I guess there are several perspectives for viewing this project.
When I saw it, I did not see it much as a production plan for making the device, as much as I saw it as a platform they had constructed to demonstrate their ability to serially communicate to a mouse, process the info with a microcontroller, then drive motors based on the result. An exercise in interfacing.
I also consider that AVR processors are quite cheap, damn near cheap as a couple of glue logic chips. The programming is a one-time effort, and the use of as many off-the-shelf commodity items, such as the mouse, AVR processor, motor driver chips, etc, shove quite a bit of R&D costs away. As you know, the very chip in the mouse that reads the quadrature encoded X-Y wheels and prepares the serial info stream for the PC is also a microcontroller.
Their implementation indeed used two microcontrollers, when in reality none at all were needed. But then, reliability of AVR processors is hardly questionable ( as I have yet to see one fail ).
Their design can be viewed as redundant, but knowing what I do about the elemental parts of the design, for commercial use, I would probably come up with something very similar. I would want my customer to be able to walk into his local "Radio Shack" and buy spare parts should something break. If I made attempts to redesign a standard mouse, I could easily create a lot of chaos in the supply chain.
From my chair, I would have given them an A. I would have also considered it good for a Master's project if they threw in the control systems math for matching the controller to the stepper motor... as the motor and load have inertia - and optimizing it for fastest error-free operation would require implementation of some DSP in the processor.
However I certainly see your viewpoint - its the same as mine when I was working in aerospace - as simplicity, reliability, and power consumption were our prime design objectives. Until Goldin and his team of tie-guys managementized the industry, elegance of design was top dog.
I didn't survive when the aerospace firm I worked for managementized - as I stood up for what I believed - and quickly got labeled as an uncooperative member of the team. What they were asking me to do involved asking me to give up my computer and circuit simulator which I understood intimately, and in its place they were demanding I use some proprietary piece of stuff I did not understand... and thinking I could still produce good design using it with even faster time frames, as well as asking me to take on several things at once. Damm, my own OS is still God's Original Wet-Ware version 1.0 (Homo Sapiens). There are only so many things I can consider at a time. Does one tell the tie-guy the honest truth and lose one's job, or be a nice subordinate little minion and hope for the best, hoping something where I do not have twenty years worth of experience backing up my judgment will work?
I certainly understand about the guys who can't find their ass with both hands and a GPS... the problem is that they have gone beyond engineering and often become an engineer's boss.
Before we flame the guy too bad, I think its pretty obvious what he's talking about.
Inside the mouse is a ball driving two optical encoders: one for X, one for Y, mechanically placed 90 degrees apart.
The optical disks and detector are made in such a manner as to produce a quadrature encoded output.
With very minimal "glue logic", these signals could be changed to the quadrature encoded drive signals required by a stepper motor.
This would have eliminated the whole processor.
But, they used a roundabout way of doing it.
I'll often do things for my own edification that are not optimal just to see how things work.
In this case, the students got to experience working with the AVR compiler, programming in machine code, and real-world interface design, so I won't bang on them for not doing it in such a way I would have if I were gonna make a million of 'em.
Now, if I had found out that they were just drawing lines on the CRT screen, I would have posted a very vile commentary on the state of what is passing for education these days. What I saw looked appropriate to me for a class project for BSEE.
Just for funsies, my final project in College back in the early 70's was building my own oscilloscope from scratch. I thought I was gonna get really good bandwidth because I was using 45MHz IF tubes from television receivers as my CRT drive. Got my design finished... Surprise! I got 10KHz! Well, so much for my rude awakening to plate resistance and capacitive loads... but the professor gave me full credit anyway because I offered the correct explanation of why I didn't get the response I expected.
Well, that hum is kinda "hidden", but you can hear it if you are listening for it in some amplifiers. It shows up in some interesting places during intermod.
Many of those old amps didn't have all that much feedback, therefore the 120Hz hum on the power supply got multiplied ( not added ) into the audio.
It was customary to use unregulated full wave power supplies. Remember the old 5U4 and 5Y3 rectifier tubes where you pulled around 350 volts DC off the 5V/3A filament? It usually went to about 40 microfarad / 450V electrolytic capacitor, which also fed the plates of the push-pull amplifier stage via the center tap of the output transformer. Well, that wasn't the cleanest DC in the world. There was usually one or two more stages of power supply decoupled by resistors that fed the preamp stages.
Ooooh the memories of playing around with those old amps... brings back all the memories of the aromas emitted by all those different components when they failed... transformers smelled one way, capacitors another, resistors yet another, and a blown selenium rectifier stack would emit enough stench to clear the house. Those old wax paper condensers would leak and screw up the bias, and there was always those old carbon resistors which occasionally took it on themselves to change their resistances at will - always seeming to sense when I get a call and give me the proper reading so I spent my time barking up the wrong tree.
And the hardest one I ever had to fix was an amplifier that didn't "sound" right even though it appeared to work just fine. It was that cathode bypass capacitor coming from the cathodes of the push-pull output stage had developed some ESR. None of my equipment detected it, but the musician sure did. I still remember that little bastard. 50 microfarads at 25 working volts. Yellow cardboard jacket.
Sound is logarithmic. There are many "impulse" type percussion sounds which mimic a damn near infinite energy spike, or a train of spikes.
Transistors are almost perfectly linear right into cutoff and saturation. Tubes are not. Tubes are linear only in a narrow section of their operating curves...dig up an old tube manual, look at the operating lines and see. There were some weird physics in tube circuit design. The more you tried to "turn the tube on", the lower the plate voltage would drop, resulting in less gain of the tube. You had to drive the control grid increasingly positive to try to accelerate the electron flow to the plate, yet as the plate voltage lost potential, the control grid itself began attracting the electron stream intended for the plate. But at least the reduction in gain for increased drive could be designed to be quite smooth.
And every tube design worked a bit different...and various tube types had their own unique "sound". Some liked 6550, others liked 6L6. There are quite a few others. Some thought the Russian tubes were quite superior.
There were all sorts of tricks played with the various grid structures mechanical placement in the beams of electron flow to cause the grids to control the flow in various ways. Many of these devices were pin compatible on their basing and could be substituted for comparisons. This lead to lots of subjective comparison of which tubes "sounded" better.
Yes, it frustrated the hell out of some of us which designed to spec using oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and tried to design a "perfect" amplifier, only to be upstaged by an "audio expert" who just listened to it and would use descriptors in his analysis that we could not translate into technical terms... like whether or not its a "warm" sound. ( The best I could make of it was it was something to do with where I was operating the tube on DC bias, which affected cutoff distortion.).
It was fun in those days. Back in the 60's. Got to work with a lot of very interesting and colorful people. Lots of long hair and hallucenogenic chemicals. Those folks really knew how to party. I think we had a lot better music back then, although personal hygiene was often lacking. I loved the light shows. I got my first intro to SCR's and high power xenon strobes during that era.
I haven't seen any mention of these guys here, but a few years ago, I remember a company, CREO, working on a data recorder which used a spoolable optical tape. I believe this tape was made by ICI over in Europe.
There were several packaging options for this tape.. including reels of 2" wide tape and cartridges.
I've lost track of what happened to it. All I remember is that this tape existed at one time and some research was being done to make data recorders of phenomenal storage capacity.
Back in the early 90's, there was one company in Campbell, California, known as "LaserTape" which was trying to design a tape drive for the PC which used cartridges of this tape. I have lost track of whatever happened to the company.
You are hinting that it looks feasable to you for constructing interfaces to take a high-speed binary serial stream, using some sort of implantable serial to parallel converter, to generate a video signal which would be like that on the optic nerve and recognizible by the brain as video?
Bridging the gap between binary electronics and and the neurological networks of life has got to be the biggest "hack" of all time.
Although I feel I understand the former extremely intimately, I am absolutely in the cold about the data formats, even to the physical layer, in the latter. About the closest I can come to is its some sort of frequency modulated 70 millivolt pulses mimicing synaptic firings. But there are so many parallel channels! And I would take a very strong guess that a lot of information is located in relative timing of the firings.
Has your involvement in the neurological end of things given you any good leads on hacking the biological end of the interface?
I envy you guys.. as you are on the edge of unknown. The Frontier.
I get the idea that you, like me, were active during the fun years of the 60's and 70's before Dan Goldin and his suite of tie-guys ran the tech force into the ground.
Personally, I think that guy set the technology back in this country by at least one half a century, if you consider the loss of all the integrated knowledge we acquired by doing what we did when his suite of tie-guys did all their "right-sizing" by laying off droves of their own scientists and engineers.
I consider that man the equivalent of the adolescent pizza truck driver which tells management he can deliver the pizza five minutes sooner, but wrecks the truck in the process... while the more experienced people would sit back and analyze the economics of marginal benefit over marginal cost and come to the decision that it wasn't worth wrecking a $25,000 truck over a $10 pizza. But marketing and engineering, who base the concept of "value" from different perspectives, seldom - if ever - arrive at the same conclusion as to how to proceed. Whether or not we will succeed follows the laws of physics, which the engineer follows, but whether or not we will be allowed to even try follows the laws of marketing. Unfortunately for us, the engineers were placed below executive management types in the corporate hierarchy, rendering our engineering skills rather moot. And for many years - although funding was not a problem, it was damn near impossible to get any US payload into space.
Enjoy Cassini. It's the last of the old-school technology we all loved.
The latest stellar performances of the Mars Exploration Rovers though gives me hope that maybe our technology hasn't been completely flushed down the toilet.
When I worked in the Aerospace industry a few years ago, I had lots of models for the devices and fabrication methods so I could try to predict their electronic behaviour using the SPICE simulator.
The SPICE simulator itself is mostly set up to simultaneously solve lots of linear differential equations with connectivity represented by placement in the matrix. A big linear algebra array of differential equations. We could see how the math worked. But trying to get an accurate - I mean a really accurate - model of the real world??? It seems no matter how fine I tuned something, after comparing what I was calculated to get against what I got, there was always some interraction that went unaccounted for and screwed up the entire calculation. Many of the designs had chaotic elements that had large nonlinear outcomes to small control inputs, which meant even a small unaccounted for coupling would royally screw up the works.
I worked for years on some of that until a new management team came in and mandated we all go to closed-source simulators. At that point, I lost damn near all understanding of what I was doing, as sans understanding how the machine handled my simulations, I could no longer get anything to simulate properly. But management liked the pretty reports, even if I had no idea how accurate they were. I ended up losing my job over my bickering over the loss of my machine.
But then, I could see their point of view too... when one is getting paid what those guys got paid, they had better things to do than listen to whining engineers.
Yes. Cars have a fixed size, but just as stock orders can be any size, the effect of a driver error can range anywhere between a minor pullover to the side of the road, or taking the whole freeway down.
And yes, it sure seems weather should be more of an example of a complex system, but I still consider that the nonlinearities involved force it to chaotic behaviour. We can get close... and the shorter the time frame, the more accurate we can get. As we increase the resolution of the complex system of weather models, we can predict further into the future. I hold that the chaotic nature driven by these un-modelable nonlinearities which extend beyond the molecular level will mean we will never develop accurate long-term forecasts, although our statistical predictions should hold out fine.
Its just I don't think I will be able to predict with much degree of certainity how much rain will fall on Atlanta, Georgia on May 12 of next year, but I think I can pretty accurately tell you how much rain to expect in the State of Georgia for the week or month a year from now.
Statistics seems to me a weird mistress. She teases me a lot.
Yeh... the thing that makes it seem awful hard to me to predict traffic flow is not knowing how severely any given error will impact the general flow.
Its a highly nonlinear system... and I cannot even begin to guess the "gain" of the feedback loop. One driver mistake may end up as a matter discussed alongside the freeway as traffic continues largely unaffected... another ends up taking the whole freeway down for hours.
Every time I have ever played with such a system, I could use statistical strategy to predict what things should be, but I was usually quite a bit off from what things would actually come to be for any particular instance.
hehe... your dog analogy... this too is a system that weeds out dumb dogs that run out in the street without looking. Statistics says the dogs that run out in the street without looking will soon cease to exist, ergo the ones that still exist have likely acquired the art of looking before leaping.
I like your reference to the Germans. In my earlier years, I was subordinate to a fine German Engineer. He left me with a tremendous respect for the German ways of doing things. To this day I remember his wisdom and try to come up to his standards. He was by far the finest Engineer I have ever met, and I felt very honored to have worked under him.
Some very interesting things come out when one starts using statistical analysis of chaotic phenomena. The patterns, as you say, are pretty consistent.
I guess its kinda like predicting what the noise level next to the freeway at any particular hour will be - and be pretty darned accurate. But try to identify exactly where you will be in the measured acoustical waveform and you will be completely out of luck.
It seems to me its nearly as impossible to predict a traffic jam as it is to predict stock prices.
Both are fundamentally chaotic.
Sure, you can calculate expected probability based on past performances and expected flow... but we've all seen freeways humming right along at 70MPH and no problems until just ONE driver makes an error... then all hell breaks loose.
I don't think even predicting the weather is as tricky as predicting traffic flow, as at least the weather patterns follow known laws of physics for at least near-term before losing out to the chaotic nature of weather patterns. People are just flat out unpredictable.
If I had mod points today, you would have definitely got one. Lacking any, I will reply about some things I have seen on vector processing I ran across when I was trying to see how feasable it was to use 3-D terrains to display automobile engine diagnostic data.
I have seen some books on GPU ( Graphics Processor Unit ) vector processing that knocked my socks off. Its literally amazing what they are doing right on the graphics card these days, as the graphics card's GPU instruction set - programmed in an assembler-like language - is crammed with vector and matrix operations.
Other parts in the book had snippets of assembler for going directly to the floating point processor for extremely tight vector and matrix operations.
When you consider the clock speed of a modern processor... well, let me say I am quite literally blown away by the power of these modern machines... yet we literally consider many of them to be a toy.
Yes... I think I and every other slashdotter are puzzled at this whole charade.
Most of us have far better understandings of physics and the inevitable outcomes of actions that it predicts than, say, politics, which appears mostly a marketing scheme selling "leadership skills".
As anyone whose taken a marketing class knows, the whole idea of marketing skills is "perceived value" to a human mind, not "quantitative value" as the laws of physics would account.
So, here we are, glut of laid-off high tech people right here in the United States. I have a resume that reads like an encyclopedia and *I* have trouble finding jobs!
Here's my problem: I am specialized in design for manufacture... and we don't manufacture in America much anymore. Outsourcing.
I am watching imported electronics come in to the local arcade with absolutely amazing realtime rendering engines. God only knows the effectiveness of using such advanced fast technology for nefarious purposes. Although the powers that be may think of it only as a game for children, I see very powerful CPU's driving extremely sophisticated rendering engines... and know the difference between a game and reality is only in the hardware interface.
So, we outsource our high tech and somehow Congress thinks US is gonna remain a world leader?
Foreign countries are now developing the technologies of the future while our own technical people languish in the unemployment office?
How much does a good engineer go for these days?
Is a politician more valuable?
How much value is, say, 20 years of training by actually working in the field?
I think the idea the politicians can keep the cat in the bag by simply passing laws is gone. "How to Make Fire" is now public knowledge... the entire world knows how to make matches now. We do not have a monopoly on it anymore. And it looks like we won't even have match factories anymore... and we think we are gonna remain a world power?
My feeling is we are heading straight for the poorhouse.
I see this latest collapse of interest rates as one of the dying gasps of our economy, as the last bastion of the American economy - the solidity of the dollar itself - is sacrificed by dilution of the money supply so that sufficient numbers of dollars can be generated for the balance sheets - irrespective of any "value" that the dollar is to represent. I feel soon the dollar will be just a number... meaningless as a measure of wealth. Just a number. Congress can print as many as they want to wipe out past debts. Something else has to evolve as a standard unit of wealth, as holding a dollar is like holding ice on a hot day.
Its gonna be interesting when the power of foreign game consoles exceed the power of our best military chips, driven by the economics of worldwide purchases of entertainment compared to a country whose military budget depends on collecting income taxes from its laid off citizenry.
Its sobering to think that not only the machines we all knew and grew up with are passing away into oblivion, but also those who designed those early machines are also passing away.
Those were the days when this technology was still full of unknowns and dreams of possibilities were limitless. Just the word "computer" conjured images of electronic brains doing what was in our wildest imagination. Oh, the stories that were told in those days.
I *still* have my first computer: an old IMSAI 8080 I built from a kit. It still works. I even have cross compilers for it so I can still generate code for it when the PC came out.
The machine ran at a whopping 2 MHz.
I had 12 Kilobytes of EPROM.
4 Kilobytes of VideoRam ( Yup, I could drive four monitors independently... each 16 lines of 64 characters. )
I had all remaining 48 Kilobytes of address space filled with 2102 1Kx1 450nS RAM, best you could get, in those days. It took six S-100 cards to hold them all... you could only get 8K on a card... and even then you had thermal problems.
And you know, when I turned the system on, I had system ready prompt by the time the monitor filaments warmed up enough to display an image.
And the pages would scroll past so fast they could not be read. I could prepare a whole new screen in one vertical retrace inverval. On a 2 MHz machine! Oooh, the wonders of assembly language.
Would I want to go back... well, uh, no. You see, it took weeks for me to code a barely operable word processor. And forget the luxury of C. If I wanted a float, I had a major programming project on my hands. I could only play with 8 bits at a time. A tic-tac-toe logic game was par for the course for making a decent computer demo. Even a rudimentary multiply was a royal pain...calculating trancendentals to any degree of accuracy could take several seconds.
But it *was* fun. And there was lots of blinking lights on that old box that made it even look like it was doing something... not these bland boxes of today whose only indication they are doing anything at all is maybe a disk access light.
What bothers the hell out of me, though, is that it can be done.
How in the world can I trust *anything* that willy-nilly follows whatever orders someone else tells *my* machine to do, leaving me powerless to override? The most surprising thing to me is that business is taking this. Do they really think only "good guys" know where the unlocked back doors to the operating system are?
Stuff like this just convinces me further that anyone even thinking of using this kind of system in a business environment needs to have his salary and standing in his organization re-evaluated.
Update... I was able a few minutes ago to access my email account at Yahoo.
They didn't appear to have lost any of my mails.
They were apparently upgrading the accounts for 100 Megabyte (!) email boxes. For free.
Only thing, I sure would have appreciated a note to the effect that my mailbox was temporarily unreachable during construction, instead of the blank page I was getting to. To have things suddenly disappear scares me... because sometimes they never work again. And its very difficult to communicate this problem when its not an item on a drop-down menu.
I had them for years as my ISP, because when I first got onto the 'net, I had this preconceived idea that no-one would be better at telecom than the phone company.. geez - they're the ones who put the lines in around the 1900's or so - and even my old dial phone still works. So, I figured Pacific Bell was just as solid as the Rock of Gilbraltar.
My sentiments were later shattered as Pacific Bell became SBC and got into bed with YAHOO.
I had plain vanilla POP dialup. Thats all I needed. I start getting barrages of emails indicating "Action Required" in my mailbox urging me to download/install proprietary YAHOO stuff that only runs on certain flavors of Microsoft stuff...
Now, let me get this straight. This is the phone company I am working with. And they can't support plain old POP anymore? What happened to that 100 year legacy? My 50 year old dial phone still works but they cannot support vanilla POP standard? What are they smoking over there these days?
I am forced to abandon SBC/YAHOO for Localnet. LocalNet actually gave me faster connections at half the price. From my LocalNet access, I did try to re-access Yahoo to see what it was like.
I have not been impressed. I started up one account over there - from that started up a couple of groups.. then my account suddenly disappeared, leaving the groups I started with no "owner" - they are "in the wild" now, filling with spam. I started up another account, so at least I could re-access the groups I had started, albeit now as only a member with no ability to clean up the spam.. but only two days ago my email access at Yahoo suddenly ceased working. I just tried to access it a few minutes ago.. its still not working.
I know they will tell me I have to use the latest flavor of Microsoft Product if I contact their customer support... It bugs the pookie out of me that they can't support existing standards. And how am I ever going to think of anything that has demonstrated such lack of robustness as being suitable for any business activity? God knows just how thankful I am that I did not establish any fiduciary business using such finicky technology. Its become painfully obvious to me that doing business with SBC/YAHOO will only obligate me to a never-ending stream of demands that I constantly change my end to remain compatible with them.
Sometimes I wonder if changing things such that the customer owns "his" end was such a good idea. You know, it provided the phone company a helluva incentive to keep things standardized if they knew that they were gonna have to pick up the tab if they changed something that affected every phone out there.
In my mind, SBC has grown too big, like a huge brittle tree full of deadwood. Tiers upon tiers of highly-paid executive types who spend the day shaking hands with marketers devising plans to coerce their customer base into compliance with their marketing plans. Its high time the little guys swarm in and take advantage of this situation and take the customer base that SBC no longer needs.
I am wondering if this attack on Akamai is responsible for me no longer being able to access my email account at Yahoo?
I have been unsucessful all day trying to access my mail. Problem is when I do sign onto Yahoo, I have yet to find any info pages where they indicate if they have changed the system any or where to email any impacts of their changes to.
But, being its a freebie thing, I can't complain too loudly.. I just consider myself forewarned of things to be if I do anything critical there, like any financial or business stuff.
Incidentally, yesterday's log at Internet Storm Center was pretty informative too. Here's a snippet:
Large Websites Unreachable (update. added June 15th 9:41 am EDT)
Several sources worldwide report that large websites, among them Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, are currently not reachable due to DNS problems.
It is suspected at this time that the root cause is a problem with Akamai's DNS service (see the diary for the 15th for more updates)
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-06-15
Linux kernel local DoS
A local crash against Linux kernels on x86 has been released. Working code has been released that crashes affected kernels (latest 2.4 and 2.6). The program has been confirmed to crash kernels protected with the Openwall and grsecurity kernel patches. If you run a public shell server, it would be wise to patch your kernel now.
I get these things from my bank all the time, neatly enclosed with all sorts of other advertisement flyers in my credit card statement.
It miffs me off everytime I read one. Its the couchy language they use.. like "only sharing personal information as permitted by law."
What I want to see is the word required by law.
How do you feel they would think if I told them I would haxor their system as permitted by law to verify confidentiality of my personal information, especially after its been shown how the RIAA can apparently use similar techniques to verify misuse of their copyrighted information.
Its obvious that that piece of paper they sent me is just to fulfull some legal requirement that says they must inform me that they are going to share my information, but in order to mislead me, they couch it in "businessese" lingo to make it look like they are only going to violate my trust if they have to. But that's not what they actually say at all!
I just try to limit my exposure by doing business with as few of these guys as possible.
Actually, I would love to see some scenes of some of the more "tense" situations as they happened in the control room.. like how they recovered Spirit, and the discussions of whether to enter Endurance. I am sure there are many memorable discussions taking place there.
When this wraps up, I would love to see NASA do a really good documentary on this stellar success and release it in such a way that insures that the information they have created will never be forgotten. ( meaning open-source release, so that hopefully centuries from now, the information we create today will be just as readable then as it is now. )
If I could have exactly what I wanted, NASA would release this on media designed to last for centuries... maybe pyrex glass disks and gold. The best we have. With this opportunity to spread the costs over a wide audience, in my mind, its worth it. To me, NASA's achievement here is the most significant thing Man has ever done. Personally, I think this effort needs to be documented in the most robust ways possible for future generations to reflect back on.
This is one movie collection I am looking very forward to getting.
Although not a coder, per se, I do a lot of design work and IR&D. Your concerns on being there for family strike a very deep chord in me. I am way past the age for doing the "family thing", as all my life I have been trying to put my job and training first, so that later I should have been rewarded with a decent position and would have time for family later... but for me it didn't work out that way at all. Technology keeps changing so fast that all the skills we develop are damn near obsolete by the time they are used. Employers keep a sharp eye on new graduates, still learning the latest cutting edge stuff while off their payroll, then we that are in the workforce find ourselves competing with a steady stream of newly minted graduates that know the latest technology but are totally ignorant of the preceding technologies. My personal disaster happened when one of the new guys was hired in as my boss, and the first thing he did was take my old computer away from me and expect me to use another machine of his choosing...
I had no earthly idea how to use that machine. It was running Windows. I had twenty years experience with assembler/DOS/SuperVGA-VESA and felt I could do damn near anything with my trusty old Borland C++ compiler. I did all sorts of device drivers under DOS, but I had no idea how to do anything under Windows. My pleas to let me use technology I was familiar with was only met by condecending utterances from the man-on-high that I was to "get with the program". I felt my work had nothing to do with presentation - I was only doing analysis work on satellite tracking. It had taken me twenty years work to understand my machine well enough to have it do *exactly* what I wanted it to do. It takes a lot of time to learn all this new technology, and our experience is the integral of all the things we have done. Problem is with technology these days is only thing most employers seem to see is the integral of over the last two years or so. So a very deep experience base does not mean much these days.. Geez. Look how much experience I have with Borland C++ for DOS and all the VESA SuperVGA graphics I have done.. who needs that kind of stuff. So the technology guy is constantly running ass-out just trying to stay current. Its like a never-ending marathon. How does one ever take time out for family?
My relationships to family have deteriorated to the point of damn near non-existence. I do not have a retirement plan, and I am still going to school in addition to trying to stay employed.
I never found the time to get married.
Much less have kids.
Would I encourage technology career to anyone? Well, only if they *really* liked it. Enough to forego wife, family, kids, parents, everything else.
At this stage in the game, I kinda wish I had just stayed a technician. The pay and prestige as an Engineer in my estimation is not nearly commensurate with the effort and committment required to sustain an existence in the field.
I certainly understand your concern about the kids. My career is so demanding I felt I had to forego kids for the very same reasons you are concerned about your inability to find time to nurture the family relationships. You are only echoing the mantra of every decent Engineer type I have ever met... that "if you can't do it right, there ain't much sense in doing it at all."
As far as I know, everyone considered he did the best he knew.
But, from what I could tell, ever since then, the guards were kept very well informed about anything that involved equipment moving, and this incident was never forgotten, and used to illustrate just how sneaky and well-prepared thieves can be.
Even twenty years later, me, as well as probably everybody who worked in or around that company, remembers the whole charade like it happened yesterday.
Nobody blamed the guard for doing his job. He did the best he could, tried his very best to be helpful. A typical example of how that company did things.
If anybody is gonna get any heat, its gonna be the guy who arranges for something to happen and fails to let it be well known to everyone - especially the guards.
White panel truck with appropriate lettering pulled up to corporate headquarters. Man wearing logo'd shirt gets out and approaches security guard, papers in hand. He is supposed to remove typewriters for cleaning, and is supposed to come back Sunday to return them. Papers are signed by an executive of that company.
[ uh-huh. right name, but *that* executive has never even seen the papers. Its just a signature. ]
Guard is cautious. Needs to call and check. Truck driver agrees to wait. Executive out of town. Guard says no-go. Truck driver says fine, just sign here that I showed up. Your company still must pay the $5000 fee for weekend overtime service as per the contract. ( Shows contract details to guard ). No biggie to me. ( Guard gets ansy. A lot of money, What's his boss gonna say about losing more money than his monthly pay just because he wouldn't let another man do his work? ). The guard refused to sign anything. The truck guy notes down his name from his badge, notes it on his form, looks at his watch again, dates and signs the form, and asks the guard to let 'em know he was there. Leaves the guard a business card, and mentions that the next available window to do the cleaning work on a weekend is about 3 months away. Another fee will be assessed for the next service. He tells the guard he has 50 people at his plant right now ready to clean typewriters, and when he gets back, he has no work for them, so he will pay them their four hours Union wage for showing up and send them home.
The guard is really sweating now. He doesn't know exactly what to do, but he doesn't wanna find out he screwed up the company something fierce by keeping someone from doing their job, so he relents. He even helps load the truck!
We never saw those typewriters again.
The truck? Bogus plates. Plain white panel truck with vinyl stick on lettering. Run of the mill truck. The guy even had shelves in it made in such a way so he could load up the completely full. Seeing how professional the truck was equipped for the job impressed the guard and reassured him that everything was indeed on the up-and-up.
The forms? Yes, lots of forms! Every typewriter was duly noted on its own form..serial numbers and all! Obviously our con-guy had gotten a hold of an inventory list, because every form indicated where the typewriter was. Why even a copy of each form was even left with the guard! The only traceable signature was that of the guard. There were other signatures on the forms, but no one ever found out who the actual signers were.
Come Monday, Management was very puzzled and disturbed over the missing typewriters.. a little over a couple hundred of them. There were investigations. There were lots of phone calls to the non-existent phone numbers, people, and attempted visits to the addresses referenced to in those oh-so-professionally done forms.
Yup, some clever guy invested in a couple hundred dollars worth of "movie props" and walked out with several hundred thousand dollars worth of nearly brand new IBM typewriters.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess there are several perspectives for viewing this project.
When I saw it, I did not see it much as a production plan for making the device, as much as I saw it as a platform they had constructed to demonstrate their ability to serially communicate to a mouse, process the info with a microcontroller, then drive motors based on the result. An exercise in interfacing.
I also consider that AVR processors are quite cheap, damn near cheap as a couple of glue logic chips. The programming is a one-time effort, and the use of as many off-the-shelf commodity items, such as the mouse, AVR processor, motor driver chips, etc, shove quite a bit of R&D costs away. As you know, the very chip in the mouse that reads the quadrature encoded X-Y wheels and prepares the serial info stream for the PC is also a microcontroller.
Their implementation indeed used two microcontrollers, when in reality none at all were needed. But then, reliability of AVR processors is hardly questionable ( as I have yet to see one fail ).
Their design can be viewed as redundant, but knowing what I do about the elemental parts of the design, for commercial use, I would probably come up with something very similar. I would want my customer to be able to walk into his local "Radio Shack" and buy spare parts should something break. If I made attempts to redesign a standard mouse, I could easily create a lot of chaos in the supply chain.
From my chair, I would have given them an A. I would have also considered it good for a Master's project if they threw in the control systems math for matching the controller to the stepper motor... as the motor and load have inertia - and optimizing it for fastest error-free operation would require implementation of some DSP in the processor.
However I certainly see your viewpoint - its the same as mine when I was working in aerospace - as simplicity, reliability, and power consumption were our prime design objectives. Until Goldin and his team of tie-guys managementized the industry, elegance of design was top dog.
I didn't survive when the aerospace firm I worked for managementized - as I stood up for what I believed - and quickly got labeled as an uncooperative member of the team. What they were asking me to do involved asking me to give up my computer and circuit simulator which I understood intimately, and in its place they were demanding I use some proprietary piece of stuff I did not understand... and thinking I could still produce good design using it with even faster time frames, as well as asking me to take on several things at once. Damm, my own OS is still God's Original Wet-Ware version 1.0 (Homo Sapiens). There are only so many things I can consider at a time. Does one tell the tie-guy the honest truth and lose one's job, or be a nice subordinate little minion and hope for the best, hoping something where I do not have twenty years worth of experience backing up my judgment will work?
I certainly understand about the guys who can't find their ass with both hands and a GPS... the problem is that they have gone beyond engineering and often become an engineer's boss.
Inside the mouse is a ball driving two optical encoders: one for X, one for Y, mechanically placed 90 degrees apart.
The optical disks and detector are made in such a manner as to produce a quadrature encoded output.
With very minimal "glue logic", these signals could be changed to the quadrature encoded drive signals required by a stepper motor.
This would have eliminated the whole processor.
But, they used a roundabout way of doing it.
I'll often do things for my own edification that are not optimal just to see how things work.
In this case, the students got to experience working with the AVR compiler, programming in machine code, and real-world interface design, so I won't bang on them for not doing it in such a way I would have if I were gonna make a million of 'em.
Now, if I had found out that they were just drawing lines on the CRT screen, I would have posted a very vile commentary on the state of what is passing for education these days. What I saw looked appropriate to me for a class project for BSEE.
Just for funsies, my final project in College back in the early 70's was building my own oscilloscope from scratch. I thought I was gonna get really good bandwidth because I was using 45MHz IF tubes from television receivers as my CRT drive. Got my design finished... Surprise! I got 10KHz! Well, so much for my rude awakening to plate resistance and capacitive loads... but the professor gave me full credit anyway because I offered the correct explanation of why I didn't get the response I expected.
Many of those old amps didn't have all that much feedback, therefore the 120Hz hum on the power supply got multiplied ( not added ) into the audio.
It was customary to use unregulated full wave power supplies. Remember the old 5U4 and 5Y3 rectifier tubes where you pulled around 350 volts DC off the 5V/3A filament? It usually went to about 40 microfarad / 450V electrolytic capacitor, which also fed the plates of the push-pull amplifier stage via the center tap of the output transformer. Well, that wasn't the cleanest DC in the world. There was usually one or two more stages of power supply decoupled by resistors that fed the preamp stages.
Ooooh the memories of playing around with those old amps... brings back all the memories of the aromas emitted by all those different components when they failed... transformers smelled one way, capacitors another, resistors yet another, and a blown selenium rectifier stack would emit enough stench to clear the house. Those old wax paper condensers would leak and screw up the bias, and there was always those old carbon resistors which occasionally took it on themselves to change their resistances at will - always seeming to sense when I get a call and give me the proper reading so I spent my time barking up the wrong tree.
And the hardest one I ever had to fix was an amplifier that didn't "sound" right even though it appeared to work just fine. It was that cathode bypass capacitor coming from the cathodes of the push-pull output stage had developed some ESR. None of my equipment detected it, but the musician sure did. I still remember that little bastard. 50 microfarads at 25 working volts. Yellow cardboard jacket.
Sound is logarithmic. There are many "impulse" type percussion sounds which mimic a damn near infinite energy spike, or a train of spikes.
Transistors are almost perfectly linear right into cutoff and saturation. Tubes are not. Tubes are linear only in a narrow section of their operating curves...dig up an old tube manual, look at the operating lines and see. There were some weird physics in tube circuit design. The more you tried to "turn the tube on", the lower the plate voltage would drop, resulting in less gain of the tube. You had to drive the control grid increasingly positive to try to accelerate the electron flow to the plate, yet as the plate voltage lost potential, the control grid itself began attracting the electron stream intended for the plate. But at least the reduction in gain for increased drive could be designed to be quite smooth.
And every tube design worked a bit different...and various tube types had their own unique "sound". Some liked 6550, others liked 6L6. There are quite a few others. Some thought the Russian tubes were quite superior.
There were all sorts of tricks played with the various grid structures mechanical placement in the beams of electron flow to cause the grids to control the flow in various ways. Many of these devices were pin compatible on their basing and could be substituted for comparisons. This lead to lots of subjective comparison of which tubes "sounded" better.
Yes, it frustrated the hell out of some of us which designed to spec using oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and tried to design a "perfect" amplifier, only to be upstaged by an "audio expert" who just listened to it and would use descriptors in his analysis that we could not translate into technical terms... like whether or not its a "warm" sound. ( The best I could make of it was it was something to do with where I was operating the tube on DC bias, which affected cutoff distortion.).
It was fun in those days. Back in the 60's. Got to work with a lot of very interesting and colorful people. Lots of long hair and hallucenogenic chemicals. Those folks really knew how to party. I think we had a lot better music back then, although personal hygiene was often lacking. I loved the light shows. I got my first intro to SCR's and high power xenon strobes during that era.
There were several packaging options for this tape.. including reels of 2" wide tape and cartridges.
I've lost track of what happened to it. All I remember is that this tape existed at one time and some research was being done to make data recorders of phenomenal storage capacity.
Back in the early 90's, there was one company in Campbell, California, known as "LaserTape" which was trying to design a tape drive for the PC which used cartridges of this tape. I have lost track of whatever happened to the company.
You are hinting that it looks feasable to you for constructing interfaces to take a high-speed binary serial stream, using some sort of implantable serial to parallel converter, to generate a video signal which would be like that on the optic nerve and recognizible by the brain as video?
Bridging the gap between binary electronics and and the neurological networks of life has got to be the biggest "hack" of all time.
Although I feel I understand the former extremely intimately, I am absolutely in the cold about the data formats, even to the physical layer, in the latter. About the closest I can come to is its some sort of frequency modulated 70 millivolt pulses mimicing synaptic firings. But there are so many parallel channels! And I would take a very strong guess that a lot of information is located in relative timing of the firings.
Has your involvement in the neurological end of things given you any good leads on hacking the biological end of the interface?
I envy you guys.. as you are on the edge of unknown. The Frontier.
I get the idea that you, like me, were active during the fun years of the 60's and 70's before Dan Goldin and his suite of tie-guys ran the tech force into the ground.
Personally, I think that guy set the technology back in this country by at least one half a century, if you consider the loss of all the integrated knowledge we acquired by doing what we did when his suite of tie-guys did all their "right-sizing" by laying off droves of their own scientists and engineers.
I consider that man the equivalent of the adolescent pizza truck driver which tells management he can deliver the pizza five minutes sooner, but wrecks the truck in the process... while the more experienced people would sit back and analyze the economics of marginal benefit over marginal cost and come to the decision that it wasn't worth wrecking a $25,000 truck over a $10 pizza. But marketing and engineering, who base the concept of "value" from different perspectives, seldom - if ever - arrive at the same conclusion as to how to proceed. Whether or not we will succeed follows the laws of physics, which the engineer follows, but whether or not we will be allowed to even try follows the laws of marketing. Unfortunately for us, the engineers were placed below executive management types in the corporate hierarchy, rendering our engineering skills rather moot. And for many years - although funding was not a problem, it was damn near impossible to get any US payload into space.
Enjoy Cassini. It's the last of the old-school technology we all loved.
The latest stellar performances of the Mars Exploration Rovers though gives me hope that maybe our technology hasn't been completely flushed down the toilet.
Oh yes. Models.
When I worked in the Aerospace industry a few years ago, I had lots of models for the devices and fabrication methods so I could try to predict their electronic behaviour using the SPICE simulator.
The SPICE simulator itself is mostly set up to simultaneously solve lots of linear differential equations with connectivity represented by placement in the matrix. A big linear algebra array of differential equations. We could see how the math worked. But trying to get an accurate - I mean a really accurate - model of the real world??? It seems no matter how fine I tuned something, after comparing what I was calculated to get against what I got, there was always some interraction that went unaccounted for and screwed up the entire calculation. Many of the designs had chaotic elements that had large nonlinear outcomes to small control inputs, which meant even a small unaccounted for coupling would royally screw up the works.
I worked for years on some of that until a new management team came in and mandated we all go to closed-source simulators. At that point, I lost damn near all understanding of what I was doing, as sans understanding how the machine handled my simulations, I could no longer get anything to simulate properly. But management liked the pretty reports, even if I had no idea how accurate they were. I ended up losing my job over my bickering over the loss of my machine.
But then, I could see their point of view too... when one is getting paid what those guys got paid, they had better things to do than listen to whining engineers.
And yes, it sure seems weather should be more of an example of a complex system, but I still consider that the nonlinearities involved force it to chaotic behaviour. We can get close... and the shorter the time frame, the more accurate we can get. As we increase the resolution of the complex system of weather models, we can predict further into the future. I hold that the chaotic nature driven by these un-modelable nonlinearities which extend beyond the molecular level will mean we will never develop accurate long-term forecasts, although our statistical predictions should hold out fine.
Its just I don't think I will be able to predict with much degree of certainity how much rain will fall on Atlanta, Georgia on May 12 of next year, but I think I can pretty accurately tell you how much rain to expect in the State of Georgia for the week or month a year from now.
Statistics seems to me a weird mistress. She teases me a lot.
Its a highly nonlinear system... and I cannot even begin to guess the "gain" of the feedback loop. One driver mistake may end up as a matter discussed alongside the freeway as traffic continues largely unaffected... another ends up taking the whole freeway down for hours.
Every time I have ever played with such a system, I could use statistical strategy to predict what things should be, but I was usually quite a bit off from what things would actually come to be for any particular instance.
hehe... your dog analogy... this too is a system that weeds out dumb dogs that run out in the street without looking. Statistics says the dogs that run out in the street without looking will soon cease to exist, ergo the ones that still exist have likely acquired the art of looking before leaping.
I like your reference to the Germans. In my earlier years, I was subordinate to a fine German Engineer. He left me with a tremendous respect for the German ways of doing things. To this day I remember his wisdom and try to come up to his standards. He was by far the finest Engineer I have ever met, and I felt very honored to have worked under him.
Some very interesting things come out when one starts using statistical analysis of chaotic phenomena. The patterns, as you say, are pretty consistent.
I guess its kinda like predicting what the noise level next to the freeway at any particular hour will be - and be pretty darned accurate. But try to identify exactly where you will be in the measured acoustical waveform and you will be completely out of luck.
Chaos gets interesting, doesn't it?
Both are fundamentally chaotic.
Sure, you can calculate expected probability based on past performances and expected flow... but we've all seen freeways humming right along at 70MPH and no problems until just ONE driver makes an error... then all hell breaks loose.
I don't think even predicting the weather is as tricky as predicting traffic flow, as at least the weather patterns follow known laws of physics for at least near-term before losing out to the chaotic nature of weather patterns. People are just flat out unpredictable.
I have seen some books on GPU ( Graphics Processor Unit ) vector processing that knocked my socks off. Its literally amazing what they are doing right on the graphics card these days, as the graphics card's GPU instruction set - programmed in an assembler-like language - is crammed with vector and matrix operations.
Other parts in the book had snippets of assembler for going directly to the floating point processor for extremely tight vector and matrix operations.
When you consider the clock speed of a modern processor... well, let me say I am quite literally blown away by the power of these modern machines... yet we literally consider many of them to be a toy.
Most of us have far better understandings of physics and the inevitable outcomes of actions that it predicts than, say, politics, which appears mostly a marketing scheme selling "leadership skills".
As anyone whose taken a marketing class knows, the whole idea of marketing skills is "perceived value" to a human mind, not "quantitative value" as the laws of physics would account.
So, here we are, glut of laid-off high tech people right here in the United States. I have a resume that reads like an encyclopedia and *I* have trouble finding jobs!
Here's my problem: I am specialized in design for manufacture... and we don't manufacture in America much anymore. Outsourcing.
I am watching imported electronics come in to the local arcade with absolutely amazing realtime rendering engines. God only knows the effectiveness of using such advanced fast technology for nefarious purposes. Although the powers that be may think of it only as a game for children, I see very powerful CPU's driving extremely sophisticated rendering engines... and know the difference between a game and reality is only in the hardware interface.
So, we outsource our high tech and somehow Congress thinks US is gonna remain a world leader?
Foreign countries are now developing the technologies of the future while our own technical people languish in the unemployment office?
How much does a good engineer go for these days?
Is a politician more valuable?
How much value is, say, 20 years of training by actually working in the field?
I think the idea the politicians can keep the cat in the bag by simply passing laws is gone. "How to Make Fire" is now public knowledge... the entire world knows how to make matches now. We do not have a monopoly on it anymore. And it looks like we won't even have match factories anymore... and we think we are gonna remain a world power?
My feeling is we are heading straight for the poorhouse.
I see this latest collapse of interest rates as one of the dying gasps of our economy, as the last bastion of the American economy - the solidity of the dollar itself - is sacrificed by dilution of the money supply so that sufficient numbers of dollars can be generated for the balance sheets - irrespective of any "value" that the dollar is to represent. I feel soon the dollar will be just a number... meaningless as a measure of wealth. Just a number. Congress can print as many as they want to wipe out past debts. Something else has to evolve as a standard unit of wealth, as holding a dollar is like holding ice on a hot day.
Its gonna be interesting when the power of foreign game consoles exceed the power of our best military chips, driven by the economics of worldwide purchases of entertainment compared to a country whose military budget depends on collecting income taxes from its laid off citizenry.
Only a Congressman could be so smart.
Those were the days when this technology was still full of unknowns and dreams of possibilities were limitless. Just the word "computer" conjured images of electronic brains doing what was in our wildest imagination. Oh, the stories that were told in those days.
I *still* have my first computer: an old IMSAI 8080 I built from a kit. It still works. I even have cross compilers for it so I can still generate code for it when the PC came out.
The machine ran at a whopping 2 MHz.
I had 12 Kilobytes of EPROM.
4 Kilobytes of VideoRam ( Yup, I could drive four monitors independently ... each 16 lines of 64 characters. )
I had all remaining 48 Kilobytes of address space filled with 2102 1Kx1 450nS RAM, best you could get, in those days. It took six S-100 cards to hold them all... you could only get 8K on a card... and even then you had thermal problems.
And you know, when I turned the system on, I had system ready prompt by the time the monitor filaments warmed up enough to display an image.
And the pages would scroll past so fast they could not be read. I could prepare a whole new screen in one vertical retrace inverval. On a 2 MHz machine! Oooh, the wonders of assembly language.
Would I want to go back... well, uh, no. You see, it took weeks for me to code a barely operable word processor. And forget the luxury of C. If I wanted a float, I had a major programming project on my hands. I could only play with 8 bits at a time. A tic-tac-toe logic game was par for the course for making a decent computer demo. Even a rudimentary multiply was a royal pain...calculating trancendentals to any degree of accuracy could take several seconds.
But it *was* fun. And there was lots of blinking lights on that old box that made it even look like it was doing something... not these bland boxes of today whose only indication they are doing anything at all is maybe a disk access light.
What bothers the hell out of me, though, is that it can be done.
How in the world can I trust *anything* that willy-nilly follows whatever orders someone else tells *my* machine to do, leaving me powerless to override? The most surprising thing to me is that business is taking this. Do they really think only "good guys" know where the unlocked back doors to the operating system are?
Stuff like this just convinces me further that anyone even thinking of using this kind of system in a business environment needs to have his salary and standing in his organization re-evaluated.
They didn't appear to have lost any of my mails.
They were apparently upgrading the accounts for 100 Megabyte (!) email boxes. For free.
Only thing, I sure would have appreciated a note to the effect that my mailbox was temporarily unreachable during construction, instead of the blank page I was getting to. To have things suddenly disappear scares me... because sometimes they never work again. And its very difficult to communicate this problem when its not an item on a drop-down menu.
I had them for years as my ISP, because when I first got onto the 'net, I had this preconceived idea that no-one would be better at telecom than the phone company.. geez - they're the ones who put the lines in around the 1900's or so - and even my old dial phone still works. So, I figured Pacific Bell was just as solid as the Rock of Gilbraltar.
My sentiments were later shattered as Pacific Bell became SBC and got into bed with YAHOO.
I had plain vanilla POP dialup. Thats all I needed. I start getting barrages of emails indicating "Action Required" in my mailbox urging me to download/install proprietary YAHOO stuff that only runs on certain flavors of Microsoft stuff...
Now, let me get this straight. This is the phone company I am working with. And they can't support plain old POP anymore? What happened to that 100 year legacy? My 50 year old dial phone still works but they cannot support vanilla POP standard? What are they smoking over there these days?
I am forced to abandon SBC/YAHOO for Localnet. LocalNet actually gave me faster connections at half the price. From my LocalNet access, I did try to re-access Yahoo to see what it was like.
I have not been impressed. I started up one account over there - from that started up a couple of groups.. then my account suddenly disappeared, leaving the groups I started with no "owner" - they are "in the wild" now, filling with spam. I started up another account, so at least I could re-access the groups I had started, albeit now as only a member with no ability to clean up the spam.. but only two days ago my email access at Yahoo suddenly ceased working. I just tried to access it a few minutes ago.. its still not working.
I know they will tell me I have to use the latest flavor of Microsoft Product if I contact their customer support... It bugs the pookie out of me that they can't support existing standards. And how am I ever going to think of anything that has demonstrated such lack of robustness as being suitable for any business activity? God knows just how thankful I am that I did not establish any fiduciary business using such finicky technology. Its become painfully obvious to me that doing business with SBC/YAHOO will only obligate me to a never-ending stream of demands that I constantly change my end to remain compatible with them.
Sometimes I wonder if changing things such that the customer owns "his" end was such a good idea. You know, it provided the phone company a helluva incentive to keep things standardized if they knew that they were gonna have to pick up the tab if they changed something that affected every phone out there.
In my mind, SBC has grown too big, like a huge brittle tree full of deadwood. Tiers upon tiers of highly-paid executive types who spend the day shaking hands with marketers devising plans to coerce their customer base into compliance with their marketing plans. Its high time the little guys swarm in and take advantage of this situation and take the customer base that SBC no longer needs.
I have been unsucessful all day trying to access my mail. Problem is when I do sign onto Yahoo, I have yet to find any info pages where they indicate if they have changed the system any or where to email any impacts of their changes to.
But, being its a freebie thing, I can't complain too loudly.. I just consider myself forewarned of things to be if I do anything critical there, like any financial or business stuff.
Incidentally, yesterday's log at Internet Storm Center was pretty informative too. Here's a snippet:
I wonder if this has anything to do with that little "C" program we discussed yesterday that just spawns forks.I get these things from my bank all the time, neatly enclosed with all sorts of other advertisement flyers in my credit card statement.
It miffs me off everytime I read one. Its the couchy language they use.. like "only sharing personal information as permitted by law."
What I want to see is the word required by law.
How do you feel they would think if I told them I would haxor their system as permitted by law to verify confidentiality of my personal information, especially after its been shown how the RIAA can apparently use similar techniques to verify misuse of their copyrighted information.
Its obvious that that piece of paper they sent me is just to fulfull some legal requirement that says they must inform me that they are going to share my information, but in order to mislead me, they couch it in "businessese" lingo to make it look like they are only going to violate my trust if they have to. But that's not what they actually say at all!
I just try to limit my exposure by doing business with as few of these guys as possible.
Actually, I would love to see some scenes of some of the more "tense" situations as they happened in the control room.. like how they recovered Spirit, and the discussions of whether to enter Endurance. I am sure there are many memorable discussions taking place there.
When this wraps up, I would love to see NASA do a really good documentary on this stellar success and release it in such a way that insures that the information they have created will never be forgotten. ( meaning open-source release, so that hopefully centuries from now, the information we create today will be just as readable then as it is now. )
If I could have exactly what I wanted, NASA would release this on media designed to last for centuries... maybe pyrex glass disks and gold. The best we have. With this opportunity to spread the costs over a wide audience, in my mind, its worth it. To me, NASA's achievement here is the most significant thing Man has ever done. Personally, I think this effort needs to be documented in the most robust ways possible for future generations to reflect back on.
This is one movie collection I am looking very forward to getting.
Although not a coder, per se, I do a lot of design work and IR&D. Your concerns on being there for family strike a very deep chord in me. I am way past the age for doing the "family thing", as all my life I have been trying to put my job and training first, so that later I should have been rewarded with a decent position and would have time for family later... but for me it didn't work out that way at all. Technology keeps changing so fast that all the skills we develop are damn near obsolete by the time they are used. Employers keep a sharp eye on new graduates, still learning the latest cutting edge stuff while off their payroll, then we that are in the workforce find ourselves competing with a steady stream of newly minted graduates that know the latest technology but are totally ignorant of the preceding technologies. My personal disaster happened when one of the new guys was hired in as my boss, and the first thing he did was take my old computer away from me and expect me to use another machine of his choosing...
I had no earthly idea how to use that machine. It was running Windows. I had twenty years experience with assembler/DOS/SuperVGA-VESA and felt I could do damn near anything with my trusty old Borland C++ compiler. I did all sorts of device drivers under DOS, but I had no idea how to do anything under Windows. My pleas to let me use technology I was familiar with was only met by condecending utterances from the man-on-high that I was to "get with the program". I felt my work had nothing to do with presentation - I was only doing analysis work on satellite tracking. It had taken me twenty years work to understand my machine well enough to have it do *exactly* what I wanted it to do. It takes a lot of time to learn all this new technology, and our experience is the integral of all the things we have done. Problem is with technology these days is only thing most employers seem to see is the integral of over the last two years or so. So a very deep experience base does not mean much these days.. Geez. Look how much experience I have with Borland C++ for DOS and all the VESA SuperVGA graphics I have done.. who needs that kind of stuff. So the technology guy is constantly running ass-out just trying to stay current. Its like a never-ending marathon. How does one ever take time out for family?
My relationships to family have deteriorated to the point of damn near non-existence. I do not have a retirement plan, and I am still going to school in addition to trying to stay employed.
I never found the time to get married.
Much less have kids.
Would I encourage technology career to anyone? Well, only if they *really* liked it. Enough to forego wife, family, kids, parents, everything else.
At this stage in the game, I kinda wish I had just stayed a technician. The pay and prestige as an Engineer in my estimation is not nearly commensurate with the effort and committment required to sustain an existence in the field.
I certainly understand your concern about the kids. My career is so demanding I felt I had to forego kids for the very same reasons you are concerned about your inability to find time to nurture the family relationships. You are only echoing the mantra of every decent Engineer type I have ever met... that "if you can't do it right, there ain't much sense in doing it at all."
No, the security guard did not get fired.
As far as I know, everyone considered he did the best he knew.
But, from what I could tell, ever since then, the guards were kept very well informed about anything that involved equipment moving, and this incident was never forgotten, and used to illustrate just how sneaky and well-prepared thieves can be.
Even twenty years later, me, as well as probably everybody who worked in or around that company, remembers the whole charade like it happened yesterday.
Nobody blamed the guard for doing his job. He did the best he could, tried his very best to be helpful. A typical example of how that company did things.
If anybody is gonna get any heat, its gonna be the guy who arranges for something to happen and fails to let it be well known to everyone - especially the guards.
It happened on a Saturday.
White panel truck with appropriate lettering pulled up to corporate headquarters. Man wearing logo'd shirt gets out and approaches security guard, papers in hand. He is supposed to remove typewriters for cleaning, and is supposed to come back Sunday to return them. Papers are signed by an executive of that company.
[ uh-huh. right name, but *that* executive has never even seen the papers. Its just a signature. ]
Guard is cautious. Needs to call and check. Truck driver agrees to wait. Executive out of town. Guard says no-go. Truck driver says fine, just sign here that I showed up. Your company still must pay the $5000 fee for weekend overtime service as per the contract. ( Shows contract details to guard ). No biggie to me. ( Guard gets ansy. A lot of money, What's his boss gonna say about losing more money than his monthly pay just because he wouldn't let another man do his work? ). The guard refused to sign anything. The truck guy notes down his name from his badge, notes it on his form, looks at his watch again, dates and signs the form, and asks the guard to let 'em know he was there. Leaves the guard a business card, and mentions that the next available window to do the cleaning work on a weekend is about 3 months away. Another fee will be assessed for the next service. He tells the guard he has 50 people at his plant right now ready to clean typewriters, and when he gets back, he has no work for them, so he will pay them their four hours Union wage for showing up and send them home.
The guard is really sweating now. He doesn't know exactly what to do, but he doesn't wanna find out he screwed up the company something fierce by keeping someone from doing their job, so he relents. He even helps load the truck!
We never saw those typewriters again.
The truck? Bogus plates. Plain white panel truck with vinyl stick on lettering. Run of the mill truck. The guy even had shelves in it made in such a way so he could load up the completely full. Seeing how professional the truck was equipped for the job impressed the guard and reassured him that everything was indeed on the up-and-up.
The forms? Yes, lots of forms! Every typewriter was duly noted on its own form..serial numbers and all! Obviously our con-guy had gotten a hold of an inventory list, because every form indicated where the typewriter was. Why even a copy of each form was even left with the guard! The only traceable signature was that of the guard. There were other signatures on the forms, but no one ever found out who the actual signers were.
Come Monday, Management was very puzzled and disturbed over the missing typewriters.. a little over a couple hundred of them. There were investigations. There were lots of phone calls to the non-existent phone numbers, people, and attempted visits to the addresses referenced to in those oh-so-professionally done forms.
Yup, some clever guy invested in a couple hundred dollars worth of "movie props" and walked out with several hundred thousand dollars worth of nearly brand new IBM typewriters.