Thanks. That is the first thing I thought too when I saw this topic under discussion.
I have been working in electronic design for many years, I started out in CAD with "Futurenet" schematic capture and PADS for PCB layout. Both ran under DOS on 386 machines ( actually the Futurenet would run on a '286 ). I had SPICE analog circuit simulators which also ran on a '286.
I still use these programs today. They are almost thirty years old. So far, I have been able to migrate them to run on the hardware I have.
A couple of months ago, I had a customer I did a design for ten years ago tell me the ADC on the board I had designed for him was no longer available, and could I re-do it to use something else? The files were still on my machine and came right up. It did not take me long to completely redesign the layout to make him a highly upgraded board with the latest parts on it, yet still be completely fit and form compatible with the existing sockets of his product. Thank goodness the PCB house still honors old Gerber formats, and I can still print my schematics off with the old AutoCad.DXF.
This was exactly the thing I groused a lot about when working in the aerospace industry when we constantly ditched what we had always chasing the latest thing. What happens when existing product in the field needs support? And how long do we expect product in the field to last? If our product only lasts a year or so, go ahead and design with tools that are only viable for a few months or so... but if we are designing a product that should last a hundred years, we better use tools and record-keeping instruments that will also be usable a hundred years from now. For hundreds of years, paper and ink worked fine as a storage medium. I can't say the same for digital storage - The physical media: optical CDROMS and flash drive, may make it through - especially if we have redundant file integrity and backup systems in place - but will we have the capability to read it with all the proprietary file formats, encryption, and IP law? Anything much beyond the standard public filetypes ( i.e..TXT ), may go the way of ancient languages without even the benefit of a rosetta stone.
Well, I guess I am about a quarter-way into my design of a 100 year support capability. I am quite confident my CAD system will last longer than I will, if anyone else sees fit to maintain it.
The stuff I did for the Government during that same time frame is inaccessible, as the old CAD tools are now gone. I would have no idea how to resurrect the diagrams to those old RF modems that were done in the old special hardware machines. I guess it was a fortunate thing for me that when they "cleaned house", it was not only people like me that went, our old tools went too - and these were the old ones that would run under anything we could boot up into DOS.
I was able to buy the CAD system I had used for five years at the company surplus store. The software has went from running on a '286, to '386, to '486, then Pentium, and now runs in a DOS box.... I figure that no matter how sophisticated our processors get, there will always be some DOS emulator floating around, just as no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, I should always be able to find a pencil and pad of paper - because sometimes that's exactly what you need.
We have passed law that allows business to exact full payment for undefined partial service. Clever business use of phrases like " service up to " followed by phrases like " for only $$$.$$/mo* " then " * other charges may apply " and the like have led to a business environment where business can provide whatever they feel like and customers have to take what they are lucky enough to get.
Just one change in the interpretation of the law, where the customer's right to withhold payment for service not received, regardless of what the business printed on their contracts would do the trick.
It would incentivize customer service instead of incentivizing legal trickery as it does now.
Can you imagine the legal representatives of some company defending themselves against a defamation lawsuit where some plaintiff is suing because the company screwed up his credit report ? The plaintiff shows the judge a http://www.speedtest.com/ report showing 23kB/sec when the company claimed a 3MB/sec speed? The corporate lawyer approaches the judge and shows the bill clearly showed $53.93 and the plaintiff only paid fifty cents!
The judge looks at the plaintiff's speedtest report and asks the corporate rep if the IP address on the sheet is theirs.... well follow your imagination of how that meeting should go.
A business license should not be an open pass for theft-by-one-sided contract.
I consider myself spiritual. I know God exists. Look around and consider Occam's razor. See creation - observe its complexity. There has to be something that created it.
In the Christian Bible, there is the story of Moses, who asked God about who was sending him to the Pharoah of Egypt to tell him to let the Israelites go. God replied " I am who I am". So what does that say? God is not man. He is who He is. A process? I do not know. No one else seems to either.
Only thing I know is that this thing I know as God has to be extremely powerful, creative and intelligent - much more than I am. Does He take a personal interest in me? That is what I would like to find out. Forces that have a substantial financial interest in our belief systems would have us think so. Especially if they can position themselves as the intermediary. How seriously can the hocking from their heads be taken?
You should have seen the wake of frustration I stirred up in my Church when I confessed to the Pastor that I was having fits over the faith doctrines and I had a lot of doubting Thomas in me. One of the Ten Commandments was not to bear false witness. So am I to confess to things I have not personally witnessed? This is the kind of behaviour I expect from politicians, used car salesmen and stockbrokers... whose headhocking has extremely low credibility in my book.
I ended up downright asking if I had to be a liar and give up my personal integrity in order to be a proper church Christian... as I felt - as an engineer - duty bound to report the truth. My personal integrity demands it. At that point, they suddenly had important matters that had to be attended to and they scurried to their cars. They had time to hock up in front of microphones, but all they can tell me is God wants gullible people who accept whatever some head hocks up?
The Bible also tells us to be wary of the False Prophet. The Parable of the Fig Tree, who Jesus Himself told us to learn, tells of the wolves in sheep's clothing who seek to enslave us. How about the part that says we aren't to go around preaching while carrying a begging bag? We are just here to "sow seeds", then show up next week for the "harvest" of new believers and tithers? Whatever happened to "tending the sheep", or do we just show up every week with silver begging bowls and shearing tools?
I guess if I am going to Hell, I am going to be sent there because I refused to witness to things I have not seen.
Am I to believe that the Church is trying to screen in the most gullible, superstitious, and ignorant among us, discarding the rest of us as agents of Satan, because they cast their "pearls of wisdom" before us, and we, being the swine we are, question the intention?
No wonder the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, described so well in the Bible, hates science! You can break Man's law as long as you avoid getting caught. Ever tried to break one of God's law? You can't. They are self-enforcing! Of course, we can't stand to give God the credit for His law, so we call it some arcane thing like "Thermodynamics". God's Law reveals the False Prophet in all its nakedness. Of course, expect them to use everything in their power to discredit truth - starting with microphones and high powered amplifiers, financed with proceeds from silver bowls.
Ok, ok, enough of this rant. I am going to get moderated "off topic" for this rant, and deservedly so. All I can say is that I consider myself spiritual, believe in God, and even I am highly leery of "religious fanatics" coming into power. Even my "own" religion!
You read "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram and you see we are capable of extremely heinous acts if someone else puts us up to it. I would hate to have our fate determined by some religious fanatic's imagination.
This is exactly what we are seeing a lot of today.
The God I believe in is quite powerful enough to do whatever He wants to do. For me to meddle in it is just about as helpful as my cat trying to "help" me fix my car.
All have a targeted ad system to show me products similar to ones I have placed on my wish list or have purchased.
Frankly, I like it.
I have been buying a lot of Arduino stuff, DC/DC converters, electronic components, connectors, lithium batteries, LED's, sensors, motors.
I am not interested in plastic flowers, dresses, Ipods, bridal accessories, diapers, insurance, or dinnerware. They have not been loading my screen with these unwanted items. The suggestions they have offered me have been welcome - they often offer an item I wasn't aware that it even existed.
Now, one place that I had just as soon not be tracked is which YouTube videos I will watch. I do not mind them tracking me for that session - but its quite annoying if they remember and suggest the same thing at a later time - when I am in another environment. For that reason, I do not want YouTube's cookies or registration. What goes on in the bedroom needs to stay there, and not be revealed at the office.
Its a shame I cannot simply donate $5000 to a charity of her choice rather than be forced to subsidize a corporation I have absolutely no love for - just for the sake of "proving" my love for her.
It ought to be obvious... this diamond mentality is nothing more than a demonstration of our obedience to do really asinine things just because we are told to do so.
I still have my old Smith-Corona I went through College with. 100% mechanical. This was the one that looked like a small suitcase. Works perfect, but I would have no idea of where to get another ribbon for the thing. It uses the old cloth ribbons saturated with ink and it would shuttle back and forth as keys were pressed. Red and black ink too. Not many mechanical things nearly 100 years old still work ( this was the machine my mom went through school on ). They sure made things to last in those days.
No erase key. You had to use those old style abrasive eraser pens or a white paint-like fluid for that. If you made a significant screw up, might as well put in a new piece of paper and retype the whole page.
Would I go back to advocating this? No. I'd rather see them resurrect the old Radio Shack Tandy 100 with its low power processor and reflective LCD screen. With today's technology, these could probably be made with solar cells just like a calculator. I'd love to have one of those that could use a USB stick for program and data storage.
Doesn't that mean the people own the technology developed - so if anything does come of this - who is going to tell the taxpayer who funded this that he can't go build one for himself or sell the power he can make off of his unit?
Or give him any authority to tell his neighbor not to do the same should his neighbor want to do likewise?
I am puzzled why we do not take this more seriously.
My belief is that the derivative of the logistic equation, distorted by technological advances combined with economic pressures, has its peak shifted to the right by quite some amount. Meaning the slope-up is gradual, an extended peak, and a cliff-like demise when a failing economy can no longer finance extraction costs. The area under the curve is constant ( total petroleum on this planet ), but the extraction rate is astronomical right now in a geologic sense.
I do not feel the curve shown on the Wikipedia page conveys the full impact of the problem. Its the derivative of that curve that does. That would be the oil extraction RATE. Yes, there is lots of oil on this planet - very hard to extract oil. Will our science and economy support the extraction of it?
My own feeling is I am seeing a re-run of "Rat Attack" , but its humans instead of rats, and oil instead of bamboo seeds. When the extraction rates start declining, all hell is going to break loose.
I would think with as many people out there who are really into security, log their routers, and know who they are connecting to, it wouldn't be long before flags would raise and some company will have the uber-embarassing duty of having someone explain why their companies' product is spilling beans.
In my old DOS days, I had a floppy drive I had deliberately modified so any attempt to write to it would just trigger a piezo beeper. I had diagnostic disks loaded in it, and the beeper came in handy to let me know when some rogue program had identified the floppy and was trying to infect it.
At that time, the "boot sector infectors" were common, and I wanted assurance that when I did a FDISK and FORMAT, I was re-initializing the target with good clean code. I could not trust anything that could be written to.
I had no idea at the time what kind of mischief was in the target machine and often all I could do was boot up into DOS with the known good copy in my butchered floppy drive, then under control of that DOS, using LapLink, transfer all the target's data files onto another disk through the printer port. Then I would re-FDISK, re-FORMAT, re-install the executables from the original purchased diskettes, and hope the virus writers had not infected the data files.
I still rant and rave about mixing code with data for that reason. I can't for the life of me see executing stuff in a data file as much as I can't see storing gasoline in a switchgear room. Just asking for grief.
One thing I would love to see is a USB stick that will accept programming only if a jumper plug is removed. I can then get my USB stick, pull the jumper, load in my secure system boot and troubleshooting diagnostics when I know I am in a clean environment, reassemble the stick, then I can insert my USB stick into the most hostile of virus environments and know nothing can mess up my diagnostic programs. Any attempt to write to the USB just flashes a LED on it and lets me know something out there is trying to write to me. A program on the USB stick will be running to let me know what process is trying to write to me. As for now, I use CDR's for this as I have yet to hear of viruses that would open up a CDR and successfully rewrite it with modified viral code.
I find it puzzling why in this day of common gigabyte flash, why our machines aren't shipped with a basic OS in flash already loaded with minimal and thoroughly tested code for at least internet browsing Kinda like the old Commodore used to ship with Basic preinstalled - all you did was turn it on and it "woke up" at the BASIC prompt displayed on the screen before it ever began to look for disks or other peripherals.
I want my off-the-shelf machine opening up a browser window pointed at 0.0.0.0 upon power up without needing a disk. If no TCPIP addresses are found, then all I can see is my own machine. I think 0.0.0.0 would be perfect for accessing one's own machine as no-one would put this address onto the web. 0.0.0.0 would be my desktop. It should quite happily surf the web - until it has to deal with some proprietary content or save something - and even then it should be smart enough to display blanks where the proprietary content is and indicate what the problem is, never hanging up.
Pull the disk completely, and the machine should still run fine, albeit no flash, no movies, no additional capabilities, and a lack of saving anything. It won't need anything like a special "boot" disk or special sectors. If it even as much as finds a USB stick out there, it would offer it as a storage option. With the size of USB sticks these days, I could keep any drivers, extended code, data, whatever, on USB drives. In the event I do have some unforseen malcode which makes its way onto my removable media, there is nothing saying I can't remove everything, come back up with a virus killer program running from a known and trusted USB stick - once that program has control, plug my problem drive in and let the virus program examine the problem drive.
The ROM routines should include a TCPIP stack, at least a WAV, MP3, MPG, JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP display routines and a rudimentary windowing system library callable from a resident C++ ( processing ? ) compiler. ( it would program like a big Arduino ).
You want special stuff that runs on top of it? Go buy it. Whoever made the special stuff takes responsibility for its behaviour ( or misbehaviour ). I can't trust any executables on rewritable media any more than I can trust contracts written in pencil. At least ROM is like a contract written in ink. ( Hint to the BSA: ROM is a physical product, and its easy to identify if you sold it or not. If you find your code in someone else's ROM, you have someone to go after. No use going after someone else's machine - there's nothing in it )
My own personal belief is that the write be disabled to the boot ROM at the factory, so no software can overwrite it. If one HAS to, he can disassemble his machine down to get physical access to the board and install a jumper plug in just the right place if he wants to reflash his ROM, but at least make it hard enough one has to deliberately go out of his way to do so. And of course, all obligations of the manufacturer regarding the security of their machine would be voided.
I hate all this malcode as much as the next guy, and I am all for cleaning up all these piles of muck everyone keeps stepping in. This muck is much like the problem a lot of us Arduino folks have where some layout guy ten years ago decided to put two pin connectors offset by.160 inches. They won't fit into 0.1 inch protoboards neatly. To this day they still build the boards with that frustrating offset because ten years ago some layout guy at his PCB workstation did not forsee people trying to use Arduinos with the 0.1" vectorboards and CSC socketboards.
I think Google ( Android ) is closing fast on this dream.
I can relate personally. I had an aerospace job once. Loved it. Until we sold out to a big corporation who saw we were profitable. They brought in lots of bean counters and other useless folk whom I suspect were hired into a "good job" as a return favor for a relative's help getting funding.
Working there became like hell for me. Lots of "men of the suit" micromanaging everything. What was once "creativity" became "re-inventing the wheel", what was once "meticulous diligence" became "perfectionist"- in a negative light. Everything became justified only on a profit basis, lots of points for making things cheap, and no-one seemed to care whether or not the thing would work or be maintainable.
At one time, sleeping, eating, or having to attend to bodily functions were a royal nuisance for me because they trumped my work. After management succeeded in "de-funning" the work, I began looking forward to the end of the day and hating like all getout to get out of bed in the morning. When I voiced my concerns, the reply was down the lines of "that's why it's called work - and why your pay is called compensation". Well, it used to be fun. If I just wanted money, I would have been a plumber. Not much fun, but people with a stopped up toilet will pay damn near anything to have it work again.
I was making good money, but my soul just wasn't there anymore. Forces valued far more than my engineering skill were at work, forces of pure economics. We had the money for cosmetic things and "leadership", but I would have to justify things like getting time to explore new technologies. I lost drive. No-one else seemed to care. We were so inundated with Government money all that seemed to matter was meetings and forms. We could always outsource the work, put our name on it, then our commitment would be met. Handshakes and hefty checks for everyone in the upper echelons.
I was just getting ulcers, high blood pressure, and water retention problems which I think was due to my anxiety over being responsible for things I had no control over. I was just a lowly lab rat - not much use to a megamoney corp.
I make nowhere near what I used to make, but at least I enjoy my day building embedded controllers ( mostly Arduino based ) along with the analog/power interfaces. I dabble in refrigeration too, lately working on ice-bank technologies using propane refrigerant and arduino based controllers. I get to play with Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors, I2C busses, ADS1115 digitizers, Ferromagnetic memories, DS1307 clocks, linked together with YellowJacket WIFI interfaces.
Like messing with race cars or sports, I get a kick of seeing how many BTU ( MJ ) I can transfer to the ice-based phase-change energy storage with the energy I have available.
This is a heck of a lot more interesting than filling out all the forms and keeping time sheets of numerous "simultaneous" projects, at 6 minute resolution, for projects falling further and further behind because when I am working on one, someone is always badgering me about yet another one. The time sheets were a joke anyway - as we all knew certain projects were running low on funding, but it was politically inexpedient to charge time to them - but they had to be done. Well-funded projects took the brunt of everything. ( Just like an insured patient in a hospital ).
Bottom line.... if you are not happy, your enthusiasm will soon leave you, then you will eventually be fired for not being a "team player". Best find something you enjoy so you will make money for those who employ you. .
Money isn't everything. Observe how the rich often abuse their cars as well - they always have plenty of money to pay the mechanic to keep them fixed. Their skill is in getting paid. That is not one of my skills. I'd rather eat at McDonalds in peace than in the fanciest restaurant in town, full of ulcers and stress of trying to be something I am not.
Geez, encoding audio on a LED has been standard science fair fare since LED's came out.
About 40 years ago, I had even proposed to Chevron about having the new LED displays on our digital panel meters flash their reading to mimic a UPC code so a supermarket barcode inventory scanner gun would be able to read the meter from a distance, This was in the 70's. I had a lot of meters in remote areas which needed to be read and logged. I wanted to make things easier for my field crew by placing the meter displays where they could drive by and "shoot" them with a supermarket inventory gun, then bring the gun back. I would know the numbers weren't "dry-labbed", as well as I would not be asking the guys to go fumble with pens and paper in inclement weather. Nobody wants to be fiddling around with a clipboard and papers in a 50 mph santa ana wind, or when its midnight and pouring down rain. Even if the digits on the meter were illegible, the blinking pattern would still be recognizable by the inventory gun. It would beep when it got a readable code and my guy could go on his way.
That was in the 70's. I'd do it with RF today if I were still with Chevron. Its amazing what I can do with today's microcontrollers.
I think this app is great if implemented properly.
Its the customer, not the cabbie, who should be fiddling around with a cellphone.
The fare would be given the opportunity to link to a routing computer over the phone. The routing computer would know the status of every subscribing cab, its availability, location, and direction, and be able to notify the proper cab of an awaiting fare.
The cabbie gets a GPS display, much like the existing ones, but this one would be linked to the routing computer and flash where his fare is waiting. There is no reason to annoy the cabbie with anything more than where his fare is, and select one cabbie so they all don't do a mad rush. The cabbie may be given a few seconds to accept the fare, else the routing computer will select another cabbie. The computer would know which cabbies are busy delivering, which are idle, and the idea is to keep the idle ones busy and minimizing non-passenger distance. The routing computer will then inform the caller which cabbie it has arranged to pick them up, along with estimated time to arrival.
Note: This is how I would do it - exactly how they intend to implement this, I am quite ignorant. The whole concept looks great to me - it puzzles me as to why anyone would object.
Both eBay and AliExpress are competing in this arena, and if I had my guess, AliExpress is going to be a formidable competitor because of the international nature of their operations.
Remember when "internet search" meant "Yahoo"?
Things can change damn fast these days, rivers of revenue change courses, and what was once a river becomes a dry bed of sand.
Just one tax law or regulation changes, then a business model based on the existing set of conditions becomes nonviable. Just as copyright law put napster out of business, tax law could easily put a damper on interstate trade - not revectoring the trade through a local route, but stopping the trade completely. It seems that 99% of the stuff I buy, I really do not need, but at a good price, I'll go for it Bump the price or aggravation to purchase up, and I'll just say "to hell with it", and the purchase and resulting economic activity just doesn't happen.
The understanding of how DNA works, ( and correspondingly, how to hack it ) is the ultimate reverse-engineering accomplishment.
Life is a textbook, full of worked examples. We are at the stage we realize there is an alphabet, the letters mean something, and have the definition of a few words. Kindergarten stuff.
If we play our cards right, and don't spend all our resources fighting amongst ourselves, the future is incredibly bright. We have worked examples of damn near everything we need... photosynthesis ( solar powered CO2 sequestration and energy storage ) for starters. We have bioluminescence, electric eels, and all sorts of sensor examples.
I figure we have been given a huge shipment of arduinos with all sorts of accessories, and we have now figured out how to make the light blink.
We don't know how its wired yet, how the compiler works, and just now figuring out some of what makes the hardware work.
If our society will value knowledge above greed and accounting, if there is anything limiting our potential, I have yet to see it. However if greed and accounting is all we know, we will soon run into all sorts of limits, imposed only by our inability to adapt. First of these will be exhaustion of the earth's fossil fuels, followed by food and water famines. We will be like the chick that hatched, but failed to scratch, find food, and thrive, living off the energy stored in the egg - until it is depleted.
The earth is our egg.
I value highly the knowledge our species acquires. It is our survival.
Yes, That reflectiveness of the white ice as compared to the darkness of the deep blue sea is known as its albedo.
Being I first learned solid state linear design on germanium transistors, I am well aware of something we called "thermal runaway", in which the transistor would bias itself on more and more as it got hotter, yet being biased on was what was making it hot. The hotter it got, the more current it passed. Thermal runaway.
The result was a fused transistor.
The mathematics of thermal runaway on those old designs is nearly identical to the albedo-loss calculations of our ice caps. I find it a frightening scenario, as I can't simply change out the planet as easily as I can replace a fused transistor.
I think anyone who has used pneumatic power tools can vouch for the insight of your post. It takes a pretty powerful air compressor to run the tool, but the inefficiency is tolerated in exchange for the convenience of having a very small and lightweight power release at the tool.
Its not unusual for me to run a 2HP compressor to run a hand sander.
I'd prefer mine in a USB stick, for the same reason I used to gleefully accept AOL floppies.
I keep 99.9% of what music I have for the same reason I have jars full of assorted nuts and bolts I have no use for - I keep them because someone else might need it, and it costs me nothing to not throw it away. I hate to throw something away someone else might want, because so many people have given me something just because they saw I liked it.
Life seems to work better when I take an interest in what my neighbors want. I'll get it for them if it falls in my path. They do the same for me. Life gets good.
I can get great joy designing a new digitizer, or building a heat transfer engine. I feel I've created something. It makes me feel worthwhile.
Nothing bores me worse than sports. I have no part in controlling the outcome, and even if I did - I fail to see any benefit to me or anyone else. I had just as soon sit above a bridge over a freeway overpass and root for one lane over another, scoring a point for that lane every time a vehicle passes under the bridge. Maybe even two points and a touchdown if its a truck. Root! Root! Root for Lane number! 3 Yay!
Gambling is yet another common human entertainment that completely eludes me. Slot machines. Casinos. Cards. What's the point?
Recreational boating... spending all day on a small unstable platform? May as well spend the day sitting on the toilet.
After an argument with a supervisor over which CAD system I would be permitted to use at work resulted in my layoff from the aerospace industry, I went to the local college and consulted the psychology dean, and offered my services as a subject for their students. I felt I had good reason to question my own sanity, as I was overwhelmed with what I perceived as complete and utter nonsense and waste of resources. I felt I could trust them to tell me if I was nuts far more than I could trust a "licensed professional", as I felt a licensed professional had a vested interest in finding anything he could treat for a fee. I felt at least the students and college would be honest. They were.
They subjected me to a series of tests. Myers Briggs. Keirsey. Turns out we all have a lot of different personality types, just as much as we have varying skin color, eye color, hair type, whatever. I am INTP. Dead center INTP. INTP often has problems with authority types, as INTP types respect truth, not position. They introduced me to Stanley Milgram ( Obedience to Authority ) which finally got through my thick head why the managers did what they did - which seemed so completely illogical to me. I was hung up on not expending resources to make something until I was confident it would work. The managers saw the economic and human side of things - the salesmanship side - that I have a lot of problems with. I really have problems there because in my mind, I can not even see it and those concepts are about as hard for me to comprehend as time distortions in particle physics studies. I have yet to comprehend why someone would value someone else to tell me I no longer had a job more than they valued me. I realize its my fault somehow. I know in our American society, the skills of getting someone else to do the work far out-trumps actually doing the work. That's why we have such a steep Pareto curve over here. We control the world's reserve currency - we are the only nation allowed to debase our currency by just printing more. I rationalize it by postulating I live in a world where economics, not physics, is the overruling force, despite my belief to the contrary. I will be allowed to live in my make-believe world of energy and thermodynamics as long as I do not cause problems for the people of the suit-and-tie. The shakers of the hand. The writers of one-sided contracts.
So, I was not crazy. I just have a fringe thinking pattern. They pointed out if Tesla had have taken their exams, he would most likely have been INTP too. Well, Nikola Tesla has long been my idol... so that explained that. Nikola died in poverty, a lot of his work never understood. I expect the same. I know others have little interest in the alternative refrigeration schemes that interest me, just as the Edison folks could care less about Tesla's alternating current, much less his three-phase concept. When I saw three-phase, I thought it was one of the most elegant things I had ever seen. I live in a world where a joule has great value, where the world runs on dollars, not joules. We can print endless amounts of dollars, but I wonder how many
Slashdot Mirror
This oughta be a lot of fun for the tailgater!
Thanks. That is the first thing I thought too when I saw this topic under discussion.
.DXF.
.TXT ), may go the way of ancient languages without even the benefit of a rosetta stone.
I have been working in electronic design for many years, I started out in CAD with "Futurenet" schematic capture and PADS for PCB layout. Both ran under DOS on 386 machines ( actually the Futurenet would run on a '286 ). I had SPICE analog circuit simulators which also ran on a '286.
I still use these programs today. They are almost thirty years old. So far, I have been able to migrate them to run on the hardware I have.
A couple of months ago, I had a customer I did a design for ten years ago tell me the ADC on the board I had designed for him was no longer available, and could I re-do it to use something else? The files were still on my machine and came right up. It did not take me long to completely redesign the layout to make him a highly upgraded board with the latest parts on it, yet still be completely fit and form compatible with the existing sockets of his product. Thank goodness the PCB house still honors old Gerber formats, and I can still print my schematics off with the old AutoCad
This was exactly the thing I groused a lot about when working in the aerospace industry when we constantly ditched what we had always chasing the latest thing. What happens when existing product in the field needs support? And how long do we expect product in the field to last? If our product only lasts a year or so, go ahead and design with tools that are only viable for a few months or so... but if we are designing a product that should last a hundred years, we better use tools and record-keeping instruments that will also be usable a hundred years from now. For hundreds of years, paper and ink worked fine as a storage medium. I can't say the same for digital storage - The physical media: optical CDROMS and flash drive, may make it through - especially if we have redundant file integrity and backup systems in place - but will we have the capability to read it with all the proprietary file formats, encryption, and IP law? Anything much beyond the standard public filetypes ( i.e.
Well, I guess I am about a quarter-way into my design of a 100 year support capability. I am quite confident my CAD system will last longer than I will, if anyone else sees fit to maintain it.
The stuff I did for the Government during that same time frame is inaccessible, as the old CAD tools are now gone. I would have no idea how to resurrect the diagrams to those old RF modems that were done in the old special hardware machines. I guess it was a fortunate thing for me that when they "cleaned house", it was not only people like me that went, our old tools went too - and these were the old ones that would run under anything we could boot up into DOS.
I was able to buy the CAD system I had used for five years at the company surplus store. The software has went from running on a '286, to '386, to '486, then Pentium, and now runs in a DOS box.... I figure that no matter how sophisticated our processors get, there will always be some DOS emulator floating around, just as no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, I should always be able to find a pencil and pad of paper - because sometimes that's exactly what you need.
( Oh, incidentally, I'll run Eagle too. )
We have passed law that allows business to exact full payment for undefined partial service. Clever business use of phrases like " service up to " followed by phrases like " for only $$$.$$/mo* " then " * other charges may apply " and the like have led to a business environment where business can provide whatever they feel like and customers have to take what they are lucky enough to get.
Just one change in the interpretation of the law, where the customer's right to withhold payment for service not received, regardless of what the business printed on their contracts would do the trick.
It would incentivize customer service instead of incentivizing legal trickery as it does now.
Can you imagine the legal representatives of some company defending themselves against a defamation lawsuit where some plaintiff is suing because the company screwed up his credit report ? The plaintiff shows the judge a http://www.speedtest.com/ report showing 23kB/sec when the company claimed a 3MB/sec speed? The corporate lawyer approaches the judge and shows the bill clearly showed $53.93 and the plaintiff only paid fifty cents!
The judge looks at the plaintiff's speedtest report and asks the corporate rep if the IP address on the sheet is theirs.... well follow your imagination of how that meeting should go.
A business license should not be an open pass for theft-by-one-sided contract.
You ain't kidding.
I consider myself spiritual. I know God exists. Look around and consider Occam's razor. See creation - observe its complexity. There has to be something that created it.
In the Christian Bible, there is the story of Moses, who asked God about who was sending him to the Pharoah of Egypt to tell him to let the Israelites go. God replied " I am who I am". So what does that say? God is not man. He is who He is. A process? I do not know. No one else seems to either.
Only thing I know is that this thing I know as God has to be extremely powerful, creative and intelligent - much more than I am. Does He take a personal interest in me? That is what I would like to find out. Forces that have a substantial financial interest in our belief systems would have us think so. Especially if they can position themselves as the intermediary. How seriously can the hocking from their heads be taken?
You should have seen the wake of frustration I stirred up in my Church when I confessed to the Pastor that I was having fits over the faith doctrines and I had a lot of doubting Thomas in me. One of the Ten Commandments was not to bear false witness. So am I to confess to things I have not personally witnessed? This is the kind of behaviour I expect from politicians, used car salesmen and stockbrokers... whose headhocking has extremely low credibility in my book.
I ended up downright asking if I had to be a liar and give up my personal integrity in order to be a proper church Christian... as I felt - as an engineer - duty bound to report the truth. My personal integrity demands it. At that point, they suddenly had important matters that had to be attended to and they scurried to their cars. They had time to hock up in front of microphones, but all they can tell me is God wants gullible people who accept whatever some head hocks up?
The Bible also tells us to be wary of the False Prophet. The Parable of the Fig Tree, who Jesus Himself told us to learn, tells of the wolves in sheep's clothing who seek to enslave us. How about the part that says we aren't to go around preaching while carrying a begging bag? We are just here to "sow seeds", then show up next week for the "harvest" of new believers and tithers? Whatever happened to "tending the sheep", or do we just show up every week with silver begging bowls and shearing tools?
I guess if I am going to Hell, I am going to be sent there because I refused to witness to things I have not seen.
Am I to believe that the Church is trying to screen in the most gullible, superstitious, and ignorant among us, discarding the rest of us as agents of Satan, because they cast their "pearls of wisdom" before us, and we, being the swine we are, question the intention?
No wonder the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing, described so well in the Bible, hates science! You can break Man's law as long as you avoid getting caught. Ever tried to break one of God's law? You can't. They are self-enforcing! Of course, we can't stand to give God the credit for His law, so we call it some arcane thing like "Thermodynamics". God's Law reveals the False Prophet in all its nakedness. Of course, expect them to use everything in their power to discredit truth - starting with microphones and high powered amplifiers, financed with proceeds from silver bowls.
Ok, ok, enough of this rant. I am going to get moderated "off topic" for this rant, and deservedly so. All I can say is that I consider myself spiritual, believe in God, and even I am highly leery of "religious fanatics" coming into power. Even my "own" religion!
You read "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram and you see we are capable of extremely heinous acts if someone else puts us up to it. I would hate to have our fate determined by some religious fanatic's imagination.
This is exactly what we are seeing a lot of today.
The God I believe in is quite powerful enough to do whatever He wants to do. For me to meddle in it is just about as helpful as my cat trying to "help" me fix my car.
I shop Amazon, eBay. and AliExpress ( China ).
All have a targeted ad system to show me products similar to ones I have placed on my wish list or have purchased.
Frankly, I like it.
I have been buying a lot of Arduino stuff, DC/DC converters, electronic components, connectors, lithium batteries, LED's, sensors, motors.
I am not interested in plastic flowers, dresses, Ipods, bridal accessories, diapers, insurance, or dinnerware. They have not been loading my screen with these unwanted items. The suggestions they have offered me have been welcome - they often offer an item I wasn't aware that it even existed.
Now, one place that I had just as soon not be tracked is which YouTube videos I will watch. I do not mind them tracking me for that session - but its quite annoying if they remember and suggest the same thing at a later time - when I am in another environment. For that reason, I do not want YouTube's cookies or registration. What goes on in the bedroom needs to stay there, and not be revealed at the office.
Its a shame I cannot simply donate $5000 to a charity of her choice rather than be forced to subsidize a corporation I have absolutely no love for - just for the sake of "proving" my love for her.
It ought to be obvious... this diamond mentality is nothing more than a demonstration of our obedience to do really asinine things just because we are told to do so.
I still have my old Smith-Corona I went through College with. 100% mechanical. This was the one that looked like a small suitcase. Works perfect, but I would have no idea of where to get another ribbon for the thing. It uses the old cloth ribbons saturated with ink and it would shuttle back and forth as keys were pressed. Red and black ink too. Not many mechanical things nearly 100 years old still work ( this was the machine my mom went through school on ). They sure made things to last in those days.
No erase key. You had to use those old style abrasive eraser pens or a white paint-like fluid for that. If you made a significant screw up, might as well put in a new piece of paper and retype the whole page.
Would I go back to advocating this? No. I'd rather see them resurrect the old Radio Shack Tandy 100 with its low power processor and reflective LCD screen. With today's technology, these could probably be made with solar cells just like a calculator. I'd love to have one of those that could use a USB stick for program and data storage.
I kinda see it like delivering atomic weapons by dirigible.
Sandia National Laboratories. Government funded?
Doesn't that mean the people own the technology developed - so if anything does come of this - who is going to tell the taxpayer who funded this that he can't go build one for himself or sell the power he can make off of his unit?
Or give him any authority to tell his neighbor not to do the same should his neighbor want to do likewise?
I am puzzled why we do not take this more seriously.
My belief is that the derivative of the logistic equation, distorted by technological advances combined with economic pressures, has its peak shifted to the right by quite some amount. Meaning the slope-up is gradual, an extended peak, and a cliff-like demise when a failing economy can no longer finance extraction costs. The area under the curve is constant ( total petroleum on this planet ), but the extraction rate is astronomical right now in a geologic sense.
I do not feel the curve shown on the Wikipedia page conveys the full impact of the problem. Its the derivative of that curve that does. That would be the oil extraction RATE. Yes, there is lots of oil on this planet - very hard to extract oil. Will our science and economy support the extraction of it?
My own feeling is I am seeing a re-run of "Rat Attack" , but its humans instead of rats, and oil instead of bamboo seeds. When the extraction rates start declining, all hell is going to break loose.
I would think with as many people out there who are really into security, log their routers, and know who they are connecting to, it wouldn't be long before flags would raise and some company will have the uber-embarassing duty of having someone explain why their companies' product is spilling beans.
In my old DOS days, I had a floppy drive I had deliberately modified so any attempt to write to it would just trigger a piezo beeper. I had diagnostic disks loaded in it, and the beeper came in handy to let me know when some rogue program had identified the floppy and was trying to infect it.
At that time, the "boot sector infectors" were common, and I wanted assurance that when I did a FDISK and FORMAT, I was re-initializing the target with good clean code. I could not trust anything that could be written to.
I had no idea at the time what kind of mischief was in the target machine and often all I could do was boot up into DOS with the known good copy in my butchered floppy drive, then under control of that DOS, using LapLink, transfer all the target's data files onto another disk through the printer port. Then I would re-FDISK, re-FORMAT, re-install the executables from the original purchased diskettes, and hope the virus writers had not infected the data files.
I still rant and rave about mixing code with data for that reason. I can't for the life of me see executing stuff in a data file as much as I can't see storing gasoline in a switchgear room. Just asking for grief.
One thing I would love to see is a USB stick that will accept programming only if a jumper plug is removed. I can then get my USB stick, pull the jumper, load in my secure system boot and troubleshooting diagnostics when I know I am in a clean environment, reassemble the stick, then I can insert my USB stick into the most hostile of virus environments and know nothing can mess up my diagnostic programs. Any attempt to write to the USB just flashes a LED on it and lets me know something out there is trying to write to me. A program on the USB stick will be running to let me know what process is trying to write to me. As for now, I use CDR's for this as I have yet to hear of viruses that would open up a CDR and successfully rewrite it with modified viral code.
I find it puzzling why in this day of common gigabyte flash, why our machines aren't shipped with a basic OS in flash already loaded with minimal and thoroughly tested code for at least internet browsing Kinda like the old Commodore used to ship with Basic preinstalled - all you did was turn it on and it "woke up" at the BASIC prompt displayed on the screen before it ever began to look for disks or other peripherals.
.160 inches. They won't fit into 0.1 inch protoboards neatly. To this day they still build the boards with that frustrating offset because ten years ago some layout guy at his PCB workstation did not forsee people trying to use Arduinos with the 0.1" vectorboards and CSC socketboards.
I want my off-the-shelf machine opening up a browser window pointed at 0.0.0.0 upon power up without needing a disk. If no TCPIP addresses are found, then all I can see is my own machine. I think 0.0.0.0 would be perfect for accessing one's own machine as no-one would put this address onto the web. 0.0.0.0 would be my desktop. It should quite happily surf the web - until it has to deal with some proprietary content or save something - and even then it should be smart enough to display blanks where the proprietary content is and indicate what the problem is, never hanging up.
Pull the disk completely, and the machine should still run fine, albeit no flash, no movies, no additional capabilities, and a lack of saving anything. It won't need anything like a special "boot" disk or special sectors. If it even as much as finds a USB stick out there, it would offer it as a storage option. With the size of USB sticks these days, I could keep any drivers, extended code, data, whatever, on USB drives. In the event I do have some unforseen malcode which makes its way onto my removable media, there is nothing saying I can't remove everything, come back up with a virus killer program running from a known and trusted USB stick - once that program has control, plug my problem drive in and let the virus program examine the problem drive.
The ROM routines should include a TCPIP stack, at least a WAV, MP3, MPG, JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP display routines and a rudimentary windowing system library callable from a resident C++ ( processing ? ) compiler. ( it would program like a big Arduino ).
You want special stuff that runs on top of it? Go buy it. Whoever made the special stuff takes responsibility for its behaviour ( or misbehaviour ). I can't trust any executables on rewritable media any more than I can trust contracts written in pencil. At least ROM is like a contract written in ink. ( Hint to the BSA: ROM is a physical product, and its easy to identify if you sold it or not. If you find your code in someone else's ROM, you have someone to go after. No use going after someone else's machine - there's nothing in it )
My own personal belief is that the write be disabled to the boot ROM at the factory, so no software can overwrite it. If one HAS to, he can disassemble his machine down to get physical access to the board and install a jumper plug in just the right place if he wants to reflash his ROM, but at least make it hard enough one has to deliberately go out of his way to do so. And of course, all obligations of the manufacturer regarding the security of their machine would be voided.
I hate all this malcode as much as the next guy, and I am all for cleaning up all these piles of muck everyone keeps stepping in. This muck is much like the problem a lot of us Arduino folks have where some layout guy ten years ago decided to put two pin connectors offset by
I think Google ( Android ) is closing fast on this dream.
Enjoying what you do is *everything*.
I can relate personally. I had an aerospace job once. Loved it. Until we sold out to a big corporation who saw we were profitable. They brought in lots of bean counters and other useless folk whom I suspect were hired into a "good job" as a return favor for a relative's help getting funding.
Working there became like hell for me. Lots of "men of the suit" micromanaging everything. What was once "creativity" became "re-inventing the wheel", what was once "meticulous diligence" became "perfectionist"- in a negative light. Everything became justified only on a profit basis, lots of points for making things cheap, and no-one seemed to care whether or not the thing would work or be maintainable.
At one time, sleeping, eating, or having to attend to bodily functions were a royal nuisance for me because they trumped my work. After management succeeded in "de-funning" the work, I began looking forward to the end of the day and hating like all getout to get out of bed in the morning. When I voiced my concerns, the reply was down the lines of "that's why it's called work - and why your pay is called compensation". Well, it used to be fun. If I just wanted money, I would have been a plumber. Not much fun, but people with a stopped up toilet will pay damn near anything to have it work again.
I was making good money, but my soul just wasn't there anymore. Forces valued far more than my engineering skill were at work, forces of pure economics. We had the money for cosmetic things and "leadership", but I would have to justify things like getting time to explore new technologies. I lost drive. No-one else seemed to care. We were so inundated with Government money all that seemed to matter was meetings and forms. We could always outsource the work, put our name on it, then our commitment would be met. Handshakes and hefty checks for everyone in the upper echelons.
I was just getting ulcers, high blood pressure, and water retention problems which I think was due to my anxiety over being responsible for things I had no control over. I was just a lowly lab rat - not much use to a megamoney corp.
I make nowhere near what I used to make, but at least I enjoy my day building embedded controllers ( mostly Arduino based ) along with the analog/power interfaces. I dabble in refrigeration too, lately working on ice-bank technologies using propane refrigerant and arduino based controllers. I get to play with Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors, I2C busses, ADS1115 digitizers, Ferromagnetic memories, DS1307 clocks, linked together with YellowJacket WIFI interfaces.
Like messing with race cars or sports, I get a kick of seeing how many BTU ( MJ ) I can transfer to the ice-based phase-change energy storage with the energy I have available.
This is a heck of a lot more interesting than filling out all the forms and keeping time sheets of numerous "simultaneous" projects, at 6 minute resolution, for projects falling further and further behind because when I am working on one, someone is always badgering me about yet another one. The time sheets were a joke anyway - as we all knew certain projects were running low on funding, but it was politically inexpedient to charge time to them - but they had to be done. Well-funded projects took the brunt of everything. ( Just like an insured patient in a hospital ).
Bottom line.... if you are not happy, your enthusiasm will soon leave you, then you will eventually be fired for not being a "team player". Best find something you enjoy so you will make money for those who employ you. .
Money isn't everything. Observe how the rich often abuse their cars as well - they always have plenty of money to pay the mechanic to keep them fixed. Their skill is in getting paid. That is not one of my skills. I'd rather eat at McDonalds in peace than in the fanciest restaurant in town, full of ulcers and stress of trying to be something I am not.
Far as I am concerned, prior art.
Geez, encoding audio on a LED has been standard science fair fare since LED's came out.
About 40 years ago, I had even proposed to Chevron about having the new LED displays on our digital panel meters flash their reading to mimic a UPC code so a supermarket barcode inventory scanner gun would be able to read the meter from a distance, This was in the 70's. I had a lot of meters in remote areas which needed to be read and logged. I wanted to make things easier for my field crew by placing the meter displays where they could drive by and "shoot" them with a supermarket inventory gun, then bring the gun back. I would know the numbers weren't "dry-labbed", as well as I would not be asking the guys to go fumble with pens and paper in inclement weather. Nobody wants to be fiddling around with a clipboard and papers in a 50 mph santa ana wind, or when its midnight and pouring down rain. Even if the digits on the meter were illegible, the blinking pattern would still be recognizable by the inventory gun. It would beep when it got a readable code and my guy could go on his way.
That was in the 70's. I'd do it with RF today if I were still with Chevron. Its amazing what I can do with today's microcontrollers.
The classical model is the logistic equation. .
This the basic driving function, but there ancillary variables - especially economic functions - which distort the hell out of the waveshape.
However, the result - regardless of distortions along the way - is inevitable.
I know what is going to happen. It ain't pretty. At all.
What I do not know is when, as I do not have accurate coefficients for the equation.
I think this app is great if implemented properly.
Its the customer, not the cabbie, who should be fiddling around with a cellphone.
The fare would be given the opportunity to link to a routing computer over the phone. The routing computer would know the status of every subscribing cab, its availability, location, and direction, and be able to notify the proper cab of an awaiting fare.
The cabbie gets a GPS display, much like the existing ones, but this one would be linked to the routing computer and flash where his fare is waiting. There is no reason to annoy the cabbie with anything more than where his fare is, and select one cabbie so they all don't do a mad rush. The cabbie may be given a few seconds to accept the fare, else the routing computer will select another cabbie. The computer would know which cabbies are busy delivering, which are idle, and the idea is to keep the idle ones busy and minimizing non-passenger distance. The routing computer will then inform the caller which cabbie it has arranged to pick them up, along with estimated time to arrival.
Note: This is how I would do it - exactly how they intend to implement this, I am quite ignorant. The whole concept looks great to me - it puzzles me as to why anyone would object.
Amazon is not alone.
Both eBay and AliExpress are competing in this arena, and if I had my guess, AliExpress is going to be a formidable competitor because of the international nature of their operations.
Remember when "internet search" meant "Yahoo"?
Things can change damn fast these days, rivers of revenue change courses, and what was once a river becomes a dry bed of sand.
Just one tax law or regulation changes, then a business model based on the existing set of conditions becomes nonviable. Just as copyright law put napster out of business, tax law could easily put a damper on interstate trade - not revectoring the trade through a local route, but stopping the trade completely. It seems that 99% of the stuff I buy, I really do not need, but at a good price, I'll go for it Bump the price or aggravation to purchase up, and I'll just say "to hell with it", and the purchase and resulting economic activity just doesn't happen.
You, like I, are in complete awe of the elegance of our design. I like that. I wish more were.
It looks like some DNA codes for how to make a screw or bolt.
We have a library of what DNA codes for various screws and bolts.
It appears the "junk" DNA codes for where they go.
The sky will be the limit.
The understanding of how DNA works, ( and correspondingly, how to hack it ) is the ultimate reverse-engineering accomplishment.
Life is a textbook, full of worked examples. We are at the stage we realize there is an alphabet, the letters mean something, and have the definition of a few words. Kindergarten stuff.
If we play our cards right, and don't spend all our resources fighting amongst ourselves, the future is incredibly bright. We have worked examples of damn near everything we need... photosynthesis ( solar powered CO2 sequestration and energy storage ) for starters. We have bioluminescence, electric eels, and all sorts of sensor examples.
I figure we have been given a huge shipment of arduinos with all sorts of accessories, and we have now figured out how to make the light blink.
We don't know how its wired yet, how the compiler works, and just now figuring out some of what makes the hardware work.
If our society will value knowledge above greed and accounting, if there is anything limiting our potential, I have yet to see it. However if greed and accounting is all we know, we will soon run into all sorts of limits, imposed only by our inability to adapt. First of these will be exhaustion of the earth's fossil fuels, followed by food and water famines. We will be like the chick that hatched, but failed to scratch, find food, and thrive, living off the energy stored in the egg - until it is depleted.
The earth is our egg.
I value highly the knowledge our species acquires. It is our survival.
Yes, That reflectiveness of the white ice as compared to the darkness of the deep blue sea is known as its albedo .
Being I first learned solid state linear design on germanium transistors, I am well aware of something we called "thermal runaway", in which the transistor would bias itself on more and more as it got hotter, yet being biased on was what was making it hot. The hotter it got, the more current it passed. Thermal runaway.
The result was a fused transistor.
The mathematics of thermal runaway on those old designs is nearly identical to the albedo-loss calculations of our ice caps. I find it a frightening scenario, as I can't simply change out the planet as easily as I can replace a fused transistor.
I think anyone who has used pneumatic power tools can vouch for the insight of your post. It takes a pretty powerful air compressor to run the tool, but the inefficiency is tolerated in exchange for the convenience of having a very small and lightweight power release at the tool.
Its not unusual for me to run a 2HP compressor to run a hand sander.
I'd prefer mine in a USB stick, for the same reason I used to gleefully accept AOL floppies.
I keep 99.9% of what music I have for the same reason I have jars full of assorted nuts and bolts I have no use for - I keep them because someone else might need it, and it costs me nothing to not throw it away. I hate to throw something away someone else might want, because so many people have given me something just because they saw I liked it.
Life seems to work better when I take an interest in what my neighbors want. I'll get it for them if it falls in my path. They do the same for me. Life gets good.
Maybe my experience can offer insight.
I can get great joy designing a new digitizer, or building a heat transfer engine. I feel I've created something. It makes me feel worthwhile.
Nothing bores me worse than sports. I have no part in controlling the outcome, and even if I did - I fail to see any benefit to me or anyone else. I had just as soon sit above a bridge over a freeway overpass and root for one lane over another, scoring a point for that lane every time a vehicle passes under the bridge. Maybe even two points and a touchdown if its a truck. Root! Root! Root for Lane number! 3 Yay!
Gambling is yet another common human entertainment that completely eludes me. Slot machines. Casinos. Cards. What's the point?
Recreational boating... spending all day on a small unstable platform? May as well spend the day sitting on the toilet.
After an argument with a supervisor over which CAD system I would be permitted to use at work resulted in my layoff from the aerospace industry, I went to the local college and consulted the psychology dean, and offered my services as a subject for their students. I felt I had good reason to question my own sanity, as I was overwhelmed with what I perceived as complete and utter nonsense and waste of resources. I felt I could trust them to tell me if I was nuts far more than I could trust a "licensed professional", as I felt a licensed professional had a vested interest in finding anything he could treat for a fee. I felt at least the students and college would be honest. They were.
They subjected me to a series of tests. Myers Briggs. Keirsey. Turns out we all have a lot of different personality types, just as much as we have varying skin color, eye color, hair type, whatever. I am INTP. Dead center INTP. INTP often has problems with authority types, as INTP types respect truth, not position. They introduced me to Stanley Milgram ( Obedience to Authority ) which finally got through my thick head why the managers did what they did - which seemed so completely illogical to me. I was hung up on not expending resources to make something until I was confident it would work. The managers saw the economic and human side of things - the salesmanship side - that I have a lot of problems with. I really have problems there because in my mind, I can not even see it and those concepts are about as hard for me to comprehend as time distortions in particle physics studies. I have yet to comprehend why someone would value someone else to tell me I no longer had a job more than they valued me. I realize its my fault somehow. I know in our American society, the skills of getting someone else to do the work far out-trumps actually doing the work. That's why we have such a steep Pareto curve over here. We control the world's reserve currency - we are the only nation allowed to debase our currency by just printing more. I rationalize it by postulating I live in a world where economics, not physics, is the overruling force, despite my belief to the contrary. I will be allowed to live in my make-believe world of energy and thermodynamics as long as I do not cause problems for the people of the suit-and-tie. The shakers of the hand. The writers of one-sided contracts.
So, I was not crazy. I just have a fringe thinking pattern. They pointed out if Tesla had have taken their exams, he would most likely have been INTP too. Well, Nikola Tesla has long been my idol... so that explained that. Nikola died in poverty, a lot of his work never understood. I expect the same. I know others have little interest in the alternative refrigeration schemes that interest me, just as the Edison folks could care less about Tesla's alternating current, much less his three-phase concept. When I saw three-phase, I thought it was one of the most elegant things I had ever seen. I live in a world where a joule has great value, where the world runs on dollars, not joules. We can print endless amounts of dollars, but I wonder how many