And your attitude is the exact reason why I'm leaving I/T if I can do it. People who work their ass off should be rewarded and NOT replaced. Why? Because if you reward them and keep them they'll work their ass off for you AGAIN and AGAIN.
It's not how hard you did or did not work, nor how competent you are that elicited that response. Incidentally, you would get that type of a response from pretty much all but the most extraordinary managers. You got that response because of how you approached the problem. There isn't a manager in the world who wants a self-important egomaniac on their staff. That kind of employee is a real massive waste of time to handle, and when you start talking about wasting your managers time, you are talking about your own time *plus* their time, so the cost adds up fast. Any manager who didn't severely punish that behavior fast would be up to their ass in trouble from every single employee they have. There isn't any employee in any company who isn't worth more to the company than they are being paid, otherwise the company wouldn't retain them at all. Taking advantage of that situation as though it only applied to you will get you removed fast so that you can no longer threaten the company. As a Manager, if I ever get wind that an applicant ever pulled that kind of stunt, their application would go in the shit-can so fast it would leave a crater.
On the other hand, if you came to me and stated, as others here have suggested, that there is a problem that I need to be aware of (Morale problems are very real problems too...), then my reaction is entirely different. Perhaps the company does not have the resources to accommodate your request, but more than likely something can be done. It all depends on your approach to the discussion. If you are hostile, then the conversation and reaction will be hostile. If your approach is a friendly, lets-solve-this-together approach, then the result will be in the same spirit.
What about the other way? Your boss has hired you to build a shed but by the time the project is done your building a mansion and they haven't giving you any more resources to do so. That shows that management is manipulative hiring a guy to to a job but then over time they can get job b, c and d as well for free.
That is the very definition of what a manager is expected to do. They are hired to maximize return on investment. If a manager doesn't save the company at least as much as his/her own salary, then he/she isn't doing his/her job, or his/her job needs to be eliminated. In many cases, doing that job means eliminating inefficiencies, but it almost always means pushing their employees as far as they will allow.
Did they not honestly believe that a disaster could occur? Did the right people not talk to each other? Or was the urge to cut corners simply so great that people ignored the risk?
From the ABC interview with one of the survivors, the BP people were arguing with the Transocean people, insisting that it would be ok to skip some phases of sealing the well because they wanted to move the schedule up. I wonder what that BP manager was thinking.
As someone who has found himself on both sides of this thought process, it is actually very easy to fall into the trap of making bad assumptions. People inherently underestimate risks. This leads to the common belief that cutting a few corners once in a while is acceptable. 60%-80% of Americans use a cell phone while driving on a regular basis, in spite of the fact that almost everyone agrees that this is a dangerous habit, and study after study has shown that it overwhelmingly increases your chances of being in an accident. The root of the problem isn't this particular set of people making the decisions, the problem is that people have any say in the process at all. Decisions at this level should be made by following a rigorous procedure without exception. When safety is concerned, no exceptions should ever be made. If exceptions can be necessary to proceed, then either the situation is unsafe, or the procedure was inadequate to begin with.
Bigger companies would have routines in place that would make this very hard... if you send an invoice, they'd better have a current PO number (or equivalent) or they'd be out of luck. Big companies have routines, and dedicated people to carry them out. This wouldn't be the first scam they'd see...
In my experience, "big companies" have lots of people working for them, doing jobs that they don't understand the importance of. Many of these people simply follow the routine without understanding the point of it. As such most of them will cheerfully help you with and what you need to do to meet their process. As such, "big companies" tend to be very easy prey for these sorts of shenanigans. Where I work, we pay a 75 year old retired contractor $470 / hour to maintain one of our legacy systems. (you read that right). This guy long ago made plain what his price was, and there isn't any other soul on earth who is "qualified" to handle the old system, so the morons I work for continue to pay the extortion when the system breaks (which thankfully is not often). The moral of the story, is that the process may be setup to prevent abuses, but no process will prevent any real amount of abuse. The only effective safeguard is having savvy employees, which, sadly, given the state of phishing in this world, just isn't in the cards.
I'd dispute that. If the signal is, say, on for one second, then off for the next, does that make it less visible? You've just halved the average power requirement, and I'd argue the flashing makes it more visible if anything. I think you'd only need a very brief flash to make it visible, particularly if that flash was repeating periodically, so the average power requirement would fall correspondingly.
What was discussed was using rastering to reduce the power need, but to reduce the power need to something manageable would require several orders of magnitude less on-time. You would be looking at 1 second on, 1 millions seconds off (scanning somewhere else). This would mean roughly two weeks between one second pulses. ?Or, you could have it on for only 1 ms out of every 1000 seconds (14 minutes), but a 1 ms pulse at 10 watts is too little to be seen against the daylight sky, so the power would have to be several kw to be seen, and once again you are back to unmanageable power again. The solution is unworkable plain and simple, there is just no real way to compete with the sun in this respect, unless your entire target is sufficiently small (a few tens of square meters at most).
I had in mind a thin line, 20km long, but only 1 meter wide - one end of the strip at the beach, the other end inland (exact distance depending on gradient of coastline at that point). So that's 20,000 square meters, and I believe that 200kW is achievable with (really big) solar panels.
Still no go, 10 watts / square meter is only bright enough to be seen as a light in the sky, reflected light will be non-existent, so it will be invisible for all intents and purposes. To "light up the sand" above daylight, you would need kws/square meter, and again it would be unworkable for anything larger than a few tens of square meters. Once again, you are failing to understand the truly colossal amount of power being output by the sun on a regular basis. The amount of power hitting the earth on Hawaii, in the form of sunlight, is greater than all of mankind's power consumption combined. You are simply not going to compete on any real meaningful basis.
Who said this thing had to illuminate the entire damn planet in one go? Jeez, ever heard of raster scanning people?
Ok, as the post above stated above, it takes ~10 watts / m^2 to illuminate. Raster scanning does not fix the problem. if you only have a signal in a given place for say 1/1000th of the time, then the signal needs to be 1000 times stronger to be noticed by the naked eye. You have to remember that we are not talking about a transmission to dedicated hardware. The end result is that your power level required is the same no matter how fancy you get with your scanning system. Unless you are proposing that we attempt to shoot just the people with the laser, and skip everywhere else to save power, but I humbly suggest that this is impracticable...
So, it has to warn people in at-risk sections of coastline. That alone cuts the area to be illuminated by orders of magnitude. Then, it doesn't need to illuminate all of these areas simultaneously and permanently - it could sweep them repeatedly. Imagine that the laser was spread out along a line, say 20Km wide, and that then scanned the affected coastlines. So the people underneath might only see a bright flash lasting for say, 10th of a second every ten seconds. Brief, but maybe enough - better than nothing if you're out of range of a siren.
Say for the sake of argument that this was just 1 square mile of coastline. That is around 2.5 Million square meters, so again for just one square mile of coastline you need 25 Megawatts. This is roughly the power consumption of a small town. Good luck with that.
The whole idea is thoroughly unworkable, not necessarily because we cant build the tech, but because the cost would be prohibitive, and there are far cheaper and more effective solutions. The process you have witnessed here, is one I have seen countless times in engineering:
Step1: Clueless moron (usually management), says hay, lets build x to solve problem y.
Step: Engineer looks at solution x, and cringes at the raw stupidity of it, then looks at problem y, and realizes that there is a far cheaper solution, possibly even already in place.
Step 3: if this is government, the moron pushes ahead with solution x anyway because it is politically valuable, even though it has no practical value.
This whole thread has been an exercise in those who understand good engineering trying to pass some knowledge to those who are quite clearly ignorant and should stop trying to solve engineering problems with frikkin lasers
I was only addressing free speech wrt government, not anything to do with impinging on other individuals' rights. What one can be criminally prosecuted for and what one can be sued for are two completely different things, and I'm discussing more the former. Well, not exactly prosecution, but government control of public domain information that effectively creates a criminal situation if you violate the order where there ought not be one.
One can be criminally prosecuted for infringing another persons rights. Hence the link to the Phoebe Prince case, which is directly to the heart of the controversy, and clearly within the governments ability to prosecute. This is one of those cases where the defense will try to argue free speech, but there is no first amendment restrictions because the government is clearly prosecuting on behalf of a victim, where the victim lost some of their "inalienable rights" due to the defendants' actions. The government is not prohibited from meting justice as a result of the first amendment prohibitions, because the government is in no way trying to restrict free speech for anyone's ends except Phoebe Prince as a private individual.
You're wrong. There are no limitations on free speech. Our Constitution is not intended to protect some particular kind of speech, political or other. In fact, it's not designed to protect the free speech of citizens at all.
Our Constitution does not grant citizens free speech, it recognizes our right to free speech as an inalienable right. The point of this document is not to call out specific freedoms that people have, rather it's to grant the government certain powers. If it's not specifically mentioned, rights are presumed to reside with the individual or the state in the US (and state constitutions are similarly framed).
In the case where information is generated by government officials (the police), that information is presumed to be in the public domain except in specific circumstances.
Now it is you who have failed to understand what the constitution has to say about government, and free speech. The first amendment is about prohibiting the government from taking any action against our various rights, including free speech. It does not however recognize any right to anything where that right impinges on other individuals rights. Free Speech is only free when the act of speaking does no harm that would not otherwise have come to pass. If you Bully and taunt someone , to the point of loss for example, then you are responsible for the consequences. The first amendment merely codifies the fact that the government has no standing to complain about anything anyone says. That does not mean that individuals cannot make such complaint, and under those circumstances, the government is justified and required to act on behalf of the individuals, and in their best interests. Up until that point however, the government has no right to act, and our government is supposed to be explicitly prevented from pro-active action by the constitution.
A good way to paraphrase is: The government may punish individuals for what they say, but it must not take action to prevent them from ever saying it in the first place
Censorship is inherently contrary to democracy, because the only way a democracy can function is with an informed electorate, Hence a democracy with censorship is not really a democracy, but rather more of an aristocracy, or worse: a farce.
It is precisely this attitude that allows injustice to prevail in the world. Congratulations, you've just enabled evil.
No, its the people who, ignorantly, believe that democracy will fix this problem due to some "will of the people", that are enabling evil. Capitalism and democracy created this problem and enable the behavior. Just like all other forms of government, the problem is that government does a poor job of controlling and channeling greed into productive ends.
In the early '80's, it was discovered that a PC would hang on the average of about every three weeks due to the ionizing effect of cosmic rays here in Denver.
No, it was postulated that this was the cause. The reality was that if this was truly the cause of most random errors, then different software running on identical hardware would be more or less equally susceptible to the same transient errors. The reality is that most errors are from software faults, and not transient errors, as evidenced by the fact that most alternative OS's from the 80's and early 90's (UNIX, OS2, etc) were significantly more stable than the M$ variants. BTW, 80's microprocessor systems did not have login prompts, only the mainframe systems did, and they did not BSOD.If you are referring to the mid 90's, then yes, M$ pc's regularly BSOD'd, but the problem was usually from an endless supply of memory leaks in the kernel, and not from any outside events, again evidenced by the fact that competing OS products did not have this failure mode with any significant regularity.
Modern hardware has been hardened against other kinds of failures that caused trouble including higher transient voltage protections which keep voltage spikes in the power source, and across networks from causing as much damage to components. Modern components also have a higher tolerance for static discharge, which reduces DOA frequencies, but there are no special protections, built into modern microchips, against cosmic radiation. ECC and other protections are generally designated for signals that must traverse a bus, and are thereby significantly more susceptible to outside EM interference (which, unlike cosmic radiation, is a very real problem for microchip designers).
I know you meant this sarcastically, but in fact, this example demonstrates their incompetence. How often do you see boondoggles like this when two private sector companies write contracts with each other? Maybe it's because when a private sector buyer writes a contract, the contract guarantees delivery of the product. With the government, everything is "renegotiable".
Actually, this kind of crap happens in the private sector as well. I work for a fortune 100 company, and we just blew over a billion dollars on a company wide "systemic upgrade", which failed to produce any of the promised efficiency gains, caused massive service problems for our customers, and apparently has no viable software maintenance program. The difference, is that usually when a private company does something this monumentally stupid, they go out of business...
BTW, is anyone out there looking for an embedded engineer with 10 years management experience, or a project manager with embedded design experience?
Could you please point out exactly where I proposed any thing at all, let alone that everyone should "avoid everything"?
Please, do not pull this sort of idiotic stunt. I am pretty capable of saying crap by myself. I don't need you to try to put your words into my mouth, let alone that sort of nonsense.
He responded to you the way he did because you came off as a bit of a paranoid nutjob.
And for the record, New Scientist is not what you would call a highly reputable organization. Linking them was your first mistake, after that few people will take you seriously.
If you can afford a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, you're making an awful lot of money for a computer engineer. Where can the rest of us get jobs like yours?
When / if you make an offer, make sure that it includes an allowance for modification of the structure to make it "radiation safe". Take the allowance and pocket it, thereby saving you a bunch of money on the upfront side.
Be prepared for the next purchaser to use this same pretext when you sell, and price accordingly.
Even better: once you own the property, create a B.S. LLC and use it to certify the property as "radiation safe" Then provide the certificate, the "radiation data", and the receipt for the radiation exposure study, when you go to sell the property. Then you get the best price coming and going...
Care to name all of these conflicts we supposedly started? Please cite your sources to how we started them too. I think if you take the time to research this subject you're going to get a wicked eye opening.
Ok, since we are going to have a go of it...
1st: Iraq. We invaded Iraq ostensibly to depose a Dictator, but instead only ended up wreaking havoc on the most politically and socially stable country in the middle east. Anyone who believes Bush seniors decision to invade Iraq following the Kuwait fiasco, needs only come and see me about a bridge I have for sale. The reasons for the Gulf Ware were largely fabricated at the time by the Kuwaiti Royal family who by no co-incidence happen to be family friends of the Bush family. Whether knowingly or not, George Bush senior involved us in a war which gave the impression to the rest of the world to be an almost completely unwarranted US invasion of an OPEC nation, for what appeared to be monetary reasons.
2nd: Iraq again, Round two, had even less valid reasons, and smelled worse than the first.
3rd: Afghanistan. Once again, we invade another country, This time for supporting terrorists, but if you had asked any of the senior Russian military personnel about catching terrorists in Afghanistan, they would have told you to save your effort. Even without US interference, Afghanistan was difficult for the USSR to handle, but then the US provided them with weapons to kill Soviets (and one another) with, but was no where to be found when the killing was over, and it was time to rebuild. We shouldn't have to wonder why the Taliban (who we actually supported at one time) think we're slime.
4th: Bay of pigs. You can look that one up on your own time.
5th: The Spanish American war. The US on the path to empire takes on those who are in the way.
There is plenty more, that was just what I came across in a 10 minute trek through Wikipedia.
I don't have an iPhone, but I know for a FACT that it's damned easy to ruin a phone accidentally. My (now ex) wife dropped our new Star Tek in the coffee when we were travelling; bye bye Star Tek. I got caught in a thunderstorm at a George Thorogood concert at the Illinois State Fair; bye bye LG. I slipped on the ice and fell with my phone in the pocket I fell on; bye bye Nokia. Dropped my Razr in the toilet while trying to answer it when I was pissing; despite immediatekly removing the battery and washing it and drying it out, it was ruined, never to work again.
Ok, first: Dropping a phone in a coffee pot? Are you trying to do too many things at once? Fell on ice with your nokia? maybe you should keep it in a shirt pocket instead, or cough up the $15 for a hard shell case, since you seem to have a hard time keeping your feet under you and exercising appropriate caution.when walking. Dropped a phone in the toilet? There are two basic times when a person should *never* use a phone. Driving and pissing, and I'm not 100% on the former. Keep your life to one activity at a time, you can call the person back in 3 minutes when you are done emptying your bladder: "I was in the bathroom" is a commonly accepted excuse for not answering a call right away, and is in fact proper etiquette.
Of all the indicated ways you destroyed your phone, the only one that might be the result of anything other than your own carelessness would be the concert, but I'm not really sure how a rain storm, even a torrential downpour, would destroy a phone unless you fell in a mud puddle and submerged the phone for an extended period, in which case the question needs to be asked: "What were you doing when that phone got drenched?
I have owned a half dozen cell phones in my life, and all of them succumbed to upgrades save one, which I carelessly lost the phone. The moral of the story is that if you don't treat your belongings with respect, you wont have them for long.
I actually build my own spdif hardware and audio dacs (my audio gear is all DIY stuff). and I do use i2s as an 'interconnect' between spdif receivers and the dac chips (when we build dacs, we take great care to layout the pcb traces to ENSURE that the i2s lines are exact(!) lengths. its just proper engineering.)
There is a vast difference between building your own equipment and designing it. Building something from a kit requires only knowledge of the assembly techniques required and an ability to follow, paint-by-number style, instructions. Designing something requires fundamental understanding. It is clear from your numerous posts that you are clearly skilled as an assembly technician, but are equally clearly lacking in formal design skill. If you were in fact a skilled *designer*, you would understand the way in which the SPDIF spec is designed and why they made the decisions they did. Poor quality cabling is a design consideration that can, and is, compensated for in the design of the IIS specification. As such, only minimal quality cabling is required. In fact, IIS borrowed heavily from Ethernet, and the two specs are remarkably similar. If you were a skilled designer, you would also be aware that modern interconnect specifications (anything more recent than 1990), are designed with tolerances for signal skew, crosstalk, and hundreds of other little annoyances that engineers deal with. The long and short is that the assembly instructions are written to strict tolerances so that even if an amateur assembler is sloppy in the construction of the final product, it will still be within needed tolerances and function as expected. A good engineer always works form the assumption that all parts of the project they are not directly involved with will be done slipshod, and that their part must be able to tolerate the faults of the other components. Not all engineers are good, but interface specs are almost always designed by good engineers because they are the only ones who understand enough of the project to be able to tie it all together in an interface spec.
there is no digital error correction that fixes clock skew. error correction is one thing and clock dejittering is entirely separate. apples and oranges.
And in Ethernet, clock skew doesn't mean what you think it does. The Ethernet protocol has built in methods to deal with clocking issues (which is partly why there is a maximum Ethernet cable length). Otherwise, the length of the various twisted pairs in Ethernet makes no practical difference. In the protocol, there is no correlation between signals sent over any one pair vs another. They are independent signals, which require no correlation with the other pairs. SPDIF, is similar in its designation of signals, and similarly does not care much about the length of the pairs. As you mentioned, there is no retry opportunity with real time digital audio, but the only question is what percentage of data packets are unrecognizable on the receiving end. With Cables less than 2 meters long, and a transmission rate of less than 10Mbit, coat hangers (not even twisted together), would likely have a vanishingly small lost packet percentage. Regular $5 Ethernet cables would loose less than 1 packet in every 100,000 hours of use. If you want to verify this for yourself, get a copy of ethereal (now called wireshark), a small Hub (not a router), and plug your hub in between the source and the receiver, and plug you PC with ethereal into the hub, and sniff away. You can then see the number of dropped packets, the number of collisions (should be zero because twisted pair Ethernet doesn't really have this problem anymore), and the total bandwidth used. You will find that the difference between the Denon cable, a radio shack $5 cable, and a coat hanger jig is practically zero for such short lengths. (the coat hanger jig might have a few badly formed packets, but even that could be due to bad solder joints, sloppy connections.)
Any setup that has zero errors when used for Ethernet, will have zero errors when used for SPDIF: End of story.
You're 43 and your highest paying job ever is stuffing boxes for Amazon? Have you ever considered furthering your education?
That way he can be the best educated box stuffer at amazon. Those who believe the high paying jobs are coming back in any quantity have another thing coming... The truth is that the median income in the US is actually much lower than people seem to realize. $13.50/Hour is the median income. There are whole swaths of the United States where $11 / hours is actually a "desirable" job as opposed to the minimum wage jobs that are otherwise available. We have become a service industry country, and have given all of the "high paying" jobs to foreign nationals because otherwise our corporate masters would have to pay for real benefits and a meaningful pension plan. Corporations have abdicated their moral responsibilities for their employees. As long as our justification is the almighty dollar, this situation is only getting worse. I am not one to advocate socialism in any form, but capitalism only works when those who benefit from the system perform their social responsibility towards their employees and treat them right. The people who reap the profits have to take a backseat to the common good of all, otherwise the system collapses and no-one gets any profit. The only viable way to ensure that every employee exercises their responsibility is through regulation. We have already seen what happens when they are allowed to operate on their own recognizance. Every industry that has been allowed to function without regulatory oversight has found a way to bubble. This situation can logically only result in an ultimate burst which threatens the stability of our entire economy. It is a publicly sanctioned pyramid scheme, where a select few early adopters make money and everyone else gets screwed. When are we going to collectively put a stop to it. Do we have to see 90% of the population below the poverty line before we will wake up and see it for what it is?
-=Geoskd
I know this isn't really in the spirit of the article, but the 300,000 "men in brown", who rack up 10,000,000 miles a day delivering around the world deserve at least a little of the credit.
I can remember a time, not long ago, when shipping something during the Christmas season meant hoping with your fingers crossed that it would arrive on time, but now thanks to the real technology behind the scenes, and the men and women involved, pretty much everything is delivered on time (assuming the retailers send it out on time).
So the next time you stop to think about santa, remember that there is an army of people, both in the limelight, and behind the scenes who bring Christmas to every house every year.
Yes, I remember that, but I am also thinking of these things called towers. They ain't cheap and you need thousands and thousands of them along with all the cellular electronic radio doo dads (hi tech speak there). I mean, maybe google could pull it off, but it would take all their spare cash, then some to do it.
Most cell towers are not owned by carriers, the carriers merely rent space on the towers from those who do own them. Often you will see a tower in a prime location has all three carriers hanging off it. This means that if google should chose to do so, jumping in would not be as expensive as you think. The key cost is funding your cell network until you get enough users to pay the rents. Kind of a chicken and egg thing. If you don't have the infrastructure, you wont get the users, but you cen't get the infrastructure until you have enough users to pay for it. The cure for this problem is a large influx of cash to tide your company over until your profit model goes black. Already having the fiber and the distributed computing backend is a big step in that direction. I'm guessing that google becoming a national carrier is limited more by antitrust laws, and less by market forces than you might think.
Here's the thing, it doesn't really matter if she is plain old lazy, or truly depressed.
The issue here is that the insurance company is making the call, and it is not their job to make that decision.
The insurance company's job is to collect premiums and pay out when the doctor says "this person has a bad back" or "this person has a broken leg" or "this person is clinically depressed".
Clinical Depression is a bullshit disease used by modern doctors as a scapegoat diagnosis. It is akin to welfare, and should be abolished. I hate my job, but I show up every day and do the work despite the "pain" of being there, because that is what mature adults do. Mature people deal with their day-to-day pains and aches. I am not saying that they should not seek medication if available, god knows most of my co-workers are one one mood stabilizer or another, but you still have to show up to work, otherwise, why should anyone have to work?
Not everyone gets to be a professional video game tester, or the CEO of a fortune 500 company, get over yourself and get back to work.
My attitude is simple. if your condition would make you incapable of escaping a life threatening situation while your fellow humans could escape, then you have a disability. Anything else is fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
And your attitude is the exact reason why I'm leaving I/T if I can do it. People who work their ass off should be rewarded and NOT replaced. Why? Because if you reward them and keep them they'll work their ass off for you AGAIN and AGAIN.
It's not how hard you did or did not work, nor how competent you are that elicited that response. Incidentally, you would get that type of a response from pretty much all but the most extraordinary managers. You got that response because of how you approached the problem. There isn't a manager in the world who wants a self-important egomaniac on their staff. That kind of employee is a real massive waste of time to handle, and when you start talking about wasting your managers time, you are talking about your own time *plus* their time, so the cost adds up fast. Any manager who didn't severely punish that behavior fast would be up to their ass in trouble from every single employee they have. There isn't any employee in any company who isn't worth more to the company than they are being paid, otherwise the company wouldn't retain them at all. Taking advantage of that situation as though it only applied to you will get you removed fast so that you can no longer threaten the company. As a Manager, if I ever get wind that an applicant ever pulled that kind of stunt, their application would go in the shit-can so fast it would leave a crater.
On the other hand, if you came to me and stated, as others here have suggested, that there is a problem that I need to be aware of (Morale problems are very real problems too...), then my reaction is entirely different. Perhaps the company does not have the resources to accommodate your request, but more than likely something can be done. It all depends on your approach to the discussion. If you are hostile, then the conversation and reaction will be hostile. If your approach is a friendly, lets-solve-this-together approach, then the result will be in the same spirit.
-=Geoskd
What about the other way? Your boss has hired you to build a shed but by the time the project is done your building a mansion and they haven't giving you any more resources to do so. That shows that management is manipulative hiring a guy to to a job but then over time they can get job b, c and d as well for free.
That is the very definition of what a manager is expected to do. They are hired to maximize return on investment. If a manager doesn't save the company at least as much as his/her own salary, then he/she isn't doing his/her job, or his/her job needs to be eliminated. In many cases, doing that job means eliminating inefficiencies, but it almost always means pushing their employees as far as they will allow.
-=Geoskd
Did they not honestly believe that a disaster could occur? Did the right people not talk to each other? Or was the urge to cut corners simply so great that people ignored the risk?
From the ABC interview with one of the survivors, the BP people were arguing with the Transocean people, insisting that it would be ok to skip some phases of sealing the well because they wanted to move the schedule up. I wonder what that BP manager was thinking.
As someone who has found himself on both sides of this thought process, it is actually very easy to fall into the trap of making bad assumptions. People inherently underestimate risks. This leads to the common belief that cutting a few corners once in a while is acceptable. 60%-80% of Americans use a cell phone while driving on a regular basis, in spite of the fact that almost everyone agrees that this is a dangerous habit, and study after study has shown that it overwhelmingly increases your chances of being in an accident. The root of the problem isn't this particular set of people making the decisions, the problem is that people have any say in the process at all. Decisions at this level should be made by following a rigorous procedure without exception. When safety is concerned, no exceptions should ever be made. If exceptions can be necessary to proceed, then either the situation is unsafe, or the procedure was inadequate to begin with.
-=Geoskd
Bigger companies would have routines in place that would make this very hard... if you send an invoice, they'd better have a current PO number (or equivalent) or they'd be out of luck. Big companies have routines, and dedicated people to carry them out. This wouldn't be the first scam they'd see...
In my experience, "big companies" have lots of people working for them, doing jobs that they don't understand the importance of. Many of these people simply follow the routine without understanding the point of it. As such most of them will cheerfully help you with and what you need to do to meet their process. As such, "big companies" tend to be very easy prey for these sorts of shenanigans. Where I work, we pay a 75 year old retired contractor $470 / hour to maintain one of our legacy systems. (you read that right). This guy long ago made plain what his price was, and there isn't any other soul on earth who is "qualified" to handle the old system, so the morons I work for continue to pay the extortion when the system breaks (which thankfully is not often). The moral of the story, is that the process may be setup to prevent abuses, but no process will prevent any real amount of abuse. The only effective safeguard is having savvy employees, which, sadly, given the state of phishing in this world, just isn't in the cards.
-=Geoskd
Did he say your glasses were half full?
Yes, but, they're really twice as big as I wanted...
I'd dispute that. If the signal is, say, on for one second, then off for the next, does that make it less visible? You've just halved the average power requirement, and I'd argue the flashing makes it more visible if anything. I think you'd only need a very brief flash to make it visible, particularly if that flash was repeating periodically, so the average power requirement would fall correspondingly.
What was discussed was using rastering to reduce the power need, but to reduce the power need to something manageable would require several orders of magnitude less on-time. You would be looking at 1 second on, 1 millions seconds off (scanning somewhere else). This would mean roughly two weeks between one second pulses. ?Or, you could have it on for only 1 ms out of every 1000 seconds (14 minutes), but a 1 ms pulse at 10 watts is too little to be seen against the daylight sky, so the power would have to be several kw to be seen, and once again you are back to unmanageable power again. The solution is unworkable plain and simple, there is just no real way to compete with the sun in this respect, unless your entire target is sufficiently small (a few tens of square meters at most).
I had in mind a thin line, 20km long, but only 1 meter wide - one end of the strip at the beach, the other end inland (exact distance depending on gradient of coastline at that point). So that's 20,000 square meters, and I believe that 200kW is achievable with (really big) solar panels.
Still no go, 10 watts / square meter is only bright enough to be seen as a light in the sky, reflected light will be non-existent, so it will be invisible for all intents and purposes. To "light up the sand" above daylight, you would need kws/square meter, and again it would be unworkable for anything larger than a few tens of square meters. Once again, you are failing to understand the truly colossal amount of power being output by the sun on a regular basis. The amount of power hitting the earth on Hawaii, in the form of sunlight, is greater than all of mankind's power consumption combined. You are simply not going to compete on any real meaningful basis.
-=Geoskd
Who said this thing had to illuminate the entire damn planet in one go? Jeez, ever heard of raster scanning people?
Ok, as the post above stated above, it takes ~10 watts / m^2 to illuminate. Raster scanning does not fix the problem. if you only have a signal in a given place for say 1/1000th of the time, then the signal needs to be 1000 times stronger to be noticed by the naked eye. You have to remember that we are not talking about a transmission to dedicated hardware. The end result is that your power level required is the same no matter how fancy you get with your scanning system. Unless you are proposing that we attempt to shoot just the people with the laser, and skip everywhere else to save power, but I humbly suggest that this is impracticable...
So, it has to warn people in at-risk sections of coastline. That alone cuts the area to be illuminated by orders of magnitude. Then, it doesn't need to illuminate all of these areas simultaneously and permanently - it could sweep them repeatedly. Imagine that the laser was spread out along a line, say 20Km wide, and that then scanned the affected coastlines. So the people underneath might only see a bright flash lasting for say, 10th of a second every ten seconds. Brief, but maybe enough - better than nothing if you're out of range of a siren.
Say for the sake of argument that this was just 1 square mile of coastline. That is around 2.5 Million square meters, so again for just one square mile of coastline you need 25 Megawatts. This is roughly the power consumption of a small town. Good luck with that.
The whole idea is thoroughly unworkable, not necessarily because we cant build the tech, but because the cost would be prohibitive, and there are far cheaper and more effective solutions. The process you have witnessed here, is one I have seen countless times in engineering:
Step1: Clueless moron (usually management), says hay, lets build x to solve problem y.
Step: Engineer looks at solution x, and cringes at the raw stupidity of it, then looks at problem y, and realizes that there is a far cheaper solution, possibly even already in place.
Step 3: if this is government, the moron pushes ahead with solution x anyway because it is politically valuable, even though it has no practical value.
This whole thread has been an exercise in those who understand good engineering trying to pass some knowledge to those who are quite clearly ignorant and should stop trying to solve engineering problems with frikkin lasers
-=Geoskd
I was only addressing free speech wrt government, not anything to do with impinging on other individuals' rights. What one can be criminally prosecuted for and what one can be sued for are two completely different things, and I'm discussing more the former. Well, not exactly prosecution, but government control of public domain information that effectively creates a criminal situation if you violate the order where there ought not be one.
One can be criminally prosecuted for infringing another persons rights. Hence the link to the Phoebe Prince case, which is directly to the heart of the controversy, and clearly within the governments ability to prosecute. This is one of those cases where the defense will try to argue free speech, but there is no first amendment restrictions because the government is clearly prosecuting on behalf of a victim, where the victim lost some of their "inalienable rights" due to the defendants' actions. The government is not prohibited from meting justice as a result of the first amendment prohibitions, because the government is in no way trying to restrict free speech for anyone's ends except Phoebe Prince as a private individual.
-=Geoskd
You're wrong. There are no limitations on free speech. Our Constitution is not intended to protect some particular kind of speech, political or other. In fact, it's not designed to protect the free speech of citizens at all.
Our Constitution does not grant citizens free speech, it recognizes our right to free speech as an inalienable right. The point of this document is not to call out specific freedoms that people have, rather it's to grant the government certain powers. If it's not specifically mentioned, rights are presumed to reside with the individual or the state in the US (and state constitutions are similarly framed).
In the case where information is generated by government officials (the police), that information is presumed to be in the public domain except in specific circumstances.
Now it is you who have failed to understand what the constitution has to say about government, and free speech. The first amendment is about prohibiting the government from taking any action against our various rights, including free speech. It does not however recognize any right to anything where that right impinges on other individuals rights. Free Speech is only free when the act of speaking does no harm that would not otherwise have come to pass. If you Bully and taunt someone , to the point of loss for example, then you are responsible for the consequences. The first amendment merely codifies the fact that the government has no standing to complain about anything anyone says. That does not mean that individuals cannot make such complaint, and under those circumstances, the government is justified and required to act on behalf of the individuals, and in their best interests. Up until that point however, the government has no right to act, and our government is supposed to be explicitly prevented from pro-active action by the constitution.
A good way to paraphrase is: The government may punish individuals for what they say, but it must not take action to prevent them from ever saying it in the first place
Censorship is inherently contrary to democracy, because the only way a democracy can function is with an informed electorate, Hence a democracy with censorship is not really a democracy, but rather more of an aristocracy, or worse: a farce.
-=Geoskd
It is precisely this attitude that allows injustice to prevail in the world. Congratulations, you've just enabled evil.
No, its the people who, ignorantly, believe that democracy will fix this problem due to some "will of the people", that are enabling evil. Capitalism and democracy created this problem and enable the behavior. Just like all other forms of government, the problem is that government does a poor job of controlling and channeling greed into productive ends.
In the early '80's, it was discovered that a PC would hang on the average of about every three weeks due to the ionizing effect of cosmic rays here in Denver.
No, it was postulated that this was the cause. The reality was that if this was truly the cause of most random errors, then different software running on identical hardware would be more or less equally susceptible to the same transient errors. The reality is that most errors are from software faults, and not transient errors, as evidenced by the fact that most alternative OS's from the 80's and early 90's (UNIX, OS2, etc) were significantly more stable than the M$ variants. BTW, 80's microprocessor systems did not have login prompts, only the mainframe systems did, and they did not BSOD.If you are referring to the mid 90's, then yes, M$ pc's regularly BSOD'd, but the problem was usually from an endless supply of memory leaks in the kernel, and not from any outside events, again evidenced by the fact that competing OS products did not have this failure mode with any significant regularity.
Modern hardware has been hardened against other kinds of failures that caused trouble including higher transient voltage protections which keep voltage spikes in the power source, and across networks from causing as much damage to components. Modern components also have a higher tolerance for static discharge, which reduces DOA frequencies, but there are no special protections, built into modern microchips, against cosmic radiation. ECC and other protections are generally designated for signals that must traverse a bus, and are thereby significantly more susceptible to outside EM interference (which, unlike cosmic radiation, is a very real problem for microchip designers).
-=Geoskd
I know you meant this sarcastically, but in fact, this example demonstrates their incompetence. How often do you see boondoggles like this when two private sector companies write contracts with each other? Maybe it's because when a private sector buyer writes a contract, the contract guarantees delivery of the product. With the government, everything is "renegotiable".
Actually, this kind of crap happens in the private sector as well. I work for a fortune 100 company, and we just blew over a billion dollars on a company wide "systemic upgrade", which failed to produce any of the promised efficiency gains, caused massive service problems for our customers, and apparently has no viable software maintenance program. The difference, is that usually when a private company does something this monumentally stupid, they go out of business...
BTW, is anyone out there looking for an embedded engineer with 10 years management experience, or a project manager with embedded design experience?
What is to stop comcast from taking their unused IP's and filling out the form from addresses where they fail to provide decent service?
The fact that getting caught doing so is a felony, and will involve jail time for those involved.
-=Geoskd
Could you please point out exactly where I proposed any thing at all, let alone that everyone should "avoid everything"?
Please, do not pull this sort of idiotic stunt. I am pretty capable of saying crap by myself. I don't need you to try to put your words into my mouth, let alone that sort of nonsense.
He responded to you the way he did because you came off as a bit of a paranoid nutjob.
And for the record, New Scientist is not what you would call a highly reputable organization. Linking them was your first mistake, after that few people will take you seriously.
-=Geoskd
If you can afford a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, you're making an awful lot of money for a computer engineer. Where can the rest of us get jobs like yours?
That's easy, create a successful start-up. Duh.
-=Geoskd
When / if you make an offer, make sure that it includes an allowance for modification of the structure to make it "radiation safe". Take the allowance and pocket it, thereby saving you a bunch of money on the upfront side.
Be prepared for the next purchaser to use this same pretext when you sell, and price accordingly.
Even better: once you own the property, create a B.S. LLC and use it to certify the property as "radiation safe" Then provide the certificate, the "radiation data", and the receipt for the radiation exposure study, when you go to sell the property. Then you get the best price coming and going...
-=Geoskd
Care to name all of these conflicts we supposedly started? Please cite your sources to how we started them too. I think if you take the time to research this subject you're going to get a wicked eye opening.
Ok, since we are going to have a go of it...
1st: Iraq. We invaded Iraq ostensibly to depose a Dictator, but instead only ended up wreaking havoc on the most politically and socially stable country in the middle east. Anyone who believes Bush seniors decision to invade Iraq following the Kuwait fiasco, needs only come and see me about a bridge I have for sale. The reasons for the Gulf Ware were largely fabricated at the time by the Kuwaiti Royal family who by no co-incidence happen to be family friends of the Bush family. Whether knowingly or not, George Bush senior involved us in a war which gave the impression to the rest of the world to be an almost completely unwarranted US invasion of an OPEC nation, for what appeared to be monetary reasons.
2nd: Iraq again, Round two, had even less valid reasons, and smelled worse than the first.
3rd: Afghanistan. Once again, we invade another country, This time for supporting terrorists, but if you had asked any of the senior Russian military personnel about catching terrorists in Afghanistan, they would have told you to save your effort. Even without US interference, Afghanistan was difficult for the USSR to handle, but then the US provided them with weapons to kill Soviets (and one another) with, but was no where to be found when the killing was over, and it was time to rebuild. We shouldn't have to wonder why the Taliban (who we actually supported at one time) think we're slime.
4th: Bay of pigs. You can look that one up on your own time.
5th: The Spanish American war. The US on the path to empire takes on those who are in the way.
There is plenty more, that was just what I came across in a 10 minute trek through Wikipedia.
-=Geoskd
Not to mention, does that comparison mean anything to anyone else? I've never stood in front of the LHC personally and don't know anyone who has.
Think gigantic laser beam, that uses the entire output of a nuclear power plant for its power source, and you're on the right track.
-=Geoskd
I don't have an iPhone, but I know for a FACT that it's damned easy to ruin a phone accidentally. My (now ex) wife dropped our new Star Tek in the coffee when we were travelling; bye bye Star Tek. I got caught in a thunderstorm at a George Thorogood concert at the Illinois State Fair; bye bye LG. I slipped on the ice and fell with my phone in the pocket I fell on; bye bye Nokia. Dropped my Razr in the toilet while trying to answer it when I was pissing; despite immediatekly removing the battery and washing it and drying it out, it was ruined, never to work again.
Ok, first: Dropping a phone in a coffee pot? Are you trying to do too many things at once? Fell on ice with your nokia? maybe you should keep it in a shirt pocket instead, or cough up the $15 for a hard shell case, since you seem to have a hard time keeping your feet under you and exercising appropriate caution.when walking. Dropped a phone in the toilet? There are two basic times when a person should *never* use a phone. Driving and pissing, and I'm not 100% on the former. Keep your life to one activity at a time, you can call the person back in 3 minutes when you are done emptying your bladder: "I was in the bathroom" is a commonly accepted excuse for not answering a call right away, and is in fact proper etiquette.
Of all the indicated ways you destroyed your phone, the only one that might be the result of anything other than your own carelessness would be the concert, but I'm not really sure how a rain storm, even a torrential downpour, would destroy a phone unless you fell in a mud puddle and submerged the phone for an extended period, in which case the question needs to be asked: "What were you doing when that phone got drenched?
I have owned a half dozen cell phones in my life, and all of them succumbed to upgrades save one, which I carelessly lost the phone. The moral of the story is that if you don't treat your belongings with respect, you wont have them for long.
I actually build my own spdif hardware and audio dacs (my audio gear is all DIY stuff). and I do use i2s as an 'interconnect' between spdif receivers and the dac chips (when we build dacs, we take great care to layout the pcb traces to ENSURE that the i2s lines are exact(!) lengths. its just proper engineering.)
There is a vast difference between building your own equipment and designing it. Building something from a kit requires only knowledge of the assembly techniques required and an ability to follow, paint-by-number style, instructions. Designing something requires fundamental understanding. It is clear from your numerous posts that you are clearly skilled as an assembly technician, but are equally clearly lacking in formal design skill. If you were in fact a skilled *designer*, you would understand the way in which the SPDIF spec is designed and why they made the decisions they did. Poor quality cabling is a design consideration that can, and is, compensated for in the design of the IIS specification. As such, only minimal quality cabling is required. In fact, IIS borrowed heavily from Ethernet, and the two specs are remarkably similar. If you were a skilled designer, you would also be aware that modern interconnect specifications (anything more recent than 1990), are designed with tolerances for signal skew, crosstalk, and hundreds of other little annoyances that engineers deal with. The long and short is that the assembly instructions are written to strict tolerances so that even if an amateur assembler is sloppy in the construction of the final product, it will still be within needed tolerances and function as expected. A good engineer always works form the assumption that all parts of the project they are not directly involved with will be done slipshod, and that their part must be able to tolerate the faults of the other components. Not all engineers are good, but interface specs are almost always designed by good engineers because they are the only ones who understand enough of the project to be able to tie it all together in an interface spec.
-=Geoskd
there is no digital error correction that fixes clock skew. error correction is one thing and clock dejittering is entirely separate. apples and oranges.
And in Ethernet, clock skew doesn't mean what you think it does. The Ethernet protocol has built in methods to deal with clocking issues (which is partly why there is a maximum Ethernet cable length). Otherwise, the length of the various twisted pairs in Ethernet makes no practical difference. In the protocol, there is no correlation between signals sent over any one pair vs another. They are independent signals, which require no correlation with the other pairs. SPDIF, is similar in its designation of signals, and similarly does not care much about the length of the pairs. As you mentioned, there is no retry opportunity with real time digital audio, but the only question is what percentage of data packets are unrecognizable on the receiving end. With Cables less than 2 meters long, and a transmission rate of less than 10Mbit, coat hangers (not even twisted together), would likely have a vanishingly small lost packet percentage. Regular $5 Ethernet cables would loose less than 1 packet in every 100,000 hours of use. If you want to verify this for yourself, get a copy of ethereal (now called wireshark), a small Hub (not a router), and plug your hub in between the source and the receiver, and plug you PC with ethereal into the hub, and sniff away. You can then see the number of dropped packets, the number of collisions (should be zero because twisted pair Ethernet doesn't really have this problem anymore), and the total bandwidth used. You will find that the difference between the Denon cable, a radio shack $5 cable, and a coat hanger jig is practically zero for such short lengths. (the coat hanger jig might have a few badly formed packets, but even that could be due to bad solder joints, sloppy connections.)
Any setup that has zero errors when used for Ethernet, will have zero errors when used for SPDIF: End of story.
-=Geoskd
You're 43 and your highest paying job ever is stuffing boxes for Amazon? Have you ever considered furthering your education?
That way he can be the best educated box stuffer at amazon. Those who believe the high paying jobs are coming back in any quantity have another thing coming... The truth is that the median income in the US is actually much lower than people seem to realize. $13.50/Hour is the median income. There are whole swaths of the United States where $11 / hours is actually a "desirable" job as opposed to the minimum wage jobs that are otherwise available. We have become a service industry country, and have given all of the "high paying" jobs to foreign nationals because otherwise our corporate masters would have to pay for real benefits and a meaningful pension plan. Corporations have abdicated their moral responsibilities for their employees. As long as our justification is the almighty dollar, this situation is only getting worse. I am not one to advocate socialism in any form, but capitalism only works when those who benefit from the system perform their social responsibility towards their employees and treat them right. The people who reap the profits have to take a backseat to the common good of all, otherwise the system collapses and no-one gets any profit. The only viable way to ensure that every employee exercises their responsibility is through regulation. We have already seen what happens when they are allowed to operate on their own recognizance. Every industry that has been allowed to function without regulatory oversight has found a way to bubble. This situation can logically only result in an ultimate burst which threatens the stability of our entire economy. It is a publicly sanctioned pyramid scheme, where a select few early adopters make money and everyone else gets screwed. When are we going to collectively put a stop to it. Do we have to see 90% of the population below the poverty line before we will wake up and see it for what it is?
-=Geoskd
I know this isn't really in the spirit of the article, but the 300,000 "men in brown", who rack up 10,000,000 miles a day delivering around the world deserve at least a little of the credit.
I can remember a time, not long ago, when shipping something during the Christmas season meant hoping with your fingers crossed that it would arrive on time, but now thanks to the real technology behind the scenes, and the men and women involved, pretty much everything is delivered on time (assuming the retailers send it out on time).
So the next time you stop to think about santa, remember that there is an army of people, both in the limelight, and behind the scenes who bring Christmas to every house every year.
-=Geoskd
Yes, I remember that, but I am also thinking of these things called towers. They ain't cheap and you need thousands and thousands of them along with all the cellular electronic radio doo dads (hi tech speak there). I mean, maybe google could pull it off, but it would take all their spare cash, then some to do it.
Most cell towers are not owned by carriers, the carriers merely rent space on the towers from those who do own them. Often you will see a tower in a prime location has all three carriers hanging off it. This means that if google should chose to do so, jumping in would not be as expensive as you think. The key cost is funding your cell network until you get enough users to pay the rents. Kind of a chicken and egg thing. If you don't have the infrastructure, you wont get the users, but you cen't get the infrastructure until you have enough users to pay for it. The cure for this problem is a large influx of cash to tide your company over until your profit model goes black. Already having the fiber and the distributed computing backend is a big step in that direction. I'm guessing that google becoming a national carrier is limited more by antitrust laws, and less by market forces than you might think.
-=Geoskd
Here's the thing, it doesn't really matter if she is plain old lazy, or truly depressed. The issue here is that the insurance company is making the call, and it is not their job to make that decision. The insurance company's job is to collect premiums and pay out when the doctor says "this person has a bad back" or "this person has a broken leg" or "this person is clinically depressed".
Clinical Depression is a bullshit disease used by modern doctors as a scapegoat diagnosis. It is akin to welfare, and should be abolished. I hate my job, but I show up every day and do the work despite the "pain" of being there, because that is what mature adults do. Mature people deal with their day-to-day pains and aches. I am not saying that they should not seek medication if available, god knows most of my co-workers are one one mood stabilizer or another, but you still have to show up to work, otherwise, why should anyone have to work?
Not everyone gets to be a professional video game tester, or the CEO of a fortune 500 company, get over yourself and get back to work.
My attitude is simple. if your condition would make you incapable of escaping a life threatening situation while your fellow humans could escape, then you have a disability. Anything else is fraud.
-=Geoskd