We studied the draft in a Microeconomics class here at college.
Interesting thing.
We were studying supply and demand, and the relationships in a Free Enterprise System. Demand is paid-for transfer of goods from seller to buyer when both agree on price. If you want a product bad enough, and if you are capable and willing to pay enough for it, some seller will generate a supply. Thats just how the system works. Sure, there are workarounds for the system, like simply taking it if you want it, and we call it theft and extortion. Note how the government has passed all sorts of law to protect the owners of intellectual property lately.
So, one way of looking at a draft is imposing a severe tax on some of the population based on whatever criteria they choose because the demander ( government ) of the resource ( someone else's time and labor ) refuses to negotiate for it, and simply uses a gun to achieve his objectives.
If the free enterprise system, which this country is supposedly based on, is supposed to work, the rights of all, not just some, have to be respected. How can Congress say downloading music or copying software is bad, yet think its OK to commit widespread theft of "factors of production" by invoking a draft? If they need soldiers, PAY for them. Up the salary enough, people will join. Need specialized skills? Compete the same way everyone else has to. I wish Congress could tell me just what is the American Way to fill a need.. negotiate for it, or just use a gun.
That damn draft kept me uncomfortable the whole time I went through adolescence. Although I lucked out on the "lottery", it did drive in just how wrong it was to force ones way at gunpoint. I know the current regime likes to have a lot of prayer breakfasts, but actions like this say a lot more than strings of words ending in "amen."
It just seems to me that we are no better than the ones we fight, if we use the same tactics to enforce compliance with the dictator's rulings.
The government has already shown in my mind very poor fiscal policy by lowering the federal funds rate to such riduculous lows and causing our dollar to become cheap. It places rewards on those who live beyond their means by ensuring they pay back less value than they borrowed, and it damn nearly assures all the working wage-slaves out there that they will probably never be able to afford their own home. Did wages track the the resultant spike in housing and fuel prices as the market achieved a new price point equilibrium reflecting the new inflated value of the dollar?
Most likely, all working people received an effective wage cut, as they keep getting paid numerically yesterdays wage. It makes way for an endless spiral of "raises" just to stay where we are, invisibly pushing us up into higher and higher tax rate brackets. No wonder our employers can't afford us anymore.
Any monetary assets people were saving for retirement are effectively diminshed. And they don't even allow us with retirement accounts to write off the effect of the inflation against the interest on the account. And we wonder why the US has such a low saving rate?
I honestly believe I have been cursed by an old Chinese curse... "May you live in interesting times." I believe the door is just opening now for some real lulus.
You know, I would really like to know how much power it would take from Earth to illuminate the moon sufficiently for it to be easily recoginized from Earth... especially knowing the moon is not especially of a reflective nature.
The moon I see is illuminated by terawatts of sunlight. I suppose if I sat down and figured out exactly how many square feet of surface area was facing the sun at the time, and luminous flux per square foot, I could arrive at a more precise answer, but for now, I just know the answer is " a lot. ".
Trying to keep the light focused as it leaves our constantly changing refractive atmosphere might be a lot of fun too.
The only chance I see they could try is to try to do it during an eclipse?
If I didn't know any better, I would think this is an extension of...eh... wasn't Science Fiction author Robert Heinlein thinking along this line?
Just glad its not a government thing. I can buy Wal-Mart cola at 50 cents per 2 liter jug, if Coca Cola wants to spend their money on this, but I have no alternative to paying tax. That's my money gone - it won't live to support the economy by ending up in a local businesses cash register.
I wonder if this will spawn off another generation of "harassmentware/entertainmentware" that will allow one to step into cyberspace, launch a few packets, then gleefully watch the ensuing food fight as packets start wildly flying....
Ok, the ol' US of A isn't really cutting it in the world anymore after the profits generated rebuilding the world after WW2. We aren't the only show in town anymore, but most of us don't know it yet. Fat, dumb and happy, we are.
Technology is what drives our rise to fame, yet not only do we export the technology freely, we also discourage ( by lack of the promise of any sort of meaningful employment ) our youth from technology fields, choosing to use what others make rather than learning how to innovate on what we made before.
So, we now import damn near everything.
Gone are those days when kids would tear a disposed TV apart and re-use its components to build all sorts of gadgets like I did.
Note the latest wealth-building books all speak of "earned income" as the worst kind of income - taxed to the hilt. What they tout is "passive income", that is making money from appreciation of your investments. Most tout real estate for this. So the price of a home is rising much faster than the wages ( driven by outsource competition ).
In order to "help" the buyers come up with more money, the government drops the federal funds rates. Sure, now the market is flooded with cheap dollars. Lots and lots of borrowed dollars are now competing with earned dollars in the market. Prices go up. Merchants rake in increased dollar sales. The wealthy snap up yet more and more properties. The new incoming generation finds themselves trapped between competing with third world countries labor rates and the price of a home.
So, economic costs force them to delay having kids until they can at least hold down a place to live. Back to the "Rich-Dad, Poor-Dad" syndrome, these kids will soon find they can not work for any sort of corporation who not only will force them to compete internationally, they will also force them to render their SSN, so the corporation can gladly give any earnings info to the gov't so the gov't can tax it back.
I think the writing is on the wall that the next generation - if they are gonna survive - is going to have to work for themselves. That is - find something there is a market for and do it themselves. Things like auto repair come to mind. Its something that one - armed with enough tools, could do at home without involving anyone else. A job paid for in cash. Cash unseen by the monitoring systems currently in place. This way, costs to the consumer can still be held to a low rate so the rich can have their toys maintained. But I think it will become standard knowledge that if you ask for anyone's SSN, you expect to pay about quadruple the rate so your servant can pay the tax on the money you are about to give him.
Its kinda obvious things are heading for a tumble. I think the government knows it. I think they know they better get a system in place to control the people while the going is good. They wanna make sure that any revolt among the wage-slaves is controllable by knowing exactly who is involved, and economically ruining the dissident without taking out the rest of the wage-slaves, whose labor supports the lifestyles of the owning classes.
To me, all this 9-11 stuff did was give our government all the justification it needed to install all sorts of snooping technology aimed at ourselves. I am sure all these fancy databases will be mostly used for taxation enforcement.
I do not like what I see in the future. If we pee-ons don't get busy at the ballot box, and hold politicians accountable, we are gonna be in for a world of hurt.
Example: When Congress is presented with the H1B Visa program showing how many jobs, they should simultaneously consider the equal amount of Americans who won't have jobs, look at their salary, how much taxes they would have paid, and at the same time as they sign the bill, they would be signing immediate budget cuts to reflect the lost tax revenues, and also support costs for the unemployed workforce resulting from their signature.
So, right now, the government is putting the machinery in place for enforce compliance while the getting is good. Can't blame them for that.
( taking off paranoia hat... )
Are there any business people reading this topic?
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
My parent is explaining precisely why me and a helluva lot of other people are fuming about this software.
As you consider how you want to present your corporate webpages to the public, do you want to share in this wrath?
If you are in business to sell a product, please stick with common public formats and don't ask us to install proprietary crap to see your site.
I have yet to see any site content good enough to warrant the irritation I have to go through not only to load the proprietary crap, but to expunge it.
Call your city... especially the department which handles the trash.
Most of them are very concerned about things ending up in the trash which are not supposed to be in the trash, and are quite helpful when questioned.
Its a helluva lot easier to help someone properly dispose of something than it is to try to recover it out of the landfill once its presence has been detected.
Yes.. the aerospace contractor I worked for quite a while operated like this... and you know what? It was very efficient. We knew exactly how our stuff worked. If something broke, we fixed it. Yes, a lot of us brought tools from home to work. It was that kind of place. Most of us were older amateur radio operators and electronic hobbyists having the time of our lives. It was our company, and our efforts made a difference.
Then big company came in and bought us out. Money from venture capitalists flooded our organization. Highly paid management professionals were brought in to optimize our operations. Pride in workmanship flew out the window, to be replaced by whatever got the immediate job at hand done cheapest. We no longer fixed our stuff - we had support contracts. Who cared if we even knew how it worked? But now we had dress codes. Oooh, didn't we look all pretty with our suits and ties! Well, we did get paid better, and dressing the part went with the privilege of being kept on the payroll. But who cared if you spent day and night working on some little quirk you didn't thoroughly understand? Or if you knew how to build something you needed - when you could just throw cash at the problem and gloss it over with some powerpoint presentations? With the mass infusions of cash, technical knowledge seemed to become much less important than management skills. It seemed everybody wanted the latest presentation software, and no-one wanted a thing to do with the old circuit analysis software we had used for years. Having the snazziest system on your desk and office decor seemed to be what everyone wanted. It flat was not fun to work there anymore. It seemed it became dog-eat-dog. They moved us out of the lab and into cubicles. The took our coffee machine away and gave us "secretarial services". Dammit, I was just about born with a soldering iron in my hand...not a Franklin Day Planner!
Everytime I have seen a mass infusion of money into something, it seems to ruin it. The first time I noted this effect, it was in a school system, where when a lot of money was granted into the system, the first thing they did was buy a bunch of unnecessary stuff which then mandated substantial resources to maintain it. Not only that, it completely showed all of us that were volunteering our efforts just how insignificant we were. Just think, who needs to know how to build an oscilloscope from scratch in an electronics class when you could just tweak the knobs on the latest models? I still remember the joys of going into my old EICO and fixing whatever I smoked when I misused the thing ( usually the FET on the frontend differential amp when I got a nasty inductive kickback from a relay coil. )
Answer me this: If a college has an assortment of older oscilloscopes ( some are in need of repair ), and the students not only learn to use the scopes that work, they also learn to fix the broken ones, do you think they got a better education than the ones who only got to use later scopes, but have no idea what's actually in them?
At the college I am attending right now, I am taking some automotive courses. I am doing a "special studies" program... you see, they have an old infrared exhaust analyzer that is no longer functional. I am having a helluva time taking that old thing apart, figuring out how the infrared chopper worked, and will hopefully build an interface so I can send the signals through a A/D converter so I can drop it into a computer. When I get through with that thing, I expect not only to have a helluva good idea of how NonDispersive Infrared analyzers ( CO, CO2, HC ) work, but also how the UV analyzers ( NO, NO2 ), and oxygen sensors work. Not only will I know when a machine is giving me funny readings I can't trust, I will know how to go into the machine, locate the funny and fix it.
Here's the crux of the problem... If I do not know how the machine works and how it arrives at its answers, I probably won't know if the machine is malfunction
Basically, it was a CMOS "Linear Feedback Shift Register", aka "PseudRandom Sequence Generator" (PSRG) which generated a predictable stream of 1 and 0. The output signal went to both a "D" type flip-flop and the class-C buffer amp which fed the transmit antenna. The idea was not to transmit the levels of the PRSG, but just the edges. Those edges are sharp and transmit well... ( eh, ANY digital edges are sharp and transmit well, and we jump through all sorts of hoops to try to minimize radiated EMI. ).
Ok, the idea is we are making a helluva EMI racket in the immediate vicinity. But its a known racket, as we are generating it on the spot. Back to the D flip-flop. It is clocked a varying swept time from the time the PSRG is clocked. We now feed the edges ( capacitive coupling ) of our delayed PSRG to a mixer, where we use this to multiply back to the signal coming in from our receive antenna. We are mixing lots of little narrow spicks of both polarities from both our intentionally delayed PSRG, with those little spicks coming in from the antenna, and we are looking for when they match up.
Remember, we are only looking at edges. The mixer output is a voltage representing the statistical correlation of how well the two streams are matching up. When these edges line up, that means the delay from clocking the D flip flop is the same as the delay for the PSRG from the main generator to go through the amplifier, to the target, and back. I am not talking about a fancy radio on for the receiver, its more like a wide open wideband RF amp input.
Bring any amplifier near the thing and you will hear it. AM radio tuned to dead air works great. Sounds like white noise.
By sweeping the delay, you get a report on anything in your vicinity reflecting your PSRG signal back to you as a function of time ( i.e distance traveled at the speed of light. You then get back info on how far out you looked, and how much energy got bounced back at you from that distance away.
It was to be used for things like sensing how close your bumper was to anything, as well as intrusion detection ( of the human body type ). What you would do is baseline your environment response, then look for any changes in it. Your changing area then was the area that had something moving in it.
This was a really fun thingie. I played around with one for quite some time as a "home security system", as I could set the delay for something like 30 feet out. Anything greater or less than 30 feet wouldn't arrive at the mixer at the right time and wouldn't be seen... only stuff right at 30 feet would be seen. If I saw quivering of the signal, I knew something was amiss. Although I did have falsing problems with wind blowing wet trees, it would quite easily pick up someone walking through the spherical "sense area", while ignoring my trips to the bathroom and around the house, etc.
If you wanna play with one, they are quite easy to make with off-the-shelf CMOS 74AC logic and RF mixers.
These days, having something work is getting rarer and rarer, and when I find something that actually works the way it oughta work, maybe its time for me to make my appreciation public.
I load so many corporate sites these days that flat don't work... its getting so that I really hate going to a corporate site on the net, cause many get so anxious to blow off their technical superiority of having all the latest whiz-bang latest edition of whatever that they could seemingly care less that I am using older technology and only wanted info on their product.
Oh, you know why retailers love Christmas so much.
This is when people have an onus to go out and buy some crap to give you, and you have the onus to do the same for them, before you can even visit for tea.
And, of course, the "present" is usually presented personally, and its kinda in bad taste to not open it up and fawn over it for a while. I mean, you don't really wanna hurt their feelings after they went through all that mad rush to get it for you do you? Its not like you personally have had to experience the same frustration yourself trying to hold up your end of the bargain. So, you open it and drool over it awhile so their feelings won't get hurt. Presto! Opened product!
Now, to add injury to it, if your donor finds out you returned the thing they so "carefully selected" for you, their feelings might be hurt. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Yep, a marketer's dream market.
Damm, I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge!
But before you bah-humbug me as such, I will say I think the holidays are for sharing as much time as you can with others, as our busy worklives, accounted for by the minute, doesn't leave much time for social interaction with loved ones. Its just the horning in of others with the fiduciary interest of milking this occasion for all its worth that irritates me so.
Yeh, but what they *won't* tell you up front is that the latest "upgrade" contains the latest DRM enforcement for all the workarounds you have been using in order to use the car stereo for its intended function in the first place.
For one thing, I believe if a system is gonna be secure, its gotta be simple.
My own observation is that the basic kernel of both Linux and Microsoft is way, way, way too complex. I still can't see why the kernel itself needs to be much more than a couple hundred KB of tight code. Of course, it can launch whatever processes needed for I/O, filesystem, etc. The kernel itself though should be damn close to incorruptible, with it being a standard configuration - with its MD5 well known - so in the event it is messed with at all, you can easily get a trusted evaluation of your kernel. Maybe even put a MD5 as part of the BIOS so it displays the MD5 on startup, and you can see if something's amiss if your system starts acting strange. As long as your kernel's intact, it should have its own debugging and system verification utilities to help one pinpoint a malfunctioning process.
And the person using it has got to know how to use it. And what its limitations are.
Make it too complex, and people won't know its limitations.
Trying to code a system "immune to viruses" is like trying to design a car that won't crash.
Of course, there are a few things that greatly enhance security, such as holding the integrity of the system files, and restricting each program to its own partition. But, doggone it, there are way too many legitimate needs to access the filesystem and TCPIP stack to really discriminate which usages are intentional, and which are not.
All I can really ask is that the OS files themselves be proven secure and verifiable by integrity checks, and have an architecture whereas each executable thread must be "visible" to be executed. Of course, this means each operation the computer performs must be examinable, which does not bode well at all for keeping what a program is doing hidden, as is commonly done in today's proprietary computing environment.
I'm pissed off as hell the way this business ramrods their business models on me.
But whining about it won't do any good.
Face it fellas, they have guts. They don't mind going after and pissing off their own customers. They even call it good business!
We consumer wimps don't even have the wherewithall to put our wallets back in our pockets and move along.
They get paid well while we whine. I don't think its their fault at all... they are protecting their interests and business models - its US that are letting them get away with it by not fighting back! They are free to fight us with lawyers and buying law. Our tools are only our wallet, but its one helluva powerful tool. Without the Fruit of the Wallet, even the most powerful business soon finds itself like a powerful military weapon, with no gas in the tank. All the muscle of business, including all the lawyers and lobbyists, depend on the Fruit of the Wallet for their sustenance.
The Capitalist System still depends on cash flow just as your computer depends on a steady stream of current from its power supply. And you control whether or not you open your wallet.
They don't have sole control. Two can play this game.
While they put up all their advertising, featuring products that won't allow you to use in the way you wish to use it, feel free to flit back and forth in front of the Main Business Power Supply ( The Cash Register ) and fail to tender your dollars.
Shut up and put those wallets back in those pockets, folks, until they produce something you think worthy of purchase!
I think JPL somehow held onto the really good ones.
I don't think many of us survived the Goldin years. Yeh, the 60's... those were the days. Definitely. I still go by old Gene Kranz's motto... "Failure is NOT an option!".
I guess its no big thing though... We don't build technology stuff much in this country anymore. I guess we won't even design it much anymore. I note even we are beginning to outsource even medical work. But we will do what we are really good at... that is arguing about who can do what.
When our Congress sees the need for us to get back to work, they will rescind restrictive legislation and again encourage acquiring skills and economically viable employment in the technical sector... but for now, it looks good on the books to outsource technology development. For the time being, we can simply print more money to make business happy, giving them the requisite year-to-year "sales gains" that keep them from crying and declaring "recession", despite the flood of dollars becoming so worthless that it now takes damn near a half-million of them to buy a house that 20 years ago sold for $70,000.
My intended use was in conjunction with voice recognition, and multiple processes running so the service tech could see "Mitchell's On Demand", anything on the network, or displays from engine and emissions diagnostics (including OBD-II scanner).
I wanted something small, along with microcamera capability so the mechanic could look at things he can not get his head into, such as examining areas for air conditioning freon-dye leakage - which is very obvious under UV illumination when the proper fluorescent dyes and optical passband filters are used.
Re:Why hate cell phones?
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is the part that annoys the crap out of me... its that the machine is so rude, but people accept it.
Face it, if I went around banging on a bell or making all sorts of annoying noises demanding attention from someone before I would shut up, in normal society, I would expect my face smashed in to shut me up.
But let a machine do it, and people will not only ignore other people in their presence, they will grant the machine priority. A ringing phone seems to have top priority with most people. I find it extremely annoying to make time to meet with someone, only to be usurped by someone else using the phone.
I have had very similar experiences with my college instructors. There is this one guy, quite old, teaching Data Structures here. Oooh, some of the things I have heard about this guy. I talked to the guy a bit before signing up for his class.
The problem? This guy really gave some nasty homeworks. Yes, really time consuming. But there is a big difference between time consuming and busywork. He was trying to take a bunch of people who barely knew the most basic "Hello, World" C++ students and bring us to the level we could understand how to code damn near anything.
So he had these five projects we had to complete in the semester. The first one just got us familiar with class structure - instantiating and deleting objects, the second one made a several linked lists of these, the third had us make a binary search trees of them, the fourth had us do a maze, and the fifth had us do a graph.
No big thing really, but it did take a lot of time. Especially doing it the way he wanted it done. His was not simple textbook snippets. No, his were all wrapped up in an application, like that which would be quite suitable for use in a business. He wanted all the bells and whistles, like templates, inheritances, operator overloading, copy constructors, and file operations. But he was also very flexible. He let us code in any C++ compiler, but he did insist we use the input data streams he provided and our programs had to generate the output streams he expected.
And that guy could spot plagiarism a mile away.
Some students needed to take as many courses as possible and get documentation they "passed". They weren't happy. This guy assigned most of the course grade to the projects, and if you didn't do them, well let's just say he would let you try again next semester.
Some of us were coming back to school after layoff situations, looking mostly for skills on how to program using the object-oriented methods.. and we sought out anything this man taught, because he - by far - gave us the biggest "bang for the buck" of any instructor on the campus. I felt that I got the equivalent of 12 semester credits when I only paid for 4.
I understand its because its a heckuva lot easier to build high resolution cameras as monochrome, as you can place the pixels immediately adjacent to each other and not concern yourself with placement of color filter masks.
Also, having external color filter masks which can be rotated into place means we are no longer limited in vision to just the visible spectrum we see, but we can see anything the raw silicon sensor allows, meaning we can also view the infrared to ultraviolet, and let us assign "pseudo color" as we see fit.
We are clinging to an expired paradigm. Like purveyors of old LED calculators.
You see, we were raised in an era where we went to school, paid for and took courses in college, just to make us valuable to Corporations.
There's the rub! Valuable to Corporations... not to People!
Corporations can outsource... Easily. So, at the stroke of a pen, all your preparations and polishing to make yourself look sweet to the corporate eye is gone.
About five years ago when the crunch hit the Aerospace industry, I had a guy come to me and ask me if I needed my trees trimmed. He gave me a quote of $200. I looked at the trees. Maybe two days work for me to do it. Well, in the past, I had a job. For a corporation. They seemed to pay me well, but the problem is they exacted just about all my time, leaving me just enough time to eat, sleep, shit, and wake up the next day for the next day's efforts. All continuously supervised and evaluated. I started thinking how many hours I would have to work to earn that $200 . Well, at $20/hour, maybe 10 hours? NO. More like 25 hours. Tax. And keeping all that paperwork associated with tax, being an unpaid accountant keeping track of everything lest I fail to take deductions I am entitled to yet fail to claim. Maybe this guy is onto something. He gets ME to pay the tax on my pay, then he just takes pure clean cash, after I have paid all the tax on it.
Ok. I get the idea. Instead of designing satellite commlinks for aerospace corporations, I would probably do just as good diagnosing malfunctions on car electronics. I have all the equipment and skills to do so. Especially nice is that I have all the computer tools, such as C++ compilers which I can use to make me some really nice OBD-II parsers, and digital storage oscilloscopes, which when coupled to the appropriate transducers will tell me loads about engine component timings and operation. But the best thing is I will be working for another person, not under a corporation. He will pay me in cash. Its not that big of thing if I just get me a big SUV and load all my tools in it and drive to the job.
I flat do not want to run a big business. I just wanna provide for family and keep food on the table.
And I want to do my technical stuff. I am really good at it. Paperwork bores me to no friggen end. And I am not good at it at all.
The reason I mention the SUV bit, is I have a guy in my automotive classes at College, and he is doing this on the side, to the point he is quitting his "company" job because his moonlighting is so lucrative. That is exactly what he does. He has an SUV he fixed up, and he simply drives to customer houses and works on their cars. He only works on a couple types of car, and you have to know him quite well to get him. His time, through the business, is about $150 an hour, but if you know him, you can get his undivided attention to your problem, at your house, at night, for less than half that rate.
I have seen how he does this. No business per se. No advertising. No employees. No buildings. No hassles. He just likes to work on cars. And knows just one make through and through. He has connections through the grapevines which keep him stocked with all the diagnostic codes and mods for the engines which he can pull off as easily as we do computer patches.
I flat do not want any employees. Nor do I want a building. A good-sized "garden shed" in my back yard should be sufficient for anything I can imagine. I know what my thing is, my target is now to build skills where I am useful to People, and they will pay me to do my thing for them.
If they can get me alone a helluva lot cheaper than if I came to them via a business operation, and I do a good job, there oughta be enough people out there to keep me busy.
I had one guy tell me he works quite happily for five dollars an hour, provided he is paid in pre-1964 silver coins.
I think they are a standard thread. I have some old rackmount stuff and I wassle around in my screw box and usually end up with one that fits.
Yes, there are generic rack shelves.. just about anything. Look in something like Allied or Digi-Key catalogs. Or, get some "unistrut" and make whatever you want. Unistrut is that heavy channel metal used in industrial plants...its so common many hardware stores carry it and all sorts of hardware that goes along with it... its like an Erector set that uses 1/4 inch bolts. I've used a lot of it. Personally, I prefer the aluminum unistrut, but its harder to find.
I suggest you take a screw that fits your rack to the hardware store...you know, the neighborhood one where the old geezers that run the place have done so since they were kids, and ask them. They will probably sell you a box of premium ones less than the cost of the cute little plastic boxed one at the nerd store. Forget the megastore places.. most of the people I meet there know the stock number, price, how many they have in stock, but usually don't have a clue what they are used for.
Around my neck of the woods, we have one we know as "McFadden-Dale Industrial Hardware". They stock the damndest stuff.
I thought I might teach a class at my local community college on the SPICE circuit analyzer being I have used one for about 15 years. I have several sources for generic paperback textbooks that have been out for years, quite reasonably priced. Linear Technology has generously placed
their SWCAD III full-fledged spice analyzer ( albeit pre-loaded with Linear Tech libraries ) for free download.
I looked at this, and saw I could get my students a pretty good understanding of SPICE and have a pretty robust tool for their further studies for about $30. Not bad, I thought, for the skills I did not pick up until I had graduated and was already practicing circuit design. I would have almost killed for one of these.
I figured in all reality, SPICE had not changed much since I had my first operable copy which was translated directly from Lawrence Nagel's "Berkeley 2G.5" back in 1987. ( Several of the guys in the company I worked for rewrote it from FORTRAN to C and linked it to a nifty little graphing utility.) Sure gives you a comfy feeling when you know exactly whats going on. But that one was mostly designed for the XT machine. Believe it or not, its the one I still use the most, because I understand its model structures.
All the time, I had been seeing all these high-priced analyzers on the market - each had some particular feature that made them kinda nice for certain things, but all seemed based off the original core analyzer kernel. And all were pricey. I played with Linear Tech's version, and it seemed quite nice - and if it was gratis, I figured it would be ideal for teaching a class. At least I could get the concepts across without asking the students for a $500 outlay before they even knew what they were doing. Sure, after covering the basics of design, I would discuss switchers too. I didn't plan on getting much into the math side, but just give 'em a heads up on how they work so they won't be too surprised when they see them in real life.
But with all this downsizing, the CC dropped my proposal. I was lucky enough to be doing this kinda stuff when it was being developed and understanding how it worked internally was important and shared, not at all like today's proprietary environment. It annoys me to know I am going to the grave with what I know.
Re:Bjarne Stroustroup quote
on
KISS
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· Score: 3, Funny
I understand exactly what Bjarne meant.
Here I am at College, and I find a cellphone, all by itself, left in the bushes behind a little concrete edge often used as a bench. Looks like an expensive little bugger. I retrieve it. Maybe I could call its owner or maybe some of their friends and let their caller ID tell them whose calling, then maybe one of them can help me return it to its rightful owner. Guess what, I get the darned thing turned on, lots of buttons, each does something, but I will be darned if I can get the phone to make a call. I accessed some sort of clock, some scheduler, probably reset a helluva lot of stuff just trying to get back, I could not get the thing back off, and all I could think of is how fast I am draining the tiny thing's batteries with all those display lights flashing all over the keyboard.
I know once I drain its little battery, I have lost all chance of using it to help me find its owner, as it has nonstandard cells, and I have no way of routing the proper power to the phone's charging connector. Yes, I have top-flight power supplies in the lab which will power damn near anything, but lacking knowledge of what voltage and polarity the phone needs, any attempt to power the phone through the lab supply is apt to be fatal.
I did not wanna take it to lost and found, as once the phone passes through too many hands, it might stay lost forever. That was my attempt of last resort.
Never got a call out. But in a few minutes, the thing started buzzing. Ok, someone's calling me, can I even get on the line. They called me three times before I successfully got voice link. It was the owner, calling from a friend's phone. She was still at the college, frantically searching for her phone.
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Interesting thing.
We were studying supply and demand, and the relationships in a Free Enterprise System. Demand is paid-for transfer of goods from seller to buyer when both agree on price. If you want a product bad enough, and if you are capable and willing to pay enough for it, some seller will generate a supply. Thats just how the system works. Sure, there are workarounds for the system, like simply taking it if you want it, and we call it theft and extortion. Note how the government has passed all sorts of law to protect the owners of intellectual property lately.
So, one way of looking at a draft is imposing a severe tax on some of the population based on whatever criteria they choose because the demander ( government ) of the resource ( someone else's time and labor ) refuses to negotiate for it, and simply uses a gun to achieve his objectives.
If the free enterprise system, which this country is supposedly based on, is supposed to work, the rights of all, not just some, have to be respected. How can Congress say downloading music or copying software is bad, yet think its OK to commit widespread theft of "factors of production" by invoking a draft? If they need soldiers, PAY for them. Up the salary enough, people will join. Need specialized skills? Compete the same way everyone else has to. I wish Congress could tell me just what is the American Way to fill a need.. negotiate for it, or just use a gun.
That damn draft kept me uncomfortable the whole time I went through adolescence. Although I lucked out on the "lottery", it did drive in just how wrong it was to force ones way at gunpoint. I know the current regime likes to have a lot of prayer breakfasts, but actions like this say a lot more than strings of words ending in "amen."
It just seems to me that we are no better than the ones we fight, if we use the same tactics to enforce compliance with the dictator's rulings.
The government has already shown in my mind very poor fiscal policy by lowering the federal funds rate to such riduculous lows and causing our dollar to become cheap. It places rewards on those who live beyond their means by ensuring they pay back less value than they borrowed, and it damn nearly assures all the working wage-slaves out there that they will probably never be able to afford their own home. Did wages track the the resultant spike in housing and fuel prices as the market achieved a new price point equilibrium reflecting the new inflated value of the dollar?
Most likely, all working people received an effective wage cut, as they keep getting paid numerically yesterdays wage. It makes way for an endless spiral of "raises" just to stay where we are, invisibly pushing us up into higher and higher tax rate brackets. No wonder our employers can't afford us anymore.
Any monetary assets people were saving for retirement are effectively diminshed. And they don't even allow us with retirement accounts to write off the effect of the inflation against the interest on the account. And we wonder why the US has such a low saving rate?
I honestly believe I have been cursed by an old Chinese curse... "May you live in interesting times." I believe the door is just opening now for some real lulus.
The moon I see is illuminated by terawatts of sunlight. I suppose if I sat down and figured out exactly how many square feet of surface area was facing the sun at the time, and luminous flux per square foot, I could arrive at a more precise answer, but for now, I just know the answer is " a lot. ".
Trying to keep the light focused as it leaves our constantly changing refractive atmosphere might be a lot of fun too.
The only chance I see they could try is to try to do it during an eclipse?
If I didn't know any better, I would think this is an extension of...eh... wasn't Science Fiction author Robert Heinlein thinking along this line?
Just glad its not a government thing. I can buy Wal-Mart cola at 50 cents per 2 liter jug, if Coca Cola wants to spend their money on this, but I have no alternative to paying tax. That's my money gone - it won't live to support the economy by ending up in a local businesses cash register.
Ok, the ol' US of A isn't really cutting it in the world anymore after the profits generated rebuilding the world after WW2. We aren't the only show in town anymore, but most of us don't know it yet. Fat, dumb and happy, we are.
Technology is what drives our rise to fame, yet not only do we export the technology freely, we also discourage ( by lack of the promise of any sort of meaningful employment ) our youth from technology fields, choosing to use what others make rather than learning how to innovate on what we made before.
So, we now import damn near everything.
Gone are those days when kids would tear a disposed TV apart and re-use its components to build all sorts of gadgets like I did.
Note the latest wealth-building books all speak of "earned income" as the worst kind of income - taxed to the hilt. What they tout is "passive income", that is making money from appreciation of your investments. Most tout real estate for this. So the price of a home is rising much faster than the wages ( driven by outsource competition ).
In order to "help" the buyers come up with more money, the government drops the federal funds rates. Sure, now the market is flooded with cheap dollars. Lots and lots of borrowed dollars are now competing with earned dollars in the market. Prices go up. Merchants rake in increased dollar sales. The wealthy snap up yet more and more properties. The new incoming generation finds themselves trapped between competing with third world countries labor rates and the price of a home.
So, economic costs force them to delay having kids until they can at least hold down a place to live. Back to the "Rich-Dad, Poor-Dad" syndrome, these kids will soon find they can not work for any sort of corporation who not only will force them to compete internationally, they will also force them to render their SSN, so the corporation can gladly give any earnings info to the gov't so the gov't can tax it back.
I think the writing is on the wall that the next generation - if they are gonna survive - is going to have to work for themselves. That is - find something there is a market for and do it themselves. Things like auto repair come to mind. Its something that one - armed with enough tools, could do at home without involving anyone else. A job paid for in cash. Cash unseen by the monitoring systems currently in place. This way, costs to the consumer can still be held to a low rate so the rich can have their toys maintained. But I think it will become standard knowledge that if you ask for anyone's SSN, you expect to pay about quadruple the rate so your servant can pay the tax on the money you are about to give him.
Its kinda obvious things are heading for a tumble. I think the government knows it. I think they know they better get a system in place to control the people while the going is good. They wanna make sure that any revolt among the wage-slaves is controllable by knowing exactly who is involved, and economically ruining the dissident without taking out the rest of the wage-slaves, whose labor supports the lifestyles of the owning classes.
To me, all this 9-11 stuff did was give our government all the justification it needed to install all sorts of snooping technology aimed at ourselves. I am sure all these fancy databases will be mostly used for taxation enforcement.
I do not like what I see in the future. If we pee-ons don't get busy at the ballot box, and hold politicians accountable, we are gonna be in for a world of hurt.
Example: When Congress is presented with the H1B Visa program showing how many jobs, they should simultaneously consider the equal amount of Americans who won't have jobs, look at their salary, how much taxes they would have paid, and at the same time as they sign the bill, they would be signing immediate budget cuts to reflect the lost tax revenues, and also support costs for the unemployed workforce resulting from their signature.
So, right now, the government is putting the machinery in place for enforce compliance while the getting is good. Can't blame them for that.
( taking off paranoia hat... )
As you consider how you want to present your corporate webpages to the public, do you want to share in this wrath?
If you are in business to sell a product, please stick with common public formats and don't ask us to install proprietary crap to see your site.
I have yet to see any site content good enough to warrant the irritation I have to go through not only to load the proprietary crap, but to expunge it.
Most of them are very concerned about things ending up in the trash which are not supposed to be in the trash, and are quite helpful when questioned.
Its a helluva lot easier to help someone properly dispose of something than it is to try to recover it out of the landfill once its presence has been detected.
Then big company came in and bought us out. Money from venture capitalists flooded our organization. Highly paid management professionals were brought in to optimize our operations. Pride in workmanship flew out the window, to be replaced by whatever got the immediate job at hand done cheapest. We no longer fixed our stuff - we had support contracts. Who cared if we even knew how it worked? But now we had dress codes. Oooh, didn't we look all pretty with our suits and ties! Well, we did get paid better, and dressing the part went with the privilege of being kept on the payroll. But who cared if you spent day and night working on some little quirk you didn't thoroughly understand? Or if you knew how to build something you needed - when you could just throw cash at the problem and gloss it over with some powerpoint presentations? With the mass infusions of cash, technical knowledge seemed to become much less important than management skills. It seemed everybody wanted the latest presentation software, and no-one wanted a thing to do with the old circuit analysis software we had used for years. Having the snazziest system on your desk and office decor seemed to be what everyone wanted. It flat was not fun to work there anymore. It seemed it became dog-eat-dog. They moved us out of the lab and into cubicles. The took our coffee machine away and gave us "secretarial services". Dammit, I was just about born with a soldering iron in my hand...not a Franklin Day Planner!
Everytime I have seen a mass infusion of money into something, it seems to ruin it. The first time I noted this effect, it was in a school system, where when a lot of money was granted into the system, the first thing they did was buy a bunch of unnecessary stuff which then mandated substantial resources to maintain it. Not only that, it completely showed all of us that were volunteering our efforts just how insignificant we were. Just think, who needs to know how to build an oscilloscope from scratch in an electronics class when you could just tweak the knobs on the latest models? I still remember the joys of going into my old EICO and fixing whatever I smoked when I misused the thing ( usually the FET on the frontend differential amp when I got a nasty inductive kickback from a relay coil. )
Answer me this: If a college has an assortment of older oscilloscopes ( some are in need of repair ), and the students not only learn to use the scopes that work, they also learn to fix the broken ones, do you think they got a better education than the ones who only got to use later scopes, but have no idea what's actually in them?
At the college I am attending right now, I am taking some automotive courses. I am doing a "special studies" program... you see, they have an old infrared exhaust analyzer that is no longer functional. I am having a helluva time taking that old thing apart, figuring out how the infrared chopper worked, and will hopefully build an interface so I can send the signals through a A/D converter so I can drop it into a computer. When I get through with that thing, I expect not only to have a helluva good idea of how NonDispersive Infrared analyzers ( CO, CO2, HC ) work, but also how the UV analyzers ( NO, NO2 ), and oxygen sensors work. Not only will I know when a machine is giving me funny readings I can't trust, I will know how to go into the machine, locate the funny and fix it.
Here's the crux of the problem... If I do not know how the machine works and how it arrives at its answers, I probably won't know if the machine is malfunction
Basically, it was a CMOS "Linear Feedback Shift Register", aka "PseudRandom Sequence Generator" (PSRG) which generated a predictable stream of 1 and 0. The output signal went to both a "D" type flip-flop and the class-C buffer amp which fed the transmit antenna. The idea was not to transmit the levels of the PRSG, but just the edges. Those edges are sharp and transmit well... ( eh, ANY digital edges are sharp and transmit well, and we jump through all sorts of hoops to try to minimize radiated EMI. ).
Ok, the idea is we are making a helluva EMI racket in the immediate vicinity. But its a known racket, as we are generating it on the spot. Back to the D flip-flop. It is clocked a varying swept time from the time the PSRG is clocked. We now feed the edges ( capacitive coupling ) of our delayed PSRG to a mixer, where we use this to multiply back to the signal coming in from our receive antenna. We are mixing lots of little narrow spicks of both polarities from both our intentionally delayed PSRG, with those little spicks coming in from the antenna, and we are looking for when they match up.
Remember, we are only looking at edges. The mixer output is a voltage representing the statistical correlation of how well the two streams are matching up. When these edges line up, that means the delay from clocking the D flip flop is the same as the delay for the PSRG from the main generator to go through the amplifier, to the target, and back. I am not talking about a fancy radio on for the receiver, its more like a wide open wideband RF amp input.
Bring any amplifier near the thing and you will hear it. AM radio tuned to dead air works great. Sounds like white noise.
By sweeping the delay, you get a report on anything in your vicinity reflecting your PSRG signal back to you as a function of time ( i.e distance traveled at the speed of light. You then get back info on how far out you looked, and how much energy got bounced back at you from that distance away.
It was to be used for things like sensing how close your bumper was to anything, as well as intrusion detection ( of the human body type ). What you would do is baseline your environment response, then look for any changes in it. Your changing area then was the area that had something moving in it.
This was a really fun thingie. I played around with one for quite some time as a "home security system", as I could set the delay for something like 30 feet out. Anything greater or less than 30 feet wouldn't arrive at the mixer at the right time and wouldn't be seen... only stuff right at 30 feet would be seen. If I saw quivering of the signal, I knew something was amiss. Although I did have falsing problems with wind blowing wet trees, it would quite easily pick up someone walking through the spherical "sense area", while ignoring my trips to the bathroom and around the house, etc.
If you wanna play with one, they are quite easy to make with off-the-shelf CMOS 74AC logic and RF mixers.
The site worked great. The first time.
These days, having something work is getting rarer and rarer, and when I find something that actually works the way it oughta work, maybe its time for me to make my appreciation public.
I load so many corporate sites these days that flat don't work... its getting so that I really hate going to a corporate site on the net, cause many get so anxious to blow off their technical superiority of having all the latest whiz-bang latest edition of whatever that they could seemingly care less that I am using older technology and only wanted info on their product.
This is when people have an onus to go out and buy some crap to give you, and you have the onus to do the same for them, before you can even visit for tea.
And, of course, the "present" is usually presented personally, and its kinda in bad taste to not open it up and fawn over it for a while. I mean, you don't really wanna hurt their feelings after they went through all that mad rush to get it for you do you? Its not like you personally have had to experience the same frustration yourself trying to hold up your end of the bargain. So, you open it and drool over it awhile so their feelings won't get hurt. Presto! Opened product!
Now, to add injury to it, if your donor finds out you returned the thing they so "carefully selected" for you, their feelings might be hurt. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Yep, a marketer's dream market.
Damm, I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge!
But before you bah-humbug me as such, I will say I think the holidays are for sharing as much time as you can with others, as our busy worklives, accounted for by the minute, doesn't leave much time for social interaction with loved ones. Its just the horning in of others with the fiduciary interest of milking this occasion for all its worth that irritates me so.
My own observation is that the basic kernel of both Linux and Microsoft is way, way, way too complex. I still can't see why the kernel itself needs to be much more than a couple hundred KB of tight code. Of course, it can launch whatever processes needed for I/O, filesystem, etc. The kernel itself though should be damn close to incorruptible, with it being a standard configuration - with its MD5 well known - so in the event it is messed with at all, you can easily get a trusted evaluation of your kernel. Maybe even put a MD5 as part of the BIOS so it displays the MD5 on startup, and you can see if something's amiss if your system starts acting strange. As long as your kernel's intact, it should have its own debugging and system verification utilities to help one pinpoint a malfunctioning process.
And the person using it has got to know how to use it. And what its limitations are.
Make it too complex, and people won't know its limitations.
Trying to code a system "immune to viruses" is like trying to design a car that won't crash.
Of course, there are a few things that greatly enhance security, such as holding the integrity of the system files, and restricting each program to its own partition. But, doggone it, there are way too many legitimate needs to access the filesystem and TCPIP stack to really discriminate which usages are intentional, and which are not.
All I can really ask is that the OS files themselves be proven secure and verifiable by integrity checks, and have an architecture whereas each executable thread must be "visible" to be executed. Of course, this means each operation the computer performs must be examinable, which does not bode well at all for keeping what a program is doing hidden, as is commonly done in today's proprietary computing environment.
I don't trust it until I can verify it.
The drive bay will even do the form-factor correction for you so the 3 1/2" hard drive fits the 5 1/4" bay.
I can't say how frustrated I get when people put something on the web - which requires some special proprietary thing to view it.
But whining about it won't do any good.
Face it fellas, they have guts. They don't mind going after and pissing off their own customers. They even call it good business!
We consumer wimps don't even have the wherewithall to put our wallets back in our pockets and move along.
They get paid well while we whine. I don't think its their fault at all... they are protecting their interests and business models - its US that are letting them get away with it by not fighting back! They are free to fight us with lawyers and buying law. Our tools are only our wallet, but its one helluva powerful tool. Without the Fruit of the Wallet, even the most powerful business soon finds itself like a powerful military weapon, with no gas in the tank. All the muscle of business, including all the lawyers and lobbyists, depend on the Fruit of the Wallet for their sustenance.
The Capitalist System still depends on cash flow just as your computer depends on a steady stream of current from its power supply. And you control whether or not you open your wallet.
They don't have sole control. Two can play this game.
While they put up all their advertising, featuring products that won't allow you to use in the way you wish to use it, feel free to flit back and forth in front of the Main Business Power Supply ( The Cash Register ) and fail to tender your dollars.
Shut up and put those wallets back in those pockets, folks, until they produce something you think worthy of purchase!
I don't think many of us survived the Goldin years. Yeh, the 60's... those were the days. Definitely. I still go by old Gene Kranz's motto... "Failure is NOT an option!".
I guess its no big thing though... We don't build technology stuff much in this country anymore. I guess we won't even design it much anymore. I note even we are beginning to outsource even medical work. But we will do what we are really good at... that is arguing about who can do what.
When our Congress sees the need for us to get back to work, they will rescind restrictive legislation and again encourage acquiring skills and economically viable employment in the technical sector... but for now, it looks good on the books to outsource technology development. For the time being, we can simply print more money to make business happy, giving them the requisite year-to-year "sales gains" that keep them from crying and declaring "recession", despite the flood of dollars becoming so worthless that it now takes damn near a half-million of them to buy a house that 20 years ago sold for $70,000.
My intended use was in conjunction with voice recognition, and multiple processes running so the service tech could see "Mitchell's On Demand", anything on the network, or displays from engine and emissions diagnostics (including OBD-II scanner).
I wanted something small, along with microcamera capability so the mechanic could look at things he can not get his head into, such as examining areas for air conditioning freon-dye leakage - which is very obvious under UV illumination when the proper fluorescent dyes and optical passband filters are used.
Face it, if I went around banging on a bell or making all sorts of annoying noises demanding attention from someone before I would shut up, in normal society, I would expect my face smashed in to shut me up.
But let a machine do it, and people will not only ignore other people in their presence, they will grant the machine priority. A ringing phone seems to have top priority with most people. I find it extremely annoying to make time to meet with someone, only to be usurped by someone else using the phone.
It shouldn't bother me, but it does.
The problem? This guy really gave some nasty homeworks. Yes, really time consuming. But there is a big difference between time consuming and busywork. He was trying to take a bunch of people who barely knew the most basic "Hello, World" C++ students and bring us to the level we could understand how to code damn near anything.
So he had these five projects we had to complete in the semester. The first one just got us familiar with class structure - instantiating and deleting objects, the second one made a several linked lists of these, the third had us make a binary search trees of them, the fourth had us do a maze, and the fifth had us do a graph.
No big thing really, but it did take a lot of time. Especially doing it the way he wanted it done. His was not simple textbook snippets. No, his were all wrapped up in an application, like that which would be quite suitable for use in a business. He wanted all the bells and whistles, like templates, inheritances, operator overloading, copy constructors, and file operations. But he was also very flexible. He let us code in any C++ compiler, but he did insist we use the input data streams he provided and our programs had to generate the output streams he expected.
And that guy could spot plagiarism a mile away.
Some students needed to take as many courses as possible and get documentation they "passed". They weren't happy. This guy assigned most of the course grade to the projects, and if you didn't do them, well let's just say he would let you try again next semester.
Some of us were coming back to school after layoff situations, looking mostly for skills on how to program using the object-oriented methods.. and we sought out anything this man taught, because he - by far - gave us the biggest "bang for the buck" of any instructor on the campus. I felt that I got the equivalent of 12 semester credits when I only paid for 4.
Also, having external color filter masks which can be rotated into place means we are no longer limited in vision to just the visible spectrum we see, but we can see anything the raw silicon sensor allows, meaning we can also view the infrared to ultraviolet, and let us assign "pseudo color" as we see fit.
We are clinging to an expired paradigm. Like purveyors of old LED calculators.
You see, we were raised in an era where we went to school, paid for and took courses in college, just to make us valuable to Corporations.
There's the rub! Valuable to Corporations... not to People!
Corporations can outsource... Easily. So, at the stroke of a pen, all your preparations and polishing to make yourself look sweet to the corporate eye is gone.
About five years ago when the crunch hit the Aerospace industry, I had a guy come to me and ask me if I needed my trees trimmed. He gave me a quote of $200. I looked at the trees. Maybe two days work for me to do it. Well, in the past, I had a job. For a corporation. They seemed to pay me well, but the problem is they exacted just about all my time, leaving me just enough time to eat, sleep, shit, and wake up the next day for the next day's efforts. All continuously supervised and evaluated. I started thinking how many hours I would have to work to earn that $200 . Well, at $20/hour, maybe 10 hours? NO. More like 25 hours. Tax. And keeping all that paperwork associated with tax, being an unpaid accountant keeping track of everything lest I fail to take deductions I am entitled to yet fail to claim. Maybe this guy is onto something. He gets ME to pay the tax on my pay, then he just takes pure clean cash, after I have paid all the tax on it.
Ok. I get the idea. Instead of designing satellite commlinks for aerospace corporations, I would probably do just as good diagnosing malfunctions on car electronics. I have all the equipment and skills to do so. Especially nice is that I have all the computer tools, such as C++ compilers which I can use to make me some really nice OBD-II parsers, and digital storage oscilloscopes, which when coupled to the appropriate transducers will tell me loads about engine component timings and operation. But the best thing is I will be working for another person, not under a corporation. He will pay me in cash. Its not that big of thing if I just get me a big SUV and load all my tools in it and drive to the job.
I flat do not want to run a big business. I just wanna provide for family and keep food on the table.
And I want to do my technical stuff. I am really good at it. Paperwork bores me to no friggen end. And I am not good at it at all.
The reason I mention the SUV bit, is I have a guy in my automotive classes at College, and he is doing this on the side, to the point he is quitting his "company" job because his moonlighting is so lucrative. That is exactly what he does. He has an SUV he fixed up, and he simply drives to customer houses and works on their cars. He only works on a couple types of car, and you have to know him quite well to get him. His time, through the business, is about $150 an hour, but if you know him, you can get his undivided attention to your problem, at your house, at night, for less than half that rate.
I have seen how he does this. No business per se. No advertising. No employees. No buildings. No hassles. He just likes to work on cars. And knows just one make through and through. He has connections through the grapevines which keep him stocked with all the diagnostic codes and mods for the engines which he can pull off as easily as we do computer patches.
I flat do not want any employees. Nor do I want a building. A good-sized "garden shed" in my back yard should be sufficient for anything I can imagine. I know what my thing is, my target is now to build skills where I am useful to People, and they will pay me to do my thing for them.
If they can get me alone a helluva lot cheaper than if I came to them via a business operation, and I do a good job, there oughta be enough people out there to keep me busy.
I had one guy tell me he works quite happily for five dollars an hour, provided he is paid in pre-1964 silver coins.
We all know what
Yes, there are generic rack shelves.. just about anything. Look in something like Allied or Digi-Key catalogs. Or, get some "unistrut" and make whatever you want. Unistrut is that heavy channel metal used in industrial plants...its so common many hardware stores carry it and all sorts of hardware that goes along with it... its like an Erector set that uses 1/4 inch bolts. I've used a lot of it. Personally, I prefer the aluminum unistrut, but its harder to find.
I suggest you take a screw that fits your rack to the hardware store...you know, the neighborhood one where the old geezers that run the place have done so since they were kids, and ask them. They will probably sell you a box of premium ones less than the cost of the cute little plastic boxed one at the nerd store. Forget the megastore places.. most of the people I meet there know the stock number, price, how many they have in stock, but usually don't have a clue what they are used for.
Around my neck of the woods, we have one we know as "McFadden-Dale Industrial Hardware". They stock the damndest stuff.
I thought I might teach a class at my local community college on the SPICE circuit analyzer being I have used one for about 15 years. I have several sources for generic paperback textbooks that have been out for years, quite reasonably priced. Linear Technology has generously placed their SWCAD III full-fledged spice analyzer ( albeit pre-loaded with Linear Tech libraries ) for free download.
I looked at this, and saw I could get my students a pretty good understanding of SPICE and have a pretty robust tool for their further studies for about $30. Not bad, I thought, for the skills I did not pick up until I had graduated and was already practicing circuit design. I would have almost killed for one of these.
I figured in all reality, SPICE had not changed much since I had my first operable copy which was translated directly from Lawrence Nagel's "Berkeley 2G.5" back in 1987. ( Several of the guys in the company I worked for rewrote it from FORTRAN to C and linked it to a nifty little graphing utility.) Sure gives you a comfy feeling when you know exactly whats going on. But that one was mostly designed for the XT machine. Believe it or not, its the one I still use the most, because I understand its model structures.
All the time, I had been seeing all these high-priced analyzers on the market - each had some particular feature that made them kinda nice for certain things, but all seemed based off the original core analyzer kernel. And all were pricey. I played with Linear Tech's version, and it seemed quite nice - and if it was gratis, I figured it would be ideal for teaching a class. At least I could get the concepts across without asking the students for a $500 outlay before they even knew what they were doing. Sure, after covering the basics of design, I would discuss switchers too. I didn't plan on getting much into the math side, but just give 'em a heads up on how they work so they won't be too surprised when they see them in real life.
But with all this downsizing, the CC dropped my proposal. I was lucky enough to be doing this kinda stuff when it was being developed and understanding how it worked internally was important and shared, not at all like today's proprietary environment. It annoys me to know I am going to the grave with what I know.
Here I am at College, and I find a cellphone, all by itself, left in the bushes behind a little concrete edge often used as a bench. Looks like an expensive little bugger. I retrieve it. Maybe I could call its owner or maybe some of their friends and let their caller ID tell them whose calling, then maybe one of them can help me return it to its rightful owner. Guess what, I get the darned thing turned on, lots of buttons, each does something, but I will be darned if I can get the phone to make a call. I accessed some sort of clock, some scheduler, probably reset a helluva lot of stuff just trying to get back, I could not get the thing back off, and all I could think of is how fast I am draining the tiny thing's batteries with all those display lights flashing all over the keyboard.
I know once I drain its little battery, I have lost all chance of using it to help me find its owner, as it has nonstandard cells, and I have no way of routing the proper power to the phone's charging connector. Yes, I have top-flight power supplies in the lab which will power damn near anything, but lacking knowledge of what voltage and polarity the phone needs, any attempt to power the phone through the lab supply is apt to be fatal.
I did not wanna take it to lost and found, as once the phone passes through too many hands, it might stay lost forever. That was my attempt of last resort.
Never got a call out. But in a few minutes, the thing started buzzing. Ok, someone's calling me, can I even get on the line. They called me three times before I successfully got voice link. It was the owner, calling from a friend's phone. She was still at the college, frantically searching for her phone.
Man, I felt dumb.
Securityfocus.com ran a story on this.