Bluetooth can't be the BetaMax of wireless protocols. BetaMax was of higher quality than its competition, but failed due to lack of licensing.
Are you trolling? Bluetooth's biggest problem is that Ericsson's licensing policies makes it a pain in the neck, and expensive, to develop with it. Lack of licensing, precisely.
The other problem, that it solves problems (power consumption, authentication by pairing, better use of spectrum) that consumers are less concerned with than "easy-to-use high-speed wireless networking" is also pretty analogous to Betamax: consumers wanted a format that could hold a whole movie and were less concerned with image quality.
That said, I'm not impressed with the quality of current Bluetooth offerings either: a wireless headset shouldn't crash! I've heard similar reports about crashes during Bluetooth syncing of PDAs and mobile telephones, too.
indeed, bluetooth is the betamax of wireless protocols, though you left out one big remaining bluetooth application: headsets.
There's also the nice market of serial and parallel cable replacements, where Bluetooth is almost ideally suited, but I don't think that's going to set the world on fire.
It was a software engineering job; it's a now-cliched question in engineering disciplines other than mechanical engineering, especially computer programming for some reason.
To add to the indignity and bitter irony, the interviewer gave me a little lecture on how they wanted people that "think out of the box" after I didn't give him his pat "correct" answer.
Having something of a materials science and mechanical engineering background myself, although my BS is in physics, I think most smart mechanical and civil engineers would laugh at the software engineering approach to manhole cover design.
It's for a client, so I can't give details. I'm more excited about it because it's
a) my first AVR project and b) my first microcontroller project in almost ten years and c) I'm getting paid for it
than I am about any of the application details.
If I'd known how straightforward assembly on these buggers is, I'd probably have skipped wrangling with C compilers.
I probably should have made clear, to be fair above, that the article itself was pretty vague on the "hardware hacking" issue and it's apparently Taco or "santos_douglas" that thinks case modding is "hardware hacking".
case modding is about as much hardware hacking as putting a giant tail on your honda civic is hot rodding.
I'll just say the current generation of microcontrollers is a dream to work with, and programmable logic is really hot right now too...
foog (who has been up all night with an Atmel AVR, and the blinkenlights are flashing and the solenoid valves are clacking and everything's worked as designed so far, just with the usual minor hitches...)
Pundits used to say that it was to make it easier to roll the cover into place, but, since they're not all round, that's obviously baloney. Besides, the proper way to move a manhole cover is to hook your pickaxe into a hole, then drag it into position. Trying to roll or flip it into place risks broken footbones - even with steel toes. Those suckers are HEAVY.
Yet another reason the average software manager shouldn't even be allowed to hold a screwdriver...
a) people have to fit in them (so triagular shapes are less desirable because they waste space) b) it's good if they're easy to manufacture c) they're made by the same people who make sewer pipes
etc.
I explained this in an interview once, the first time I got that question, and the interviewer was very unhappy with that answer. He got even more unhappy when I pointed out that not all manholes are round. There are rectangular access vias of different sorts, and these usually have rectangular covers (which are often hinged, which is another solution to the falling-in problem).
Although I agree the now-conventional "so they don't fall in and so you can roll them around, and hinges are undesirable on a street" answers are clever in an appealing way, and are true in their way, I still think I'm right. That is, I don't think they describe the real design motives behind the shape of manhole covers.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was disappointing at the time, because I really needed a decent job, but it would have probably been a terrible place to work.
The really killer advantage to good middleware for this kind of thing would be improvements in the user experience and relief from the drudgery of learning yet another arcane sub-language to get the results you want.
I think you're asking for a very powerful, very well-designed IDE with good integration with configuration management, software instrumentation, etc.
I wish I could mod the above up, great advice, I might not have posted below if I'd seen it.
I'd emphasize that using a scriptable graphing/postprocessing program (I used to use gnuplot and octave, there are many interesting options more widely documented now) is really key.
Nothing like starting a script and being able to walk away from it for the afternoon, or the night, or the weekend...
management of all details of an experiment, including parameter sets, datasets, and the resulting data
This can be handled by an ad-hoc database, a flat file in most cases. If you were a Windows power user, you'd spend an hour or two putting together something in Access for it.
ability to "execute" experiments and report their status
make with a little scripting, or whatever you use as a build system.
an API for obtaining parameter values and writing out results (available to multiple languages) additionally (alternately?) a standard format for transferring data (XDF might be good) ability to extract selected results from experimental data ability to add notes
Again, an ad-hoc database would be your friend.
ability to differentiate versions of software
This is conventionally handled with a configuration management system like CVS, Sourcesafe, or Clearcase.
I hate reinventing the wheel, too, and I'd love to see a good book on using standard free Unix tools like make, CVS, Postgres, perl or some other common scripting language, TeX, etc for cleanly and efficiently
automating complex computing processes and producing nice reports from them.
PAW and ROOT look interesting though they look like overkill for many apps.
Also, get a copy of Writing The Laboratory Notebook, some hardbound buffered laboratory notebooks, and Sakura 05 Pigma Micron archival pigment pens to keep your paper records. You'll thank me.
So we don't know why the Earths rotation is slowing? I'll bet we do. It's probably the net result of several factors, most if not all of which are understood.
OK, here's my bias as an experimentalist: Not well enough to make accurate predictions. Do you realize how vague and wishy-washy "It's probably the net result of several factors, most if not all of which are understood" sounds? And I'll bet if you dig into the serious study of each of those "factors", there are problems and controversies that would contradict any attempt to present the whole problem as being well understood.
Weather prediction is a problem at the limits of our understanding, too. I don't buy the chaos theory cop-outs, either, those arguments pretty much are just "the butterfly effect implies weather forecasting can never be 100% perfect, even with the most precise data about starting conditions that are theoretically possible." Well, what are the real limits? What are the practical ones? Weather forecasting seems to keep getting better. It's a lot better than it was when I was a kid, which wasn't that long ago. Maybe it could be far better than it is now.
The problem is that we have no way to collect enough data to predict the amount of slowing.
You have no way to know if you understand a system---if your model is correct---until you start collecting that kind of data. You never know, when you're modeling a real system, what it is you're leaving out, until you test.
It's important for systems programmers, and lots of folks here are at least systems programming fanboys.
It's important for navigation. Yeah, that includes your GPS toys.
It's important for a number of scientific disciplines, including a number of subdisciplines of radio astronomy.
It's also really interesting that the change in the Earth's rotation can't yet be predicted with enough accuracy to set a schedule in advance for adding leap seconds, but must be measured. This is relatively prosaic stuff that's nonetheless at the limits of our current understanding. Doesn't anyone get excited or curious about science anymore?
I bet neither of you can explain the difference between "precision" and "accuracy", much less intelligently compare the tradeoffs in design between UTC and the old Central American calendars.
Wire wrap. You can be not so good at soldering and still get some pretty complex circuits working - and changes/repairs are often easier than soldering, especially on prototypes.
This is true, but I meant things that people think will be "easier" than using a soldering iron, but actually aren't. Wire wrap, for the few cases you can use it, actually is simpler and easier than soldering. On the other hand, I have had to explain to someone in the last year that getting set up for wire-wrapping will not save you from having to solder...
To be fair, solderless breadboards are right at the tipping point too, and for similar reasons: I always get bitten by loose connections and stray capacitances, but lots of apparently competent people find them acceptable and convenient.
I haven't wire wrapped anything since the early nineties. I haven't seen any commercial prototypes wire-wrapped since about then, either. For small stuff, microcontrollers and such, they have so much of the glue logic and peripherals on-chip, you don't need a lot of hook-up. You kind of have to be stringing a lot of chips onto a parallel bus for wire-wrapping to really come into its own. For fancy stuff, layout becomes critical enough and having a board made is cheap enough and fast enough that wire-wrap looks ridiculous...
I am pretty mediocre as a technician myself, but I put a lot of stock in the old saw about "two ways to do anything, the easy way and the one that works." Or something like that. "The hard way and the wrong way"? I forget...
I've been planning to try this the first time I get a board run by one of the "3 for $60" circuit board houses. Note that it shouldn't be too hard to add decent temperature control to a $30 toaster oven, though the mods would likely exceed the cost of the oven.
THAT SAID, WHAT IS IT ABOUT SOLDERING THAT STRIKES FEAR INTO PEOPLE???
I wish I'd thought of this back when I had to solder one of those *ahem* aftermarket accessories to my playstation, since the whole process looks easier than trying to hold a soldering iron steady.
This technique isn't a substitute for learning to use a soldering iron. It's just not. "Maybe if I do this complicated, tricky thing with a toaster oven, I won't have to use (shudder) a soldering iron!!!"
Just to get things straight here, a few things I've had to explain to people in the last year or so:
Reflow with a toaster oven will not substitute for learning to solder.
Conductive epoxy will not substitute for learning to solder. (it's for making connections to things you can't solder, and is more difficult to work with than solder)
"Solderless breadboards" will not substitute for learning to solder.
Buying lots of alligator clip jumpers is no substitute for learning to solder, either.
Conductive pens will not substitute for making circuit boards
I've always been skeptical of the effectiveness of these programs. If someone can't keep it together well enough to afford a pre-paid cell phone, do you really expect them to keep it together well enough to remember to carry the cell phone and to keep it charged?
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Bluetooth can't be the BetaMax of wireless protocols. BetaMax was of higher quality than its competition, but failed due to lack of licensing.
Are you trolling? Bluetooth's biggest problem is that Ericsson's licensing policies makes it a pain in the neck, and expensive, to develop with it. Lack of licensing, precisely.
The other problem, that it solves problems (power consumption, authentication by pairing, better use of spectrum) that consumers are less concerned with than "easy-to-use high-speed wireless networking" is also pretty analogous to Betamax: consumers wanted a format that could hold a whole movie and were less concerned with image quality.
That said, I'm not impressed with the quality of current Bluetooth offerings either: a wireless headset shouldn't crash! I've heard similar reports about crashes during Bluetooth syncing of PDAs and mobile telephones, too.
indeed, bluetooth is the betamax of wireless protocols, though you left out one big remaining bluetooth application: headsets.
There's also the nice market of serial and parallel cable replacements, where Bluetooth is almost ideally suited, but I don't think that's going to set the world on fire.
It was a software engineering job; it's a now-cliched question in engineering disciplines other than mechanical engineering, especially computer programming for some reason.
To add to the indignity and bitter irony, the interviewer gave me a little lecture on how they wanted people that "think out of the box" after I didn't give him his pat "correct" answer.
Having something of a materials science and mechanical engineering background myself, although my BS is in physics, I think most smart mechanical and civil engineers would laugh at the software engineering approach to manhole cover design.
It's for a client, so I can't give details. I'm more excited about it because it's
a) my first AVR project and
b) my first microcontroller project in almost ten years and
c) I'm getting paid for it
than I am about any of the application details.
If I'd known how straightforward assembly on these buggers is, I'd probably have skipped wrangling with C compilers.
I probably should have made clear, to be fair above, that the article itself was pretty vague on the "hardware hacking" issue and it's apparently Taco or "santos_douglas" that thinks case modding is "hardware hacking".
case modding is about as much hardware hacking as putting a giant tail on your honda civic is hot rodding.
I'll just say the current generation of microcontrollers is a dream to work with, and programmable logic is really hot right now too...
foog (who has been up all night with an Atmel AVR, and the blinkenlights are flashing and the solenoid valves are clacking and everything's worked as designed so far, just with the usual minor hitches...)
Pundits used to say that it was to make it easier to roll the cover into place, but, since they're not all round, that's obviously baloney. Besides, the proper way to move a manhole cover is to hook your pickaxe into a hole, then drag it into position. Trying to roll or flip it into place risks broken footbones - even with steel toes. Those suckers are HEAVY .
Yet another reason the average software manager shouldn't even be allowed to hold a screwdriver...
right, and manholes are round because
a) people have to fit in them (so triagular shapes are less desirable because they waste space)
b) it's good if they're easy to manufacture
c) they're made by the same people who make sewer pipes
etc.
I explained this in an interview once, the first time I got that question, and the interviewer was very unhappy with that answer. He got even more unhappy when I pointed out that not all manholes are round. There are rectangular access vias of different sorts, and these usually have rectangular covers (which are often hinged, which is another solution to the falling-in problem).
Although I agree the now-conventional "so they don't fall in and so you can roll them around, and hinges are undesirable on a street" answers are clever in an appealing way, and are true in their way, I still think I'm right. That is, I don't think they describe the real design motives behind the shape of manhole covers.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was disappointing at the time, because I really needed a decent job, but it would have probably been a terrible place to work.
R is a clone of S, not SPSS. The FSF does have PSPP, but it doesn't do very much yet.
XML and XSLT are also becoming increasingly useful in describing input data, recording results and keeping track of things done.
Those of you that are finding XML useful for this sort of thing, what tools and ideas are you using?
The really killer advantage to good middleware for this kind of thing would be improvements in the user experience and relief from the drudgery of learning yet another arcane sub-language to get the results you want.
I think you're asking for a very powerful, very well-designed IDE with good integration with configuration management, software instrumentation, etc.
I wish I could mod the above up, great advice, I might not have posted below if I'd seen it.
I'd emphasize that using a scriptable graphing/postprocessing program (I used to use gnuplot and octave, there are many interesting options more widely documented now) is really key.
Nothing like starting a script and being able to walk away from it for the afternoon, or the night, or the weekend...
The features I would want would be:
management of all details of an experiment, including parameter sets, datasets, and the resulting data
This can be handled by an ad-hoc database, a flat file in most cases. If you were a Windows power user, you'd spend an hour or two putting together something in Access for it.
ability to "execute" experiments and report their status
make with a little scripting, or whatever you use as a build system.
an API for obtaining parameter values and writing out results (available to multiple languages)
additionally (alternately?) a standard format for transferring data (XDF might be good)
ability to extract selected results from experimental data
ability to add notes
Again, an ad-hoc database would be your friend.
ability to differentiate versions of software
This is conventionally handled with a configuration management system like CVS, Sourcesafe, or Clearcase.
I hate reinventing the wheel, too, and I'd love to see a good book on using standard free Unix tools like make, CVS, Postgres, perl or some other common scripting language, TeX, etc for cleanly and efficiently
automating complex computing processes and producing nice reports from them.
PAW and ROOT look interesting though they look like overkill for many apps.
Also, get a copy of Writing The Laboratory Notebook, some hardbound buffered laboratory notebooks, and Sakura 05 Pigma Micron archival pigment pens to keep your paper records. You'll thank me.
So we don't know why the Earths rotation is slowing? I'll bet we do. It's probably the net result of several factors, most if not all of which are understood.
OK, here's my bias as an experimentalist: Not well enough to make accurate predictions. Do you realize how vague and wishy-washy "It's probably the net result of several factors, most if not all of which are understood" sounds? And I'll bet if you dig into the serious study of each of those "factors", there are problems and controversies that would contradict any attempt to present the whole problem as being well understood.
Weather prediction is a problem at the limits of our understanding, too. I don't buy the chaos theory cop-outs, either, those arguments pretty much are just "the butterfly effect implies weather forecasting can never be 100% perfect, even with the most precise data about starting conditions that are theoretically possible." Well, what are the real limits? What are the practical ones? Weather forecasting seems to keep getting better. It's a lot better than it was when I was a kid, which wasn't that long ago. Maybe it could be far better than it is now.
The problem is that we have no way to collect enough data to predict the amount of slowing.
You have no way to know if you understand a system---if your model is correct---until you start collecting that kind of data. You never know, when you're modeling a real system, what it is you're leaving out, until you test.
time "ticks" at a constant rate in any particular reference frame (SR), which is how time standards are defined, anyway.
Satellite clocks have to be relativistically corrected, especially for applications like GPS.
ok, try this:
intelligently compare the tradeoffs in design between UTC and the old Central American calendars
And why do we care?
Read the article!
It's important for systems programmers, and lots of folks here are at least systems programming fanboys.
It's important for navigation. Yeah, that includes your GPS toys.
It's important for a number of scientific disciplines, including a number of subdisciplines of radio astronomy.
It's also really interesting that the change in the Earth's rotation can't yet be predicted with enough accuracy to set a schedule in advance for adding leap seconds, but must be measured. This is relatively prosaic stuff that's nonetheless at the limits of our current understanding. Doesn't anyone get excited or curious about science anymore?
I bet neither of you can explain the difference between "precision" and "accuracy", much less intelligently compare the tradeoffs in design between UTC and the old Central American calendars.
Push to get in a disposable earplug dispenser from Lab Safety Supply. Or buy your own. Headphones don't cut it, music is a distraction.
And get your resume out if you're at all good at what you do, getting moved from offices to cubes is a sign of how much management values you...
Wire wrap. You can be not so good at soldering and still get some pretty complex circuits working - and changes/repairs are often easier than soldering, especially on prototypes.
This is true, but I meant things that people think will be "easier" than using a soldering iron, but actually aren't. Wire wrap, for the few cases you can use it, actually is simpler and easier than soldering. On the other hand, I have had to explain to someone in the last year that getting set up for wire-wrapping will not save you from having to solder...
To be fair, solderless breadboards are right at the tipping point too, and for similar reasons: I always get bitten by loose connections and stray capacitances, but lots of apparently competent people find them acceptable and convenient.
I haven't wire wrapped anything since the early nineties. I haven't seen any commercial prototypes wire-wrapped since about then, either. For small stuff, microcontrollers and such, they have so much of the glue logic and peripherals on-chip, you don't need a lot of hook-up. You kind of have to be stringing a lot of chips onto a parallel bus for wire-wrapping to really come into its own. For fancy stuff, layout becomes critical enough and having a board made is cheap enough and fast enough that wire-wrap looks ridiculous...
I am pretty mediocre as a technician myself, but I put a lot of stock in the old saw about "two ways to do anything, the easy way and the one that works." Or something like that. "The hard way and the wrong way"? I forget...
RF inductive heated soldering irons like Metcal's use much lower frequencies than microwaves, somewhere in the range of 10-15 Mhz IIRC.
But yeah, they're damned useful, and affordably available on ebay.
THAT SAID, WHAT IS IT ABOUT SOLDERING THAT STRIKES FEAR INTO PEOPLE???
I wish I'd thought of this back when I had to solder one of those *ahem* aftermarket accessories to my playstation, since the whole process looks easier than trying to hold a soldering iron steady.
This technique isn't a substitute for learning to use a soldering iron. It's just not. "Maybe if I do this complicated, tricky thing with a toaster oven, I won't have to use (shudder) a soldering iron!!!"
Just to get things straight here, a few things I've had to explain to people in the last year or so:
Reflow with a toaster oven will not substitute for learning to solder.
Conductive epoxy will not substitute for learning to solder. (it's for making connections to things you can't solder, and is more difficult to work with than solder)
"Solderless breadboards" will not substitute for learning to solder.
Buying lots of alligator clip jumpers is no substitute for learning to solder, either.
Conductive pens will not substitute for making circuit boards
Am I leaving anything out?
I've always been skeptical of the effectiveness of these programs. If someone can't keep it together well enough to afford a pre-paid cell phone, do you really expect them to keep it together well enough to remember to carry the cell phone and to keep it charged?
you left out "Leonardo's Roommate"
foog
except it's not meant to be worn on the finger. it's a pendant.
foog
Did we see the same movie? In the first film, which is the only important one, Rocky lost. It's sort of the whole point of the movie that he loses.