"but I've heard their 'apathy' described better as 'a healthy detachment.' "
I really like that. I have been accused of this several times, but there are some things ( like office politics ) that I consider myself far too powerless to control. Once subjected to it, I lose damn near all interest. Once I come to the realization that the powers that be value the skills of those who tell me how to do my work (micromanaging) more than me, I lose my feelings of responsibility for whether the work gets done or not. I have been looking for a neat explanation of what happened.
I had been under the impression that a barbeque grill loaded with diamonds would charbroil a steak just as well as one loaded with briquettes, albeit no flavor due to the purity of the carbon. And burn a bit longer due to the density. I did not think briquettes would be burning on the inside as the oxidation, taking place on the surface, would consume all available oxygen.
"If you release a piece of software that works really well, does everything the users want, and never crashes or causes trouble, then you may as well pack up shop and go out of business quietly."
Geez! You stated exactly what happened to me. The company I used to work for bought some really neat DOS software for circuit analysis, schematic capture, and PCB layout. It worked flawlessly. Very easy to use. No frustrating DRM/Licensing issues to deal with. User-definable libraries. Nice file structures. In short, what I would have done if I did it myself.
When they transitioned from an Engineering Company to a Management Company, they surplussed all this neat software. Me, along with my software, was excessed. I was first in line to buy it from the company, being I knew exactly what it was and how I could run it on anything I could get my hands on. The company no longer exists, but I still run the software daily, albeit in another company.
Here it is, nearly 20 years later. I *still* prefer to use these programs. They are blindingly fast on a Pentium, allow me to update their libraries with all the latest parts I use, and still work perfectly.
By this time, I understand exactly what these programs do and am quite fast with them.. they are so familiar by now that I no longer have to concern myself with how to get the system to do what I want... now that I have finally perfected a simple DOS-based system thats ready for work about 13 seconds after I turn on power. I still fail to see what everyone is carrying-on about over these finicky new design softwares. I *try* to use them but soon become so frustrated with them that I keep reverting to the simple one.
It kinda bugs me when I have way too many choices - like do I really care what font or centering options the resistor values show up in the schematic I am preparing to feed to the SPICE simulator or the PCB Layout proggie? Just put the value where I place it and I'm happy. I just want it done NOW. I don't wanna dicker with it. If its gonna get published, I'll dump it into a.DXF file and let the AutoCad and PhotoShop guys gussy it up all they want.
See? There's an anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. They did the software right, and never sold another to me. All the companies that made the software are now out of business ( one got bought out, the other two are just gone.)
The favorite concern of the company I now work with is that I am using completely unsupported software. But then, I used a completely unsupported hammer when I built my doghouse. Big deal. If it works, what do you need support for?
I have invested a lot of resources in designing my systems highly centered around my computational capabilities. I do not even own any form of standalone CD player. Once in the system CD tray, if I like the music, I convert a copy to MP3 so I can carry it with me. I see the original media only as a container for the music I purchased. Once I remove the product from the bag, I have no problem with what happens to the bag. But modern DRM is making it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to remove the product from the bag.
So, I increaingly find it far more convenient to obtain the product sans bag. ( i.e. already ripped to MP3 )
Personally, I see it the same as if I went to the hardware store to buy a box of 1/4" bolts to fit all the 1/4" nuts and receptacles I already have. If they put some sort of DRM on the bolts, such as an extra thread or something that prevents it from being used with my existing supply of 1/4" hardware, then I go to whatever effort I have to to obtain the bolts I need. If the guy next door has a lathe cranked up to make them, I'll get them from him. The fact someone else over at the bolt company is popping his head up and down wailing over the fact that he has a patent on the bolt design is not quite as important to me as the fact that the bolts I get fit my stuff.
You know, I really do not have much ideas left on how to communicate to the music industry. We have complained here on Slashdot till we are blue in the face over this and still no one seems to acknowledge it. From my chair, it seems some of the qualifications for being a music executive is a total ignorance of what the public is trying to tell them.
A lot of people will install legally purchased software on their machine at work, where they have fast internet connections and a nice printer.
Now, they sneak some really insidious DRM scheme in and fouls up the machine. The employee is now in a really neat snit with his management now that corporate resources must now be pulled into play to undo the snarls caused by DRM enforcement incompatibilites with other programs.
By EULA, the corporations who infected the victim employees computer are harmless. Its the poor nitwit who bought and installed that software thats gonna get nailed.
AC, What you just posted is what I have been fussing and fuming about for years. As far as I am concerned, this kinda stuff should be illegal as hell, but yet I see it pushed, not as illegal tampering but "the latest technology".
It pisses me off to no end to go to business sites and have them force this on me. God knows how many business sites I hit on and after waiting God only knows how long, I get a blank page, yet my indicators show I downloaded several hundred KB. I view "document source" and find out its a bunch of java laden crap, with no idea what some of the executables would do if I launched them.
It seems the business sites are thumbing their noses at me as if to tell me that they are so big and powerful. They have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on executive salaries, webmasters that use the very latest technologies, and the budget for stuff I do not have and take risks I do not want to take. Like they are telling me that they are big business, and I have to kowtow to them and be compatible with them and their latest standards if I want to do business with them. Maybe I don't have the millions of dollars a year to support a technical staff to keep the virii out of my system, so I use a firewall to block all executables. A lot of big businesses have made it clear to me that they could care less if others can hear what they say. If I don't run my system in such a way as to leave myself open to all sorts of net vermin, they figure I am beneath them.
I have no idea how to communicate to these behemoths. They insist on running all this "entertainment" shit on their end when all I wanted was to look up a product. I tried a major book vendor, could not connect. Same with a major lead-acid battery manufacturer - could not get past their front page. Even the company in England who made my digitizers force this on me. They used to leave the subdirectories accessible so I could go directly to where I had to go to get the updates to my digitizers, but they got clever and closed it off so now I have to go through their java redirection shit to get there. I had to go to an insecure system with a throwaway OS ( ghosted WIN95 ) to access their site, knowing I may have to reload the OS image if the site downloaded anything nasty to my end. With the new "state of the art" OS being so cantankerous on reloading and moving around from machine to machine and techniques such as ghosting, time is running out for these options and these companies will be almost impossible to reach on a secure system.
HTML ( like the CD's ) was designed to be adherent to standards. When people take it on themselves to generate their own deviants, then only those compatible with their deviant can view the content, and often incompatibility with even a minor deviant renders the entire site inacessable.
I guess the executives in these companies just weigh off how many customers will not be able to view the site versus how much they can dazzle the CEO with their new snazzy website on a compatible system, and keep the CEO unaware of how much customer frustration thats resulting from this. I know I can rant here, and the CEO will never see it, as he would probably prefer to get his feedback from someone well paid to do so so the feedback presents his leadership in a positive light. If I were a CEO, I would definitely be reading sites like slashdot to get unfiltered rants over what direction things were headed. I wonder if the CEO of that battery company even cared if people were having trouble accessing the corporate site, even though he had the money and technical expertise to afford his corporate terminal linked directly into his server? What is it going to take to get them to hire people who know what they are doing and make web pages that work. Amazon makes pages that work. So does Google. I expect porn sites to give a lot of shit because by their nature they wanna probe your machine for marketing info. But this kinda shit is highly resented when found on corporate sites.
Re:Amazon not take, I give
on
Mighty Amazon
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· Score: 1
"Even if I did, how much could I get for my personal CD collection?
$2-$3 a pop, even if the locals had the same taste as I do."
The last garage sale I went to, CD's were 25 cents each. And they weren't selling.
I wasn't interested either. They would have been worth more to me if they were blank CDR.
I get the idea that "millions" is probably more accurate than "thousands" when talking of exposure through a mainstream site which provides the search and accounting services such as Amazon and eBay.
Ahhh.. Johnny Quest.. ( Somehow I thought it was "Jonny Quest" ). That was by far my favorite one. As far as I was concerned, that was the only one really worth going out of my way for. The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, etc. were OK if I didn't have anything else I was excited over. The rest I considered junk. The stuff I see today is worse than junk. I consider it an ordeal. Frankly, I am amazed they get anyone to watch it. I think I could get more amused watching a televised snail race.
It all just seems like one long commercial.
It seems my intelligence is insulted continuously as I seem to perceive a continuous subliminal stream of "If you have this thing, your friends will like you. Now go out and buy one."
I went to your halfbakery.com link and retrieved this snippet:
"If the human body is subjected to low-frequency sound waves (between 10.5 and 16 Hz), there is often an uncontrollable and instant urge to defecate. While the use of this 'brown noise' has been investigated for military and crowd control uses, I've not found any references to its use as an anti-constipation device."
My observation:
If there were any substance to this claim, I think there would have been a ton of anecdotal evidence reported when kids started putting these kilowatt "boom-boxes" in cars.
Yeah, I looked up the terms of service from
his service provider and retrieved this snippet:
How much bandwidth/traffic do I get with my Web site?
We allow 15 GB of transfer per month. This is an adequate amount to operate a bandwidth intensive website. If your web pages average 10 KB in size, you would be able to receive 1,500,000 million hits per month.
So it looks like we chewed up his whole month's allocation in a few minutes... wow!
I think what the RIAA is afraid of is that they will go through all this trouble, buying off Congress to pass all this law to require DRM technology in all consumer stuff. And all the negotiation and working with Microsoft to incorporate all sorts of crypto-shit in their media players.
Then have the consumer connect one of these to the analog audio-out connector, or across the speaker connection, neatly bypassing everything they've lobbied for.
Kinda like the surprise the homeowner encounters when he buys all the latest security for his front door, and the burglar slips in through the bathroom window.
"Having been the recipient of a lot of commercial support, I have to say it's extremely overrated. The only thing it really buys you is the abilityto push the blame for something onto someone else."
Did you ever hit the nail on the head.
I wish I could come up with an insightful way of convincing others on what I have seen from much experience, but my experiences are mostly considered anecdotal.
Businessmen are kinda funny creatures. They have quite unpredictable behaviour patterns.
Example: If one goes to a cash register even one penny short of the price stated, the sale will likely not be consummated. But the same entity who sets demanding pricing is apt not to be concerned with the visibility of his website, often using technology viewable with only one browser ( you know, the "best viewed with... " one). These same people call their employees into quite demanding salary reviews, where all sorts of subjective material such as "people skills" are used to justify ranking an otherwise productive employee to be given minimal salary treatment, yet they use software that really presents a bad face to everyone not using the latest version of the server software vendor's browser product. I, for
one, have a helluva time with one particular software vendor's product because I run behind a firewall that blocks a lot of proprietary scripting codes, as well as not using that vendor's browser. I do this not only for security concerns at my end but also to alleviate the hell that many webmasters foist upon me by taking advantage of that company's browser capabilities to annoy me with all sorts of time-taking clutter that takes forever and a day to download on a dialup.
Typically, the companies who use this stuff have grown big enough they really don't need a customer base anymore. They now consider themselves big enough that people will do whatever it takes to communicate with them, for its a power thing now, its similar to the who has to wait for who thing.
Can you imagine a big corporate webmaster demo-ing the company website to the executive president on a dialup? On a random browser? Many big corps act as if they had so many million dollars to spend on a site and they just want the money spent. For them, there is another company which is more than willing to take their money.
Smaller companies, who want to be a big company one day, seem to take other approaches, like being very easy to communicate with. They make clean web pages, stick with international standards and don't coin their own on the fly, and realize that not everyone out there has ( or wants ) the latest scripting technologies.
So, I guess you just have to try to see what the company really wants.
If they have budgeted so much money and they want it spent, go one way. They give you somebody to blame. This is nice if you are in a big company with your pension and retirement plans anchored firmly in place and what happens to the company has little bearing on you.. kinda like the way American Airline executives got their pension plans funded regardless of what happens to the company itself.
But if you are a smaller company still in the growth stages, having someone to blame doesn't help much if you are losing customer shares because your site won't talk to them. A smaller company would need people who know what they are doing... not just figureheads to accept blame.
With Open Source gaining in acceptance, I question why one would want to commit to a proprietary solution where changing from it could be extremely cost prohibitive.
From the looks of what I am seeing, I get the idea that many executives have never gone fishing. There is an art to "sinking the hook". The whole game changes once the fish takes the bait. You no longer have to tempt it with a tasty morsel... you just reel it in. The muscles that once propelled the fish wherever it wanted to go are now on the dinner plate. The head is in the kitchen trash.
I guess you know you calibrate one with a tuning fork.
The displacement of the tines when struck cause the microwaves ( at around 10GHz ) to exhibit the same doppler shift as, say, a car passing at 60 MPH.
Well, say, you have a car with a plastic grille, and you have metal fan blades spinning. Whose to say that the blades may have been in perfect view of the beam? The stealth aircraft relies on shaping the surfaces such that radar beams do not reflect properly. Whose to say that the frame of the car, at the instant of taking the reading, emitted the reflection recorded, or if the fan blades did?
One more note... the radar detectors I have seen mostly worked in the 10 GHz region and acted as somewhat of a "spectrum analyser"; that is they were continuously scanning the spectrum around 10GHz and looking for any strong carrier. The 10 GHz is usually generated by a solid-state "gunn" diode. Very low power. Microwave ovens are at 2.45 GHz. Generated via Magnetron vacuum tube by a technique strongly reminescent of how an air whistle works.. that is a whistle works by air streams at high velocity across resonant cavities, a magnetron tube works by electron streams, confined by a magnetic field, passing by resonant cavities. Water absorbs strongly at 2.45 GHz, and the cavities are a convienent size. Anyone have comment on whether 2.45 GHz is in use for traffic radar?
Incidentally, you can find 10GHz handheld oscillators for use in tripping off automotive radar detectors. I guess they could be useful in reminding speeders to obey the 70MPh limits when one passes you at 90+...
Imagine each mirror on the octagon was placed at an incrementing angle such that its reflection did not overlay the others but instead was angled so that its horizontal line went to a specific line in a raster. You now get eight individual horizontal lines as the octagonal mirror spins.
Expand this to 600. Voila. 600 line raster. One moving part. Theta maps to (x,y) by use of only one mirror.
Now bend each mirror to account for aberrations and any desired magnification.
Now that you have the shape, mold out thousands of the things.. you have the entire scan engine for a raster scanner all on one rotating mirror. 3600 RPM is 60 frames per second. There is nothing magical about 3600 RPM. Disk drives do it all the time.
Now, imagine about 600 mirrors instead of the six, and each at a slightly different azimuth, so each successive horizontal line reflects to a slightly lower height than the previous one.
That way, the rotational angle of the disk maps directly to an (x,y) on the raster generated.
One complete rotation of the mirror maps to one complete raster scan.
Nothing says each mirror has to be flat.. each mirror can be curved to subtract out the optical aberrations caused by keystone effect and the pincushioning caused by unequal distances to each point on the projection screen. Also, by playing with the curvature, you can set image size.
The trick I am trying to illustrate is using only one rotating mirror to provide the entire raster scan and all corrections.
Yes, the first mirror will be a bitch to calculate and manufacture, but once the profile has been generated, it should be a snap to replicate. Technology already exists for very precise motors to spin it... they are used on disk drives.
"I wonder what it'd take to use 3 lasers, a couple of oscillating mirrors, and a timing circuit to make a full color projector."
I have often pondered the same thing, albeit instead of oscillating mirrors, I was considering a specially formed mirror on a rotating disk made such that it would produce a raster when the beam was directed at it.
Since, by todays machining technology, I can shape the surfaces of the rotating mirror in any way necessary, I should be able to set its surface in such a manner so that the projected dot reflects onto the screen to form a raster in both the horizontal and vertical plane, as well as incorporate keystone correction so that the projected image is square, even though the projector itself is off to the side. Each revolution of the specially shaped mirror disk would provide, say, a 600 line raster ( it could be changed by changing mirror disks ) where the disk is spinning in phaselock at the vertical (frame) refresh rate. In this case, there would be 600 little sub-mirror segments along the circumference edge of the disk; each would sweep the beam across as the disk rotated, then each successive segment displays the sweep one pixel lower. Until the last segment passed then the upon the next complete revolution, the entire frame starts again.
The three lasers would go through a combiner ( beam splitter in reverse) so that all three beams would be collimated into one beam holding the three colors. This beam would be aimed onto the rotating mirror.
It would require potent red/green/blue ( neon - argon ) lasers, but it looks to me like it would make way for a good theater-size projector of just about any desired resolution.
I do wonder how fast I could turn the beams on and off though. I would prefer to modulate the beams directly via drive current, but I really do not know if there are any time constants for the excitation/lasing of the gases.
Re: my Braun ( which I consider an exceptionally well designed product ), when its NiCD cells failed, it took the internal charger module out with them. The charger module was made and potted in such a way I could not trace it and fix it. But then, it was a shaver - designed for use in the bathroom - where environmental/safety issues are a real concern, so I feel the potting was warranted.
So, when I replaced its cells, I had to rig up the connection so I could charge its new cells via what was the old 120V connector.
But, at least I don't feel like a criminal for doing so.
It would have really pissed me off if I had discovered something in its design that programmed it to fail. But I did not find anything of the sort. So, I reported for work unshaven that day, with broken shaver in tow, and picked up a new Braun at lunch and recovered. And found one where the parts were still interchangeable with the old one. I like Braun's stuff. I have not seen them stoop to this petty crap yet.
"Went to their page and not one of their "technologies" works for me in Mozilla. Either they rely on javascript that Mozilla refuses to run with my prefs or they rely on Macromedia plugins that I have purposly not installed."
This is another very good reason to stop upgrading stuff that works.
On my latest visit to my favorite PCB house, I noted I could no longer see their site. They upgraded. New Microsoft technology. Lots of Java stuff. Well, I don't run Java for
these reasons which I noted in an email I fired back off to them to complain. But then I realize the position the company executives are in... they have their customers on one side that are connecting and doing business, and they have a corporate rep right in their office, shaking their hand and buying them lunch. The rep wants to leverage his corporate force by using his software on their system to help force the public into using a certain browser. The decision has to be made... use a technology the people already have to run their site, or use the new "upgraded, improved" stuff a lot of people don't have. They view the Corporate rep who just took them to lunch and have to tell him they won't "be a technology partner" and fall in line with his plan? They have to look at whats important in the big picture. What's really important? How expendable is a customer base? Do you really need customers anyway? I mean your customers did not take the time to come to your office and shake your hand and buy you lunch. The sales rep cared enough though.
And now I see this. 15 seconds tie-up time. 300K Downloads. On a "56K modem" through and ISP that often slows down the actual send rate to like 2.4 kilobytes per second. Thats the entire 15 seconds assuming I get a steady send.
This crap I have to put up with to connect to some business sites is absurd. I took a class in a community college on HTML, PERL, CGI. At the end of these simple little classes, I feel I could write pages far better than that I see on websites run by multibillion dollar corporations. Pages that loaded fast in any browser. Pages that did not require plug-ins. Pages that did not require my visitors to put their machines at risk. Just plain interactive pages - that followed HTML4.0 standards. Pages that work. Didn't even need any fancy editors, any plain ascii text editor worked fine. Why is it that when corporations put up pages, many can't make them work?
I know this is a bit of a rant, but I am really getting miffed off at technology being used to make a pain in the ass out of itself, and even businesses I trade with using the dollars I send them to work in collusion with those to force this on me.
Thanks for replying to Demo9Orgon instead of a negative moderation. I think he has a good point.
If I had some points this go-around, I would have probably modded him "interesting".
By our very design, we have to be robust to survive, or soon we will find ourselves expending way too much of our resources trying to maintain a marginal existence.
I accept the fact things may not always go as nice as I would like, as I hate to see the fires in Montana destroying green forest - but the argument about the fuel load is also valid. If I end up with SARS and don't make it, at least I know it didn't get everybody, and those who made it will have in their genes the codes that make them resistant, not only to SARS but most likely to its derivatives as well.
I know several people who refuse to reproduce because they know they carry bad genetics. They will go ahead and take the years they have, but knowing they carry bad code - they elect not to pass it on. I respect them for that.
I am a tiny piece in a big machine, and ( like kittens ) nature has in place ways of replacing me. I hate the idea of suffering, but we are going to get it either way. Personally, I would rather see a robust genome out of this whole thing so that the quality of life is good for those lucky enough to get the good code, rather than sentence the whole human species to marginal existence.
I had those things when I was a teenager too. At that time, the drug thing was not so prevalent, so hypodermic syringes were easy to come by. I used them all the time for oiling things and refilling the ink cartridges in those old fountain pens ( I could buy an entire jar of ink for the price of a pack of cartridges ). I also found that the syringe (sans needle) made a dandy vacuuming device for removing the contents of blackheads. I would pop the blackhead, then use a little alcohol in the syringe ( so there would be no air to expand and reduce the suction, as well as the antimicrobial effects ) and pull the contents from the site of the blackhead. It seemed to make way for a good cleanout and minimal damage around the blackhead site. It seemed if I left anything in there, the blackhead would just fester up again.. but if I pulled until I just got clear blood plasma out, that did it.
The contents of the blackhead site would then be mixed with the alcohol, which was easy to eject from the syringe, so I could use the syringe repeatedly. In those days, the plunger was glass too, and made to be used repeatedly. Because I was only pulling suction, I could use the same syringe that I oiled with. The alcohol would readily evaporate if I needed to load it with oil, and any remaining oil did not interfere with the blackhead removal.
Sometimes we the managers in the business world see things differently than those in the trenches. It's what keeps companies running smoothly and
profitably.
One of the managers at a company ( which is no longer ) that I worked it looked at things like this.
I am an engineer. This is how I see it.
You lose a power supply. No big deal - but in the process of losing the power supply, you corrupt your system. Big deal. This could be very costly to recover from.
Now, even if you were lucky and the system suffered no damage from the failing power supply, you have the time to account for to take the system offline, obtain, and replace the supply. Time is expensive. You are now losing on two paths: You can not use the machine, and you are expending time finding parts and fixing the machine.
Personally, I find it much much more expedient to provide the infrastructure for trouble free operation than to let things fail and try to fix them. Yes, the power supply is cheap. So are engine bearings. But saving money by scrimping on oil changes is hardly a way to "keep companies running smoothly and profitably", rather, as an engineer, I see this the quickest way of running a company into the ground with soaring overhead maintenance costs.
Given my own knowledge of the costs involved and failure statistics, I would opt for prevention, but should the company see fit to make me subordinate to someone who sees fit to override my judgement, I would obey, but find somewhere else to work, for the higher-ups are apparently clueless about the mountain of maintainance costs heading their way - and have no idea how much the management skills they hired is really costing them.
I normally would not be so straighforward, truthful, and harsh in my reply, but you did post AC, so I feel you are fair game.
One is specifically for anti-static buildup and they typically put out both negative and positive ions. They come in several flavors.
Simco makes the bipolar types which alternately release waves of positive and negative ions. You can note them as they either drive the ionizer grid with high voltage 60Hz. AC ( my old SIMCO ionizer uses a neon-sign transformer to get the HV to the grid ). Some smaller desktop units have two separate high voltage inverters, one positive and one negative, driven by a small switch that alternately powers one then the other.
There is another ionizer out there that delivers only ONE polarity... usually negative. Thats the one thats bad news. There is all sorts of claims out there that they are healthful. I have no proof of any of it... but they will clean the air - no doubt about it. They charge up every particle in the air and the charged particles attach themselves to anything they can find in the room.. furniture, walls, lamp fixtures, equipment, anything. It does NOT make the dust go away, nor does it collect any. It just makes the dust go attach itself to something else. Because the ions are of only one polarity, they have a tendency of charging everything else in the room up. There is even one book on the market I recall as showing how to make a remote "zapper" out of a high-voltage flyback transformer for prank charging of things so that recepients of the prank get zapped with static charges accumulated from the ion streams beamed to it.
The electrostatic filters are of the second type but provide a convenient removeable surface of the opposite charge to attract the dust charged by the first grid. The Sharper Image unit uses this technique. The grid is an array of small vertical wires ( charged negative ). The removable plates are charged at a lower positive potential. The negatively charged dust is then attracted to the much larger plates and deposit themselves on it, where they will be easy to remove and clean. The higher negative voltage will generate the ions, whereas the lower positive voltage provides the attraction without that much ionization. The attractive forces also draw air along with the dust which creates the "zenion effect", which is also known as "ion wind" to anybody whose played with tesla coils.
I would think the Sharper Image unit would be quite effective in removing dust, but I am concerned about the ozone generation. I have not measured the device, so I do not know if the device emits a balanced quantity of positive and negative ions, which is necessary for making the air "conductive" so that ionic charge buildup is mitigated.
Slashdot Mirror
I had been under the impression that a barbeque grill loaded with diamonds would charbroil a steak just as well as one loaded with briquettes, albeit no flavor due to the purity of the carbon. And burn a bit longer due to the density. I did not think briquettes would be burning on the inside as the oxidation, taking place on the surface, would consume all available oxygen.
Thanks for the input on this.
When they transitioned from an Engineering Company to a Management Company, they surplussed all this neat software. Me, along with my software, was excessed. I was first in line to buy it from the company, being I knew exactly what it was and how I could run it on anything I could get my hands on. The company no longer exists, but I still run the software daily, albeit in another company.
Here it is, nearly 20 years later. I *still* prefer to use these programs. They are blindingly fast on a Pentium, allow me to update their libraries with all the latest parts I use, and still work perfectly.
By this time, I understand exactly what these programs do and am quite fast with them.. they are so familiar by now that I no longer have to concern myself with how to get the system to do what I want... now that I have finally perfected a simple DOS-based system thats ready for work about 13 seconds after I turn on power. I still fail to see what everyone is carrying-on about over these finicky new design softwares. I *try* to use them but soon become so frustrated with them that I keep reverting to the simple one.
It kinda bugs me when I have way too many choices - like do I really care what font or centering options the resistor values show up in the schematic I am preparing to feed to the SPICE simulator or the PCB Layout proggie? Just put the value where I place it and I'm happy. I just want it done NOW. I don't wanna dicker with it. If its gonna get published, I'll dump it into a .DXF file and let the AutoCad and PhotoShop guys gussy it up all they want.
See? There's an anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. They did the software right, and never sold another to me. All the companies that made the software are now out of business ( one got bought out, the other two are just gone.)
The favorite concern of the company I now work with is that I am using completely unsupported software. But then, I used a completely unsupported hammer when I built my doghouse. Big deal. If it works, what do you need support for?
I have invested a lot of resources in designing my systems highly centered around my computational capabilities. I do not even own any form of standalone CD player. Once in the system CD tray, if I like the music, I convert a copy to MP3 so I can carry it with me. I see the original media only as a container for the music I purchased. Once I remove the product from the bag, I have no problem with what happens to the bag. But modern DRM is making it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to remove the product from the bag.
So, I increaingly find it far more convenient to obtain the product sans bag. ( i.e. already ripped to MP3 )
Personally, I see it the same as if I went to the hardware store to buy a box of 1/4" bolts to fit all the 1/4" nuts and receptacles I already have. If they put some sort of DRM on the bolts, such as an extra thread or something that prevents it from being used with my existing supply of 1/4" hardware, then I go to whatever effort I have to to obtain the bolts I need. If the guy next door has a lathe cranked up to make them, I'll get them from him. The fact someone else over at the bolt company is popping his head up and down wailing over the fact that he has a patent on the bolt design is not quite as important to me as the fact that the bolts I get fit my stuff.
You know, I really do not have much ideas left on how to communicate to the music industry. We have complained here on Slashdot till we are blue in the face over this and still no one seems to acknowledge it. From my chair, it seems some of the qualifications for being a music executive is a total ignorance of what the public is trying to tell them.
Diamond is carbon. So is charcoal.
I betcha it takes a helluva temperature to melt charcoal briquettes too. But they really don't get all that hot in the barbeque.
Now, they sneak some really insidious DRM scheme in and fouls up the machine. The employee is now in a really neat snit with his management now that corporate resources must now be pulled into play to undo the snarls caused by DRM enforcement incompatibilites with other programs.
By EULA, the corporations who infected the victim employees computer are harmless. Its the poor nitwit who bought and installed that software thats gonna get nailed.
It pisses me off to no end to go to business sites and have them force this on me. God knows how many business sites I hit on and after waiting God only knows how long, I get a blank page, yet my indicators show I downloaded several hundred KB. I view "document source" and find out its a bunch of java laden crap, with no idea what some of the executables would do if I launched them.
It seems the business sites are thumbing their noses at me as if to tell me that they are so big and powerful. They have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on executive salaries, webmasters that use the very latest technologies, and the budget for stuff I do not have and take risks I do not want to take. Like they are telling me that they are big business, and I have to kowtow to them and be compatible with them and their latest standards if I want to do business with them. Maybe I don't have the millions of dollars a year to support a technical staff to keep the virii out of my system, so I use a firewall to block all executables. A lot of big businesses have made it clear to me that they could care less if others can hear what they say. If I don't run my system in such a way as to leave myself open to all sorts of net vermin, they figure I am beneath them.
I have no idea how to communicate to these behemoths. They insist on running all this "entertainment" shit on their end when all I wanted was to look up a product. I tried a major book vendor, could not connect. Same with a major lead-acid battery manufacturer - could not get past their front page. Even the company in England who made my digitizers force this on me. They used to leave the subdirectories accessible so I could go directly to where I had to go to get the updates to my digitizers, but they got clever and closed it off so now I have to go through their java redirection shit to get there. I had to go to an insecure system with a throwaway OS ( ghosted WIN95 ) to access their site, knowing I may have to reload the OS image if the site downloaded anything nasty to my end. With the new "state of the art" OS being so cantankerous on reloading and moving around from machine to machine and techniques such as ghosting, time is running out for these options and these companies will be almost impossible to reach on a secure system.
HTML ( like the CD's ) was designed to be adherent to standards. When people take it on themselves to generate their own deviants, then only those compatible with their deviant can view the content, and often incompatibility with even a minor deviant renders the entire site inacessable.
I guess the executives in these companies just weigh off how many customers will not be able to view the site versus how much they can dazzle the CEO with their new snazzy website on a compatible system, and keep the CEO unaware of how much customer frustration thats resulting from this. I know I can rant here, and the CEO will never see it, as he would probably prefer to get his feedback from someone well paid to do so so the feedback presents his leadership in a positive light. If I were a CEO, I would definitely be reading sites like slashdot to get unfiltered rants over what direction things were headed. I wonder if the CEO of that battery company even cared if people were having trouble accessing the corporate site, even though he had the money and technical expertise to afford his corporate terminal linked directly into his server? What is it going to take to get them to hire people who know what they are doing and make web pages that work. Amazon makes pages that work. So does Google. I expect porn sites to give a lot of shit because by their nature they wanna probe your machine for marketing info. But this kinda shit is highly resented when found on corporate sites.
I wasn't interested either. They would have been worth more to me if they were blank CDR.
I get the idea that "millions" is probably more accurate than "thousands" when talking of exposure through a mainstream site which provides the search and accounting services such as Amazon and eBay.
Kudos to Amazon! Glad to see them in the fray.
It all just seems like one long commercial.
It seems my intelligence is insulted continuously as I seem to perceive a continuous subliminal stream of "If you have this thing, your friends will like you. Now go out and buy one."
If there were any substance to this claim, I think there would have been a ton of anecdotal evidence reported when kids started putting these kilowatt "boom-boxes" in cars.
Then have the consumer connect one of these to the analog audio-out connector, or across the speaker connection, neatly bypassing everything they've lobbied for.
Kinda like the surprise the homeowner encounters when he buys all the latest security for his front door, and the burglar slips in through the bathroom window.
I wish I could come up with an insightful way of convincing others on what I have seen from much experience, but my experiences are mostly considered anecdotal.
Businessmen are kinda funny creatures. They have quite unpredictable behaviour patterns.
Example: If one goes to a cash register even one penny short of the price stated, the sale will likely not be consummated. But the same entity who sets demanding pricing is apt not to be concerned with the visibility of his website, often using technology viewable with only one browser ( you know, the "best viewed with... " one). These same people call their employees into quite demanding salary reviews, where all sorts of subjective material such as "people skills" are used to justify ranking an otherwise productive employee to be given minimal salary treatment, yet they use software that really presents a bad face to everyone not using the latest version of the server software vendor's browser product. I, for one, have a helluva time with one particular software vendor's product because I run behind a firewall that blocks a lot of proprietary scripting codes, as well as not using that vendor's browser. I do this not only for security concerns at my end but also to alleviate the hell that many webmasters foist upon me by taking advantage of that company's browser capabilities to annoy me with all sorts of time-taking clutter that takes forever and a day to download on a dialup.
Typically, the companies who use this stuff have grown big enough they really don't need a customer base anymore. They now consider themselves big enough that people will do whatever it takes to communicate with them, for its a power thing now, its similar to the who has to wait for who thing.
Can you imagine a big corporate webmaster demo-ing the company website to the executive president on a dialup? On a random browser? Many big corps act as if they had so many million dollars to spend on a site and they just want the money spent. For them, there is another company which is more than willing to take their money.
Smaller companies, who want to be a big company one day, seem to take other approaches, like being very easy to communicate with. They make clean web pages, stick with international standards and don't coin their own on the fly, and realize that not everyone out there has ( or wants ) the latest scripting technologies.
So, I guess you just have to try to see what the company really wants.
If they have budgeted so much money and they want it spent, go one way. They give you somebody to blame. This is nice if you are in a big company with your pension and retirement plans anchored firmly in place and what happens to the company has little bearing on you.. kinda like the way American Airline executives got their pension plans funded regardless of what happens to the company itself.
But if you are a smaller company still in the growth stages, having someone to blame doesn't help much if you are losing customer shares because your site won't talk to them. A smaller company would need people who know what they are doing... not just figureheads to accept blame.
With Open Source gaining in acceptance, I question why one would want to commit to a proprietary solution where changing from it could be extremely cost prohibitive.
From the looks of what I am seeing, I get the idea that many executives have never gone fishing. There is an art to "sinking the hook". The whole game changes once the fish takes the bait. You no longer have to tempt it with a tasty morsel... you just reel it in. The muscles that once propelled the fish wherever it wanted to go are now on the dinner plate. The head is in the kitchen trash.
I guess you know you calibrate one with a tuning fork.
The displacement of the tines when struck cause the microwaves ( at around 10GHz ) to exhibit the same doppler shift as, say, a car passing at 60 MPH.
Well, say, you have a car with a plastic grille, and you have metal fan blades spinning. Whose to say that the blades may have been in perfect view of the beam? The stealth aircraft relies on shaping the surfaces such that radar beams do not reflect properly. Whose to say that the frame of the car, at the instant of taking the reading, emitted the reflection recorded, or if the fan blades did?
One more note... the radar detectors I have seen mostly worked in the 10 GHz region and acted as somewhat of a "spectrum analyser"; that is they were continuously scanning the spectrum around 10GHz and looking for any strong carrier. The 10 GHz is usually generated by a solid-state "gunn" diode. Very low power. Microwave ovens are at 2.45 GHz. Generated via Magnetron vacuum tube by a technique strongly reminescent of how an air whistle works.. that is a whistle works by air streams at high velocity across resonant cavities, a magnetron tube works by electron streams, confined by a magnetic field, passing by resonant cavities. Water absorbs strongly at 2.45 GHz, and the cavities are a convienent size. Anyone have comment on whether 2.45 GHz is in use for traffic radar?
Incidentally, you can find 10GHz handheld oscillators for use in tripping off automotive radar detectors. I guess they could be useful in reminding speeders to obey the 70MPh limits when one passes you at 90+...
Imagine each mirror on the octagon was placed at an incrementing angle such that its reflection did not overlay the others but instead was angled so that its horizontal line went to a specific line in a raster. You now get eight individual horizontal lines as the octagonal mirror spins.
Expand this to 600. Voila. 600 line raster. One moving part. Theta maps to (x,y) by use of only one mirror.
Now bend each mirror to account for aberrations and any desired magnification.
Now that you have the shape, mold out thousands of the things.. you have the entire scan engine for a raster scanner all on one rotating mirror. 3600 RPM is 60 frames per second. There is nothing magical about 3600 RPM. Disk drives do it all the time.
Now, imagine about 600 mirrors instead of the six, and each at a slightly different azimuth, so each successive horizontal line reflects to a slightly lower height than the previous one.
That way, the rotational angle of the disk maps directly to an (x,y) on the raster generated.
One complete rotation of the mirror maps to one complete raster scan.
Nothing says each mirror has to be flat.. each mirror can be curved to subtract out the optical aberrations caused by keystone effect and the pincushioning caused by unequal distances to each point on the projection screen. Also, by playing with the curvature, you can set image size.
The trick I am trying to illustrate is using only one rotating mirror to provide the entire raster scan and all corrections.
Yes, the first mirror will be a bitch to calculate and manufacture, but once the profile has been generated, it should be a snap to replicate. Technology already exists for very precise motors to spin it... they are used on disk drives.
I have often pondered the same thing, albeit instead of oscillating mirrors, I was considering a specially formed mirror on a rotating disk made such that it would produce a raster when the beam was directed at it.
Since, by todays machining technology, I can shape the surfaces of the rotating mirror in any way necessary, I should be able to set its surface in such a manner so that the projected dot reflects onto the screen to form a raster in both the horizontal and vertical plane, as well as incorporate keystone correction so that the projected image is square, even though the projector itself is off to the side. Each revolution of the specially shaped mirror disk would provide, say, a 600 line raster ( it could be changed by changing mirror disks ) where the disk is spinning in phaselock at the vertical (frame) refresh rate. In this case, there would be 600 little sub-mirror segments along the circumference edge of the disk; each would sweep the beam across as the disk rotated, then each successive segment displays the sweep one pixel lower. Until the last segment passed then the upon the next complete revolution, the entire frame starts again.
The three lasers would go through a combiner ( beam splitter in reverse) so that all three beams would be collimated into one beam holding the three colors. This beam would be aimed onto the rotating mirror.
It would require potent red/green/blue ( neon - argon ) lasers, but it looks to me like it would make way for a good theater-size projector of just about any desired resolution.
I do wonder how fast I could turn the beams on and off though. I would prefer to modulate the beams directly via drive current, but I really do not know if there are any time constants for the excitation/lasing of the gases.
So, when I replaced its cells, I had to rig up the connection so I could charge its new cells via what was the old 120V connector.
But, at least I don't feel like a criminal for doing so.
It would have really pissed me off if I had discovered something in its design that programmed it to fail. But I did not find anything of the sort. So, I reported for work unshaven that day, with broken shaver in tow, and picked up a new Braun at lunch and recovered. And found one where the parts were still interchangeable with the old one. I like Braun's stuff. I have not seen them stoop to this petty crap yet.
On my latest visit to my favorite PCB house, I noted I could no longer see their site. They upgraded. New Microsoft technology. Lots of Java stuff. Well, I don't run Java for these reasons which I noted in an email I fired back off to them to complain. But then I realize the position the company executives are in... they have their customers on one side that are connecting and doing business, and they have a corporate rep right in their office, shaking their hand and buying them lunch. The rep wants to leverage his corporate force by using his software on their system to help force the public into using a certain browser. The decision has to be made... use a technology the people already have to run their site, or use the new "upgraded, improved" stuff a lot of people don't have. They view the Corporate rep who just took them to lunch and have to tell him they won't "be a technology partner" and fall in line with his plan? They have to look at whats important in the big picture. What's really important? How expendable is a customer base? Do you really need customers anyway? I mean your customers did not take the time to come to your office and shake your hand and buy you lunch. The sales rep cared enough though.
And now I see this. 15 seconds tie-up time. 300K Downloads. On a "56K modem" through and ISP that often slows down the actual send rate to like 2.4 kilobytes per second. Thats the entire 15 seconds assuming I get a steady send.
This crap I have to put up with to connect to some business sites is absurd. I took a class in a community college on HTML, PERL, CGI. At the end of these simple little classes, I feel I could write pages far better than that I see on websites run by multibillion dollar corporations. Pages that loaded fast in any browser. Pages that did not require plug-ins. Pages that did not require my visitors to put their machines at risk. Just plain interactive pages - that followed HTML4.0 standards. Pages that work. Didn't even need any fancy editors, any plain ascii text editor worked fine. Why is it that when corporations put up pages, many can't make them work?
I know this is a bit of a rant, but I am really getting miffed off at technology being used to make a pain in the ass out of itself, and even businesses I trade with using the dollars I send them to work in collusion with those to force this on me.
By our very design, we have to be robust to survive, or soon we will find ourselves expending way too much of our resources trying to maintain a marginal existence.
I accept the fact things may not always go as nice as I would like, as I hate to see the fires in Montana destroying green forest - but the argument about the fuel load is also valid. If I end up with SARS and don't make it, at least I know it didn't get everybody, and those who made it will have in their genes the codes that make them resistant, not only to SARS but most likely to its derivatives as well.
I know several people who refuse to reproduce because they know they carry bad genetics. They will go ahead and take the years they have, but knowing they carry bad code - they elect not to pass it on. I respect them for that.
I am a tiny piece in a big machine, and ( like kittens ) nature has in place ways of replacing me. I hate the idea of suffering, but we are going to get it either way. Personally, I would rather see a robust genome out of this whole thing so that the quality of life is good for those lucky enough to get the good code, rather than sentence the whole human species to marginal existence.
The contents of the blackhead site would then be mixed with the alcohol, which was easy to eject from the syringe, so I could use the syringe repeatedly. In those days, the plunger was glass too, and made to be used repeatedly. Because I was only pulling suction, I could use the same syringe that I oiled with. The alcohol would readily evaporate if I needed to load it with oil, and any remaining oil did not interfere with the blackhead removal.
Mine blow OUT.
( Filtering exhausted air won't do much good. )
One of the managers at a company ( which is no longer ) that I worked it looked at things like this.
I am an engineer. This is how I see it.
You lose a power supply. No big deal - but in the process of losing the power supply, you corrupt your system. Big deal. This could be very costly to recover from.
Now, even if you were lucky and the system suffered no damage from the failing power supply, you have the time to account for to take the system offline, obtain, and replace the supply. Time is expensive. You are now losing on two paths: You can not use the machine, and you are expending time finding parts and fixing the machine.
Personally, I find it much much more expedient to provide the infrastructure for trouble free operation than to let things fail and try to fix them. Yes, the power supply is cheap. So are engine bearings. But saving money by scrimping on oil changes is hardly a way to "keep companies running smoothly and profitably", rather, as an engineer, I see this the quickest way of running a company into the ground with soaring overhead maintenance costs.
Given my own knowledge of the costs involved and failure statistics, I would opt for prevention, but should the company see fit to make me subordinate to someone who sees fit to override my judgement, I would obey, but find somewhere else to work, for the higher-ups are apparently clueless about the mountain of maintainance costs heading their way - and have no idea how much the management skills they hired is really costing them.
I normally would not be so straighforward, truthful, and harsh in my reply, but you did post AC, so I feel you are fair game.
One is specifically for anti-static buildup and they typically put out both negative and positive ions. They come in several flavors. Simco makes the bipolar types which alternately release waves of positive and negative ions. You can note them as they either drive the ionizer grid with high voltage 60Hz. AC ( my old SIMCO ionizer uses a neon-sign transformer to get the HV to the grid ). Some smaller desktop units have two separate high voltage inverters, one positive and one negative, driven by a small switch that alternately powers one then the other.
There is another ionizer out there that delivers only ONE polarity... usually negative. Thats the one thats bad news. There is all sorts of claims out there that they are healthful. I have no proof of any of it... but they will clean the air - no doubt about it. They charge up every particle in the air and the charged particles attach themselves to anything they can find in the room.. furniture, walls, lamp fixtures, equipment, anything. It does NOT make the dust go away, nor does it collect any. It just makes the dust go attach itself to something else. Because the ions are of only one polarity, they have a tendency of charging everything else in the room up. There is even one book on the market I recall as showing how to make a remote "zapper" out of a high-voltage flyback transformer for prank charging of things so that recepients of the prank get zapped with static charges accumulated from the ion streams beamed to it.
The electrostatic filters are of the second type but provide a convenient removeable surface of the opposite charge to attract the dust charged by the first grid. The Sharper Image unit uses this technique. The grid is an array of small vertical wires ( charged negative ). The removable plates are charged at a lower positive potential. The negatively charged dust is then attracted to the much larger plates and deposit themselves on it, where they will be easy to remove and clean. The higher negative voltage will generate the ions, whereas the lower positive voltage provides the attraction without that much ionization. The attractive forces also draw air along with the dust which creates the "zenion effect", which is also known as "ion wind" to anybody whose played with tesla coils.
I would think the Sharper Image unit would be quite effective in removing dust, but I am concerned about the ozone generation. I have not measured the device, so I do not know if the device emits a balanced quantity of positive and negative ions, which is necessary for making the air "conductive" so that ionic charge buildup is mitigated.