This whole thing to me appears to be egged on by what they teach in today's business schools. Somehow, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of economics dictates the market will provide. Engineers like you and I are more concerned with the laws of physics which are the foundation for satisfying our wants.
Don't do anything unfortunate. I know I was pushed to the brink. I ended up taking it out on my teeth and blood pressure.
Like the original story noted, the work did not stress me out. It was a thoroughly enjoyable lifestyle for me. What stressed me out beyond belief was the braking effort and interference by the Managerial Team hired by the Executives.
I can't tell you what it is in us that puts that "fire in our souls" to place our work above everything else. I wish I did - first thing I would do is rekindle mine. I had never been happier than when I was immersed in my work, and knowing I was doing something useful for the common good of Mankind. The only thing I can compare it to is a religious experience.
I know I am not alone here. Its the common thread that unites all of us. A lot of our type end up at this forum. We all have the same characteristics - excellent technical skills, while often lacking in people skills.
We often forego all the carnal pleasures of this world in pursuit of our inquisitiveness. I did. And I know many others that did too.
I consider my studies of Physics and Engineering as the purest religion, as I feel I am studying law straight from the entity that put the law in place. Although I don't espouse any particular religious denomination, I often find much truisms in the Bible, where Jesus says this about my situation in Matthew 6:24:
"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon (Man).".
I feel in my studies of God's creation, I must serve what I perceive as my God. For me, God is that which created that which I study. I cannot serve "bringers of bullshit" when I feel God himself has given me guidance to the contrary.
Even though I don't know what ignites the fires in our souls, I can tell you that the Schools of Business Management have come up with very clever skills of pissing on that fire and putting it out.
That fire was something God gave me at birth. My parents and teachers all noursished me and made me very inquisitive. Managers pissed on the fire of my soul and put it out. For that, I am quite bitter.
Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Oh boy did that bring back a memory. I got accused of being lazy too when I started refusing to stay late and come in Saturdays sans pay.
I am sure that showdown in the Manager's office went on record. When he told me my attendance on Saturday was required, I asked him if he could change the water pump on my car while I am taking care of Company needs. He looked at me, aghast. How DARE an Underling ask such a thing of a Manager. To rub it in, I inquired if he, too, was simply lazy.
It was all part of that "pecking order" thing where the Manager was asserting his authority over me by holding my employment at bay.
My take is that the executive who hired him probably doesn't know what phase noise and phaselock stability is, but does know that the words "not a team player" justifies a termination.
Besides, who is "not being a team player" here? Its according to who you listen to.
The executive has to weigh my contribution against the MBA contribution and make his Executive Decision as to who to keep. He did.
With peak oil approaching, I feel we need our engineers more than ever. We are not going to solve the biggest problem mankind has ever faced by presentations and printing propaganda. We are going to have to use that big fusion reactor in the sky to power our lifestyle if we hope to survive as a race.
I consider myself "burned out", pursuing my efforts now on a personal level or for friends. In a way, it seems a shame I am "wasting" such precious insights that 35 years in design work ( I mean *real* design work ) gives a designer. Yet, I elect to live at a near poverty level in lieu of having to "sell my soul" to the suited-and-tied corporate types. I want so bad to go back to the time that I actually meant something to the company, and not be considered just another commodity.
My burnout occurred as I had spent years learning and perfecting a set of software I liked to use on PC's where I could write my own device drivers to make the computer do ANYTHING that it was capable of doing. These were.COM,.EXE, and.SYS files, written in C++ and assembler, running under DOS. I had collected every tool imaginable to let me do any sort of DSP, control any interface, or let me do any mathematical equations ( differential calculus ) on my machine.
I was in the midst of a dream project where I was trying to build a wide-range VCO, yet have the extremely low phase noise which would be required for using it as a local oscillator to drop 256QAM to baseband. The managers came in and demanded I do my work on some lousy 386-SX based machine running Windows 2.1 ( which was current at the time ), running doublespace. My machine at the lab was a 286. But I knew what I was doing with that one. I had no idea how to make my stuff run under Windows in a supervised environment.
I had no interest whatsoever in the fancy graphical output of Windows because I had no idea how the get the machine to do what I wanted, and do it without all the bloat which took forever and a day to execute. My mind was still set on how to use amplifier gains to increase the Q of my resonant circuits and configure the short term phase error through one varactor and the long term frequency control through another varactor, so I could simultaneously reap the benefits of fast phase correction without perturbing the frequency setpoints.
I know if you are not into RF modems, the above looks like gibberish. What I am trying to say is I already knew how to do what I needed to do, I just had to do it the way I knew how to do it.
Hiring somebody to come in and tell me that I can't do it my way - without giving him the onus of showing me exactly how to do it his way - did not help matters one bit.
He came in expecting me to take like a duck to water with his paradigms. Giving me closed-source proprietary crap to build on, citing I had no "need-to-know" how it worked - to me - was tantamount to giving a lawyer legal documents, written in Swahili, to approve. Just tell the lawyer which ones do what and have him approve them.
I thought of myself much like a pianist, with years of experience on the keyboard. Some manager comes in, forces me to use another piano whose keyboard starts with all the A notes, followed by all the B's, and so on... all in order. The manager patiently sits behind his desk, considering me not to be a team player because I hate that piano. He patiently keeps asking me what the problem is, can't I understand? Here it is again, all the A's are here, all the B's are there. All in order. Can't I be flexible enough to use it? Just point and click.
I know just as soon as I take the time to play my music through that machine, the manager is just going to redo the keyboard again. I have no return on my investment of effort whatsoever. Its like trying to put a lot of effort in improving a rented house.
I realized this guy has his experience in presentations, which I consider to be corporate propaganda more than anything concrete and useful. I could not consider him actually designing anything. Yet his training prepared him to find corporate executive types who could be persuaded that his efforts were more valuable than mine, and I should work under him.
Sadly, that is easy to say but difficult to do. The difficulty is the consumers cannot make informed choices about which products are good and which are shonky pieces of crap..."
I try. Personally, I am quite miffed with Microsoft and their "Embrace and Extend" philosophy and webmasters who code a business banking site with Javascript - then cite me EULAs to distance themselves from the security holes and phishing vulnerabilities they generate.
Unfortunately, I feel I am one of a precious few who think, instead of doing what one is told to do.
It seems like elections, where I see tremendous effort being made in mailers - because way too many people do what the mailer tells them to do.
Or financial investment newsletters. "Pump and Dump" would not work if people would not obey those things blindly.
We see junk on the market because we will accept it - and actually pay for it.
Can you imagine how fast DRM would go away if people would just close their wallets?
Or how companies would pay much more attention to code robustness if people infected with viruses in masse called their credit card company and had the charges reversed, leaving the company with the onus of coming to each of our homes and fixing their machine if they ever expected to recover a dime of the purchase price?
SOME of us try... but not nearly enough of us stand up to them.
Since this forum is about one's experiences with managers, I'll post mine. This is for what its worth, likely redundant.
My most memorable experience in engineering came upon joining a group of people, all very techie, who were a group of radio amateurs doing what they liked to do - namely - tinkering with RF.
It was a helluva "job", if you can call it that. "Lifestyle" was more the word for me.
It was the kind of thing you couldn't wait to get to the lab. I bought my house really close so I could minimize the time I had to do such nuisance things like eating or sleeping. All my "toys" were at the lab. The house was more like somewhere I went when I had to go to sleep. I would have gladly slept at the lab if there were somewhere to do it. Yeh - true-blue nerd. I was just as addicted to my RF toys as gamers are to games.
I had the best boss imaginable. A wizard of all things. That guy knew everything. But he just had one set of hands and that was a severe limition to him. I'd gladly be his hands if he would just show me how all this stuff worked. He had a really uncanny understanding of how stuff worked. I almost say I had religious experiences just talking to this guy. Its just the way he could explain fields and energy flows in such a graphical nature.
A big corporation bought us out one day.
They brought in their Masters of Business Degree managers, well schooled in the motivational theories and executive management skills, but didn't know much of a damn about how anything worked. Working for them was hell.
I soon found I anxiously awaited going-home time and weekends. I soon found why they called it "work". It wasn't fun anymore. It was hell.
I found myself surrounded by people making far more money than anyone I had ever seen make, yet they were completely ignorant of what we did. Only thing they seemed to care about were schedules and what software and tools we were going to be allowed to use. They set themselves up with altars and the rest of us now had the onus of paying homage to these altars, telling the holy priests of the altar what they wanted to hear, or we would be excommunicated as "not being a team player". The old paradigms of knowing what one was doing did not seem germane anymore. We were just supposed to "point and click". A lot of us had to go. I was financially insecure, so I hung on a bit longer and got laid off.
I see two schools of thought here. Whether one aligns himself with the ability to do or the ability to control.
I guess its like supplying water to a city....are you a pump or a valve?
Companies with an overabundance of creativity may want to throttle it back by hiring people to tell the creative people that they can't use the tools they like.
Newly forming companies may want to open the creativity spigots wide open and clear our all obstructions to generate the most possible throughput.
Its a cycle seen in all of nature - things get old, and are replaced with new things. Millions of seedlings are nourished by the rot of one big dead tree.
I am quite aware that quite a few very innovative companies arose from our "corpse".
I am of the belief that in younger growing companies, the manager is a mentor, that can do everything, yet due to time constraints, has to bring in more hands to do the work, and he personally mentors them.
In larger, more mature companies, which do not need the growth, the manager does not need to know what the people do. By now, its a commodity thing, he just has to look at numbers. Who can make the cheapest aspirin...
I agree with your observation that business leaders must do whatever they can to protect the interests of their shareholders.
My primary concern is all this law is being passed which promotes useless litigation instead of productivity.
Economic races should be won by those who run the fastest, not by having our Government promoting one entity's success by encouraging his cleverness in tripping up his opponents. To me this is like telling the schoolkids that the first one to the playground can put "dibs" on all the playground toys, then extort the other kids of their lunch money to play. It distresses me to no end, living in "the land of the free, home of the brave", to have our lawmakers legislating such a litigious business environment for us.
Yes, all of us have "rights" but to what extent are these rights reasonably enforceable? Someone sings a song in public and someone else records it... or maybe I own a building, and someone else photographs it? Did they violate my rights to the image of MY building?
I feel I have a right to peace and quiet in my neighborhood, yet corporations feel if they can afford a helicopter, they have the right to fly it over my house. If the government considers it illegal for me to even record a publically aired song, then why isn't it illegal to fly a noisy machine over my house?
I don't know where this crap is going to end, but I sincerely hope the people get so fed up over it that the issue of relegislating IP becomes a cornerstone of an election.
I wonder if I own a property, say a building, I also own copyright to any images taken of it? They are, indeed, hardcopy representations of MY building!
When I typed my first entry, I was still pissed upon reading that a patent for something I had been doing for quite some time had been issued. It seemed so damned obvious to me - as an analog engineer - to watch AC solenoid current to see if the solenoid "pulled in", and if there was something wrong with the current profile, buzz it a bit to see if I can "loosen it up" and flag the solenoid in the trouble log. Watching solenoid current on high-reliability things is damn near mandatory, because if the solenoid plunger fails to "pull in", the magnetic path fails to close, the solenoid inductance remains low, the inrush current stays way too high, and within a few seconds the solenoid will become a molten mess.
It grieved me that I likely have caused my company another litigation nightmare.
We are still on pins and needles over another one where I saw the energy being wasted in a snubber network on a switching power supply, and rerouted the snubber energy which would have been lost to use as an auxiliary power source to power the switching logic of the switcher. It was just a case of capacitively coupling the unwanted energy spikes from the switching transformer back to power the switching logic, so it no longer had to get its power from the line source via a big dropping resistor. The fact that another company has a patent on doing this has left us open to litigation... which we can not afford.
We used to call this kind of stuff "tricks of the trade". Now these same tricks are called "IP" and are open to litigation.
I am not mad at the entity that got the patents. What I am grieved about is how IP is becoming so litigious that it seems the whole country is becoming hooked on litigation (against anyone else doing something) for economic survival instead of doing anything useful.
Microsoft hasn't been pushing this "Zune" nearly as much as I thought they would.
I wonder sometimes if Microsoft is putting the Zune out there just to demonstrate just what a failure a DRM-encumbered technology would be in the marketplace.
If Microsoft can point to a disastrous market penetration, they may be able to tell the content creators to lighten up a bit before they destroy the customers they have.
Or, alternatively, they may go buy laws from Congress to have Open Source technology outlawed, just as they had mod-chips outlawed.
That's the one I fear - when it is illegal to one to know how one's own technology works - at least in this country anyway.
"The company estimates it will consume 6 million tons of oil shale and 2 million tons of refinery waste each year, for an annual production of 3 million tons of product."
Thats 8 million tons of stuff in, to get 3 million tons of product out. I hope five million tons of waste ( carbon dioxide? ) isn't smokestacked to the atmosphere.
I am sure this is redundant, but I feel tne need to remind the seriousness of this.
Microsoft has a history of taking something, adding something proprietary to it, then marketing it to business droids, which then force the rest of us to adopt the Microsoft "flavor of the day" if we are communicate to the business community.
I had to drop my online broker over this - as my older system, which has "hooks" in it which will not honor embedded executables, would not communicate with his new Microsoft technologies which used some weird nonstandard crap that only IE understood. The broker thought that putting the phrase "IE Required" on his website would be enough. After all, he is a businessman, and what big businessman needs to consider whether he can talk to his customers when he feels he is big enough to command the market? Somehow, in all the business training he has received in the American Business University has convinced him forcing me to agree to a EULA which denies accountability gives me any peace of mind to deal with him? And I am supposed to be in peace with my ignorance of what my machine is doing? Gee, he might as well print his Business Agreements in Hebrew ( which I do not understand at all ) and expect me to feel comfortable with agreeing to it.
When one is paid millions of dollars, and has the clout to order others to maintain his crap, then he doesn't need to worry about things like keeping the keyloggers out or seeing to it he keeps his system "in revision sync" so he maintains compatibility. He lives in an imaginary world few of us can afford.
Asking megapaid business executives to consider the needs of their customer to me is akin to asking GM executives to proceed on the electric car, or asking Ford to develop hybrid technology. This is not the kind of a thing that people used to "making the market" will do. They have the marketing expertise to push what they can do profitably, and to heck with what the customer needs. Its up to third-tier folks like Toyota Motor Company to listen to the customer.
Its easy for top-tier businessmen to tell their customers to "go take a hike", but who is gonna risk offending a multibillionaire? Top-tier executives know how to mount the dais, stand behind the podium, and tell their stockholders of market share losses, while the lower-level companies are consigned to meeting the needs of their customers if they are going to sell a product.
I understand GM would not even sell the EV cars to their fans, even though the fans were quite willing to cover non-warrantied ownership. Once they get too large, businesses act funny and ignore their customers.
Microsoft knows business, and knows how to use people's "need to talk to business" to leverage their proprietary technologies. They see the variant of business adopting "dollars" in order to do business, so everyone who goes into a store must have "dollars" to do business. Not pesos, not francs, not pounds sterling, -
dollars.
For this reason I am extremely leery of Microsoft selling patent-protected communication protocols to business.
Most businessmen are NOT computer professionals, and most of the people who make the decisions are paid so much that the problems I will experience do not affect them. Its a problem we have here in America when everytime we need more money, the Government simply prints it. Yet we expect the world to honor every confiscory law we coin exacting revenues and taxation for even as much as using what used to be standard communication protocols.
Here's hoping the rest of the world sees whats going on, and keeps the communication infrastructure free and open, leaving America to be stuck with countless legal arguing, forced obsolecence, and other benefits that only the American executives believe to have value.
I fear things will go just like our system of physics, where our measurements and tools are different from what the rest of the world uses.
For me, DNA is like being given a 1 gigabyte ROM containing the complete OS of an unknown system. I am not given the instruction set of the machine...just the raw source. Its up to me to diddle the code- see what the machine does, and from this, deduce how the machine works.
Quite a puzzle.
I envy the guys that are in the middle of this. But I do not envy them the "pressure to show progress" when dealing with such an unknown.
Yes, but what I find so astounding is that we will run for about 70 years without reboot.
In damn near all programming work I have ever done, the slightest error usually resulted in an immediate terminal fault or worse, a BSOD.
When I consider that my entire biological OS - everything that coded me for what I am - consists of about 1 gigabyte of code ( considering human DNA consists of 3 billion base pair; 3 base pair to a codon; codon roughly equivalent to byte ), I can hardly consider my coding shoddy. I consider it far more likely that we are at this point quite ignorant on the subtleties of DNA coding.
I don't see any more "bang for the buck" as I see in biology.
If I spent the rest of my life in front of a DNA sequencer, I doubt I could code to get the chemistry of a single cell to work, much less an entire organism.
I can't harp too much on this, but the elegance of this whole thing sure makes me wonder how it came to be.
I know this is a bit late in this thread to post, but I have a question to ask...
Do you know what likelihood we have that we can "see" the entire universe? Or is there still a strong liklihood that the observeable universe is a subset of the Universe?
And, do you know if there is any way of ascertaining if the universe, as a whole, is rotating?
( The reasoning being if gravitation is cancelling out centrifugal force, we will be in position where every point appears to be rotating around any given reference point, with the radial velocity proportional to the distance to it, possibly giving the illusion of expansion.).
I am probably redundant here, but I will make the assumption that this question was asked on Slashdot as part of a marketing survey to ascertain interest in the music CD.
Yes, I will continue to buy CD's provided they continue to offer nice printed inserts and the little "extras" that make having the original CD a "collector's item".
For starters, continue making it easy to get the music onto editors so I can mix it to what I like. Getting music out of some containers is almost like getting sugar from a Tyvek envelope. Possible, but messy, and I had just as soon not mess with it at all.
There is a tremendous draw to having my source music in the highest-definition format that the pressed CD offers, and let me mix it and compress it to my liking before downloading my favorites mix to my portable player. My portable player will be subjected to things that may destroy it, and I take great comfort knowing that if the worst does happen ( my mp3 player gets dropped, stepped on, or worse ), that the thing most valuable to me - its content - is still intact on my home system. I can always buy another MP3 player, but it may have collectively taken me thousands of hours to prepare its content like I like it. I guess an apt analogy is that I do not mind it so much if I dropped the meal on the floor, if I didn't lose the kitchen in the process.
Things are changing, as they always have. Yes, I can share someone else's music - and no matter how much snooping and RIAA threats go on, I get the idea the RIAA is going to have as much fun policing music sharing as the authorities have had in controlling illicit drugs. People are intelligent and will find a way to get what they want. Put barriers in the "legal" way of getting it, and people migrate to illegal methods.
Personally, I'd much rather have my original source CD sitting in a safe place so I know I can always go back to it if any of my working copies get nailed. And I do want the original from the artist. Its a "having the original painting" versus "having a picture of it" thing. Yes, I can look at pictures of paintings for hours, but when it comes to the ones I really like, I'd just as soon have the "real thing" if I can get it.
I hope you marketing guys get this and reconsider that things are changing. You no longer have absolute control over your stuff. Nobody does. You will have as much luck controlling your stuff once you release it as I have in controlling what business does with my personal info.
Its just the way things are in the informational age.
Its as if all building materials became transparent with new technology, and others are free to observe any darned thing they want. Neither of us much like it, but its just the way it is.
May I suggest the Telecrapper 2000 telephone answering system that has been discussed on Slashdot before?
Personally, I have my phone programmed NOT to ring on "private caller" and "unknown caller".
My friends know not to call me using cloaks.
The telemarketers don't.
Personally, I feel the phone ringing with the words "Private Call" flashing in the window has just about as much tact as me donning a ski mask, emblazoned "private caller", and wearing it while ringing someone's doorbell.
Would I really expect them to open the door?
Its amazing to me how many businesses cower behind anonymity when calling. And they have the idea I will be receptive? I just have to chalk such callous behaviour to what passes for eductation in todays business curriculums.
Yea - maybe flamebait to an MBA who just paid dearly for his pedigree, but I have taken marketing classes too and became quite emotionally charged from it... a mixture of anger and distrust at the psychological tactics suggested. Such game-playing usually does nothing but make me furious.
Good point. I should have said I believe Einstein has the best explanation for the physical phenomena I observe.
While Einstein's explanation works really well for the "macro" physics I work in, I understand his explanation doesn't work so well in the world of "micro" physics at the subatomic level. Quantum theory has the best correlation of observed to predicted results there.
Our Efratom atomic clocks used RF to step-up energy levels of rubidium gas in the bulbs - a process governed entirely by quantum physics. We get a really nice indicator when we are exactly on frequency - a frequency determined solely by the quantum aspects of the rubidium atom - extremely stable.
However, we sent people to the moon on Newton's equations. [Lederman - "The God Particle"]
I admit that the "Calabi-Yau" shapes talked about in "The Elegant Universe" require quite a stretch of my imagination to consider it a fact. I cannot discount it though, as I have seen the messiest of equations simplify down to such elegant forms when understood - such is the beauty of the symmetry of nature.
My bad - I should never regard *any* theory as "the truth". If I do that, I am no better than those very folks I occasionally rail about.
And you thought it was hard keeping your prizewinning pedigreed fancycat (who is in heat) under control with all the neighborhood lowlife toms lurking nearby?
How many times have we seen rich bored housewives make rendevouz with the gardener, or repairman?
Its just in our nature. We are like animals - and will go after darned near anything that moves. Especially if alcohol is involved.
Nah, I don't think its in our willpower to selectively breed ourselves. We will only be able to do that in the sterile emotionless setting of a DNA lab.
I must disclose my background - engineer - so I fall pretty hard into the "experimental physicist's" camp.
It took me quite some time to accept Einstein's explanation of gravity as the truth. I have to admit it took some actual data I saw from some spaceborne Efratom rubidium atomic clocks that convinced me Einstein had it nailed a bit more precisely than Newton had.
I do think we get the most fun puzzles to solve. The complexities, yet the elegance, of the laws we run under are so fundamentally beautiful when we finally get to the core of it... and this one we are still peeling trying to see what makes it work.
Another one that amazes me to no end is DNA coding and the hardware it runs in.
I note your moniker, flawedconceptions, aptly describes the circumstance of an adventurer in an uncharted world.
I also need to supply energy to a photonic source to get it to emit.
I don't see graviton sources weakening as their energy depletes.
Nor do I see matter "evaporate", except in instances where the mass converts to energy.
I am not saying it does not exist, rather I am stating my complete lack of any knowledge I can use to say that it does exist.
This is where Science becomes like Religion. Lots of speculation and search for what is true - and what is not.
Each camp has their priests and holy books, but as far as I can see, only our perserverance for the truth by diligent research has any chance of yielding it.
And when the truth is found, it will be there for everybody, demonstrable.
I would love to see Hawking's reply to String Theory.
After trying to read the "Elegant Universe", I became more convinced than ever that String Theory as really grasping at straws, but when surrounded by darkness, a straw is better than empty space.
I haven't the foggiest idea where the truth really lies. Maybe Hawking does. In any event, there are not many more illustrative ways of communicating one's ideas than a good animated presentation.
Dont ya know Einstein was riding on the same confusion regarding gravity being nothing more than our perception of a time warp which is influenced by the presence of mass? And we still apparently don't know why.
I have seen much discussion involving the "graviton", relating it to the photon. Apparently I can stop a photonic flux with a photonic shield ( aka "sunshade" )... anyone been able to shade matter from the "graviton flux" yet? I haven't seen it.
It may be a long time before I can really accept any of the theory as fact, but nevertheless, I would love to see their concept of what they think happened.
My city got one of those old mailboxes, painted it white, marked it as for paying our water bill and placed it by the curb for drive-by utility bill payment.
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This whole thing to me appears to be egged on by what they teach in today's business schools. Somehow, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of economics dictates the market will provide. Engineers like you and I are more concerned with the laws of physics which are the foundation for satisfying our wants.
Don't do anything unfortunate. I know I was pushed to the brink. I ended up taking it out on my teeth and blood pressure.
Like the original story noted, the work did not stress me out. It was a thoroughly enjoyable lifestyle for me. What stressed me out beyond belief was the braking effort and interference by the Managerial Team hired by the Executives.
I can't tell you what it is in us that puts that "fire in our souls" to place our work above everything else. I wish I did - first thing I would do is rekindle mine. I had never been happier than when I was immersed in my work, and knowing I was doing something useful for the common good of Mankind. The only thing I can compare it to is a religious experience.
I know I am not alone here. Its the common thread that unites all of us. A lot of our type end up at this forum. We all have the same characteristics - excellent technical skills, while often lacking in people skills.
We often forego all the carnal pleasures of this world in pursuit of our inquisitiveness. I did. And I know many others that did too.
I consider my studies of Physics and Engineering as the purest religion, as I feel I am studying law straight from the entity that put the law in place. Although I don't espouse any particular religious denomination, I often find much truisms in the Bible, where Jesus says this about my situation in Matthew 6:24:
"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon (Man).".
I feel in my studies of God's creation, I must serve what I perceive as my God. For me, God is that which created that which I study. I cannot serve "bringers of bullshit" when I feel God himself has given me guidance to the contrary.
Even though I don't know what ignites the fires in our souls, I can tell you that the Schools of Business Management have come up with very clever skills of pissing on that fire and putting it out.
That fire was something God gave me at birth. My parents and teachers all noursished me and made me very inquisitive. Managers pissed on the fire of my soul and put it out. For that, I am quite bitter.
Oh boy did that bring back a memory. I got accused of being lazy too when I started refusing to stay late and come in Saturdays sans pay.
I am sure that showdown in the Manager's office went on record. When he told me my attendance on Saturday was required, I asked him if he could change the water pump on my car while I am taking care of Company needs. He looked at me, aghast. How DARE an Underling ask such a thing of a Manager. To rub it in, I inquired if he, too, was simply lazy.
It was all part of that "pecking order" thing where the Manager was asserting his authority over me by holding my employment at bay.
My take is that the executive who hired him probably doesn't know what phase noise and phaselock stability is, but does know that the words "not a team player" justifies a termination.
Besides, who is "not being a team player" here? Its according to who you listen to.
The executive has to weigh my contribution against the MBA contribution and make his Executive Decision as to who to keep. He did.
With peak oil approaching, I feel we need our engineers more than ever. We are not going to solve the biggest problem mankind has ever faced by presentations and printing propaganda. We are going to have to use that big fusion reactor in the sky to power our lifestyle if we hope to survive as a race.
Ghawar is dying.
I consider myself "burned out", pursuing my efforts now on a personal level or for friends. In a way, it seems a shame I am "wasting" such precious insights that 35 years in design work ( I mean *real* design work ) gives a designer. Yet, I elect to live at a near poverty level in lieu of having to "sell my soul" to the suited-and-tied corporate types. I want so bad to go back to the time that I actually meant something to the company, and not be considered just another commodity.
My burnout occurred as I had spent years learning and perfecting a set of software I liked to use on PC's where I could write my own device drivers to make the computer do ANYTHING that it was capable of doing. These were .COM, .EXE, and .SYS files, written in C++ and assembler, running under DOS. I had collected every tool imaginable to let me do any sort of DSP, control any interface, or let me do any mathematical equations ( differential calculus ) on my machine.
I was in the midst of a dream project where I was trying to build a wide-range VCO, yet have the extremely low phase noise which would be required for using it as a local oscillator to drop 256QAM to baseband. The managers came in and demanded I do my work on some lousy 386-SX based machine running Windows 2.1 ( which was current at the time ), running doublespace. My machine at the lab was a 286. But I knew what I was doing with that one. I had no idea how to make my stuff run under Windows in a supervised environment.
I had no interest whatsoever in the fancy graphical output of Windows because I had no idea how the get the machine to do what I wanted, and do it without all the bloat which took forever and a day to execute. My mind was still set on how to use amplifier gains to increase the Q of my resonant circuits and configure the short term phase error through one varactor and the long term frequency control through another varactor, so I could simultaneously reap the benefits of fast phase correction without perturbing the frequency setpoints.
I know if you are not into RF modems, the above looks like gibberish. What I am trying to say is I already knew how to do what I needed to do, I just had to do it the way I knew how to do it.
Hiring somebody to come in and tell me that I can't do it my way - without giving him the onus of showing me exactly how to do it his way - did not help matters one bit.
He came in expecting me to take like a duck to water with his paradigms. Giving me closed-source proprietary crap to build on, citing I had no "need-to-know" how it worked - to me - was tantamount to giving a lawyer legal documents, written in Swahili, to approve. Just tell the lawyer which ones do what and have him approve them.
I thought of myself much like a pianist, with years of experience on the keyboard. Some manager comes in, forces me to use another piano whose keyboard starts with all the A notes, followed by all the B's, and so on... all in order. The manager patiently sits behind his desk, considering me not to be a team player because I hate that piano. He patiently keeps asking me what the problem is, can't I understand? Here it is again, all the A's are here, all the B's are there. All in order. Can't I be flexible enough to use it? Just point and click.
I know just as soon as I take the time to play my music through that machine, the manager is just going to redo the keyboard again. I have no return on my investment of effort whatsoever. Its like trying to put a lot of effort in improving a rented house.
I realized this guy has his experience in presentations, which I consider to be corporate propaganda more than anything concrete and useful. I could not consider him actually designing anything. Yet his training prepared him to find corporate executive types who could be persuaded that his efforts were more valuable than mine, and I should work under him.
Sadly, that is easy to say but difficult to do. The difficulty is the consumers cannot make informed choices about which products are good and which are shonky pieces of crap..."
I try. Personally, I am quite miffed with Microsoft and their "Embrace and Extend" philosophy and webmasters who code a business banking site with Javascript - then cite me EULAs to distance themselves from the security holes and phishing vulnerabilities they generate.
Unfortunately, I feel I am one of a precious few who think, instead of doing what one is told to do.
It seems like elections, where I see tremendous effort being made in mailers - because way too many people do what the mailer tells them to do.
Or financial investment newsletters. "Pump and Dump" would not work if people would not obey those things blindly.
We see junk on the market because we will accept it - and actually pay for it.
Can you imagine how fast DRM would go away if people would just close their wallets?
Or how companies would pay much more attention to code robustness if people infected with viruses in masse called their credit card company and had the charges reversed, leaving the company with the onus of coming to each of our homes and fixing their machine if they ever expected to recover a dime of the purchase price?
SOME of us try... but not nearly enough of us stand up to them.
Most of us are too obedient for our own good.
My most memorable experience in engineering came upon joining a group of people, all very techie, who were a group of radio amateurs doing what they liked to do - namely - tinkering with RF.
It was a helluva "job", if you can call it that. "Lifestyle" was more the word for me.
It was the kind of thing you couldn't wait to get to the lab. I bought my house really close so I could minimize the time I had to do such nuisance things like eating or sleeping. All my "toys" were at the lab. The house was more like somewhere I went when I had to go to sleep. I would have gladly slept at the lab if there were somewhere to do it. Yeh - true-blue nerd. I was just as addicted to my RF toys as gamers are to games.
I had the best boss imaginable. A wizard of all things. That guy knew everything. But he just had one set of hands and that was a severe limition to him. I'd gladly be his hands if he would just show me how all this stuff worked. He had a really uncanny understanding of how stuff worked. I almost say I had religious experiences just talking to this guy. Its just the way he could explain fields and energy flows in such a graphical nature.
A big corporation bought us out one day.
They brought in their Masters of Business Degree managers, well schooled in the motivational theories and executive management skills, but didn't know much of a damn about how anything worked. Working for them was hell.
I soon found I anxiously awaited going-home time and weekends. I soon found why they called it "work". It wasn't fun anymore. It was hell.
I found myself surrounded by people making far more money than anyone I had ever seen make, yet they were completely ignorant of what we did. Only thing they seemed to care about were schedules and what software and tools we were going to be allowed to use. They set themselves up with altars and the rest of us now had the onus of paying homage to these altars, telling the holy priests of the altar what they wanted to hear, or we would be excommunicated as "not being a team player". The old paradigms of knowing what one was doing did not seem germane anymore. We were just supposed to "point and click". A lot of us had to go. I was financially insecure, so I hung on a bit longer and got laid off.
I see two schools of thought here. Whether one aligns himself with the ability to do or the ability to control.
I guess its like supplying water to a city....are you a pump or a valve?
Companies with an overabundance of creativity may want to throttle it back by hiring people to tell the creative people that they can't use the tools they like.
Newly forming companies may want to open the creativity spigots wide open and clear our all obstructions to generate the most possible throughput.
Its a cycle seen in all of nature - things get old, and are replaced with new things. Millions of seedlings are nourished by the rot of one big dead tree.
I am quite aware that quite a few very innovative companies arose from our "corpse".
I am of the belief that in younger growing companies, the manager is a mentor, that can do everything, yet due to time constraints, has to bring in more hands to do the work, and he personally mentors them.
In larger, more mature companies, which do not need the growth, the manager does not need to know what the people do. By now, its a commodity thing, he just has to look at numbers. Who can make the cheapest aspirin...
I agree with your observation that business leaders must do whatever they can to protect the interests of their shareholders.
My primary concern is all this law is being passed which promotes useless litigation instead of productivity.
Economic races should be won by those who run the fastest, not by having our Government promoting one entity's success by encouraging his cleverness in tripping up his opponents. To me this is like telling the schoolkids that the first one to the playground can put "dibs" on all the playground toys, then extort the other kids of their lunch money to play. It distresses me to no end, living in "the land of the free, home of the brave", to have our lawmakers legislating such a litigious business environment for us.
Yes, all of us have "rights" but to what extent are these rights reasonably enforceable? Someone sings a song in public and someone else records it... or maybe I own a building, and someone else photographs it? Did they violate my rights to the image of MY building?
I feel I have a right to peace and quiet in my neighborhood, yet corporations feel if they can afford a helicopter, they have the right to fly it over my house. If the government considers it illegal for me to even record a publically aired song, then why isn't it illegal to fly a noisy machine over my house?
I don't know where this crap is going to end, but I sincerely hope the people get so fed up over it that the issue of relegislating IP becomes a cornerstone of an election.
These are PUBLICALLY exposed words.
I wonder if I own a property, say a building, I also own copyright to any images taken of it? They are, indeed, hardcopy representations of MY building!
When I typed my first entry, I was still pissed upon reading that a patent for something I had been doing for quite some time had been issued. It seemed so damned obvious to me - as an analog engineer - to watch AC solenoid current to see if the solenoid "pulled in", and if there was something wrong with the current profile, buzz it a bit to see if I can "loosen it up" and flag the solenoid in the trouble log. Watching solenoid current on high-reliability things is damn near mandatory, because if the solenoid plunger fails to "pull in", the magnetic path fails to close, the solenoid inductance remains low, the inrush current stays way too high, and within a few seconds the solenoid will become a molten mess.
It grieved me that I likely have caused my company another litigation nightmare.
We are still on pins and needles over another one where I saw the energy being wasted in a snubber network on a switching power supply, and rerouted the snubber energy which would have been lost to use as an auxiliary power source to power the switching logic of the switcher. It was just a case of capacitively coupling the unwanted energy spikes from the switching transformer back to power the switching logic, so it no longer had to get its power from the line source via a big dropping resistor. The fact that another company has a patent on doing this has left us open to litigation... which we can not afford.
We used to call this kind of stuff "tricks of the trade". Now these same tricks are called "IP" and are open to litigation.
I am not mad at the entity that got the patents. What I am grieved about is how IP is becoming so litigious that it seems the whole country is becoming hooked on litigation (against anyone else doing something) for economic survival instead of doing anything useful.
This way, the "barriers to entry" can be set to any level the more powerful entity desires, so they can maintain their monopoly.
Smaller companies simply do not have the financial stamina to fend off litigation attacks like this.
The strongest ( most well funded ) entities will do well under such a system.
The rest of us... well... better do it in another country.
I wonder sometimes if Microsoft is putting the Zune out there just to demonstrate just what a failure a DRM-encumbered technology would be in the marketplace.
If Microsoft can point to a disastrous market penetration, they may be able to tell the content creators to lighten up a bit before they destroy the customers they have.
Or, alternatively, they may go buy laws from Congress to have Open Source technology outlawed, just as they had mod-chips outlawed.
That's the one I fear - when it is illegal to one to know how one's own technology works - at least in this country anyway.
"The company estimates it will consume 6 million tons of oil shale and 2 million tons of refinery waste each year, for an annual production of 3 million tons of product."
Thats 8 million tons of stuff in, to get 3 million tons of product out. I hope five million tons of waste ( carbon dioxide? ) isn't smokestacked to the atmosphere.
You knew what it was damned near immediately.
And fixed 16 million comments - in 3 hours?
This just goes to show you the power of knowing what you are doing.
Stuff like this impresses the hell out of me.
Microsoft has a history of taking something, adding something proprietary to it, then marketing it to business droids, which then force the rest of us to adopt the Microsoft "flavor of the day" if we are communicate to the business community.
I had to drop my online broker over this - as my older system, which has "hooks" in it which will not honor embedded executables, would not communicate with his new Microsoft technologies which used some weird nonstandard crap that only IE understood. The broker thought that putting the phrase "IE Required" on his website would be enough. After all, he is a businessman, and what big businessman needs to consider whether he can talk to his customers when he feels he is big enough to command the market? Somehow, in all the business training he has received in the American Business University has convinced him forcing me to agree to a EULA which denies accountability gives me any peace of mind to deal with him? And I am supposed to be in peace with my ignorance of what my machine is doing? Gee, he might as well print his Business Agreements in Hebrew ( which I do not understand at all ) and expect me to feel comfortable with agreeing to it.
When one is paid millions of dollars, and has the clout to order others to maintain his crap, then he doesn't need to worry about things like keeping the keyloggers out or seeing to it he keeps his system "in revision sync" so he maintains compatibility. He lives in an imaginary world few of us can afford.
Asking megapaid business executives to consider the needs of their customer to me is akin to asking GM executives to proceed on the electric car, or asking Ford to develop hybrid technology. This is not the kind of a thing that people used to "making the market" will do. They have the marketing expertise to push what they can do profitably, and to heck with what the customer needs. Its up to third-tier folks like Toyota Motor Company to listen to the customer.
Its easy for top-tier businessmen to tell their customers to "go take a hike", but who is gonna risk offending a multibillionaire? Top-tier executives know how to mount the dais, stand behind the podium, and tell their stockholders of market share losses, while the lower-level companies are consigned to meeting the needs of their customers if they are going to sell a product.
I understand GM would not even sell the EV cars to their fans, even though the fans were quite willing to cover non-warrantied ownership. Once they get too large, businesses act funny and ignore their customers.
Microsoft knows business, and knows how to use people's "need to talk to business" to leverage their proprietary technologies. They see the variant of business adopting "dollars" in order to do business, so everyone who goes into a store must have "dollars" to do business. Not pesos, not francs, not pounds sterling, - dollars.
For this reason I am extremely leery of Microsoft selling patent-protected communication protocols to business.
Most businessmen are NOT computer professionals, and most of the people who make the decisions are paid so much that the problems I will experience do not affect them. Its a problem we have here in America when everytime we need more money, the Government simply prints it. Yet we expect the world to honor every confiscory law we coin exacting revenues and taxation for even as much as using what used to be standard communication protocols.
Here's hoping the rest of the world sees whats going on, and keeps the communication infrastructure free and open, leaving America to be stuck with countless legal arguing, forced obsolecence, and other benefits that only the American executives believe to have value.
I fear things will go just like our system of physics, where our measurements and tools are different from what the rest of the world uses.
For me, DNA is like being given a 1 gigabyte ROM containing the complete OS of an unknown system. I am not given the instruction set of the machine...just the raw source. Its up to me to diddle the code- see what the machine does, and from this, deduce how the machine works.
Quite a puzzle.
I envy the guys that are in the middle of this. But I do not envy them the "pressure to show progress" when dealing with such an unknown.
In damn near all programming work I have ever done, the slightest error usually resulted in an immediate terminal fault or worse, a BSOD.
When I consider that my entire biological OS - everything that coded me for what I am - consists of about 1 gigabyte of code ( considering human DNA consists of 3 billion base pair; 3 base pair to a codon; codon roughly equivalent to byte ), I can hardly consider my coding shoddy. I consider it far more likely that we are at this point quite ignorant on the subtleties of DNA coding.
I don't see any more "bang for the buck" as I see in biology.
If I spent the rest of my life in front of a DNA sequencer, I doubt I could code to get the chemistry of a single cell to work, much less an entire organism.
I can't harp too much on this, but the elegance of this whole thing sure makes me wonder how it came to be.
Do you know what likelihood we have that we can "see" the entire universe? Or is there still a strong liklihood that the observeable universe is a subset of the Universe?
And, do you know if there is any way of ascertaining if the universe, as a whole, is rotating?
( The reasoning being if gravitation is cancelling out centrifugal force, we will be in position where every point appears to be rotating around any given reference point, with the radial velocity proportional to the distance to it, possibly giving the illusion of expansion.).
Yes, I will continue to buy CD's provided they continue to offer nice printed inserts and the little "extras" that make having the original CD a "collector's item".
For starters, continue making it easy to get the music onto editors so I can mix it to what I like. Getting music out of some containers is almost like getting sugar from a Tyvek envelope. Possible, but messy, and I had just as soon not mess with it at all.
There is a tremendous draw to having my source music in the highest-definition format that the pressed CD offers, and let me mix it and compress it to my liking before downloading my favorites mix to my portable player. My portable player will be subjected to things that may destroy it, and I take great comfort knowing that if the worst does happen ( my mp3 player gets dropped, stepped on, or worse ), that the thing most valuable to me - its content - is still intact on my home system. I can always buy another MP3 player, but it may have collectively taken me thousands of hours to prepare its content like I like it. I guess an apt analogy is that I do not mind it so much if I dropped the meal on the floor, if I didn't lose the kitchen in the process.
Things are changing, as they always have. Yes, I can share someone else's music - and no matter how much snooping and RIAA threats go on, I get the idea the RIAA is going to have as much fun policing music sharing as the authorities have had in controlling illicit drugs. People are intelligent and will find a way to get what they want. Put barriers in the "legal" way of getting it, and people migrate to illegal methods.
Personally, I'd much rather have my original source CD sitting in a safe place so I know I can always go back to it if any of my working copies get nailed. And I do want the original from the artist. Its a "having the original painting" versus "having a picture of it" thing. Yes, I can look at pictures of paintings for hours, but when it comes to the ones I really like, I'd just as soon have the "real thing" if I can get it.
I hope you marketing guys get this and reconsider that things are changing. You no longer have absolute control over your stuff. Nobody does. You will have as much luck controlling your stuff once you release it as I have in controlling what business does with my personal info.
Its just the way things are in the informational age.
Its as if all building materials became transparent with new technology, and others are free to observe any darned thing they want. Neither of us much like it, but its just the way it is.
Personally, I have my phone programmed NOT to ring on "private caller" and "unknown caller".
My friends know not to call me using cloaks.
The telemarketers don't.
Personally, I feel the phone ringing with the words "Private Call" flashing in the window has just about as much tact as me donning a ski mask, emblazoned "private caller", and wearing it while ringing someone's doorbell.
Would I really expect them to open the door?
Its amazing to me how many businesses cower behind anonymity when calling. And they have the idea I will be receptive? I just have to chalk such callous behaviour to what passes for eductation in todays business curriculums.
Yea - maybe flamebait to an MBA who just paid dearly for his pedigree, but I have taken marketing classes too and became quite emotionally charged from it ... a mixture of anger and distrust at the psychological tactics suggested. Such game-playing usually does nothing but make me furious.
While Einstein's explanation works really well for the "macro" physics I work in, I understand his explanation doesn't work so well in the world of "micro" physics at the subatomic level. Quantum theory has the best correlation of observed to predicted results there.
Our Efratom atomic clocks used RF to step-up energy levels of rubidium gas in the bulbs - a process governed entirely by quantum physics. We get a really nice indicator when we are exactly on frequency - a frequency determined solely by the quantum aspects of the rubidium atom - extremely stable.
However, we sent people to the moon on Newton's equations. [Lederman - "The God Particle"]
I admit that the "Calabi-Yau" shapes talked about in "The Elegant Universe" require quite a stretch of my imagination to consider it a fact. I cannot discount it though, as I have seen the messiest of equations simplify down to such elegant forms when understood - such is the beauty of the symmetry of nature.
My bad - I should never regard *any* theory as "the truth". If I do that, I am no better than those very folks I occasionally rail about.
How many times have we seen rich bored housewives make rendevouz with the gardener, or repairman?
Its just in our nature. We are like animals - and will go after darned near anything that moves. Especially if alcohol is involved.
Nah, I don't think its in our willpower to selectively breed ourselves. We will only be able to do that in the sterile emotionless setting of a DNA lab.
I must disclose my background - engineer - so I fall pretty hard into the "experimental physicist's" camp.
It took me quite some time to accept Einstein's explanation of gravity as the truth. I have to admit it took some actual data I saw from some spaceborne Efratom rubidium atomic clocks that convinced me Einstein had it nailed a bit more precisely than Newton had.
I do think we get the most fun puzzles to solve. The complexities, yet the elegance, of the laws we run under are so fundamentally beautiful when we finally get to the core of it... and this one we are still peeling trying to see what makes it work.
Another one that amazes me to no end is DNA coding and the hardware it runs in.
I note your moniker, flawedconceptions, aptly describes the circumstance of an adventurer in an uncharted world.
I also need to supply energy to a photonic source to get it to emit.
I don't see graviton sources weakening as their energy depletes.
Nor do I see matter "evaporate", except in instances where the mass converts to energy.
I am not saying it does not exist, rather I am stating my complete lack of any knowledge I can use to say that it does exist.
This is where Science becomes like Religion. Lots of speculation and search for what is true - and what is not.
Each camp has their priests and holy books, but as far as I can see, only our perserverance for the truth by diligent research has any chance of yielding it.
And when the truth is found, it will be there for everybody, demonstrable.
I would love to see Hawking's reply to String Theory.
After trying to read the "Elegant Universe", I became more convinced than ever that String Theory as really grasping at straws, but when surrounded by darkness, a straw is better than empty space.
I haven't the foggiest idea where the truth really lies. Maybe Hawking does. In any event, there are not many more illustrative ways of communicating one's ideas than a good animated presentation.
Dont ya know Einstein was riding on the same confusion regarding gravity being nothing more than our perception of a time warp which is influenced by the presence of mass? And we still apparently don't know why.
I have seen much discussion involving the "graviton", relating it to the photon. Apparently I can stop a photonic flux with a photonic shield ( aka "sunshade" )... anyone been able to shade matter from the "graviton flux" yet? I haven't seen it.
It may be a long time before I can really accept any of the theory as fact, but nevertheless, I would love to see their concept of what they think happened.
Or, will this another risk businesses will be expected to absorb in order to comply with the demands of a Microsoft-written EULA?
I envy you guys for being in position for doing the ultimate software hacks... on the genome of life itself.