"Once real cash is involved, it's all about gaming the system."
You nailed it well. Promises of pay attracts those who strive to get paid.
I saw this well in some of my previous places of employment.
I was quite picky over who I wanted to work for. My selection was primarily based on what they did, and did I want to do this... in other words... "Is this gonna be fun?".
I know myself all too well. If its something I have no desire to do, and I am doing it just to get paid, my own personal economics will take over and I will allocate the bare minimal time required to maintain getting paid, transferring all available time I can into doing what I want to do.
It behooved me, and my employer, that I know myself and not even TRY to get employment doing something I wouldn't be doing myself - even if I didn't get paid.
I love thermodynamics ( refrigeration ), circuit design, robotics, power, microcontrollers. For me, great toys.
I hate what I consider mindless paperwork, confinement, and things that produce no meaningful result, hence I am awfully bored preparing taxes, routine management, sports, marketing, and most "people-skill" stuff. I would make a terrible department store manager. I hate cubicles. I am a lab-rat.
I have personally seen my "dream job" evaporate when the small company I worked for be absorbed by a much larger capitalistic corporation, whose bottom line was quarterly earnings. People like me were rapidly replaced by those who were much more social, into sports, had yachts, and discussing things like carnot cycles at lunch were a terrible no-no.
I found it extremely puzzling how these people justified enormous expenditures on things like personal transportation and entertainment, but seemed to have no concern over how reliable or efficient our products were. Gotta admit they looked pretty with all their suits and ties, PowerPoint presentations, and sales fluff, but to me it was like having an expensive unreliable sports car in lieu of my common old car which is so simple I can usually fix anything that goes wrong. A fancy cowling may improve the appearance of an engine, but if it hampers the coolant and screws up the operation, I could not justify it.
Its really easy to attract capitalistic employees, although they don't work nearly as cheap as someone who just likes what he does and is more impressed with the company's "pizza code" rather than their "dress code".
I wouldn't expect their newly hired capitalistic types to do efficiency analyses of thermodynamic systems any better than I could dress up like a banker and impress the hell out of them with clever showmanship. Hell, if I dressed that way, I could not work at all, I would be far more concerned with soiling a five hundred dollar suit than trying to find out why a pressure anomaly exists.
But, I figure the USA has become a Management-Based system, running a Faith-Based system, legislating the rest of the world produce what we need, and my time has come and gone.
Its been my observation that "trying to be useful", regardless of its economic rewards, seems to be inbred in some of us. Maybe its some sort of genetic thing. I cite the entire concept of open-source as my evidence. Some of the best minds in the industry literally give themselves to the public - a "Mother Teresa" type thing, meant in the best of hopes of sharing in the hopes of providing public display of a concept that should work. The Bible is full of it.
Payments attract the capitalists, not the philanthropists.
Capitalists are some of the greediest, self-centered, hated people on Earth. And for good reason.
Much of us who are of an unselfish "giving" nature are of the idea that everyone who has a gift of doing whatever shares, there will be more than enough to go around.
We tend to give to religions, although I personally want to give to the public-at-large - sharing what I have as my way of saying "thank you" to the people who shared with me. It doesn't have to be, and likely isn't, the same people.
As the saying goes: "What goes around, comes around", which to me is a biblical paraphrase of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.".
If I was in a position of hiring others, I would make it my prime priority to have people of this ilk on my team.
I would not go as far as to outlaw proprietary formats, any more than I would want to outlaw putting doors on movie theatres so that only paid patrons can enjoy the movie.
Hovever, a government using proprietary protocols to communicate with the populace is a horse of a different color. They would not like it if, as an American, I sent my tax return written in Swahili. Likewise, I highly resent it when I must pay someone else, and agree to whatever terms they dictate, in order to communicate with my own government.
The second condition is often worse than the first.
If using public protocols was codified into LAW, then anyone providing "embrace, extend, then patent" technology to the government would force the government to abandon said software should the software require use of patented, copyrighted product before the public could communicate with them.
What I am asking for is that Governments assume the risk of having to change out all the software interfacing to the public should Microsoft or any other private vendor start spewing copyright infringement letters to anyone just trying to communicate with their own government.
With private companies, they can do as they will. Sometimes its not easy for someone like me to even find an internet banker or stockbroker which will use standard protocols. I had to move all my retirement accounts from a major aerospace firm when I retired after 30 years on the job because the broker handling my retirement insisted I run a Microsoft product, and I had no intention to do so.
Dammit, I am old, have a lot of legacy stuff that works just fine, and I regard replacing my computational infrastructure with just about as much excitement as having some plumber tell me I have to replace the pipes in my house.
Business would not get too excited with me to pay by check after I require them to sign an agreement with me holding me harmless for bounced checks. Yet business expects me to agree to EULAS that essentially say the same thing.
Thats when my reputation becomes important. Do I have a reputation for bad checks? What kind of reputation does the software vendor have? Will he back up his promise with action...uh thats not what the EULA said.
I note all sorts of companies in business to make that vendor's product work.
Its like buying a certain brand name car, when the word is out that it breaks down all the time, and there's a garage on every block and scores of teenage kids in business to keep the car running - geez, a horse and buggy might be better.
I have heard enough marketing phrases hocked out of rep-heads, unbacked with act. Example: what does "Plays for sure" mean? Or is it just three words with no meaning at all?
Yes, I am bitter, it is because I personally take the hit for stuff that doesn't work.
I am not a highly placed executive who has the option of delegating the mess to someone else.
Its just been my observation that people who embrace all this finicky stuff have far better skill at finding the someone who can be convinced they are worth a paycheck than they are at doing the work.
Trustworthy Computing is more than a marketing slogan, its a way of life.
Every time we run "unseasoned" applications in our machine, we open ourselves up to whatever holes the programmers left in it.
Unfortunately, with today's market pressures to be "first to market", there is precious little time to beta test, so the customer has to.
Legal types have come up with all sorts of clever phrases ("hold harmless" clauses) so customers have no recourse as to being used this way. Customers desperate to remain compatible with others who have adopted this software will agree to whatever the vendors dictate.
I was at a DELL booth today, inquiring about their Linux boxes. I was shown lots and lots of Windows boxes, and urged to "go with the flow", "stay current", and buy a new Vista box. I asked him that if I offered to tender a check for his whole display if he would sign a legal agreement holding me harmless for bounced checks.
Now, I understand he is a businessman, not someone who would be held personally accountable for system failure, but he WOULD be held accountable for payment failure. As expected, he said he would not sign such a thing.
I ventured he would probably check my payment record, did I often have problems paying? Were there scores of companies out there , McAfees - Nortons - AVGs, et.al, in business to try to make my checks good?
Like my older car, which has run virtually trouble free from the 70's, I expect my software to do the same.
All I really need is an HTML browser which can interpret text(.htm,.txt), images(.bmp,.gif,.jpg), movies(.mpg,.divx), and sound(.mpg). There is no need for anything else. We just need to get these apps running trouble-free and trustworthy.
If business wants to use some weird proprietary formats "held harmless" for trustworthiness, then let them, problem is their customers that espouse trustworthy computing may never see their file.
A bank seems to have no problem denying doing business with people entering their premises with masks on their face and unverified intentions - why are we people so willing eo kowtow to business and load whatever apps they demand into our machines (IE) in order to be compatible with them? I am holding out, but I am such a minority that business just scoffs at me.
We need more people who will stand up to business and tell them if they can't use standard public protocols, they have to find their open-wallets, check signers, and credit card authorizers somewhere else.
Things like this are interesting to bring up in Church. Yes, I will do things like that. I am not the most popular fella there, ya know.
One discussion had to do with God communicating to Man by using whether or not a rag left outside would be wet in the morning. I was convinced the man was making decisions based on atmospheric psychrometrics ( humidity/dew point ).
Sometimes I wish God would give me a personal demo - maybe suspend my car five feet off the ground for seven days straight in full view of everyone so me and my scientist friends and I can verify if any known force is doing it.
It just doesn't work that way. Admittedly, it leaves me with a condrundrum. I see so much stuff that is so complex I have not the foggiest idea how it came to be. Despite all my training, I can't even make a drop of water out of nothing. Let alone just one leaf. Or an ant.
If I accept Christ was God embodied on Earth, it was the religions of the day (Sanhedrin ) that did even Him in. What makes me think Religions got their act straight?
My bet is with the scientists.
God is Truth. Fact is the holy grail of the scientists.
Damn me from the pulpit if you will, but if God is going to damn me for eternity, he is going to have to damn me for doing my best to worship Him.
He made some neat stuff, and it sold like hotcakes.
Every time I go to the mall, I always stop by the Dell booth to see when their new Linux boxes are coming out.
I want a good Linux laptop so bad - one preloaded with all the internet, office, music and video acquisition apps, and so forth, designed from the get-go to run fast and efficient.
I am not interested in trying to piecemeal a box if someone out there will standardize a box of public software.
If Dell piddle-paddles around this, its only a matter of time before I find what I want in Wal-Mart, most likely of Chinese manufacture.
Michael Dell offered us an alternative to Compaq.
I hope China does not have to offer us an alternative to Dell.
Many of us have had it up to here with proprietary software and all the reload problems we have in the event of virus or nonvolatile memory replacement.
If I find a pencil on the sidewalk, the most obvious thing is someone dropped it.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Jehovah - Yahweh - the name as I understand it is Hebrew meaning "to cause to be". The name of God. Fair enough.
My problem is finding God. I mean God. Not religion.
Religion is Man's doing. Even if it was done in the best of intentions. The Church has killed some fine scientists who had it right (Galileo and others). If God was really with the Church, somehow I think God would have let the religious leaders in on it before they went off and violently demonstrated their ignorance?
Their treatment of anyone questioning them leaves me to believe that their organizations exist to protect the political power of certain factions, and God is brought in only as a pretext for their authority.
These scientists are decoding the very work coded by God himself. (itself?).
Its amazing to me God has seen fit ( here I am again anthropomorphizing him again ) for us to have the wisdom to disassemble our own OS.
If we ever get to the bottom of this, I feel we will have an even better understanding of the Glory of God - whoever or whatever He is.
Its something about the elegance of design I see which leads me to believe there has to be some force - some intelligence - far greater than I out there.
I don't know what it is but I am insanely drawn to it.
I will not install RealPlayer stuff because I use my machine for internet banking and purchasing. That is, I am handling MONEY and need confidence in the security of my machine.
If social bullshit sites wanna commit to virus prone or hidden-agendaware, fine. I won't see it, but then I really don't need to see it either.
I don't think any serious site, especially if MONEY is involved, would consider programming their site in a frivolous Rube-Goldberg manner if they have the slightest intention of being viewed as a serious business site.
Even javascripts on a business site are usually sufficient to cause me to take my purchase elsewhere, as I have no idea what hostile scripts hosting keyloggers may be running in my machine once I open it up to run downloaded executables.
When I land on these poorly coded business websites, these things immediately come to mind...
The CEO/President of the company is technically illiterate.
The CIO of that company is far better with people skills of finding a CEO to pay him than he is at coding.
Nobody at that company gives a damm over what kind of problems I may get if I open myself up to risky intercourse with their machine.
I consider the Internet a risky and filthy place, very useful, but dangerous. I would just as soon go onto the internet with a cash-handling machine with my safeties off as go into a house of prostitution with no prophylactics. God only knows what I am going to catch, likely something I have not seen before.
Ok... Imagine Microsoft did indeed start flinging litigation all over the industry...
Then any adopters of Linux ( rest of world ) will be afraid of "embracing" Microsoft, for fear of the lawyer letter in the mail.
Then Microsoft is relegated to an American-Only protocol with not a helluva lot of political clout outside the US.
This will leave businesses which have embraced the Microsoft Representative with a crippled system incapable of communicating to every customer.
Unlike open source, which will.
The businessman who shook the hand of the Microsoft rep may have to stand before the CEO and explain why he should keep his job, given the company's competitors can talk to everyone, and his company, under his signature, can only talk to a subset of the customer base.
The handshake with the Microsoft rep could be the handshake of death for many corporate CIO, as the love of universally compatible systems - and systems open to verification of their operation - become the norm.
Microsoft has now shown their hand... its got claws in it. Do you want to trust it? The smiling face of someone anticipating getting you into their cat trap could turn into a gun pretty fast if it doesn't get its way.
I don't expect the American government to do much, but I do expect compatibility with the rest of the world will do it.
When you live to face the ramifications of your selections, ignorance is NOT bliss.
Doesn'e even this undermine to our nation just how important it is that we KNOW how our stuff works... and how to fix it if someone messes it up?
Honestly, I am so frustrated with this "its someone else's responsibility to make it work" and other finger pointing paradigms. Its MY stuff, I bought it with legal tender, and if I don't know how to maintain it, do I really have that much business having it?
If my dog made a mess, its obvious to me just what he did and where he did it. If termites made a mess, I can find and put back what they messed up. I feel exactly the same with my computing apparatus, and I highly resent efforts by others ( via DMCA like legal maneuvering ) to keep me ignorant of how my stuff works. It frustrates me to no end to have others make knowledge illegal, enforceable by police at gunpoint, only for the financial gain of blocking off alternative remedies I have for maintenance or customization needs.
Having ANY software vendor locking me in to their "support" is like having the contractor who built my house locking me in for anything I want to do to maintain or modify my house.
Not to say I would want to deprive him of his art of driving nails, but if he was too hard to get along with, or overprices himself, I strongly reserve what I feel is my right to pick up the hammer and saw and do it personally, if need be.
Yes, I *love* those e2 batteries (AA and AAA Lithium) from Energizer.
Everything I have now has either those or NiMH in them.
The Lithiums are great for clocks, remotes, electronic test equipment, and emergency gear. They claim to hold their charge for over ten years - and I have yet to see one leak.
Those are great for those things that sit around forever, but work when you need it.
As for those "chew up the battery" applications, such as toys, everyday flashlight, power tools, etc, I keep with the NiMH. I am opening those things up so many times that I usually catch a failing cell before it causes much damage. And besides, recharging them is much cheaper, as I am going to go through them much faster than their self-discharge rate.
I no longer have an alkaline in the house. I have long since had my fill of opening a battery compartment, only to find it filled with green corroded junk.
Yeh, but how do you protect yourself against "embrace, extend, patent", aka Microsoft?
Yes, I would love to completely ignore Microsoft and their extensions, but businessmen love them, and once businessmen "lock-in" to Microsoft technology, one has to adapt to the extensions in order to communicate to a "Microsoft Technology Partner".
I don't think we will see too much of a change unless we "scare" the public, via mindless lawsuiting for things like trying to watch a video downloaded onto their computer and viewed on an IPod. Or pester our viewer with unskipable ads which "pirate" technology re-empowers them to do so.
If we can hold our security high enough that our own systems don't "rat us out" to the suing business community, Linux will be perceived as a "safe haven" for technology usage, much like having a trusted nanny in the house which will mind the children and not report to the authorities if they find anything amiss in the house ( bottle of wine, weed, our lawn hasn't been mowed to specifications, or maybe we have an unused car in the back yard ).
Go ahead and honor Microsoft's whining about us maintaining compatibility with them. We only "embraced", as well.
If businesses find they are losing business because their internet servers won't talk to us, they may think twice about entering the proprietary protocol cat trap.
I have already had to move my retirement account from one broker to another because of internet compatibility problems. I minced no words to the broker over WHY I had to move my account to someone else who did not insist that I ran IE. I realized I was speaking to someone paid enough that he didn't have to worry about worms, viruses, rootkits, and other problems of IE.
I knew for him, it was only money. But for me, its my retirement.
I could not seem to get him to understand the importance of security. My perception of his company is that he would keep my assets hidden in a shoe box under a bush across the street. And have the unmitigated gall to have me agree to a Microsoft EULA that would hold everyone harmless if something went wrong.
I knew his skill was in finding someone else who thought he ranked a salary, not in managing my assets.
How does the little guy tell those "earning" millions of dollars a year that even his penny is valuable? I don't have the financial assets, paid for by others, to do my bidding for me as these big guys do.
Apache can say "We handle 100% of your customers with FREE, STANDARD, PUBLIC, RISK-FREE protocols.
Microsoft can claim a subset of that, those who use ONLY Microsoft LICENSED products.
And people like me feel like the law abiding citizen in a dark alley, knowing that I do not have any "protection", but anyone who chooses not to abide by the law has a gun.
Let the Highly Paid Executive make his decision. And answer to the stockholders. And justify his pay.
Let the executive mount the dais, go behind the podium, and tell his stockholders his corporation chooses only to do business with people who will accept virus-prone stuff and will agree to holding everyone unaccountable.
As far as these Senators go, personally, I would love to have a rider to this bill, noting that a breach of campaign promise is also a felony, life imprisonment if they fail to honor what they promised to do if elected.
I'll be more cautious about wearing my sunglasses.
I am getting older and would like to skip cataracts from my life if I can.
My dad had cataracts, and he blamed it on sun reflection from the sea. He loved deep-sea fishing and went every chance he could. ( Me, I hated it. Being held captive on a fishing boat all day reminded me of being locked up in a bathroom all day. And it rocked. And I got, well, you know, all woozy. )
You have an insightful comment on what it takes to finance "free" content.
I like most of it except tracking *me*. It unnerves me. Its too much like "stalking".
It would unnerve me to go into a store, only to have a clerk stalk me all over the mall.
Given this latest Sony Rootkit Fiasco, and seeing how our Government handles it, in comparison of how they handle other breaches of "rights" aka DMCA, I cannot trust my Government to stick up for what is righteous, as much as I can trust them to stick up for what makes someone elses money.
And we wonder why the public seems to have trouble grasping the concepts that even sharing a song is bad?
Despite the fact sharing a song, unlike stealing someone else's house, is a $180,000 offense?
Those people no longer have their house! And THAT wasn't a crime? I guess it was "just", as "justices" define it, but was it "righteous"? That's the neat thing for having power without righteousness.
That's what scares me. Power without Righteousness. Even our highest courts didn't find anything wrong with downright wanton selfish THEFT, as long as they could call it "eminent domain".
I have seen way too much evidence that says I have to watch out for myself. There is nothing much I can do to enforce how Business uses or abuses my trust. The option I have remaining is NOT do business with them if I don't HAVE to.
Businesses are organized and have much more ability to cause problems for me if they want to. I feel my advantage is the same as a hiding mouse, keeping his presence unknown to the cat. There are so few businesses I can trust these days.
I see most as simply fishermen, with ME being the fish.
It behooves me that I do not take the bait; there is likely a hook therein.
The whole idea is to hook me. Lock-in. Entrapment. Whatever. Reel in the profits!
As a member of the "aging population", I think you have a very valid reply.
I am of the era of people who have had to live with their mistakes. That is another way of saying you have to sleep in the bed you made.
I was fortunate enough to live through the era when computers just came into existence, and the mindset at the time was much like the mindset in building a tractor. One wanted to do it right so he didn't have to do it over. Any farmer will tell you a tractor not "done right" is not worth having. Its gotta work, out of the box, and continue to work robustly. If it doesn't, its a liability, not an asset.
I was lucky enough to get CAD programs, written in as day where they were more concerned that the program filled a need. In my case, it was schematic capture and PCB layout. I have programs, obviously written in assembler, which do just that, quickly and efficiently on anything honoring the old VGA baseline standard. I still use these programs. Daily.
I have refused the newer stuff, as it is so laced with DRM and finicky code. It scares me as much as these new loans they try to foist upon new homeowners. Its bloated and unreliable. It will often run only under a certain version of OS. What use is it? From what I can see, the only people who will have anything to do with it are people whose income is decoupled from their productivity - people who are driven to have the "latest thing" rather than people who, by necessity, must have "something that works".
I guess its why some of us love our simple old Toyota Corollas, and others like fancy "performance" vehicles, irregardless of their cost. I, for one, love the idea that if it goes wrong, its no big thing to fix it. I have had my Toyota for over 30 years. The first thing that turned me off on new cars was the dealer's reticence of giving me schematics and source code for the car's computer and them not having a RS-232 serial debug interface to the computer.
I could not see the difference in my seeing whether or not a brake shoe was working properly, or if the computer was working properly. If I had something fouling the brake shoe, I wanted to be able to personally see it. If the computer had a problem, I wanted to see it too. The new car people wanted to keep me ignorant. I lose all interest in having something I do not understand. Having such a thing to me is as unnerving as having a letter in my mailbox from a lawyer. Now that I am involved, what do I do with it?
I remember one simple power outage... my old T2500 phone ( yes, the old Western Electric design with carbon mike ) was the only phone working in my immediate neighborhood. I still have three of those old monsters in my house, albeit I have disconnected the bell in two of them because I didn't want to overload the new phone circuits.
My favorite OS by far was my old Commodore OS, who always greeted me with some 38K bytes ready by the time the CRT could display anything. DOS was a close second. I hated this stuff that took forever and a day, and left me hanging never knowing if it would come up or not. Being I am convinced computers are deterministic, and should come up the same way every time, it unsettles me when it occasionally needs to be rebooted to come up. Its like going to an ATM and occasionally being told I don't exist.
It seems to me that computer OS available these days has got so centered around the GUI that having one of these things is like having a construction guy that is very familiar with all the clothing styles offered at Men's Wearhouse but doesn't know much about what's in Home Depot.
His purpose is to get handshakes with millionaires, not fix the house. And he dresses accordingly. To impress. Not to work.
I am frustrated with all this useless complexity. It seems like sports scores which must be memorized in order to maintain "interesting conversation" at social gatherings. Meanwhile stuff I would find interesting, such as how to maximize efficien
I might live longer, but will I be a productive member of society, or another welfare recipient just loading the system the productive people are burdened to support?
What good does it do for me to live from 70 to 150, and have to expect my government to heavily burden everyone else with massive taxation to support those like me.
When I can no longer pull my rope, let me go offline in dignity.
Re:worms and caloric restriction: the dauer effect
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Longevity Gene Found
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Maybe an interesting study on anorexia nervosa?
We already have a group of humans doing this... are anorexics prone to longer lifespans?
I reinvent the wheel because the ones offered are so full of legal vomit and enforced ignorance, as well as having so much "flexibility" ( aka "security holes" and "useless complexity" ) as to render them useless for my purpose.
Yes, it might be hacked. Someone else may figure out how to find out how many sodapops I have.
I guess if they are really nasty and clever, they can find the IP my customer is using and DOS it, then he will have to forego the convenience of knowing when one of his sodapop machines is out. Then he has to go change the IP on his machine. Kinda like the frustration a shopkeeper would have if somone wanted to annoy him by supergluing the locks on his business.
As far as hacking me, its like someone telling my cat to log onto my bank account and report my holdings.
Its the problem hackers have if someone ISN'T using IE! Without the Microsoft support, just how does one take over a simple browser? Especially if the TCPIP stack itself only knows ONE simple protocol?
The simple browsers simply do not understand scripting, and ignore the carefully crafted scripts.
If the TCPIP stack doesn't pass muster, it just gets reset for the next packet, along with setting an error code in the log that it got a bad packet. I log a few just for internal troubleshooting purposes.
And being mine run in non-writable ROM, they can't make their attack stick.
I have had NO violations so far, and neither do I expect any. If anyone is successful, I will learn. But, for now, I encode only enough "intelligence" to do the job. No more.
My feelings on security are like my feelings on building a house.
I can buy fire insurance, and have a big company say they will "protect" me from loss.
I prefer to build my house in such a way it won't burn.
Yes, the yellow phosphor is quite slow. Its the blue mercury line thats most noticeable.
When the eye sees blue pulses in yellow light ( at least those shades of yellow and blue ), it appears white.
Sometimes, it came in handy, as fluorescent lighting would act as a strobe for setting the speed of the old-school mechanical record turntables... remember those patterns along the edge of the old turntables which would appear to stop when you adjusted the speed just right? If they were reflective, you could quite easily make out the blue flashes and the longer yellow holdover.
I have not noticed CFL flicker, but I have known others who were much more sensitive to it.
I posted mostly to offer my conjecture on why others may perceive a flicker, even though I do not.
My "hot spot" was noise. I could hear the older switchers a mile away, it seemed. I could walk by a house and know if anyone had a TV on, as its horizontal transformer whined away. There were several department stores I could not enter, as doing so would guarantee a major excedrin moment, because they would not turn off their ultrasonic burglar detectors during the day. If someone wanted to administer to me a coup-de-gras, bring in one of those ultrasonic cleaner tanks and turn it on. The first thing I would hear in the mall is the incessant whine of the jewelery store's ultrasonic cleaner. I would get poo-poo'd because they could not hear it.
Now that I am older, I no longer hear them either.
Oh, you might wanna check out Samsung's new LED DLP TV. It uses a "phlatlight" LED (Luminus Technologies) and does completely away with the color wheel. I saw one the other day and was quite impressed. I would be curious if you can detect the "rainbow" in those.
If I am making ONE of 'em, I really don't care how inefficient I may be, as long as the job gets done.
But, if I am gonna replicate millions of 'em, I try like the dickens to make a clean design, especially minimizing product cost and dependence on anything proprietary that may cease to be supported over the design life of my product.
Figure 50 years for a sodapop dispenser. Think I'm kidding? I can show you sodapop dispensers made in the 50's STILL IN SERVICE.
I can also show you trash bins of perfectly good computers, thrown away, because one company in particular is withdrawing support for their older OS.
And THOSE are less than ten years old!
It would grieve me for my soda pop machines, with perfectly good vend and refrigeration mechanisms, to be forced into retirement just because some big software company decided to obsolete their OS.
I just had in mind a simple soda pop machine controller... with a simple TCPIP stack which would daily IM me and report how much pop it had, how much money it had collected, the temperature of its pop, etc, or in the case it thought it was being violated, it would IM me for help.
Microcontroller programming is NOT complicated when you know what you are doing.
Of course, if things aren't quite so simple and I need a fullbore computer, my next choice would be some realtime Linux kernel, VxWorks, or similar. Whatever I use, I need to make damm sure that I can support it, as experience has taught me that depending on anyone else to support me, over time, leads to ulcers more than anything else.
I maybe came down a bit hard. The book this article is about goes into the stuff an order of magnitude more serious than the problems I often go after.
I have seen just too many times things get way way way more complex than they need be, leading to stuff so complicated that its useless. If I cannot design simply, my customers won't use my product for the very same reason they leave "12:00" flashing on their VCR.
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You nailed it well. Promises of pay attracts those who strive to get paid.
I saw this well in some of my previous places of employment.
I was quite picky over who I wanted to work for. My selection was primarily based on what they did, and did I want to do this... in other words... "Is this gonna be fun?".
I know myself all too well. If its something I have no desire to do, and I am doing it just to get paid, my own personal economics will take over and I will allocate the bare minimal time required to maintain getting paid, transferring all available time I can into doing what I want to do.
It behooved me, and my employer, that I know myself and not even TRY to get employment doing something I wouldn't be doing myself - even if I didn't get paid.
I love thermodynamics ( refrigeration ), circuit design, robotics, power, microcontrollers. For me, great toys.
I hate what I consider mindless paperwork, confinement, and things that produce no meaningful result, hence I am awfully bored preparing taxes, routine management, sports, marketing, and most "people-skill" stuff. I would make a terrible department store manager. I hate cubicles. I am a lab-rat.
I have personally seen my "dream job" evaporate when the small company I worked for be absorbed by a much larger capitalistic corporation, whose bottom line was quarterly earnings. People like me were rapidly replaced by those who were much more social, into sports, had yachts, and discussing things like carnot cycles at lunch were a terrible no-no.
I found it extremely puzzling how these people justified enormous expenditures on things like personal transportation and entertainment, but seemed to have no concern over how reliable or efficient our products were. Gotta admit they looked pretty with all their suits and ties, PowerPoint presentations, and sales fluff, but to me it was like having an expensive unreliable sports car in lieu of my common old car which is so simple I can usually fix anything that goes wrong. A fancy cowling may improve the appearance of an engine, but if it hampers the coolant and screws up the operation, I could not justify it.
Its really easy to attract capitalistic employees, although they don't work nearly as cheap as someone who just likes what he does and is more impressed with the company's "pizza code" rather than their "dress code".
I wouldn't expect their newly hired capitalistic types to do efficiency analyses of thermodynamic systems any better than I could dress up like a banker and impress the hell out of them with clever showmanship. Hell, if I dressed that way, I could not work at all, I would be far more concerned with soiling a five hundred dollar suit than trying to find out why a pressure anomaly exists.
But, I figure the USA has become a Management-Based system, running a Faith-Based system, legislating the rest of the world produce what we need, and my time has come and gone.
So, here's looking at retirement.
Its been fun.
Its been my observation that "trying to be useful", regardless of its economic rewards, seems to be inbred in some of us. Maybe its some sort of genetic thing. I cite the entire concept of open-source as my evidence. Some of the best minds in the industry literally give themselves to the public - a "Mother Teresa" type thing, meant in the best of hopes of sharing in the hopes of providing public display of a concept that should work. The Bible is full of it.
Payments attract the capitalists, not the philanthropists.
Capitalists are some of the greediest, self-centered, hated people on Earth. And for good reason.
Much of us who are of an unselfish "giving" nature are of the idea that everyone who has a gift of doing whatever shares, there will be more than enough to go around.
We tend to give to religions, although I personally want to give to the public-at-large - sharing what I have as my way of saying "thank you" to the people who shared with me. It doesn't have to be, and likely isn't, the same people.
As the saying goes: "What goes around, comes around", which to me is a biblical paraphrase of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.".
If I was in a position of hiring others, I would make it my prime priority to have people of this ilk on my team.
Its at the top of my bookmarks lists for PVR now. It looks like one helluva neat box.
Geez, why try to "roll my own" when I can get this? Everything I wanted and then some.
Tips like this is why I read Slashdot.
I would not go as far as to outlaw proprietary formats, any more than I would want to outlaw putting doors on movie theatres so that only paid patrons can enjoy the movie.
Hovever, a government using proprietary protocols to communicate with the populace is a horse of a different color. They would not like it if, as an American, I sent my tax return written in Swahili. Likewise, I highly resent it when I must pay someone else, and agree to whatever terms they dictate, in order to communicate with my own government.
The second condition is often worse than the first.
If using public protocols was codified into LAW, then anyone providing "embrace, extend, then patent" technology to the government would force the government to abandon said software should the software require use of patented, copyrighted product before the public could communicate with them.
What I am asking for is that Governments assume the risk of having to change out all the software interfacing to the public should Microsoft or any other private vendor start spewing copyright infringement letters to anyone just trying to communicate with their own government.
With private companies, they can do as they will. Sometimes its not easy for someone like me to even find an internet banker or stockbroker which will use standard protocols. I had to move all my retirement accounts from a major aerospace firm when I retired after 30 years on the job because the broker handling my retirement insisted I run a Microsoft product, and I had no intention to do so.
Dammit, I am old, have a lot of legacy stuff that works just fine, and I regard replacing my computational infrastructure with just about as much excitement as having some plumber tell me I have to replace the pipes in my house.
Business would not get too excited with me to pay by check after I require them to sign an agreement with me holding me harmless for bounced checks. Yet business expects me to agree to EULAS that essentially say the same thing.
Thats when my reputation becomes important. Do I have a reputation for bad checks? What kind of reputation does the software vendor have? Will he back up his promise with action...uh thats not what the EULA said.
I note all sorts of companies in business to make that vendor's product work.
Its like buying a certain brand name car, when the word is out that it breaks down all the time, and there's a garage on every block and scores of teenage kids in business to keep the car running - geez, a horse and buggy might be better.
I have heard enough marketing phrases hocked out of rep-heads, unbacked with act. Example: what does "Plays for sure" mean? Or is it just three words with no meaning at all?
Yes, I am bitter, it is because I personally take the hit for stuff that doesn't work.
I am not a highly placed executive who has the option of delegating the mess to someone else.
Its just been my observation that people who embrace all this finicky stuff have far better skill at finding the someone who can be convinced they are worth a paycheck than they are at doing the work.
Every time we run "unseasoned" applications in our machine, we open ourselves up to whatever holes the programmers left in it.
Unfortunately, with today's market pressures to be "first to market", there is precious little time to beta test, so the customer has to.
Legal types have come up with all sorts of clever phrases ("hold harmless" clauses) so customers have no recourse as to being used this way. Customers desperate to remain compatible with others who have adopted this software will agree to whatever the vendors dictate.
I was at a DELL booth today, inquiring about their Linux boxes. I was shown lots and lots of Windows boxes, and urged to "go with the flow", "stay current", and buy a new Vista box. I asked him that if I offered to tender a check for his whole display if he would sign a legal agreement holding me harmless for bounced checks.
Now, I understand he is a businessman, not someone who would be held personally accountable for system failure, but he WOULD be held accountable for payment failure. As expected, he said he would not sign such a thing.
I ventured he would probably check my payment record, did I often have problems paying? Were there scores of companies out there , McAfees - Nortons - AVGs, et.al, in business to try to make my checks good?
Like my older car, which has run virtually trouble free from the 70's, I expect my software to do the same.
All I really need is an HTML browser which can interpret text(.htm,.txt), images(.bmp,.gif,.jpg), movies(.mpg,.divx), and sound(.mpg). There is no need for anything else. We just need to get these apps running trouble-free and trustworthy.
If business wants to use some weird proprietary formats "held harmless" for trustworthiness, then let them, problem is their customers that espouse trustworthy computing may never see their file.
A bank seems to have no problem denying doing business with people entering their premises with masks on their face and unverified intentions - why are we people so willing eo kowtow to business and load whatever apps they demand into our machines (IE) in order to be compatible with them? I am holding out, but I am such a minority that business just scoffs at me.
We need more people who will stand up to business and tell them if they can't use standard public protocols, they have to find their open-wallets, check signers, and credit card authorizers somewhere else.
Things like this are interesting to bring up in Church. Yes, I will do things like that. I am not the most popular fella there, ya know.
One discussion had to do with God communicating to Man by using whether or not a rag left outside would be wet in the morning. I was convinced the man was making decisions based on atmospheric psychrometrics ( humidity/dew point ).
Sometimes I wish God would give me a personal demo - maybe suspend my car five feet off the ground for seven days straight in full view of everyone so me and my scientist friends and I can verify if any known force is doing it.
It just doesn't work that way. Admittedly, it leaves me with a condrundrum. I see so much stuff that is so complex I have not the foggiest idea how it came to be. Despite all my training, I can't even make a drop of water out of nothing. Let alone just one leaf. Or an ant.
If I accept Christ was God embodied on Earth, it was the religions of the day (Sanhedrin ) that did even Him in. What makes me think Religions got their act straight?
My bet is with the scientists.
God is Truth. Fact is the holy grail of the scientists.
Damn me from the pulpit if you will, but if God is going to damn me for eternity, he is going to have to damn me for doing my best to worship Him.
I am looking for something with video capture capability (S-video/RGB to MPEG/DIVX).
He made some neat stuff, and it sold like hotcakes.
Every time I go to the mall, I always stop by the Dell booth to see when their new Linux boxes are coming out.
I want a good Linux laptop so bad - one preloaded with all the internet, office, music and video acquisition apps, and so forth, designed from the get-go to run fast and efficient.
I am not interested in trying to piecemeal a box if someone out there will standardize a box of public software.
If Dell piddle-paddles around this, its only a matter of time before I find what I want in Wal-Mart, most likely of Chinese manufacture.
Michael Dell offered us an alternative to Compaq.
I hope China does not have to offer us an alternative to Dell.
Many of us have had it up to here with proprietary software and all the reload problems we have in the event of virus or nonvolatile memory replacement.
For me, its an Occam's Razor thing.
If I find a pencil on the sidewalk, the most obvious thing is someone dropped it.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Jehovah - Yahweh - the name as I understand it is Hebrew meaning "to cause to be". The name of God. Fair enough.
My problem is finding God. I mean God. Not religion.
Religion is Man's doing. Even if it was done in the best of intentions. The Church has killed some fine scientists who had it right (Galileo and others). If God was really with the Church, somehow I think God would have let the religious leaders in on it before they went off and violently demonstrated their ignorance?
Their treatment of anyone questioning them leaves me to believe that their organizations exist to protect the political power of certain factions, and God is brought in only as a pretext for their authority.
These scientists are decoding the very work coded by God himself. (itself?). Its amazing to me God has seen fit ( here I am again anthropomorphizing him again ) for us to have the wisdom to disassemble our own OS.
If we ever get to the bottom of this, I feel we will have an even better understanding of the Glory of God - whoever or whatever He is.
Its something about the elegance of design I see which leads me to believe there has to be some force - some intelligence - far greater than I out there.
I don't know what it is but I am insanely drawn to it.
If social bullshit sites wanna commit to virus prone or hidden-agendaware, fine. I won't see it, but then I really don't need to see it either.
I don't think any serious site, especially if MONEY is involved, would consider programming their site in a frivolous Rube-Goldberg manner if they have the slightest intention of being viewed as a serious business site.
Even javascripts on a business site are usually sufficient to cause me to take my purchase elsewhere, as I have no idea what hostile scripts hosting keyloggers may be running in my machine once I open it up to run downloaded executables.
When I land on these poorly coded business websites, these things immediately come to mind...
The CEO/President of the company is technically illiterate.
The CIO of that company is far better with people skills of finding a CEO to pay him than he is at coding.
Nobody at that company gives a damm over what kind of problems I may get if I open myself up to risky intercourse with their machine.
I consider the Internet a risky and filthy place, very useful, but dangerous. I would just as soon go onto the internet with a cash-handling machine with my safeties off as go into a house of prostitution with no prophylactics. God only knows what I am going to catch, likely something I have not seen before.
Then any adopters of Linux ( rest of world ) will be afraid of "embracing" Microsoft, for fear of the lawyer letter in the mail.
Then Microsoft is relegated to an American-Only protocol with not a helluva lot of political clout outside the US.
This will leave businesses which have embraced the Microsoft Representative with a crippled system incapable of communicating to every customer.
Unlike open source, which will.
The businessman who shook the hand of the Microsoft rep may have to stand before the CEO and explain why he should keep his job, given the company's competitors can talk to everyone, and his company, under his signature, can only talk to a subset of the customer base.
The handshake with the Microsoft rep could be the handshake of death for many corporate CIO, as the love of universally compatible systems - and systems open to verification of their operation - become the norm.
Microsoft has now shown their hand... its got claws in it. Do you want to trust it? The smiling face of someone anticipating getting you into their cat trap could turn into a gun pretty fast if it doesn't get its way.
I don't expect the American government to do much, but I do expect compatibility with the rest of the world will do it.
When you live to face the ramifications of your selections, ignorance is NOT bliss.
Honestly, I am so frustrated with this "its someone else's responsibility to make it work" and other finger pointing paradigms. Its MY stuff, I bought it with legal tender, and if I don't know how to maintain it, do I really have that much business having it?
If my dog made a mess, its obvious to me just what he did and where he did it. If termites made a mess, I can find and put back what they messed up. I feel exactly the same with my computing apparatus, and I highly resent efforts by others ( via DMCA like legal maneuvering ) to keep me ignorant of how my stuff works. It frustrates me to no end to have others make knowledge illegal, enforceable by police at gunpoint, only for the financial gain of blocking off alternative remedies I have for maintenance or customization needs.
Having ANY software vendor locking me in to their "support" is like having the contractor who built my house locking me in for anything I want to do to maintain or modify my house.
Not to say I would want to deprive him of his art of driving nails, but if he was too hard to get along with, or overprices himself, I strongly reserve what I feel is my right to pick up the hammer and saw and do it personally, if need be.
Ignorance is going to be the end of us (US).
A hotter generator should increase the carnot efficiency substantially.
Everything I have now has either those or NiMH in them.
The Lithiums are great for clocks, remotes, electronic test equipment, and emergency gear. They claim to hold their charge for over ten years - and I have yet to see one leak.
Those are great for those things that sit around forever, but work when you need it.
As for those "chew up the battery" applications, such as toys, everyday flashlight, power tools, etc, I keep with the NiMH. I am opening those things up so many times that I usually catch a failing cell before it causes much damage. And besides, recharging them is much cheaper, as I am going to go through them much faster than their self-discharge rate.
I no longer have an alkaline in the house. I have long since had my fill of opening a battery compartment, only to find it filled with green corroded junk.
Yes, I would love to completely ignore Microsoft and their extensions, but businessmen love them, and once businessmen "lock-in" to Microsoft technology, one has to adapt to the extensions in order to communicate to a "Microsoft Technology Partner".
I don't think we will see too much of a change unless we "scare" the public, via mindless lawsuiting for things like trying to watch a video downloaded onto their computer and viewed on an IPod. Or pester our viewer with unskipable ads which "pirate" technology re-empowers them to do so.
If we can hold our security high enough that our own systems don't "rat us out" to the suing business community, Linux will be perceived as a "safe haven" for technology usage, much like having a trusted nanny in the house which will mind the children and not report to the authorities if they find anything amiss in the house ( bottle of wine, weed, our lawn hasn't been mowed to specifications, or maybe we have an unused car in the back yard ).
Go ahead and honor Microsoft's whining about us maintaining compatibility with them. We only "embraced", as well.
If businesses find they are losing business because their internet servers won't talk to us, they may think twice about entering the proprietary protocol cat trap.
I have already had to move my retirement account from one broker to another because of internet compatibility problems. I minced no words to the broker over WHY I had to move my account to someone else who did not insist that I ran IE. I realized I was speaking to someone paid enough that he didn't have to worry about worms, viruses, rootkits, and other problems of IE.
I knew for him, it was only money. But for me, its my retirement.
I could not seem to get him to understand the importance of security. My perception of his company is that he would keep my assets hidden in a shoe box under a bush across the street. And have the unmitigated gall to have me agree to a Microsoft EULA that would hold everyone harmless if something went wrong.
I knew his skill was in finding someone else who thought he ranked a salary, not in managing my assets.
How does the little guy tell those "earning" millions of dollars a year that even his penny is valuable? I don't have the financial assets, paid for by others, to do my bidding for me as these big guys do.
Apache can say "We handle 100% of your customers with FREE, STANDARD, PUBLIC, RISK-FREE protocols.
Microsoft can claim a subset of that, those who use ONLY Microsoft LICENSED products.
And people like me feel like the law abiding citizen in a dark alley, knowing that I do not have any "protection", but anyone who chooses not to abide by the law has a gun.
Let the Highly Paid Executive make his decision. And answer to the stockholders. And justify his pay.
Let the executive mount the dais, go behind the podium, and tell his stockholders his corporation chooses only to do business with people who will accept virus-prone stuff and will agree to holding everyone unaccountable.
As far as these Senators go, personally, I would love to have a rider to this bill, noting that a breach of campaign promise is also a felony, life imprisonment if they fail to honor what they promised to do if elected.
I'll be more cautious about wearing my sunglasses.
I am getting older and would like to skip cataracts from my life if I can.
My dad had cataracts, and he blamed it on sun reflection from the sea. He loved deep-sea fishing and went every chance he could. ( Me, I hated it. Being held captive on a fishing boat all day reminded me of being locked up in a bathroom all day. And it rocked. And I got, well, you know, all woozy. )
I like most of it except tracking *me*. It unnerves me. Its too much like "stalking".
It would unnerve me to go into a store, only to have a clerk stalk me all over the mall.
Given this latest Sony Rootkit Fiasco, and seeing how our Government handles it, in comparison of how they handle other breaches of "rights" aka DMCA, I cannot trust my Government to stick up for what is righteous, as much as I can trust them to stick up for what makes someone elses money.
We have seen the Men of the Robe gather and find nothing wrong with someone who wants someone else's legally bought home simply taking it.
And we wonder why the public seems to have trouble grasping the concepts that even sharing a song is bad?
Despite the fact sharing a song, unlike stealing someone else's house, is a $180,000 offense?
Those people no longer have their house! And THAT wasn't a crime? I guess it was "just", as "justices" define it, but was it "righteous"? That's the neat thing for having power without righteousness.
That's what scares me. Power without Righteousness. Even our highest courts didn't find anything wrong with downright wanton selfish THEFT, as long as they could call it "eminent domain".
I have seen way too much evidence that says I have to watch out for myself. There is nothing much I can do to enforce how Business uses or abuses my trust. The option I have remaining is NOT do business with them if I don't HAVE to.
Businesses are organized and have much more ability to cause problems for me if they want to. I feel my advantage is the same as a hiding mouse, keeping his presence unknown to the cat. There are so few businesses I can trust these days.
I see most as simply fishermen, with ME being the fish.
It behooves me that I do not take the bait; there is likely a hook therein.
The whole idea is to hook me. Lock-in. Entrapment. Whatever. Reel in the profits!
I am of the era of people who have had to live with their mistakes. That is another way of saying you have to sleep in the bed you made.
I was fortunate enough to live through the era when computers just came into existence, and the mindset at the time was much like the mindset in building a tractor. One wanted to do it right so he didn't have to do it over. Any farmer will tell you a tractor not "done right" is not worth having. Its gotta work, out of the box, and continue to work robustly. If it doesn't, its a liability, not an asset.
I was lucky enough to get CAD programs, written in as day where they were more concerned that the program filled a need. In my case, it was schematic capture and PCB layout. I have programs, obviously written in assembler, which do just that, quickly and efficiently on anything honoring the old VGA baseline standard. I still use these programs. Daily.
I have refused the newer stuff, as it is so laced with DRM and finicky code. It scares me as much as these new loans they try to foist upon new homeowners. Its bloated and unreliable. It will often run only under a certain version of OS. What use is it? From what I can see, the only people who will have anything to do with it are people whose income is decoupled from their productivity - people who are driven to have the "latest thing" rather than people who, by necessity, must have "something that works".
I guess its why some of us love our simple old Toyota Corollas, and others like fancy "performance" vehicles, irregardless of their cost. I, for one, love the idea that if it goes wrong, its no big thing to fix it. I have had my Toyota for over 30 years. The first thing that turned me off on new cars was the dealer's reticence of giving me schematics and source code for the car's computer and them not having a RS-232 serial debug interface to the computer.
I could not see the difference in my seeing whether or not a brake shoe was working properly, or if the computer was working properly. If I had something fouling the brake shoe, I wanted to be able to personally see it. If the computer had a problem, I wanted to see it too. The new car people wanted to keep me ignorant. I lose all interest in having something I do not understand. Having such a thing to me is as unnerving as having a letter in my mailbox from a lawyer. Now that I am involved, what do I do with it?
I remember one simple power outage... my old T2500 phone ( yes, the old Western Electric design with carbon mike ) was the only phone working in my immediate neighborhood. I still have three of those old monsters in my house, albeit I have disconnected the bell in two of them because I didn't want to overload the new phone circuits.
My favorite OS by far was my old Commodore OS, who always greeted me with some 38K bytes ready by the time the CRT could display anything. DOS was a close second. I hated this stuff that took forever and a day, and left me hanging never knowing if it would come up or not. Being I am convinced computers are deterministic, and should come up the same way every time, it unsettles me when it occasionally needs to be rebooted to come up. Its like going to an ATM and occasionally being told I don't exist.
It seems to me that computer OS available these days has got so centered around the GUI that having one of these things is like having a construction guy that is very familiar with all the clothing styles offered at Men's Wearhouse but doesn't know much about what's in Home Depot.
His purpose is to get handshakes with millionaires, not fix the house. And he dresses accordingly. To impress. Not to work.
I am frustrated with all this useless complexity. It seems like sports scores which must be memorized in order to maintain "interesting conversation" at social gatherings. Meanwhile stuff I would find interesting, such as how to maximize efficien
What good does it do for me to live from 70 to 150, and have to expect my government to heavily burden everyone else with massive taxation to support those like me.
When I can no longer pull my rope, let me go offline in dignity.
We already have a group of humans doing this... are anorexics prone to longer lifespans?
I just try to keep it simple. Very, very simple.
Every time I have tried to do anything I did not understand thoroughly, it has always come back to bite me.
Yes, it might be hacked. Someone else may figure out how to find out how many sodapops I have.
I guess if they are really nasty and clever, they can find the IP my customer is using and DOS it, then he will have to forego the convenience of knowing when one of his sodapop machines is out. Then he has to go change the IP on his machine. Kinda like the frustration a shopkeeper would have if somone wanted to annoy him by supergluing the locks on his business.
As far as hacking me, its like someone telling my cat to log onto my bank account and report my holdings.
Its the problem hackers have if someone ISN'T using IE! Without the Microsoft support, just how does one take over a simple browser? Especially if the TCPIP stack itself only knows ONE simple protocol?
The simple browsers simply do not understand scripting, and ignore the carefully crafted scripts.
If the TCPIP stack doesn't pass muster, it just gets reset for the next packet, along with setting an error code in the log that it got a bad packet. I log a few just for internal troubleshooting purposes.
And being mine run in non-writable ROM, they can't make their attack stick.
I have had NO violations so far, and neither do I expect any. If anyone is successful, I will learn. But, for now, I encode only enough "intelligence" to do the job. No more.
My feelings on security are like my feelings on building a house.
I can buy fire insurance, and have a big company say they will "protect" me from loss.
I prefer to build my house in such a way it won't burn.
When the eye sees blue pulses in yellow light ( at least those shades of yellow and blue ), it appears white.
Sometimes, it came in handy, as fluorescent lighting would act as a strobe for setting the speed of the old-school mechanical record turntables... remember those patterns along the edge of the old turntables which would appear to stop when you adjusted the speed just right? If they were reflective, you could quite easily make out the blue flashes and the longer yellow holdover.
I have not noticed CFL flicker, but I have known others who were much more sensitive to it.
I posted mostly to offer my conjecture on why others may perceive a flicker, even though I do not.
My "hot spot" was noise. I could hear the older switchers a mile away, it seemed. I could walk by a house and know if anyone had a TV on, as its horizontal transformer whined away. There were several department stores I could not enter, as doing so would guarantee a major excedrin moment, because they would not turn off their ultrasonic burglar detectors during the day. If someone wanted to administer to me a coup-de-gras, bring in one of those ultrasonic cleaner tanks and turn it on. The first thing I would hear in the mall is the incessant whine of the jewelery store's ultrasonic cleaner. I would get poo-poo'd because they could not hear it.
Now that I am older, I no longer hear them either.
Oh, you might wanna check out Samsung's new LED DLP TV. It uses a "phlatlight" LED (Luminus Technologies) and does completely away with the color wheel. I saw one the other day and was quite impressed. I would be curious if you can detect the "rainbow" in those.
But, if I am gonna replicate millions of 'em, I try like the dickens to make a clean design, especially minimizing product cost and dependence on anything proprietary that may cease to be supported over the design life of my product.
Figure 50 years for a sodapop dispenser. Think I'm kidding? I can show you sodapop dispensers made in the 50's STILL IN SERVICE.
I can also show you trash bins of perfectly good computers, thrown away, because one company in particular is withdrawing support for their older OS.
And THOSE are less than ten years old!
It would grieve me for my soda pop machines, with perfectly good vend and refrigeration mechanisms, to be forced into retirement just because some big software company decided to obsolete their OS.
I just had in mind a simple soda pop machine controller... with a simple TCPIP stack which would daily IM me and report how much pop it had, how much money it had collected, the temperature of its pop, etc, or in the case it thought it was being violated, it would IM me for help.
Microcontroller programming is NOT complicated when you know what you are doing.
Of course, if things aren't quite so simple and I need a fullbore computer, my next choice would be some realtime Linux kernel, VxWorks, or similar. Whatever I use, I need to make damm sure that I can support it, as experience has taught me that depending on anyone else to support me, over time, leads to ulcers more than anything else.
I maybe came down a bit hard. The book this article is about goes into the stuff an order of magnitude more serious than the problems I often go after.
I have seen just too many times things get way way way more complex than they need be, leading to stuff so complicated that its useless. If I cannot design simply, my customers won't use my product for the very same reason they leave "12:00" flashing on their VCR.