Car companies have worked for years to deaden car interiors to block out engine and road noise, This is mostly because for a lot of people, engine noise is just noise, and they would rather not hear it. The amount of deadening applied under the hood, on the firewall, on the floor, on body panels, is stagerring, and then tere are folks who fit even more deadening (I'm not talking the audiophile type - just people who want a quiet car) like rubber undercoatings to reduce road noise
Then they realize that this has turned off another demographic that likes to hear this noise. They decide that playing the sound back through speakers (there have been mechanical approaches as well ) was the cheapest option. This way, you could have a car that was quiet most of the time, but could get loud if you wanted it to. Honestly I don't see a problem here. The growl of an engine is just an indicator of its performance . If you designed an intake/exhaust system just to sound good, how is it different from an electronic system which does that ?
If the actual hardware cost is less than 99$, it could have still been possible to sell it at a loss if you were selling it at 99$( cost of R&D, marketing, any other fixed costs spread over the initial run would price it somewhere a lot higher). Since all these have already been written off, and not added to the costing any more, it makes sense to make and sell touchpads as long as the marginal cost of production is less than 99$
A lot of the folks who work with me were dropped overnight into projects they had no clue about, and couldnt get any either , because all the relevant info was with the people who were busy, and no one had any time to transfer the info either. Now that we've learnt the stuff, we've encouraged most of the people to share the info so that others will not have the hard time we had. We use drupal btw.
More often than not, its about moving relevant stuff off people's inboxes , and into a content management system that can be acessed by all, besides , searching in drupal is way faster than a mailbox search.
Of course all the wikis and CMS's would come to nothing if no one believed it. "buy - in" in management speak . you need it at all levels. and it doesnt stop at setting up a wiki, and leaving it at that. The whole thing is , at the risk of sounding cliched, a process, and some incentive for people to do this ( like karma points for adding stuff) is helpful. you need to have people contributing , and recognize and reward the effort , and make people realize the difference it makes to them. If it just makes the job of , say management or IT better, it wont help . You should be able to show that it helps the people who are contributing to it...
The Russians dug 1000 ft in the ground and found copper wire, They declared Russians had electricity 1000 years back
US dug and found Optical fibre, and said US had telepphone
2000 years back
Indians dug, found nothing, Then said we had wireless communication
technology 5000 years back
I'm in a a big IT services co, and we were developing our second major product in.NET. However, the folks working at it realized that even though.NET can be implemented with a few noobs with M$ certification, it really wont do all the things folks want done. So the whole thing is being rewritten in java. It is easy to find M$ certified "programmers"...they're dime a dozen, and thats what PHB's typically want. Thankfully,Our's realized that their way wasn't working, so let us have it our way. Hope your company doesn't have to learn it the hard way !
"The art of electronics" is *THE BIBLE* as far as further learning in electronics is considered. no book will teach you as much and take you as far as this book will. go get it now!
My PC once got hit by a trojan which created a zillion copies of itself in my downloads and shared folders , each with a different name , all names of warez
what if I got hit by a trojan which created fake files the same size and names as popular copyrighted MP3's in my download folder. from someone else's point of view, it would seem as if i was sharing and uploading copyrighted music.
I found out about the trojan when i went hunting for the missing disk space.I immediately deleted it , as well as all its copies. If i delete these 'fake' files, and later my hard disk was confiscated and it found that i had deleted those files, will i be responsible for destruction of evidence?
Oil cos to give out Rs 1 lakh cars to every family? when most dont even know how to drive?
If they DID go ahead with the laptop program, the first thing next would be a donation of one Windows os from M$... catch em young they say.Already... "computer education" in india means learning Word, Powerpoint and Excel.why would any govt want to spend its money for that?
And as harlemjoe pointed out,
these laptops are too easy to steal. Corruption in India is a big big deal. I shudder to think of the implications of thousands of these going "missing" and reappearing on the black or grey markets. In truly poor areas, parents would happily pawn the device -- which can be as much as 2 or 3 months income to some of the poorest parents.
There have been several schemes were things like sewing machines and the like were handed out for free for self employment.A lot of the machines mysteriously dissapeared along the distribution chain, and the few which did really get to the people were pawned off.
Either way,most kids dont even have basic skills like literacy.I fail to see how a computer can help,expecialy when its in a foreign language(esp whn india has several dozen native languages)
And even the kids who do get pc's most end up as gaming rigs...The general perception that computers can be used just as much for pr0n as they can be for education has started reaching the older generation. giving every kid a laptop is not a magic solution that will make all of India's problems go away
Slashdot Mirror
Car companies have worked for years to deaden car interiors to block out engine and road noise, This is mostly because for a lot of people, engine noise is just noise, and they would rather not hear it. The amount of deadening applied under the hood, on the firewall, on the floor, on body panels, is stagerring, and then tere are folks who fit even more deadening (I'm not talking the audiophile type - just people who want a quiet car) like rubber undercoatings to reduce road noise Then they realize that this has turned off another demographic that likes to hear this noise. They decide that playing the sound back through speakers (there have been mechanical approaches as well ) was the cheapest option. This way, you could have a car that was quiet most of the time, but could get loud if you wanted it to. Honestly I don't see a problem here. The growl of an engine is just an indicator of its performance . If you designed an intake/exhaust system just to sound good, how is it different from an electronic system which does that ?
If the actual hardware cost is less than 99$, it could have still been possible to sell it at a loss if you were selling it at 99$( cost of R&D, marketing, any other fixed costs spread over the initial run would price it somewhere a lot higher). Since all these have already been written off, and not added to the costing any more, it makes sense to make and sell touchpads as long as the marginal cost of production is less than 99$
http://www.tatadocomo.com/pps-tariff-plans.aspx
A lot of the folks who work with me were dropped overnight into projects they had no clue about, and couldnt get any either , because all the relevant info was with the people who were busy, and no one had any time to transfer the info either. Now that we've learnt the stuff, we've encouraged most of the people to share the info so that others will not have the hard time we had. We use drupal btw. More often than not, its about moving relevant stuff off people's inboxes , and into a content management system that can be acessed by all, besides , searching in drupal is way faster than a mailbox search. Of course all the wikis and CMS's would come to nothing if no one believed it. "buy - in" in management speak . you need it at all levels. and it doesnt stop at setting up a wiki, and leaving it at that. The whole thing is , at the risk of sounding cliched, a process, and some incentive for people to do this ( like karma points for adding stuff) is helpful. you need to have people contributing , and recognize and reward the effort , and make people realize the difference it makes to them. If it just makes the job of , say management or IT better, it wont help . You should be able to show that it helps the people who are contributing to it...
The Russians dug 1000 ft in the ground and found copper wire, They declared Russians had electricity 1000 years back US dug and found Optical fibre, and said US had telepphone 2000 years back Indians dug, found nothing, Then said we had wireless communication technology 5000 years back
seems kinda familiar.
I'm in a a big IT services co, and we were developing our second major product in .NET. However, the folks working at it realized that even though .NET can be implemented with a few noobs with M$ certification, it really wont do all the things folks want done. So the whole thing is being rewritten in java. It is easy to find M$ certified "programmers"...they're dime a dozen, and thats what PHB's typically want. Thankfully,Our's realized that their way wasn't working, so let us have it our way. Hope your company doesn't have to learn it the hard way !
"The art of electronics" is *THE BIBLE* as far as further learning in electronics is considered. no book will teach you as much and take you as far as this book will. go get it now!
Another Vote for the Art of Electronics By Horowitz and Hill (ISBN: 0521370957) Every geek of hardware should have one
Argh! ars technica linked to it http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/4/ 24/3724 .. no wonder the high rank
look for the "always look better " link in the last paragraph
same thing happens if you do a google image search . Even with strict safesearch on. Weird
It's been around for quite some time..
My PC once got hit by a trojan which created a zillion copies of itself in my downloads and shared folders , each with a different name , all names of warez what if I got hit by a trojan which created fake files the same size and names as popular copyrighted MP3's in my download folder. from someone else's point of view, it would seem as if i was sharing and uploading copyrighted music. I found out about the trojan when i went hunting for the missing disk space.I immediately deleted it , as well as all its copies. If i delete these 'fake' files, and later my hard disk was confiscated and it found that i had deleted those files, will i be responsible for destruction of evidence?
Ever even seen a F1 steering wheel?
D E_ID=1945
http://www.stuffmag.co.uk/hotstuffarticlerss.asp?
must be one of these!
Burglar caught breaking and entering on home security cam.... to sue for violation of privacy?
............You own Windows
LOL! http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/1021/ass9sn.jpg
I wonder what They'd do about the exponential discharge...Everyone knows batteries discharge much more smoothly...