Perhaps you should press for open specs and open code next time you buy a $200,000 piece of hardware, if your spending that much the company should bend over backwards to provide what you need
You either don't know how business works or you haven't worked with expensive systems.
I write software for instruments that sell for upwards of $500,000 and I can assure you that we do not give out our source code or specs to our hardware and somehow we still manage to have a market-leading product with over 1,000 systems installed. OTOH, we commit to 5 years (I think) minimum support after the last sale and 15 years is the expected lifetime of the product (meaning we expect to sell it for 15 years, not that a particular one will only last 15 years). If we've discontinued the product you may have to pay for support, but at least it will still be available.
I'll also second the poster above who noted that ISA bus is still available. The machine I am talking about uses ISA and USB bus devices of our own design and there are still many manufacturers of industrial PCs who provide ISA busses.
It helps to move to a state that has plenty of empty space to start with:-) The entire state of Minnesota probably has less population than the greater Boston area. My last place in CT was a postage stamp of land literally almost as small as the house itself. Here I have 10 acres and wish it was more.
In the city, plot sizes are about the same as most other places, but you can be already in farmland a mere 20 minutes outside Minneapolis and there is plenty of available land. It's nice having fresh eggs, being able to grow any vegetables I feel like, etc. But the scary thing is that if I did an ROI analysis, I'd probably find that the payback period was about 10 years+ on the chickens, so I'm definitely doing it for the lifestyle, not money savings.
I like your site. It reminds me that since moving to the country we haven't been visiting galleries, going to dance performances, etc like we used to:-( Mpls is probably the best place in the Midwest for art & cultural activities.
+5 to everything you said!! Wish I had mod points.
I have lived well within my means for my entire life...right up until we bought the current house:-) In my case, we prioritized having a lot of land without having a 1 hour commute over pretty much everything else. Some people like iPhones, my wife likes having her horses right outside the front door.
Anyway, I also like playing with LEDS (working on battery powered LED lighting for my chicken coop: http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/ ), do you have a link to pics of your work? I enjoy seeing how creative people get with lighting.
Do you really not get it, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
It's simply not a moral or ethical matter. There is no "gray area." This is business: a simple acceptance of payment in return for work done. Despite what you may think, leaving your employ for a competitor to work on exactly the same product is neither illegal nor unethical except, as I noted, if you divulge trade secrets. And the only way to be assured that this can never happen would be to job-change to a different industry. If you think that's an exaggeration then you have the luxury of living in a much different world than I do!
As far as the OP is concerned, while he may be commended for thinking about his responsibility to an alleged "community," the reality is that his work is his own to do with as he pleases and if he chooses to take his toys and go home, they just have to deal with it.
Are you suggesting that it is completely ethical to take a detailed knowledge of a company's future plans, as yet unreleased products, or sales leads with you to their competitor? That would make absolutely no sense!
If they're not trade secrets (and for something to be legally a Trade Secret, the company has to take steps to maintain that secrecy), of course it's ethical. How do you think salespeople move around in an industry? It's pretty much expected that they will take a number of customers with them when they move unless the co. can stop them. And since you can't force someone to do business with you, there's nothing the company can really do to stop it. If I go to work for my employer's competitor, I'm not suddenly going to forget everything I learned working here! I have tons of useful domain knowledge including what works in our products and what doesn't. That's a huge part of the reason anyone would want to hire me away.
Since I had almost exactly this conversation yesterday, I'll chime in. I have a small computer I built using an Atmel microcontroller to check status of my chicken coop: what's the inside temperature, is the door open? (http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com) that sends data over Bluetooth to the house. I can communicate with it using a PC, but what if I'm not near a PC? I wanted to be able to check status from my cell phone when inside the house. The phone supports the Bluetooth SPP that my controller does, but If I write code for the phone, then I need access to its SDK, an emulator, etc.
However if I can put a TCP stack on my little computer (I never thought about it before, but it's about the size of a business card also!) and wrote a simple webserver (a trivial one can be done in an afternoon), then I could access all the data I need just using the phone's Web browser.
There's your answer:-)
Now, to be practical, I'd also need to have a wireless AP out in the chicken pen, but in principle it would work just fine.
So you're saying that not only were you paying speakeasy late, you were also considerably behind on your power bill as well (no utility is going to shut you off without warning and not just because you're 15 days late on a single payment). Can I assume you were also very late (read: months) on other bills as well?
I've had what you mention happen to me before: you go to the bank and fill out an affidavit of unauthorized withdrawal. As you say, it is a federal crime and the bank will investigate and you'll most likely get your money back. Since you didn't mention anything like this I'll assume you didn't. Is it possible that you had an agreement with speakeasy that gave them permission to debit the account if you were significantly late with payment? Read the fine print on your contract: most corporations aren't that stupid. You probably agreed to it somewhere whether you realize it or not.
As far as the calls from the credit department goes: you may not have asked for credit, but by allowing you to pay late, they were certainly extending it to you. When BB took them over, somebody in Finance probably noticed that a lot of customers were paying late and they were told to get their Receivables aging down to improve cashflow. You're a business, you should understand this.
USB may well survive, but I'm doubtful; even RS-232 didn't last that long.
Are you kidding? RS232 has been around since the 60's and I still design it into new devices in 2008. Not to mention that you can easily buy brand new industrial computers with RS232 ports. When it comes to the combination of simplicity and ruggedness, it's hard to beat it.
One thing I will note is that the QSR is pretty waterfall oriented, both because it predates the formalization of iterative/agile methodologies, and because it's written for engineering of physical boxes that have to be released to manufacturing (which implies a fair bit of waterfallism). Part of our effort is to practice iterative development methodology while documenting to the FDA's standards.
Just a note: you're not alone. More and more device companies are trying Agile approaches while still adhering to QSR. This was a good article from MDDI a while back: http://www.devicelink.com/mddi/archive/07/10/009.html
And that is exactly what you need in countries that don't have a subsidization program
What's with this "the Government will save us attitude?" No, subsidies aren't what we need; what we need is for capitalism to work. Someone will realize that the public (probably hobbyists and technical Greens first) want these in small quantities. That someone then buys them wholesale and makes a profit by selling small numbers of panels at higher cost to the general public.
I live on a farm and have a number of applications where I need occasional electricity, but it's uneconomical to run powerlines. Solar charged batteries works great for that.
Oddly enough, I'm doing the same thing: in fact I just came back inside after a day of building. I'm building a coop for my ducks & chickens and am going to light it with power LEDs & surplus solar cells and perhaps keep the water liquid this winter using solar heating.
Solar cells are pretty straightfoward. Just think of them as batteries and you won't be too far off.
PM me if you want to run some ideas by me. I am an EE and I've done enough design work that this should be trivial. I'm also making my first attempt at a blog: http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/
The fallacy that software is somehow different is just that
I have been saying this for years to anyone who would listen. People just seem to think that there is something special about software that makes it immune to normal project management procedures. It isn't! You don't manage it properly, you get crap.
The article references the Sparkfun site as the location where he got the hardware. Sparkfun is a company started by 2 guys when they were still in college and it's a pretty good site for digital electronics beginners. Take a look at it sometime.
I'm not affiliated, but I did just buy a Bluetooth interface from them so I could turn a serial-based computer interface I sell to a few people into a wireless-enabled one.
Anyway, if you want to learn more about beginning electronics or have questions, come on over to http://forum.servomagazine.com/ and head for the General section. Plenty of people from beginning to experienced and happy to help out.
Road service is pretty much up to the job where I live. Oops, I forgot... taxes baaaaad, truck gooood.
It's asshole replies like this that give "environmentalists" a bad name. Ignoring for the moment that people should be able to spend their money however they wish, the fact is that many of us need trucks. Snowplows don't come where I live: they send in road graders. We live in a rural area and it could be hours after a snowstorm before our roads are cleared. Trust me: without a high ground-clearance vehicle, you aren't going anywhere until the road is cleared. Typically, my SUV is the only one of our three vehicles that will even make it the 500' to the next cross street after a big storm.
But what irriatates me more is this focus on automotive purchases. That guy in the SUV you hate so much, has it occurred to you, e.g., that his house is probably more energy efficient because he can afford a newer house than the person in the Geo Metro? That because the cost of filling up his tank makes him so aware of his energy usage that he finds other ways to conserve? No, you'd rather just be a jerk.
It's like the people that glare at me in the store because I want plastic bags instead of paper: they're easier to carry and I can reuse them. But hey, no one notices that my groceries are almost all fresh fruit, veggies and meat while "Mr. Paper Please" has $150 of canned & highly processed crap.
but your offhand thought that oh, it would be simple and cheap and reliable is just offbase.
Thank you for saying that. I was trying really, really hard to resist the urge not to flame that stream of poorly thought-out, half-baked posts:-)
I live in Minnesota, and even on a normal winter day here, my 3 year old sports car bitches about starting when it's -10F. Seals don't work right, electrical subsystems switch on and won't switch back off until it warms up (drained an entire tank of windshield washer fluid that way!), etc. I hate to think what the engineering challenges are for Mars, or even Antarctica. Scratch that! I'd actually love to be able to work on solving said challenges.
We should first and foremost be thinking about population controls. Nail that one (figuratively, we want less kids) and we are well on our way to solving some real-world issues
Exactly what problem would this solve? The planet is by no means even close to being overpopulated.
Try telling an aerospace engineer he should do some work on space vehicles at home in order to build experience when he's tired of working on Cessnas...
Not really. Many aerospace engineers are rocketry hobbyists. I have known Mechanical engineers who have 2-ton milling machines in their basement/garage for fun. Many people who enjoy their engineering work find ways to do it off the clock.
I think a lot has to do with the cop you speak to. A while back my garage was broken into and a ton of tools, fishing gear and a mountain bike stolen. I reported the crime, but never expected anything to happen.
Fast forward about 6 months. I'm driving home and I see this guy riding my (very rare and highly modified) bike. After rethinking the original idea of running him off the road and beating the crap out of him, I followed him to his house in an even nastier part of town than I lived in and called the cops.
Sheer dumb luck, the officer they sent was the same one who took the original theft report. He went over to the neighborhood I told him and came back an hour later with bike in his trunk and the guy in the back seat.
Turned out it wasn't my bike after all, just the same make/model/color with similar upgrades. Guess it's good I didn't drive into him with my truck like I soooo wanted to:-) But the point is, he did what I expected cops to do and I thanked him for following up on it. I don't know how rare that kind of behavior is, but I sure appreciated it.
We're all driven by the biological imperitive -- reproduction
You evidently don't realize this, but some of us are quite capable of understanding that and yet going past it. My wife, for example, is well aware that I am into her for her tits & ass -- I make sure to tell her that often and the smile on her face when I point out that the sight of her bending over in tight jeans has given me a hardon is a joy to behold. The point is we both know that even without the great T&A, she's an absolutely amazing and intelligent person who's completely spoiled me for other women and I'd marry her again in a heartbeat.
I know that the women you describe: those who only care about money and security exist. For your sake I hope you can understand that most of them are nothing like that.
Rather than assume it's a "futuristic" home, I'd approach it from "how technology can enhance your lifestyle."
I live on a small hobby farm and I like the "low tech" feeling of living here, even though the entire house is wired for Cat5e. So...
- Excellent cordless phone/intercom system. Cell reception sucks out here and in summer we'll be outside a lot. Nice to be able to control external lights from the phone.
- Good audio that's also unobtrusive. I want quality speakers that I can put in the wall in the game room, or at least blend into the wall color. A music server is a must (gotta finish building mine!).
- Nice sized plasma monitors: 42" is about the largest that will fit my living room without looking clunky. I like the idea of putting it in a frame.
- Windows that can dim electronically (LCD?): my living room has huge east-facing windows and the sun streams in during the morning (good). But it shines directly on the best spot for a TV (bad) and since we love the view, we have no intention of covering the windows with drapery.
- Remote lighting control. I use X-10 and all its annoyances. I want something better.
- Security system: nah, got two large dogs:-)
- Driveway lighting that detects *our* vehicles coming and turns on at night.
Good topic! It reminds me I have a lot of stuff to get done:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You either don't know how business works or you haven't worked with expensive systems.
I write software for instruments that sell for upwards of $500,000 and I can assure you that we do not give out our source code or specs to our hardware and somehow we still manage to have a market-leading product with over 1,000 systems installed.
OTOH, we commit to 5 years (I think) minimum support after the last sale and 15 years is the expected lifetime of the product (meaning we expect to sell it for 15 years, not that a particular one will only last 15 years). If we've discontinued the product you may have to pay for support, but at least it will still be available.
I'll also second the poster above who noted that ISA bus is still available. The machine I am talking about uses ISA and USB bus devices of our own design and there are still many manufacturers of industrial PCs who provide ISA busses.
It helps to move to a state that has plenty of empty space to start with :-) The entire state of Minnesota probably has less population than the greater Boston area. My last place in CT was a postage stamp of land literally almost as small as the house itself. Here I have 10 acres and wish it was more.
In the city, plot sizes are about the same as most other places, but you can be already in farmland a mere 20 minutes outside Minneapolis and there is plenty of available land.
It's nice having fresh eggs, being able to grow any vegetables I feel like, etc. But the scary thing is that if I did an ROI analysis, I'd probably find that the payback period was about 10 years+ on the chickens, so I'm definitely doing it for the lifestyle, not money savings.
I like your site. It reminds me that since moving to the country we haven't been visiting galleries, going to dance performances, etc like we used to :-(
Mpls is probably the best place in the Midwest for art & cultural activities.
+5 to everything you said!! Wish I had mod points.
I have lived well within my means for my entire life...right up until we bought the current house :-) In my case, we prioritized having a lot of land without having a 1 hour commute over pretty much everything else. Some people like iPhones, my wife likes having her horses right outside the front door.
Anyway, I also like playing with LEDS (working on battery powered LED lighting for my chicken coop: http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/ ), do you have a link to pics of your work? I enjoy seeing how creative people get with lighting.
Since when is a single person making $25,000/year a poor person???
Do you really not get it, or are you being deliberately obtuse?
It's simply not a moral or ethical matter. There is no "gray area." This is business: a simple acceptance of payment in return for work done. Despite what you may think, leaving your employ for a competitor to work on exactly the same product is neither illegal nor unethical except, as I noted, if you divulge trade secrets. And the only way to be assured that this can never happen would be to job-change to a different industry. If you think that's an exaggeration then you have the luxury of living in a much different world than I do!
As far as the OP is concerned, while he may be commended for thinking about his responsibility to an alleged "community," the reality is that his work is his own to do with as he pleases and if he chooses to take his toys and go home, they just have to deal with it.
If they're not trade secrets (and for something to be legally a Trade Secret, the company has to take steps to maintain that secrecy), of course it's ethical. How do you think salespeople move around in an industry? It's pretty much expected that they will take a number of customers with them when they move unless the co. can stop them. And since you can't force someone to do business with you, there's nothing the company can really do to stop it.
If I go to work for my employer's competitor, I'm not suddenly going to forget everything I learned working here! I have tons of useful domain knowledge including what works in our products and what doesn't. That's a huge part of the reason anyone would want to hire me away.
Do you actually work for a living?
Are you suggesting that every time you change jobs you should take care to get a job in a different industry? That would make absolutely no sense!
Since I had almost exactly this conversation yesterday, I'll chime in. I have a small computer I built using an Atmel microcontroller to check status of my chicken coop: what's the inside temperature, is the door open? (http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com) that sends data over Bluetooth to the house. I can communicate with it using a PC, but what if I'm not near a PC? I wanted to be able to check status from my cell phone when inside the house. The phone supports the Bluetooth SPP that my controller does, but If I write code for the phone, then I need access to its SDK, an emulator, etc.
However if I can put a TCP stack on my little computer (I never thought about it before, but it's about the size of a business card also!) and wrote a simple webserver (a trivial one can be done in an afternoon), then I could access all the data I need just using the phone's Web browser.
There's your answer :-)
Now, to be practical, I'd also need to have a wireless AP out in the chicken pen, but in principle it would work just fine.
So you're saying that not only were you paying speakeasy late, you were also considerably behind on your power bill as well (no utility is going to shut you off without warning and not just because you're 15 days late on a single payment). Can I assume you were also very late (read: months) on other bills as well?
I've had what you mention happen to me before: you go to the bank and fill out an affidavit of unauthorized withdrawal. As you say, it is a federal crime and the bank will investigate and you'll most likely get your money back. Since you didn't mention anything like this I'll assume you didn't. Is it possible that you had an agreement with speakeasy that gave them permission to debit the account if you were significantly late with payment? Read the fine print on your contract: most corporations aren't that stupid. You probably agreed to it somewhere whether you realize it or not.
As far as the calls from the credit department goes: you may not have asked for credit, but by allowing you to pay late, they were certainly extending it to you. When BB took them over, somebody in Finance probably noticed that a lot of customers were paying late and they were told to get their Receivables aging down to improve cashflow. You're a business, you should understand this.
Sorry, no cookie!
Are you kidding? RS232 has been around since the 60's and I still design it into new devices in 2008. Not to mention that you can easily buy brand new industrial computers with RS232 ports. When it comes to the combination of simplicity and ruggedness, it's hard to beat it.
Just a note: you're not alone. More and more device companies are trying Agile approaches while still adhering to QSR. This was a good article from MDDI a while back: http://www.devicelink.com/mddi/archive/07/10/009.html
What's with this "the Government will save us attitude?" No, subsidies aren't what we need; what we need is for capitalism to work. Someone will realize that the public (probably hobbyists and technical Greens first) want these in small quantities. That someone then buys them wholesale and makes a profit by selling small numbers of panels at higher cost to the general public.
I live on a farm and have a number of applications where I need occasional electricity, but it's uneconomical to run powerlines. Solar charged batteries works great for that.
Oddly enough, I'm doing the same thing: in fact I just came back inside after a day of building.
I'm building a coop for my ducks & chickens and am going to light it with power LEDs & surplus solar cells and perhaps keep the water liquid this winter using solar heating.
Solar cells are pretty straightfoward. Just think of them as batteries and you won't be too far off.
PM me if you want to run some ideas by me. I am an EE and I've done enough design work that this should be trivial. I'm also making my first attempt at a blog: http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/
You do realize, don't you, that humans have been managing projects for millenia before IT was a gleam in someone's eye?
I have been saying this for years to anyone who would listen. People just seem to think that there is something special about software that makes it immune to normal project management procedures. It isn't! You don't manage it properly, you get crap.
The article references the Sparkfun site as the location where he got the hardware. Sparkfun is a company started by 2 guys when they were still in college and it's a pretty good site for digital electronics beginners. Take a look at it sometime.
I'm not affiliated, but I did just buy a Bluetooth interface from them so I could turn a serial-based computer interface I sell to a few people into a wireless-enabled one.
Anyway, if you want to learn more about beginning electronics or have questions, come on over to http://forum.servomagazine.com/ and head for the General section. Plenty of people from beginning to experienced and happy to help out.
It's asshole replies like this that give "environmentalists" a bad name. Ignoring for the moment that people should be able to spend their money however they wish, the fact is that many of us need trucks.
Snowplows don't come where I live: they send in road graders. We live in a rural area and it could be hours after a snowstorm before our roads are cleared. Trust me: without a high ground-clearance vehicle, you aren't going anywhere until the road is cleared. Typically, my SUV is the only one of our three vehicles that will even make it the 500' to the next cross street after a big storm.
But what irriatates me more is this focus on automotive purchases. That guy in the SUV you hate so much, has it occurred to you, e.g., that his house is probably more energy efficient because he can afford a newer house than the person in the Geo Metro? That because the cost of filling up his tank makes him so aware of his energy usage that he finds other ways to conserve? No, you'd rather just be a jerk.
It's like the people that glare at me in the store because I want plastic bags instead of paper: they're easier to carry and I can reuse them. But hey, no one notices that my groceries are almost all fresh fruit, veggies and meat while "Mr. Paper Please" has $150 of canned & highly processed crap.
Um. I don't know what kind of CRT you had before, but MPEG artifacting from Dish Network shows up quite clearly on my Sony WEGA (Trinitron) screen.
First time in months that I haven't had points and I've wanted to mod someone to infinity!
Thank you for saying that. I was trying really, really hard to resist the urge not to flame that stream of poorly thought-out, half-baked posts
I live in Minnesota, and even on a normal winter day here, my 3 year old sports car bitches about starting when it's -10F. Seals don't work right, electrical subsystems switch on and won't switch back off until it warms up (drained an entire tank of windshield washer fluid that way!), etc. I hate to think what the engineering challenges are for Mars, or even Antarctica.
Scratch that! I'd actually love to be able to work on solving said challenges.
But not with ostrich feathers.
Exactly what problem would this solve? The planet is by no means even close to being overpopulated.
Not really. Many aerospace engineers are rocketry hobbyists. I have known Mechanical engineers who have 2-ton milling machines in their basement/garage for fun. Many people who enjoy their engineering work find ways to do it off the clock.
I think a lot has to do with the cop you speak to. A while back my garage was broken into and a ton of tools, fishing gear and a mountain bike stolen. I reported the crime, but never expected anything to happen.
:-)
Fast forward about 6 months. I'm driving home and I see this guy riding my (very rare and highly modified) bike. After rethinking the original idea of running him off the road and beating the crap out of him, I followed him to his house in an even nastier part of town than I lived in and called the cops.
Sheer dumb luck, the officer they sent was the same one who took the original theft report. He went over to the neighborhood I told him and came back an hour later with bike in his trunk and the guy in the back seat.
Turned out it wasn't my bike after all, just the same make/model/color with similar upgrades. Guess it's good I didn't drive into him with my truck like I soooo wanted to
But the point is, he did what I expected cops to do and I thanked him for following up on it. I don't know how rare that kind of behavior is, but I sure appreciated it.
You evidently don't realize this, but some of us are quite capable of understanding that and yet going past it.
My wife, for example, is well aware that I am into her for her tits & ass -- I make sure to tell her that often and the smile on her face when I point out that the sight of her bending over in tight jeans has given me a hardon is a joy to behold. The point is we both know that even without the great T&A, she's an absolutely amazing and intelligent person who's completely spoiled me for other women and I'd marry her again in a heartbeat.
I know that the women you describe: those who only care about money and security exist. For your sake I hope you can understand that most of them are nothing like that.
Rather than assume it's a "futuristic" home, I'd approach it from "how technology can enhance your lifestyle."
:-)
:-)
I live on a small hobby farm and I like the "low tech" feeling of living here, even though the entire house is wired for Cat5e. So...
- Excellent cordless phone/intercom system. Cell reception sucks out here and in summer we'll be outside a lot. Nice to be able to control external lights from the phone.
- Good audio that's also unobtrusive. I want quality speakers that I can put in the wall in the game room, or at least blend into the wall color. A music server is a must (gotta finish building mine!).
- Nice sized plasma monitors: 42" is about the largest that will fit my living room without looking clunky. I like the idea of putting it in a frame.
- Windows that can dim electronically (LCD?): my living room has huge east-facing windows and the sun streams in during the morning (good). But it shines directly on the best spot for a TV (bad) and since we love the view, we have no intention of covering the windows with drapery.
- Remote lighting control. I use X-10 and all its annoyances. I want something better.
- Security system: nah, got two large dogs
- Driveway lighting that detects *our* vehicles coming and turns on at night.
Good topic! It reminds me I have a lot of stuff to get done