 95% of the journals in the areas I specialize in are:
1. Impossible to read (academia style writing and non-standard vocabulary).
2. Redundant. Substrate integrated waveguide papers for example are all rehashes of original waveguide work done in the 50's and 60's, but of generally lower value. Sadly the academics have botched a lot of it, and for example have "invented" "novel" waveguide to microstrip transitions that stink compared to well known techniques from 60's papers.
3. Useless. Most, once I decipher them, end up describing a widget that sucks at the intended purpose. New and "novel" filters should actually filter, and be in some way as good or better than the current state of the art, or should not be bothered to be published.
4. Incomplete. Many interesting papers report on results, but don't describe the techniques and methods used. So while I can see that University of Dillweed has something of interest, I can't actually utilize it.
So as a result when I try to use the vast number of published papers and journals in my field, and in niches of my field to which I am darn near an expert, I cannot find the wheat from the chaff. Searches yield time wasting useless results, many of which require laborious decyphering before I can figure that they are stupid or incomplete. Maybe only 10% of the time does a day long literature search yield something of utility. Ugh.
-Evening hours to make it easier to ship (i.e. easier to hand them MONEY!)
-Drop Tuesday/Thursday mail delivery.
-Switch to Hybrid trucks, as their driving habits are about as ideal as it comes for a hybrid rig (low speed, lots of start/stop driving).
-Offer a "Spam" blocker service as a subscription to stop junk mail for a fee.
-Make their package tracking actually track packages, not just magically go from "In Transit" to "Delivered".
-Contract with Google to put cameras on top for nearly daily updates to Google Maps Streetview.
More distopian:
-Use lobbyists to subvert things so that email/online cannot be legally used to conduct business.
-Figure out how to be another "Too Big To Fail" organization.
Agreed. I remember that part of the brainwashing i got as a child was to describe how the USSR treated its prisoners using sleep deprivation, secret hidden prisons, etc. It readily dehumanized them to me as a young child. Now our own government readily admits (proudly at times) to doing worse. I can't help but fail to be proud of my country any more. Our leaders are no better than the soviet scum I was raised to hate, except their now us.
Nor waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, "black" prisons/detention facilities, Abu Ghraib, drone targeting of a US citizen, Cheney's still largely hidden secret activities, etc, etc.
Lots of stuff shouldn't have happened. The more we find out about how our government is behaving itself, the better WE THE PEOPLE can have a chance at reigning in our governments behavior. Way too much really bad stuff has gone down in the name of national security, and I for one am sick and tired of the ruling elite using the cry of national security to get away with everythign from civil rights trampling to outright war crimes. The mroe is released the merrier, the US government has very little credibility left in almost any arena.
Seriously, right after Legos, a big heap of good old fashioned woods blocks were the best. Building towers, cities, etc is the best.
Giant refrigerator sized cardboard boxes too.
Get them a playhouse, and not a plastic one. Draw up plans, precut the pieces, and have them help you assemble it. Playhouses are a blank slate for childhood adventure to paint upon.
"The actual antenna is at the focal point of the dish and it's length IS frequency-critical."
The dish is a simple parabola, it's focal point is not frequency dependent. Its gain IS frequency dependent however. Achieving the same gain at half the frequency requires double the dish size (or, double the frequency and you can halve the dish size for the same gain).
As long as the dish is smooth enough its focal point is not frequency dependent. At the extreme low end things fall apart (i.e. the dish becomes on the order of a wavelength in size).
Mathematicians berate and scold engineers who use the concept of time=0+ or 0- to denote you are referring to just before or just after an event, now it appears they've come up with a proof that we're wrong...
Jokes on them, I still make more money using my disproven notion than most of them ever will. Hah!
in a cardboard box simply marked "Please Return to FBI". Wait and watch from a distance as they call the bomb squad and blow up their own tracker as a potential bomb.
I guess in my opinion CTA is the one in the wrong. CTA broke a contract, not Vernor. I could agree with CTA getting sued for the ~3k/seat for their ill gotten copies (plus punitive, etc). As I see it, the sold software was not illegal for Vernor to buy and resell, but was illegal for CTA to sell.
I'm curious to know if the same rules should apply as to passing on endorsed checks as software, where no matter the interim steps a legally signed check is still valid by whoever cashes it in (i.e. interim illegal activities don't make the check null and void).
Clearly I am not a lawyer...
Works great, unless:
Your in a loud room.
Your tap is outside "normal" strength range
You are wearing gloves.
You tap with your fingernail, pen, etc
Just sounds like a hack to me, maybe Ok for Yes/No interactions, but I thought that was what the normal buttons are for...
While the bits are surely ambivalent to how they are transmitted, perhaps there is more going on...
We've all hear a cell phone make our speakers pop, hiss, and beep. Perhaps he's getting EMI leakage that these spiffier cables do a better job shielding? An audiophile's ear is a lousy check (unless in a properly double blinded test, and even then...). Measuring the signal to noise and distortion (SINAD) of a known test file with traceable test equipment would be the proper method to see if there is any difference at all.
If there is a measurable improvement in the SINAD, I would go thrash whoever designed the DAC board and electronics for improperly grounding and/or inadequately shielding things to keep EMI from making its way into the audio base band.
My gut feel however is that this poor bastard is deluding himself, and might as well waste his money on gold plated 10 gauge power strips, because "Audio quality starts at the wall socket."
All my hardware designs are required to have all sorts of hardware protection to guarantee that no matter what, it cannot harm itself.
For example ALL amplifiers in an REF chain are configured such that they cannot overpower the max input power range of subsequent stages.
Power supplies have thermal shutdowns (and over current foldback protection).
All devices controlled by FPGA's have appropriate pullups/downs to assure that they are in known stages if the FPGA is loaded with bogus data and leaves the outputs high-Z.
Sounds to me like the cards had grossly under-designed cooling, and that some dipshit forgot to pay $0.02 for a temperature monitor with proper interlocks to shutdown and self protect. Lame.
Downloaded Wii games live on the console, and can't get moved off to a new one. So while the Wii will play old Game Cube games, all your downloaded content will not be forward compatible to the Wii 2 (or whatever they come out with next). Physical media likely will have some sort of path forward if history is any lesson.
So yeah, disc please!
Our US thuggery is fairly predictable. I'm sure the CIA or equivalent has already been given hit orders. It will be made to look like an accident (small plane crash, car crash, mystery disease, etc). Such is necessary for plausible deniability.
Poor bastard, he will be missed.
It is one part of a process, and if you focus on the polygraph machine itself you'll miss out on the very intentional steps taken to get you to overreact if you lie. Basically the machine is half prop, and most of what is going on is a manipulation to get you to respond in a such a manner that the operator can feel some confidence in the the wiggles coming out of the POS.
I was not impressed, and put very little faith in their outcome, positive or negative.
However, if we mandated posting the estimated cost of gas over 100,000 the first miles along the lines of how appliances list cost per year for electricity, I think it would help a great deal. Putting mileage in $$$, so that it is in the same units as the car price would help. Quick math can then be done by even the moderately drooling masses as to how many years (or decades) their dream Prius will take to break even with the other options.
News at 11.
An alarming number of folks suck at everyday math, and the worst part is that most don't even realize it. Instead we see them taken in by false sales, and easy to see through misinformation all the time.
I'm not sure if I should call them fools, or try to sell them something?
BS like this keeps me from graduating from my pay-as-you-go phone where I average ~$10/mo to something snazzier that would immediately jump to ~$100/mo. The plans don't scale well at all to really light users like me who would enjoy the niftier phones, but had the gang rape every month when my 30 minutes of calls and couple email checks would still cost me ~$100.
Sadly sooner or later AT&T and the like will eventually find a quiet way to collude and make pay-as-you-go suck bad enough, or drive the prices up enough to ruin even that little haven of wireless bargains.
Actually the generators don't run all the time. There is great complexity involved to optimize the grid throughout the day. Natural gas turbines, for example, are expensive to run, but very easy/fast to bring online and offline so they get used during peak hours. Other plants (oil, coal, gas) reduce fuel usage and output during non-peak hours just as your engine uses less fuel idling than accelerating. Generally speaking you want those plants at 100% usage if possible, hence load leveling techniques like gas turbine generators, etc.
Sheesh, not sure if following the stupid directions, or suing everything in sight after wards is the worse offense.
I see more and more that the commercial side wants to tighten the grip, and intentionally hobble software for all but the highest bidders.
Meanwhile my software budget decreases out of continued disappointment and frustration.