How many jobs will get lost because folks get pissed off and use the internet less when they're confronted with bizarre throttling behaviors, and strangely blocked content? How many baby Google's will get squished by thuggish slow moving oligopolies like the telcoms decide to hold them hostage due to excess BW usage (i.e. excess in their 1980's mindset).
I can't disagree with the characterization. However I've very painfully seen and felt what the american educated management structure can do to the most amazing, talented, and hard working engineers. It is not pretty.
We as a country have dropped the ball, and have rested on our laurels for too long. The jig is largely up. The talented refugees are doomed to a life of migrant labor, wandering from one tech company to the next, eking out a living for a few years before that outfit is either shipped overseas or driven into the ground by round after round of buzzword bingo spewing MBA jerk wads.
HOA's are voluntary communism. I'm amazed to see folks who rant about freedom and liberty only to choose to live in one of these distopian cookie cutter "communities" full of conformist rules. Thanks to private security, they are like mini police states.
I made a conscious decision to buy a place where I could paint my house without getting approval from a committee. I have not regretted it, despite having one dirtbag neighbor with a bunch of dead and dying cars. It is worth it.
The ability to put a suffering animal down lies in stark contrast to how inhumanely we treat suffering humans.
Having to just "make her comfortable" while she swore at god, and asked to just end the pain solidified my views on the subject. We all need control over our own off switch (or reset switch, if that's your faith). I'd rather die under my own power while still alert and not in drastic pain.
If however you want to fight, and have the money to fight, then by all means have the conversation with the relevant family members and go into the whole process with everyone understanding the game plan.
Back in the day manufacturing served as a launching pad and incubator for hardware designers (and kept the riff-raff from accidentally getting hired into designer positions). A few years of seeing how it's done, and how it shouldn't serves as a great foundation for a design engineer to build upon for their own designs. Those days are over. Not only can college hires expect only modest salaries, and to be the butt of Dilbert stereotypes, but just over the last couple decades they get to contend with the academia to design engineer transition with no training wheels (this can be brutal to watch).
Silicon valley has also been its own worst enemy. The exorbitant housing costs have kept many very talented folks out who simply can't afford a roof over their head, let along one over their family. There is almost an aristocracy created in Palo Alto and such of the old timers who got in at the ground level who find the modestly higher salaries there to be a boon to their locked in low mortgage. The rest who came in over the last decade or so make horrendous commutes to grinding rather than innovating jobs.
I bailed out ~4 years ago to Oregon, and while the job is a little less interesting, the standard of living and stress reduction more than make up for it. My nice house cost half what our crappy little townhouse rental would have sold for to boot (and its value has held up better too).
Windows is used as the OS in many stand alone products that are not personal computers. For example test equipment (spectrum analyzers, and similar). These often see networks rarely, and have access to the internet even more rarely.
Having a piece of test gear start to nag our customers after a few months is a pretty lame proposition (yes, I know that having Windows on a piece of test gear is already lame, but was not my call).
I am not a software guy, but an analog microwave design guy. All too often management expectations can in no way jive with reality. Instead it is often necessary to intentionally underestimate times, and later find specific items to pin the "delays" on. Along the way so much money and resources get involved, that effectively you've gotten the project through the second trimester without management realizing they are pregnant. Beatings ensue, but at that point those of us with scarce skills can't be laid off, so we shield our faces and live on to design another day.
Yay, another successful project out the door despite management...
Amen! Even in the last 15 years since I was a student EE I am have amazed, and somewhat horrified, at the pace at which "tinkerable" electronics has vanished.
Op-Amps for example don't "just work", as many are such a high GBW product as to be very prone to oscillation in all but the cleanest bread boarding situations. Most are only available in SMT packages that are getting too dense for me to work with without a microscope (and I'm only in my 30's).
In many ways it is for the better, as the 98% of mainstream usage is in dense high functionality applications. But the days to going to cobble together the next revolution in your spare time are all but dead. Even getting my boss to approve the $$$ for bread boarding project related circuits is damn hard. We instead rely on a lot more leaps of faith hoping that damn fast circuits live up to their datasheets, and in many cases live up to what we have to read between the lines on the datasheet.
On the other hand, I find it easy to run circles around the poor green engineers that show up not knowing which end of the soldering iron to hold. Job security isn't always a bad thing.
Judging by how schister cable companies are already with HDTV bit rates, I'm guessing the 3D stream won't get 2x the bits.
The only thing worse than low bit rate artifacts, is ones are Left/Right eye unique. I can't wait to see a class action lawsuit after Comcast causes a nation wide vomitorium by cutting back the 3D bit rate during the superbowl...
I'm not saying that an MBA assures a good life, or an engineering degree prevents one. I am arguing that from the sample size I have seen:
1. Damn hard working, ridiculously smart engineers make OK money, get a little recognition if their lucky, and maybe even a 9x12 cube instead of a 9x9 one.
2. Dolts with MBA's (many of them also with engineering degrees, though often shoddy engineers who had to go to plan B) often easily slip into some form of management, start life with a 9x12 cube, and get heaps of recognition when projects succeed (usually despite, not because, of their "leadership").
Just my distilled observations from 10 years in the trenches.
The most heartbreaking example I witnessed while at HP/Agilent was seeing one of they most amazing engineers I'd ever met take early retirement in disgust. He is the holder of many patents, and was the driving force behind numerous kick-ass microwave instruments (i.e. ones they were huge money making platforms for a decade or more). As the story goes his wife, who was originally hired on as a secretary as part of his recruitment, had worked her way up through management. She was not a bad manager, but nothing special either, and was making 2x what he was making as the best damn engineer in the company (at least in the top 1%, and widely recognized as such).
Just saying that the incentives as they stand today are against someone smart going into science and engineering. If you do the math, as smart hard working dude can make a lot more, and be a lot less stressed going for the MBA track, than if they go the science or engineering routes. Once you add in the relative portability of an MBA, versus being a pigeon holed expert in a corner of engineering, the MBA starts to look a lot better.
Get an MBA. Half the work, twice the standard of living. If you're smart, do a salary survey and really look at the work conditions of the various career paths. I didn't.
Engineers, and many scientists from what I see, work long hours, get very little respect/recognition, and make a decent salary. Don't expect a door or window to your "office", and expect to be jealous of Dilbert (I'm no kidding).
With an MBA you get lots of recognition (i.e. take credit for what your engineers do), get little blame (i.e. blame all your engineers), and get ~50% more salary despite the omnipresent line of drool on the left side of your mouth. No one bats an eye when you leave for a 3:30 PM tee time either. Best of all your skills are "universal", no need to understand microwave design now that you manage it, you worked for a disk drive manufacturer. Same thing, right?
Seriously, the incentives are pretty fouled up at the moment, and you will kick yourself later if you get into engineering or science for anything but the cerebral self rewards your are occasionally allowed to enjoy (in between schedule related beatings from your MBA wielding overlord).
Those most recognized and rewarded in a technical organization are those who work a crisis to gain recognition (i.e. mess up big, and get a raise for fixing it). Those who avoid crisis are left in the shadows (i.e. a solution won't impress a boss unless it actually gets his balls out of a sling, merely preventing them getting there will get you nowhere). See also XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/664/
Pre-paid cell fills the pay phone void for me, and I average less than $10/mo (it's $25 every 3 months minimum, and I have been slowly accumulating on the account balance).
The poster was referring to the hordes of whack jobs paying $70-100 a MONTH for their shiny bit of junk, with a $175-350 penalty if you wise up enough to try and cancel it.
Charging for incoming text messages: Scam Charging for data service without a verification nag: Scam Seeing an iphone/droid user wander into oncoming traffic: Priceless!
I'm not sure cops would feel you were being benevolent, let alone acting legally, if average Joe Citizen tried opening every parked police car, let along lifting items from them, even if it were meant to encourage good behavior.
Even HP/Agilent have lost their way after the founders left. Back in the 50's-80's when the founders still called the shots they valued people (down to the janitors), treated them well, and fostered an environment that was aimed at excellence (i.e. you were inspired to keep up with your coworkers, not constantly dragged down to their level). Once the MBA's got in charge it has been steadily downhill.
The lure to cut costs vs. the hard to quantify benefits of nurturing employees through creating a rewarding work environement is one few business majors who have not come up through the ranks can appreciate. Sadly it feels like virtually all corporate cultures have succumb to the dark side.
I used to work 60 hour weeks happily, but having been outright screwed by too many MBA driven nickel and diming fiascos I no longer do. I work my 8 hours and go home, keeping my head down the whole time. I pour my creative juices into home projects instead of unrewarding work ones (3 industrial sewing machine actually come close to the fun of microwave IC design, who'd of thunk?).
The alternator is not "free electricity", it merely converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. If you load it down with more electrical load (fans) it will sap more energy from the engine in via the serpentine belt. You'd have to have an increase in efficiency in the engine that exceeded the extra load of the fans (including the less than 100% efficiency of the alternator).
Take note of the whiners that don't want daytime running lamps because it hurts their mileage (though less than they believe it does).
It would have been a death march, but unlike a true death march the product shipped, and is still a big seller 6 years after introduction.
I stepped in when the main IC took a dump, and the designer had already bailed. I actually managed to redesign the damn thing from scratch (old design had too many fatal flaws to salvage) and get it caught up with the rest of the project without ever becoming critical path (barely).
So I bailed out the 8 million dollar project, got the promotionalong the way, and was even shown my new salary curve. I was 30% off the bottom, and they refused to give me ANY raise. A year later I got a tiny raise and was still off the bottom of my pay scale, and was now being told my comp time was all a cruel joke. So with that I finally got the F$#@ Work epiffany and haven't worked more than a couple 60 hour weeks since, and can count the number of weekend days I've worked in the last 6 years on one hand.
My only regret is that I now work for my former employer's direct competitor, so I kind of wish I was working harder to put them under than I am, but it's 5:00 so I'm going home. F$#@ Work...
Yeah, comp time is a scam. At a previous job my boss insisted I track all the hours of comp time I was racking up since he was sort of an idealist. When it totalled up to 4 months during a brutal stretch (80-100 hour weeks, working 30+ days straight) it just depressed me and I stopped counting any additional comp time hours. Shortly later I got promoted ($0 raise though) and moved to a new manager who asked what the deal was with the comp time hours my prior manager mentioned. When I told him it was 4+ months I was told "No". Later a week long vacation was offered up in lieu.
I quit and lived out of my truck for 10 months instead.
Now I work my 8 hours and go home. It's a job, no more, no less. I'm not working my butt off for 1-2% raises.
If you're salaried ask if and how they do comp time. If it's "between you and your manager" assume this means "No, we don't do comp time." If on the other hand they have a semi-official policy it is good to know up front and figure this into the whole salary/vacation/benefits equation when deciding how to negotiate a salary.
Likewise, find out what the typical layoff behavior is, but NOT in the interview. Find someone on the inside (or and expat) through your network and find out the details of of the equations (weeks per year of service, minimum package, any help with COBRA, etc). You can really get hosed if you move your family to an area with few comparable employers and this one tanks.
Ask what their approval process is for buying tools/software/hardware, and what their current status on those is. Will you have any signing authority for buying technical books for example, or will those have to be pre-approved. I spent over a year lobbying varying levels of management to get the right software to do my job (on top of 2 previous years of lobbying by my coworkers), and then spend 9 more gut wrenching months suffering through the approval process, including writing many justification emails, as well as having to explain the justification emails to every manager up through the VP. Meanwhile I had to beg and plead with the rep to keep the original quote price so the process would not have to be reset.
Depending on your type of job, find out what the theifdoms are like inside. In my case PCB layout turned out to be a surprisingly ugly theifdom, and has been for at least 20-30 years. You can discretely ask about these by asking about the product life cycle and at every step asking who does that, what is the documentation like, what the review process is like, and how long that step typically takes. I missed asking about the time cycle on PCB layout, and boy howdy is it bad (3-4 week queue time, 3-6 week layout time for stuff I could do myself in 1-2 weeks if they would allow me to).
Unlike motorcycles, Segway riders/drivers/wtf? don't go tooling through crowds, nearly crushing toes. Motorcycle riders with bad etiquette have plenty of haters too (especially white trash who spent too much for a defective exhaust on their Harley's).
So I don't think this is some perception of work thing, but rather a combination of the poor etiquette I often see, combined with the round peg square hole issue of having a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk where even unpowered bike riders are unwelcome. The fact that most of the riders are either members of the popo, or look like pricks who drive beamers doesn't help either.
As a professional who's used Ansoft Designer, I can't say enough bad things about it. While it may do OK for college level problems, please only allow students to use it after strongly worded warning about just how buggy, incomplete, and poorly engineered the product is. Under no circumstances should students be allowed to walk away with the impression that Designer is a useful tool. My $0.02.
If M$ can shove Vista down consumers throats (admittedly their success rate has been low), why can't folks imagine something just as preposterous on the hardware front?
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How many jobs will get lost because folks get pissed off and use the internet less when they're confronted with bizarre throttling behaviors, and strangely blocked content? How many baby Google's will get squished by thuggish slow moving oligopolies like the telcoms decide to hold them hostage due to excess BW usage (i.e. excess in their 1980's mindset).
I can't disagree with the characterization. However I've very painfully seen and felt what the american educated management structure can do to the most amazing, talented, and hard working engineers. It is not pretty.
We as a country have dropped the ball, and have rested on our laurels for too long. The jig is largely up. The talented refugees are doomed to a life of migrant labor, wandering from one tech company to the next, eking out a living for a few years before that outfit is either shipped overseas or driven into the ground by round after round of buzzword bingo spewing MBA jerk wads.
HOA's are voluntary communism. I'm amazed to see folks who rant about freedom and liberty only to choose to live in one of these distopian cookie cutter "communities" full of conformist rules. Thanks to private security, they are like mini police states.
I made a conscious decision to buy a place where I could paint my house without getting approval from a committee. I have not regretted it, despite having one dirtbag neighbor with a bunch of dead and dying cars. It is worth it.
The ability to put a suffering animal down lies in stark contrast to how inhumanely we treat suffering humans.
Having to just "make her comfortable" while she swore at god, and asked to just end the pain solidified my views on the subject. We all need control over our own off switch (or reset switch, if that's your faith). I'd rather die under my own power while still alert and not in drastic pain.
If however you want to fight, and have the money to fight, then by all means have the conversation with the relevant family members and go into the whole process with everyone understanding the game plan.
I whole heartedly agree.
Back in the day manufacturing served as a launching pad and incubator for hardware designers (and kept the riff-raff from accidentally getting hired into designer positions). A few years of seeing how it's done, and how it shouldn't serves as a great foundation for a design engineer to build upon for their own designs. Those days are over. Not only can college hires expect only modest salaries, and to be the butt of Dilbert stereotypes, but just over the last couple decades they get to contend with the academia to design engineer transition with no training wheels (this can be brutal to watch).
Silicon valley has also been its own worst enemy. The exorbitant housing costs have kept many very talented folks out who simply can't afford a roof over their head, let along one over their family. There is almost an aristocracy created in Palo Alto and such of the old timers who got in at the ground level who find the modestly higher salaries there to be a boon to their locked in low mortgage. The rest who came in over the last decade or so make horrendous commutes to grinding rather than innovating jobs.
I bailed out ~4 years ago to Oregon, and while the job is a little less interesting, the standard of living and stress reduction more than make up for it. My nice house cost half what our crappy little townhouse rental would have sold for to boot (and its value has held up better too).
Windows is used as the OS in many stand alone products that are not personal computers. For example test equipment (spectrum analyzers, and similar). These often see networks rarely, and have access to the internet even more rarely.
Having a piece of test gear start to nag our customers after a few months is a pretty lame proposition (yes, I know that having Windows on a piece of test gear is already lame, but was not my call).
I am not a software guy, but an analog microwave design guy. All too often management expectations can in no way jive with reality. Instead it is often necessary to intentionally underestimate times, and later find specific items to pin the "delays" on. Along the way so much money and resources get involved, that effectively you've gotten the project through the second trimester without management realizing they are pregnant. Beatings ensue, but at that point those of us with scarce skills can't be laid off, so we shield our faces and live on to design another day.
Yay, another successful project out the door despite management...
Amen! Even in the last 15 years since I was a student EE I am have amazed, and somewhat horrified, at the pace at which "tinkerable" electronics has vanished.
Op-Amps for example don't "just work", as many are such a high GBW product as to be very prone to oscillation in all but the cleanest bread boarding situations. Most are only available in SMT packages that are getting too dense for me to work with without a microscope (and I'm only in my 30's).
In many ways it is for the better, as the 98% of mainstream usage is in dense high functionality applications. But the days to going to cobble together the next revolution in your spare time are all but dead. Even getting my boss to approve the $$$ for bread boarding project related circuits is damn hard. We instead rely on a lot more leaps of faith hoping that damn fast circuits live up to their datasheets, and in many cases live up to what we have to read between the lines on the datasheet.
On the other hand, I find it easy to run circles around the poor green engineers that show up not knowing which end of the soldering iron to hold. Job security isn't always a bad thing.
Judging by how schister cable companies are already with HDTV bit rates, I'm guessing the 3D stream won't get 2x the bits.
The only thing worse than low bit rate artifacts, is ones are Left/Right eye unique. I can't wait to see a class action lawsuit after Comcast causes a nation wide vomitorium by cutting back the 3D bit rate during the superbowl...
I'm not saying that an MBA assures a good life, or an engineering degree prevents one. I am arguing that from the sample size I have seen:
1. Damn hard working, ridiculously smart engineers make OK money, get a little recognition if their lucky, and maybe even a 9x12 cube instead of a 9x9 one.
2. Dolts with MBA's (many of them also with engineering degrees, though often shoddy engineers who had to go to plan B) often easily slip into some form of management, start life with a 9x12 cube, and get heaps of recognition when projects succeed (usually despite, not because, of their "leadership").
Just my distilled observations from 10 years in the trenches.
The most heartbreaking example I witnessed while at HP/Agilent was seeing one of they most amazing engineers I'd ever met take early retirement in disgust. He is the holder of many patents, and was the driving force behind numerous kick-ass microwave instruments (i.e. ones they were huge money making platforms for a decade or more). As the story goes his wife, who was originally hired on as a secretary as part of his recruitment, had worked her way up through management. She was not a bad manager, but nothing special either, and was making 2x what he was making as the best damn engineer in the company (at least in the top 1%, and widely recognized as such).
Just saying that the incentives as they stand today are against someone smart going into science and engineering. If you do the math, as smart hard working dude can make a lot more, and be a lot less stressed going for the MBA track, than if they go the science or engineering routes. Once you add in the relative portability of an MBA, versus being a pigeon holed expert in a corner of engineering, the MBA starts to look a lot better.
Get an MBA. Half the work, twice the standard of living. If you're smart, do a salary survey and really look at the work conditions of the various career paths. I didn't.
Engineers, and many scientists from what I see, work long hours, get very little respect/recognition, and make a decent salary. Don't expect a door or window to your "office", and expect to be jealous of Dilbert (I'm no kidding).
With an MBA you get lots of recognition (i.e. take credit for what your engineers do), get little blame (i.e. blame all your engineers), and get ~50% more salary despite the omnipresent line of drool on the left side of your mouth. No one bats an eye when you leave for a 3:30 PM tee time either. Best of all your skills are "universal", no need to understand microwave design now that you manage it, you worked for a disk drive manufacturer. Same thing, right?
Seriously, the incentives are pretty fouled up at the moment, and you will kick yourself later if you get into engineering or science for anything but the cerebral self rewards your are occasionally allowed to enjoy (in between schedule related beatings from your MBA wielding overlord).
Those most recognized and rewarded in a technical organization are those who work a crisis to gain recognition (i.e. mess up big, and get a raise for fixing it). Those who avoid crisis are left in the shadows (i.e. a solution won't impress a boss unless it actually gets his balls out of a sling, merely preventing them getting there will get you nowhere). See also XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/664/
Pre-paid cell fills the pay phone void for me, and I average less than $10/mo (it's $25 every 3 months minimum, and I have been slowly accumulating on the account balance).
The poster was referring to the hordes of whack jobs paying $70-100 a MONTH for their shiny bit of junk, with a $175-350 penalty if you wise up enough to try and cancel it.
Charging for incoming text messages: Scam
Charging for data service without a verification nag: Scam
Seeing an iphone/droid user wander into oncoming traffic: Priceless!
Sorry, but if I leave a non-E book on a plane, it's too bad, someone else gets it. Why is the e-book any different?
I'm not sure cops would feel you were being benevolent, let alone acting legally, if average Joe Citizen tried opening every parked police car, let along lifting items from them, even if it were meant to encourage good behavior.
Even HP/Agilent have lost their way after the founders left. Back in the 50's-80's when the founders still called the shots they valued people (down to the janitors), treated them well, and fostered an environment that was aimed at excellence (i.e. you were inspired to keep up with your coworkers, not constantly dragged down to their level). Once the MBA's got in charge it has been steadily downhill.
The lure to cut costs vs. the hard to quantify benefits of nurturing employees through creating a rewarding work environement is one few business majors who have not come up through the ranks can appreciate. Sadly it feels like virtually all corporate cultures have succumb to the dark side.
I used to work 60 hour weeks happily, but having been outright screwed by too many MBA driven nickel and diming fiascos I no longer do. I work my 8 hours and go home, keeping my head down the whole time. I pour my creative juices into home projects instead of unrewarding work ones (3 industrial sewing machine actually come close to the fun of microwave IC design, who'd of thunk?).
When in doubt, lie, cheat, and steal. Strong ethics and morales will get you nowhere in this world kids.
Zero sum game.
The alternator is not "free electricity", it merely converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. If you load it down with more electrical load (fans) it will sap more energy from the engine in via the serpentine belt. You'd have to have an increase in efficiency in the engine that exceeded the extra load of the fans (including the less than 100% efficiency of the alternator).
Take note of the whiners that don't want daytime running lamps because it hurts their mileage (though less than they believe it does).
It would have been a death march, but unlike a true death march the product shipped, and is still a big seller 6 years after introduction.
I stepped in when the main IC took a dump, and the designer had already bailed. I actually managed to redesign the damn thing from scratch (old design had too many fatal flaws to salvage) and get it caught up with the rest of the project without ever becoming critical path (barely).
So I bailed out the 8 million dollar project, got the promotionalong the way, and was even shown my new salary curve. I was 30% off the bottom, and they refused to give me ANY raise. A year later I got a tiny raise and was still off the bottom of my pay scale, and was now being told my comp time was all a cruel joke. So with that I finally got the F$#@ Work epiffany and haven't worked more than a couple 60 hour weeks since, and can count the number of weekend days I've worked in the last 6 years on one hand.
My only regret is that I now work for my former employer's direct competitor, so I kind of wish I was working harder to put them under than I am, but it's 5:00 so I'm going home. F$#@ Work...
Yeah, comp time is a scam. At a previous job my boss insisted I track all the hours of comp time I was racking up since he was sort of an idealist. When it totalled up to 4 months during a brutal stretch (80-100 hour weeks, working 30+ days straight) it just depressed me and I stopped counting any additional comp time hours. Shortly later I got promoted ($0 raise though) and moved to a new manager who asked what the deal was with the comp time hours my prior manager mentioned. When I told him it was 4+ months I was told "No". Later a week long vacation was offered up in lieu.
I quit and lived out of my truck for 10 months instead.
Now I work my 8 hours and go home. It's a job, no more, no less. I'm not working my butt off for 1-2% raises.
If you're salaried ask if and how they do comp time. If it's "between you and your manager" assume this means "No, we don't do comp time." If on the other hand they have a semi-official policy it is good to know up front and figure this into the whole salary/vacation/benefits equation when deciding how to negotiate a salary.
Likewise, find out what the typical layoff behavior is, but NOT in the interview. Find someone on the inside (or and expat) through your network and find out the details of of the equations (weeks per year of service, minimum package, any help with COBRA, etc). You can really get hosed if you move your family to an area with few comparable employers and this one tanks.
Ask what their approval process is for buying tools/software/hardware, and what their current status on those is. Will you have any signing authority for buying technical books for example, or will those have to be pre-approved. I spent over a year lobbying varying levels of management to get the right software to do my job (on top of 2 previous years of lobbying by my coworkers), and then spend 9 more gut wrenching months suffering through the approval process, including writing many justification emails, as well as having to explain the justification emails to every manager up through the VP. Meanwhile I had to beg and plead with the rep to keep the original quote price so the process would not have to be reset.
Depending on your type of job, find out what the theifdoms are like inside. In my case PCB layout turned out to be a surprisingly ugly theifdom, and has been for at least 20-30 years. You can discretely ask about these by asking about the product life cycle and at every step asking who does that, what is the documentation like, what the review process is like, and how long that step typically takes. I missed asking about the time cycle on PCB layout, and boy howdy is it bad (3-4 week queue time, 3-6 week layout time for stuff I could do myself in 1-2 weeks if they would allow me to).
Unlike motorcycles, Segway riders/drivers/wtf? don't go tooling through crowds, nearly crushing toes. Motorcycle riders with bad etiquette have plenty of haters too (especially white trash who spent too much for a defective exhaust on their Harley's).
So I don't think this is some perception of work thing, but rather a combination of the poor etiquette I often see, combined with the round peg square hole issue of having a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk where even unpowered bike riders are unwelcome. The fact that most of the riders are either members of the popo, or look like pricks who drive beamers doesn't help either.
As a professional who's used Ansoft Designer, I can't say enough bad things about it. While it may do OK for college level problems, please only allow students to use it after strongly worded warning about just how buggy, incomplete, and poorly engineered the product is. Under no circumstances should students be allowed to walk away with the impression that Designer is a useful tool. My $0.02.
If M$ can shove Vista down consumers throats (admittedly their success rate has been low), why can't folks imagine something just as preposterous on the hardware front?