Exactly. The Spanish bringing that gold back caused massive hyperinflation, effectively making gold worthless for trade, exactly the way fiat currencies have been seen to collapse from hyperinflation (Weimar republic, Argentina etc.) even relatively recently.
Oh wait, it didn't? You mean it was just a relatively minor inflation, a supply bubble held in check by the fact that gold is a tangible resource, and can't be created out of thin air by the government? Nevermind.
In Appalachian American English, at least, a very popular variant is "fixing the bed". It makes just as little sense as "making the bed", granted, but it might save further confusion to know.
The $100 one may be smarter, but the $40,000 one will still get hired, even if (maybe especially if) his degree is in a field of limited utility.
Only the clueless think that higher education is primarily about imparting knowledge and wisdom. It's primary purpose is to act as a filter to allow corporate culture to launder its classicsm.
The "higher education" status symbol has become heavily used as a filter because it's either illegal or unpopular to hire based on membership in other clubs like religion, race, ethnicity, or extended family. Higher education only serves its purpose as long as it's expensive in money and time. Requiring higher education is a seemingly blameless way to keep the riffraff out. A $100 degree does not serve that purpose.
An expensive education is a sociological analogue of the peafowl tail. It's an economic signal that you are the right kind of white/black/$aggrievedminority person that will fit the company's core value matrix. A $100 Master's degree subverts this utility--leave it to the Internet--which is why you can find so many confused and borderline desperate people trying to dismiss online education based on stupid arguments, as if traditional universities could possibly be worth the huge cost difference because you really learn so much more from bit of professor interaction (which, as someone who has a Masters degree, is a fiction anyway, because graduate professors in my experience do not have good student interaction).
Expensive education may go away, but it will pop up in a few decades in the form of something else. All you speculative fiction authors can get to work predicting what that will be. More likely, anyone will be able to become an expert on any subject for nearly free (we are practically there now), but companies will still hire people who wasted years of life and enough money to feed several immigrant families for a decade, because "higher education teaches you how to learn and broadens your perspectives".
Also, there are plenty of ministries that will give you a free bible. Gideon still puts millions of free bibles in hotel rooms. At my church, we have a giant bookshelf of old bibles free for the taking (mostly years worth of "lost and found" bibles that have become public due to statute of limitations). I grabbed a few old translations with good typography myself.
``Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload.''
Better yet, imagine a giant supermarket with RFIDS or smarphone-scannable barcodes so that I can just load my cart up and leave, and I don't HAVE to checkout at all.
Cinematographer incompetence is the cause, with faster film stock a contributing factor.
Smaller formats are also being used more and more. The smaller frame size requires/allows faster relative aperture (f/stop) to be used for the same depth of field, which is only going to exaggerate the judder problem if the cinematography closes the shutter way down to compensate.
16mm and Super-16mm are really coming into their own nowadays with the digital intermediate workflow. It used to be, you could save money and use a smaller camera by shooting 16mm negative stock, but you can't contact print 16mm to 35mm in post, so you had to take a cost and quality hit by doing an optical enlargement to 35mm. So even though modern film stocks are so insanely awesome that 16mm gives great image quality, a lot of people stuck with 35mm because the savings wasn't that great. But with the Great Lowest Common Denominator of digital intermediate, post is the quality bottleneck either way.
I don't know how this translates to digital, since I don't think digital cameras use rotary shutters or mechanical shutters at all, and I don't know how the 'shutter angle' is adjusted. But digital sensors are just as fast or faster than film, and the smaller sensor sizes (though not smaller than 16mm) lead to even faster relative apertures at a given depth of field, so that's not going to help anything.
I'm sure it's due partly to the use of faster film stocks. All the cool kids are using Kodak Vision 500T, which is insanely fast in historical perspective. In black and white, Kodak no longer makes Plus-X (64 speedish) stock, and only offers Double-X (200ish). Slowing the shutter down with these fast films requires either a smaller aperture, possibly smaller than the cinematographer wants, or use of an ND filter.
At 24 FPS, a wide, judder-reducing shutter angle gets you a shutter speed of like 1/50th of a second. If you want anything less than deep-focus, you need to use an aperture of like f/5.6. In sunlight, this would require a film speed of iso 6. So yeah, I'm sure Vision 500T has a lot to do with it.
The king's hoarding of the gold is not that big of a deal without a "legal tender" mandate. In a free banking system, as you point out, the peasants can use other things as money, and the value of gold as a currency just changes in real time to compensate based on the King's shenanigans. "Imperial credits aren't worth much out here, I need something more real" etc.
When the King requires that gold be the only legal money--that's what really allows him to manipulate the economy. Legal Tender laws are the real problem. With legal tender laws, there is no competition to keep a currency in check, and the for the purposes of manipulation, the sky's the limit. Without legal tender laws, devaluing one currency just results in people switching to a superior currency. Governments like power, and they like to mandate that taxes be paid in a certain currency. The gold standard is an attempt to limit the ability of a government to manipulate a 'legal tender' currency, by tying that currency to something physical. But without legal tender laws, you don't need gold. You can use soybeans, bitcoins, kongbucks, averaged indices of all the above, or whatever you and your customers agree on.
Your last point hits home. I went to college for physics and grad school for materials engineering, and I work for a fortune 500 company. People I went to highschool with didn't even go to college and make nearly what I make (possibly more due to lower cost of living) working in coal mines making $25 per hour with benefits and overtime, and work less hours than I do.
Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.
Also, it's more than that. Mostly, solar energy is not concentrated. People are just spoiled by semiconductor integrated circuits. Photovoltaics have been steadily improving, but the fact is solar power is not very dense...actual sunlight is not a concentrated source of energy. There's only so many watts per square meter that fall, and the sun doesn't always shine. The only way to get real gains is to set out more solar panels. So there is going to be no "breakthrough" like there sometimes is with other technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits; even if somebody invents the absolute perfect solar cell that sucks up every uJ of energy that hits it.
People set their expectations based on technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits, but fail to realize that more fundamental technologies can't be doubled in speed or cut to 1/4 the cost just be printing more of them on the same amount of silicon.
Cars have a certain ability to stop. That ability is dependent on speed. The safe distance to the car in front of you is determined by that. A computer may have less reaction delay, but that's only a constant factor. Physics is the main factor.
At high speeds, the safe distance to the car in front is large. At slow speeds, it's smaller. This function is monotonic. We can see that at 0MPH, we can be literally right against the car in front's bumper. But as speed increases, the safe distance must also increase.
Now consider a bunch of cars sitting at a traffic light. If, as you assume, they all start moving at the same time, then every car will immediately enter into an unsafe following distance as soon as the speed starts increasing. Every car will need to increase its following distance. How can we accomplish this? Either we have the front cars follow an acceleration profile that is faster, in order to 'stretch out' the chain or we force the rear cars to follow an acceleration profile that is slower to accomplish the same thing. Since this pack of cars is gated by an intersection, and we assume the front car is going to depart at its maximum safe comfortable speed anyway, only the second option makes sense. The later cars will have to delay their departure acceleration in order to achieve a safe distance. If every car followed the same acceleration profile of the first car, you would end up with a pack of cars going 60mph nearly touching each others' bumpers. If you are proposing tat self-driving cars will make thing safe, you are wrong.
So the whole "all the cars can start moving at the same time" thing is stupid. It doesn't make sense, even with computer-driven cars. So what if the cars all start moving at.1mph instantly. The practical effect is pointless compared to having the later cars just sit there for a few seconds until they can begin departing at a reasonable speed. The front cars in the pack begin to move faster because safe following distance must increase as the pack of cars departs. It has less to do with stupid humans as you think; in this case, it looks like the stupid humans were actually kind of doing the right thing automatically out of self-interest ("I don't want to hit the car in front of me").
My 2002 Buick Park Avenue does this too. It gets a rough shift when the transmission senses a problem with the shift solenoids, and it will shift roughly until you turn it off and turn it back on.
But the PS2 game "ICO" taught me a few things. It's hard to explain the impact the graphics had when the game came out. Particularly the trees...they look absolutely amazing for a PS2 game which was actually developed for the PS1 (it fits on a CD, rather than DVD).
I tried to get a close FPV on the leaves, and I realized there weren't any leaves. Just simple shapes that shimmered, glittered and moved in mass like a tree. The PS1-era developers didn't have anywhere near enough polygons to actually generate leaves; they didn't have raytracing hardware to simulate light glittering off millions of leaves, and they didn't have subsurface scattering to model light going through the leaves. But it didn't matter, because they managed to hack something that looks just like a fucking tree from any reasonable distance. They didn't synthesize a TREE...they synthesized something that looked like a tree, using minimal primitive elements arranged to give a stunning impression of a tree--some real Bob Ross shit.
In other parts of the game, there are what appear to be very realistic dust effects and lighting effects (in the cathedral area). These effects were just amazing at the time...beautiful. A closer inspection shows that they just hand-placed luminescent polygons to construct every shaft of light in the cathedral, and the apparent dust effects are just moving texture on the polygons. Again...no ray tracing, no particle effects, but they made something that looked absolutely convincing, the way a good painter can give an impression of light paint and canvas--basically human visual cortex hacking.
There is no point to this post, except that there is more to creating good graphics than technology.
You are wrong. Bandwidth is a correct term for describing the 3GB cap, because it's not a 3GB absolute cap, it is a cap of 3GB PER UNIT OF TIME. Which as you point out, is a RATE of usage. And so BANDWIDTH is the correct term.
It's a rate averaged over a span of time, rather than an instantaneous rate, but it's still a rate, and therefore, it's perfectly correct to call it a bandwidth cap. 3GB/MONTH or 100Mbit/s or 9600bits per second--a unit of information divided by a time is a bandwidth.
I see your point; I really do. As a Linux user, I would really like a Linux Steam client so that I can play Portal. But I don't know if I will ever see one of those in my lifetime.
I had to buy a Roku box to get Netflix, so maybe I will have to buy a Steam box to get steam. Does it bother me that I should have to buy another piece of consumer hardware just to access "content" that I should be able to access with my Linux HTPC? Yes. But beggars can't be choosers.
But you didn't get my earlier point, that the tool assumes that the end user wants to simulate, but hobbyists and robotics people are not going to be making diagrams for simulating; they just want to communicate a schematic visually. Classic blunder...not knowing your audience. Yes, a resistance in series with a coil would be equivalent, but you know what would be easier for both me and the web designer? Just let me plop down the coil symbol and then decide for my own goddam self how I want to label it, instead of "letting" me pick from a limited list of 5 parts, and forcing my label to have the unit you are just sure that I want.
This doesn't have to be a serious design tool. The real benefit is going to be to the DIY and hobby community, because tools like this are going to reduce the amount of shitty hand-drawn schematics uploaded to web forums, typically done in Paint or scrawled on notebook paper and then imaged with a cell phone. I've been looking for a quick way to bang out a schematic for a while now.
My thoughts:
The drawing is great and the interface does a good job of being easy enough to start without having to read directions.
They only have a selection of 8 NPN transistors, and you HAVE to choose one...there is no way to place a generic transistor and label it yourself. Even if you modify the parameters, you still have to have it labeled with one of the parts choices they provide. WTF? There is also no darlington transistor symbol.
Also, if you choose coil, you have to have it labeled with the inductance value in H, and you can't have it show a resistance value. This is stupid for motor coils, where you care about resistance at least as much as inductance.
So, force less shit down my throat, assume less about what I want to tell my audience, and it will be perfect.
You have it backward. The digital revolution was a boon to camera companies, not a blow. In the film era, cameras lasted decades. I'm still using my 1979 Olympus OM1, and I'm not sure it's ever even been overhauled. Digital introduced a market where pros and prosumers would be buying new cameras every year or two...especially in the beginning when technology was advancing fast.
It's also related to tax policy. Income which is poured back into assets and operating costs is not taxed. The goal for American corporations is to show 0 profit. To do otherwise results in paying more taxes.
There would be a similar amount of innovation around hydroponics and greenhouse tech if growing cannabis was legal. Or another way of looking at it, all these "innovative" homebrewers, equipment sellers, and store owners could just as easily be criminals. Hurray for "innovation" in a culture of arbitrary oppression.
Homebrewing versus homegrowing is a case study in legal versus illegal drug use. In homebrewing, we get innovation, recreation and a healthy hobby. In homegrowing, we get clogged jails, ruined lives, paramilitary police forces and thousands dead from border violence. The only difference is a few strokes of the pen in Washington. I have no doubt there is are well-meaning do-gooders lobbying to make homebrewing illegal.
Our nation is in sad shape when we have to receive permission from our government in order push technology into new areas. Engineers will not drive our future...lobbyists will, because that's what truly limits our potential.
Flying cars are technologically possible, just not politically possible. There's no license plate category for them, and until there is, they won't exist. Innovation stifled by bureaucracy.
Small aircraft to this day use ancient Rotax engines with magnetos--decades-old design--just because that's what approved, not because that's the cutting edge.
When I go to classic car rallys, I'm impressed not by the technology on display, but by the fact that it's all illegal. None of the classic cars there would be legal to produce and sell today. Nobody would probably produce a '85 firebird today, but who knows? Nobody will try, because it would be illegal anyway. Even my old Corolla, which got 35 mpg in the 90's, would probably not pass mandatory crash tests today.
Engineers and technology do not dictate what is possible in America; Washington does. It reminds me of all the stories of the failed Communist and Socialist economies where they drove shitty two-cycle cars and technology decades behind, and were lucky at that, because that's what they were reduced to by their overlords.
I'm struck by the fact that if America had always suffered under the current regulatory burdens, we probably would still be working or railroads or cars or airplanes. We would probably still be trying to get the FDA to approve the microwave oven or some other agency to approve cell phones.
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Exactly. The Spanish bringing that gold back caused massive hyperinflation, effectively making gold worthless for trade, exactly the way fiat currencies have been seen to collapse from hyperinflation (Weimar republic, Argentina etc.) even relatively recently.
Oh wait, it didn't? You mean it was just a relatively minor inflation, a supply bubble held in check by the fact that gold is a tangible resource, and can't be created out of thin air by the government? Nevermind.
In Appalachian American English, at least, a very popular variant is "fixing the bed". It makes just as little sense as "making the bed", granted, but it might save further confusion to know.
The $100 one may be smarter, but the $40,000 one will still get hired, even if (maybe especially if) his degree is in a field of limited utility.
Only the clueless think that higher education is primarily about imparting knowledge and wisdom. It's primary purpose is to act as a filter to allow corporate culture to launder its classicsm.
The "higher education" status symbol has become heavily used as a filter because it's either illegal or unpopular to hire based on membership in other clubs like religion, race, ethnicity, or extended family. Higher education only serves its purpose as long as it's expensive in money and time. Requiring higher education is a seemingly blameless way to keep the riffraff out. A $100 degree does not serve that purpose.
An expensive education is a sociological analogue of the peafowl tail. It's an economic signal that you are the right kind of white/black/$aggrievedminority person that will fit the company's core value matrix. A $100 Master's degree subverts this utility--leave it to the Internet--which is why you can find so many confused and borderline desperate people trying to dismiss online education based on stupid arguments, as if traditional universities could possibly be worth the huge cost difference because you really learn so much more from bit of professor interaction (which, as someone who has a Masters degree, is a fiction anyway, because graduate professors in my experience do not have good student interaction).
Expensive education may go away, but it will pop up in a few decades in the form of something else. All you speculative fiction authors can get to work predicting what that will be. More likely, anyone will be able to become an expert on any subject for nearly free (we are practically there now), but companies will still hire people who wasted years of life and enough money to feed several immigrant families for a decade, because "higher education teaches you how to learn and broadens your perspectives".
Also, there are plenty of ministries that will give you a free bible. Gideon still puts millions of free bibles in hotel rooms. At my church, we have a giant bookshelf of old bibles free for the taking (mostly years worth of "lost and found" bibles that have become public due to statute of limitations). I grabbed a few old translations with good typography myself.
``Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload.''
Better yet, imagine a giant supermarket with RFIDS or smarphone-scannable barcodes so that I can just load my cart up and leave, and I don't HAVE to checkout at all.
Exactly. Kodak should have taught everyone that you cannot afford to NOT scavenge you own business...because if you don't, someone else will anyway.
"black market" is often another way to say "free market"
Cinematographer incompetence is the cause, with faster film stock a contributing factor.
Smaller formats are also being used more and more. The smaller frame size requires/allows faster relative aperture (f/stop) to be used for the same depth of field, which is only going to exaggerate the judder problem if the cinematography closes the shutter way down to compensate.
16mm and Super-16mm are really coming into their own nowadays with the digital intermediate workflow. It used to be, you could save money and use a smaller camera by shooting 16mm negative stock, but you can't contact print 16mm to 35mm in post, so you had to take a cost and quality hit by doing an optical enlargement to 35mm. So even though modern film stocks are so insanely awesome that 16mm gives great image quality, a lot of people stuck with 35mm because the savings wasn't that great. But with the Great Lowest Common Denominator of digital intermediate, post is the quality bottleneck either way.
I don't know how this translates to digital, since I don't think digital cameras use rotary shutters or mechanical shutters at all, and I don't know how the 'shutter angle' is adjusted. But digital sensors are just as fast or faster than film, and the smaller sensor sizes (though not smaller than 16mm) lead to even faster relative apertures at a given depth of field, so that's not going to help anything.
I'm sure it's due partly to the use of faster film stocks. All the cool kids are using Kodak Vision 500T, which is insanely fast in historical perspective. In black and white, Kodak no longer makes Plus-X (64 speedish) stock, and only offers Double-X (200ish). Slowing the shutter down with these fast films requires either a smaller aperture, possibly smaller than the cinematographer wants, or use of an ND filter.
At 24 FPS, a wide, judder-reducing shutter angle gets you a shutter speed of like 1/50th of a second. If you want anything less than deep-focus, you need to use an aperture of like f/5.6. In sunlight, this would require a film speed of iso 6. So yeah, I'm sure Vision 500T has a lot to do with it.
The king's hoarding of the gold is not that big of a deal without a "legal tender" mandate. In a free banking system, as you point out, the peasants can use other things as money, and the value of gold as a currency just changes in real time to compensate based on the King's shenanigans. "Imperial credits aren't worth much out here, I need something more real" etc.
When the King requires that gold be the only legal money--that's what really allows him to manipulate the economy. Legal Tender laws are the real problem. With legal tender laws, there is no competition to keep a currency in check, and the for the purposes of manipulation, the sky's the limit. Without legal tender laws, devaluing one currency just results in people switching to a superior currency. Governments like power, and they like to mandate that taxes be paid in a certain currency. The gold standard is an attempt to limit the ability of a government to manipulate a 'legal tender' currency, by tying that currency to something physical. But without legal tender laws, you don't need gold. You can use soybeans, bitcoins, kongbucks, averaged indices of all the above, or whatever you and your customers agree on.
Your last point hits home. I went to college for physics and grad school for materials engineering, and I work for a fortune 500 company. People I went to highschool with didn't even go to college and make nearly what I make (possibly more due to lower cost of living) working in coal mines making $25 per hour with benefits and overtime, and work less hours than I do.
The fundamental black-body efficiency limit (the Shockley–Queisser limit) for solar cells is 33%.
Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.
Also, it's more than that. Mostly, solar energy is not concentrated. People are just spoiled by semiconductor integrated circuits. Photovoltaics have been steadily improving, but the fact is solar power is not very dense...actual sunlight is not a concentrated source of energy. There's only so many watts per square meter that fall, and the sun doesn't always shine. The only way to get real gains is to set out more solar panels. So there is going to be no "breakthrough" like there sometimes is with other technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits; even if somebody invents the absolute perfect solar cell that sucks up every uJ of energy that hits it.
People set their expectations based on technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits, but fail to realize that more fundamental technologies can't be doubled in speed or cut to 1/4 the cost just be printing more of them on the same amount of silicon.
A common fallacy.
.1mph instantly. The practical effect is pointless compared to having the later cars just sit there for a few seconds until they can begin departing at a reasonable speed. The front cars in the pack begin to move faster because safe following distance must increase as the pack of cars departs. It has less to do with stupid humans as you think; in this case, it looks like the stupid humans were actually kind of doing the right thing automatically out of self-interest ("I don't want to hit the car in front of me").
Cars have a certain ability to stop. That ability is dependent on speed. The safe distance to the car in front of you is determined by that. A computer may have less reaction delay, but that's only a constant factor. Physics is the main factor.
At high speeds, the safe distance to the car in front is large. At slow speeds, it's smaller. This function is monotonic. We can see that at 0MPH, we can be literally right against the car in front's bumper. But as speed increases, the safe distance must also increase.
Now consider a bunch of cars sitting at a traffic light. If, as you assume, they all start moving at the same time, then every car will immediately enter into an unsafe following distance as soon as the speed starts increasing. Every car will need to increase its following distance. How can we accomplish this? Either we have the front cars follow an acceleration profile that is faster, in order to 'stretch out' the chain or we force the rear cars to follow an acceleration profile that is slower to accomplish the same thing. Since this pack of cars is gated by an intersection, and we assume the front car is going to depart at its maximum safe comfortable speed anyway, only the second option makes sense. The later cars will have to delay their departure acceleration in order to achieve a safe distance. If every car followed the same acceleration profile of the first car, you would end up with a pack of cars going 60mph nearly touching each others' bumpers. If you are proposing tat self-driving cars will make thing safe, you are wrong.
So the whole "all the cars can start moving at the same time" thing is stupid. It doesn't make sense, even with computer-driven cars. So what if the cars all start moving at
My 2002 Buick Park Avenue does this too. It gets a rough shift when the transmission senses a problem with the shift solenoids, and it will shift roughly until you turn it off and turn it back on.
I don't know shit about graphics.
But the PS2 game "ICO" taught me a few things. It's hard to explain the impact the graphics had when the game came out. Particularly the trees...they look absolutely amazing for a PS2 game which was actually developed for the PS1 (it fits on a CD, rather than DVD).
I tried to get a close FPV on the leaves, and I realized there weren't any leaves. Just simple shapes that shimmered, glittered and moved in mass like a tree. The PS1-era developers didn't have anywhere near enough polygons to actually generate leaves; they didn't have raytracing hardware to simulate light glittering off millions of leaves, and they didn't have subsurface scattering to model light going through the leaves. But it didn't matter, because they managed to hack something that looks just like a fucking tree from any reasonable distance. They didn't synthesize a TREE...they synthesized something that looked like a tree, using minimal primitive elements arranged to give a stunning impression of a tree--some real Bob Ross shit.
In other parts of the game, there are what appear to be very realistic dust effects and lighting effects (in the cathedral area). These effects were just amazing at the time...beautiful. A closer inspection shows that they just hand-placed luminescent polygons to construct every shaft of light in the cathedral, and the apparent dust effects are just moving texture on the polygons. Again...no ray tracing, no particle effects, but they made something that looked absolutely convincing, the way a good painter can give an impression of light paint and canvas--basically human visual cortex hacking.
There is no point to this post, except that there is more to creating good graphics than technology.
You are wrong. Bandwidth is a correct term for describing the 3GB cap, because it's not a 3GB absolute cap, it is a cap of 3GB PER UNIT OF TIME. Which as you point out, is a RATE of usage. And so BANDWIDTH is the correct term.
It's a rate averaged over a span of time, rather than an instantaneous rate, but it's still a rate, and therefore, it's perfectly correct to call it a bandwidth cap. 3GB/MONTH or 100Mbit/s or 9600bits per second--a unit of information divided by a time is a bandwidth.
I see your point; I really do. As a Linux user, I would really like a Linux Steam client so that I can play Portal. But I don't know if I will ever see one of those in my lifetime.
I had to buy a Roku box to get Netflix, so maybe I will have to buy a Steam box to get steam. Does it bother me that I should have to buy another piece of consumer hardware just to access "content" that I should be able to access with my Linux HTPC? Yes. But beggars can't be choosers.
But you didn't get my earlier point, that the tool assumes that the end user wants to simulate, but hobbyists and robotics people are not going to be making diagrams for simulating; they just want to communicate a schematic visually. Classic blunder...not knowing your audience. Yes, a resistance in series with a coil would be equivalent, but you know what would be easier for both me and the web designer? Just let me plop down the coil symbol and then decide for my own goddam self how I want to label it, instead of "letting" me pick from a limited list of 5 parts, and forcing my label to have the unit you are just sure that I want.
This doesn't have to be a serious design tool. The real benefit is going to be to the DIY and hobby community, because tools like this are going to reduce the amount of shitty hand-drawn schematics uploaded to web forums, typically done in Paint or scrawled on notebook paper and then imaged with a cell phone. I've been looking for a quick way to bang out a schematic for a while now.
My thoughts:
The drawing is great and the interface does a good job of being easy enough to start without having to read directions.
They only have a selection of 8 NPN transistors, and you HAVE to choose one...there is no way to place a generic transistor and label it yourself. Even if you modify the parameters, you still have to have it labeled with one of the parts choices they provide. WTF? There is also no darlington transistor symbol.
Also, if you choose coil, you have to have it labeled with the inductance value in H, and you can't have it show a resistance value. This is stupid for motor coils, where you care about resistance at least as much as inductance.
So, force less shit down my throat, assume less about what I want to tell my audience, and it will be perfect.
You have it backward. The digital revolution was a boon to camera companies, not a blow. In the film era, cameras lasted decades. I'm still using my 1979 Olympus OM1, and I'm not sure it's ever even been overhauled. Digital introduced a market where pros and prosumers would be buying new cameras every year or two...especially in the beginning when technology was advancing fast.
It's also related to tax policy. Income which is poured back into assets and operating costs is not taxed. The goal for American corporations is to show 0 profit. To do otherwise results in paying more taxes.
There would be a similar amount of innovation around hydroponics and greenhouse tech if growing cannabis was legal. Or another way of looking at it, all these "innovative" homebrewers, equipment sellers, and store owners could just as easily be criminals. Hurray for "innovation" in a culture of arbitrary oppression.
Homebrewing versus homegrowing is a case study in legal versus illegal drug use. In homebrewing, we get innovation, recreation and a healthy hobby. In homegrowing, we get clogged jails, ruined lives, paramilitary police forces and thousands dead from border violence. The only difference is a few strokes of the pen in Washington. I have no doubt there is are well-meaning do-gooders lobbying to make homebrewing illegal.
Or just go straight to "ludicrous priority".
Our nation is in sad shape when we have to receive permission from our government in order push technology into new areas. Engineers will not drive our future...lobbyists will, because that's what truly limits our potential.
Flying cars are technologically possible, just not politically possible. There's no license plate category for them, and until there is, they won't exist. Innovation stifled by bureaucracy.
Small aircraft to this day use ancient Rotax engines with magnetos--decades-old design--just because that's what approved, not because that's the cutting edge.
When I go to classic car rallys, I'm impressed not by the technology on display, but by the fact that it's all illegal. None of the classic cars there would be legal to produce and sell today. Nobody would probably produce a '85 firebird today, but who knows? Nobody will try, because it would be illegal anyway. Even my old Corolla, which got 35 mpg in the 90's, would probably not pass mandatory crash tests today.
Engineers and technology do not dictate what is possible in America; Washington does. It reminds me of all the stories of the failed Communist and Socialist economies where they drove shitty two-cycle cars and technology decades behind, and were lucky at that, because that's what they were reduced to by their overlords.
I'm struck by the fact that if America had always suffered under the current regulatory burdens, we probably would still be working or railroads or cars or airplanes. We would probably still be trying to get the FDA to approve the microwave oven or some other agency to approve cell phones.