I was involved in research on effective color mapping at Lawrence Livermore 40 years ago. The issues discussed here were ones we analyzed and designed mapping tools to provide mappings that worked well for a variety of applications. Mapping proved closely linked to both the nature of the data (e.g. smooth vs. high contrast edges vs. noisy) and what the goal of the mapping was. I know of photography and graphics designers who still use the papers generated from this research, but mostly it seems to have been forgotten,
Rainbow color maps are occasionally useful, but for most cases they are dreadfully bad. Sawtooths are very good for many applications and we found that random walks, with appropriate parameters, were especially effective even though a bit of trial and error was required tor good results. A rainbow that was adjusted for the perception of the human visual system was a good general purpose mapping, but it looked quite a bit different from the normal, flat rainbow most commonly used both then and today.
FedEx packages are travelling through a confined system of checkpoints. Unless Christie wants to put checkpoints all around America and have everyone showing their papers to TSA agents on every public highway, it just won't work.
The day is young! This most likely means you have just not heard the latest comments from some other candidate. If all else fails (and it probably won't), you can depend on The Donald.
Very nice, but hardly new. Both ESnet (U.S. DOE research network) and Internet2, the national collegiate research network have been running at Nx100G to major research sites and the rest of the Internet for at least two years. They provide Internet service places like CalTech, MIT, the University of Califorrnia, Berkeley Lab and Fermilab. These are full production networks with ESnet already moving vast amounts of data from the LHC to the US for storage and dissemination to many public and private research facilities.
It's really amazing what you can do in a spreadsheet.
Several years ago I was involved with management of optical wavelength switching gear (DWDM) in conjunction with a large, national telcom. They had some very well designed tools with very nice GUIs to allow things like building an optical path. Things that require managing complex database and doing a lot of checking on availability of resources and validity of the circuit.
It was all written in Excel!
I was amazed at it all. Nothing looked at all like a spreadsheet. and it actually worked and seemed pretty maintainable. I'm sure that they would have been delighted to see this sort of things as the one issue was the time it took to update the screen when certain changes were made (re-calculation).
And exactly what were people committing into in 1980?:O
RCS was released in 1982, but SCCS goes back to 1972. In the latter part of the 70s it was dominant and available on IBM OS/360 systems and letter on AT&T Unix System III and V. It was not terribly difficult to move data from SCCS to RCS when it moved to a dominant system.
So managing a code base going back to 1980 is not at all unreasonable.
People who feel "offended" by an algorithm are batshit crazy.
No, for the most part they have no idea what an algorithm is. The deliberate "monkey" references used to refer to blacks touches a very painful part of many and, not even caring why, they are disturbed. They should not be, but they are.
In San Francisco there was (is?) no law against nudity in public. Last year the Board of Supervisors (the SF equivalent to a city counsel) voted to require those with an unclothed buttocks to cover any public seat with a towel or napkin before sitting. Many businesses also banned nudity and suggestive behavior was still illegal, but certainly you could not be charged because a child saw you while unclothed.
Exactly! People are conflating the original from Playboy (which I had) and the USC scan used by every facility in the world that was working on image processing... especially color processing. The famed image was only head and the top of the shoulder from the full centerfold.
The other images included "Drop" and "Baboon" as well as some I no longer remember. "Drop" was a glass of milk just after a drop had landed dead center, raising a drop of splash. Baboon was also mis-named. It was a male mandrill. Red nose and blue cheeks. It was the one we used most frequently.
Having worked in image processing and having made extensive use of the "standard" USC images including Lenna, I can assure you that the Lenna image was cropped at the shoulder. The Wikipedia article shows the image as encoded as an uncompressed 512x512 image.
USC errored in the image name, naming it "Lenna" when the model was correctly identified in the Playboy issue as "Lena Soderberg".
I'm confused. I have a T320. It's about three years old. With two minor changes, the "mock-up" picture is identiacl to my T520. The only differences I can see are the ugly "ThinkPad" logo which in no way is reminiscent of the old, multicolor IBM logo.and the status LEDs being moved from the bottom edge of the lid to the keyboard where they replace the useless "ThinkVantage" button.
Identical TrackPad and buttons. Identical fingerprint reader. Not very different. Makes me wonder what the latest ThinkPads look like, that a three year old system could be considered a "throw-back" to the old 700. They already brought back the most glaring "lost" feature when the new T450 restored the TrackPoint, a feature I consider essential as it "fixed" my RSI issues. (I just disable that silly touchpad.)
Words and phrases like 'hideous', 'food poisoning', and 'to hell with this'. The article needs to be withdrawn, edited, and resubmitted. Otherwise I can't take it seriously. Highly unprofessional.
Shouldn't this be labeled as "Funny"? I mean, this is slashdot. Do you really expect anything like "professional" editing?
FWIW, I find the words pretty appropriate. If you use the Internet, you better take them seriously.
Most Americans simply don't negotiate and even look on negotiation as a "bad thing". Last week there was a letter to one of the advice columns (I don't recall which) from someone who was upset that a friend was so ruse as to negotiate a better price on some item from a local merchant. Said that the negotiation was rude and embarrassing and that it was essentially stealing from the small merchant.
And the columnist agreed!
I was simply stunned. I am a terrible negotiator, but I know I should do so and never thought of it as rude. The vendor is welcome to say "No, the price is fixed."... and they almost never do so. In many cases the posted price is well over when the merchant needs to make a profit and has a "real" price that is acceptable.
Employers look at it the same way. If they can get you cheap, they are happy. At some point they will decide that you are not worth it. Negotiation is simply a matter of agreeing a a "price point" that is within the a range acceptable to both parties.That may be the empty set.
If you really want or need the job, you need to be less aggressive and make sure that the set is not empty. But a good negotiator can almost always reach a point that is better then the first offer by a significant amount.
Most stations are not open 24 hours. Updates are normally run at night when there are no customers.Even stations open around the clock, at night have light business loads, so taking two to four pumps off-line at a time may be quite reasonable. So some of these solutions should work. The ones to avoid are those that remove the air-gap to the Internet as these expose lots of potential issues.
The switch with VLANs looks like a reasonable approach.
Oh, and every gas station has ducts running to the pumps, so there won't be any exposed cables to trip over. Just be sure that the cables and how they are run comply with codes.
Weight is really not relevant to passenger cars and light-duty trucks(e.g. pick-ups). A big SUV may weigh 2.5 tons. An empty container on its carriage support will weigh in at 5.5 to 6.5 tons not including the tractor. That is why many (most?) states already charge trucks based on weight.
The difference between a hybrid or electric and a standard vehicle is noise and no passenger auto is heavy enough to make a significant impact on road wear if it is a road normally used for tractor-trailers (18-wheelers).
Weight-based fees for passenger vehicles really, really don't make much sense.
When I grew up in Colorado Alamosa disposed of treated sewage into the Arkansas River. Pueblo used Arkansas River water, treated it, and sent it right back into the river. La Junta took its water from the Arkansas, treated it and used it. It then treated the sewage and put it back into the river. Everyone seemed aware and untroubled by this simple fact: Everyone downstream from at least Alamosa was drinking some treated sewage and nobody bought bottled water.
Standard bathroom graffiti in Alamosa read "Flush twice! Pueblo needs the water!!!". In Pueblo you saw the same thing with La Junta substituted for Pueblo.
While I agree with the concept, that is often unwise. It makes the assumption that everyone wants to be treated the same way when this is often not true. It is especially likely to be untrue where psychological characteristics are as different as they are between genders.
It is also unwise to assume that they are always different or the same just because of a difference in gender. These facts make human interactions very tricky and leads to lots of confusion and stereotyping. It also does make life interesting.
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.
FTFY
Have you read the BSD license? It's kinda hard to steal something that is truly free. I respect and appreciate the GPL, but write code under BSD because I want my (pretty crappy) code to be free for anyone foolish enough to use it without restrictions.
Just to be perfectly clear, payola is illegal. It has been an on-going issue for decades, but most radio stations are NOT paid to play songs. When payments are made, they are normally to the DJ or program manager, not the radio station, itself.
Radio stations pay NO royalties to the artists. They do pay to the publisher and the author of the song through a licensing organization. In the US this is usually ASCAP American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) or BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). For decades the artists/performer has been held to receive "payment" in the form of promotion of the performance by air-play and deserving of no other compensation.
Streaming services (e.g. Pandora) claimed that they were providing the same promotional service as radio and should have the same exemption as radio, but the courts rejected this.
I'm a former DJ at a commercial station and was never offered payola. The boss (CEO) made it clear that anyone accepting payment to play any song would be summarily terminated. (I think he meant "fired", but he might have preferred a more drastic termination.)
You (probably under 125 Kg) + bicycle (probably under 20 Kg) vs even a compact car (probably over 1000 Kg... probably a LOT over). Guess who wins (e.i. lives).
As a frequent cyclist I am regularly amazed at the incredibly stupid things I see others do. Often because they don't know better (e.g. riding on the wrong side of the street) or because they are on power trip (e.g. it's legal to use the full lane even though it is wide enough to allow a car to safely pass).
The first rule of the road for every cyclist who wants to continue being one into his/her 70s is NEVER do anything unexpected by a car. You my end up dead and the car driver may have his/her life ruined because you 1) Don't know the rules of the road, 2) Don't care, 3) You ego and competitive instinct tell you to show them who's boss!
I wish drivers knew the rules, too. I have almost been hit twice because divers turned right in front of me without moving into the bike lane as required and I bet they don't know that they are supposed to do so. I lived to tell the tale because I assumed that the car (or, in one case, the bus) just might turn right without realizing I was there and was able to dodge them. Always, always assume the driver is on his/her phone or otherwise unaware you exist and has no idea of the rule of the road. You will be annoyed at times, but you will live longer (on average).
I live in Chile and we have free instantaneous wiretransfers which are required by law to be protected by 2 factor auth, Banks still make boatloads of money, not sure how the US can still be in the dark ages in this regard.
You answered your own question. Banks may make boatloads of money, but they always want bigger boats and more of them. Anything not required that costs money is simply not going to happen unless it is pretty sure to generate more money than it costs or is mandated by government action (wish is pretty unlikely, since big banks pretty much own that part of the government here).
The big banks got most of the minor restraints on risky investments put into place after the 2008 collapse removed last week. Legislation written by Citibank and probably mostly paid for by them as well.
FWIW, it is a clear violation of federal law to use ANY federal money to pay for alcoholic beverages. Likewise for lobbying. Some of the others may be, as well. The shirts are probably legal. Business expenses may or may not have been, depending on exactly what they cover, but are likely legal. Lots of things are "fuzzy".
IANAL or a procurement officer, but spent over 30 years dealing with federal procurement rules for contractors.
In California we are still releasing felons after little or no jail time due to lack of space. It sometimes is almost funny.
Recently Dorris Payne, an international jewel thief, was sentenced to four years for a $40,000 theft from a jewelry store in Palm Desert, California, a crime committed while on probation for a prior theft in Los Angeles. She was released by the sheriff after about a month as a "low -risk" offender (her thefts had never involved weapons) when there was no room available in the county jail. She was in the jail instead of prison because the prisons were so overcrowded that the governor ordered that most "low-risk" convicts be held in county facilities. Not that the county jails had room for them, either.
She was re-arrested for probation violation a few weeks later, but was released in a few days as there was still no room and probation violation does not change her "low-risk" status.
So she committed a crime, was released from LA, committed another in Palm Desert and is still not locked up. Seems like the system is neither protecting the public nor discouraging the criminal from continuing her life of crime.
Did I mention that Dorris Payne is 83? I don't see her as likely to become a model citizen in the future.
It's not automatic, but it's not rare. I worked on several telecom contracts worth many millions of USD for a federal agancy. Of the four times this basic contract was bid, for OC-3, OC12, and 10GE and most recently, 100GE including IRUs on the fiber, the award was only challenged once. A different bidder won on each re-bid.
The challenge no doubt cost the taxpayers a great deal of money and delayed deployment for almost a year. I am extremely thankful that it never happened again!
Bad caps are a common issue in cheap products of all sorts. Computers had lots of power supplies dying off a few years ago and CFLs have had the same issue. A couple of years ago I bought four CFLs. All died in under a week. I took one apart and found a failed capacitor. I assume all four were from the same production run and all had the same low quality but very cheap caps. All were Lowe's house brand and were far less expensive than the Philips or other CFLs and I'm sure that the components were the very cheapest that the manufacturer could find and probably with specs that were lower than any quality manufacturer would allow. I didn't check, so it is also possible that they were installed backwards, but they tool a little too long to die for this to be likely
My house is 18 years old and almost all of the original incandescent lights are still working fine.Not a single one of the 14 flood lights in the house has ever failed even though those in the kitchen are used quite a bit. I have replaced almost half of my ten CFLs, some more than once. None is over 3 years old
My biggest issue was that the ones I used were top-rated in Consumer Reports. They did not do any life testing nor did they tear down any units to look at the components. I just hope the much more expensive LEDs I have now installed have fewer issues. I'm sticking to name brands with these as well as CFLs. None of these has failed as of today.
Slashdot Mirror
I was involved in research on effective color mapping at Lawrence Livermore 40 years ago. The issues discussed here were ones we analyzed and designed mapping tools to provide mappings that worked well for a variety of applications. Mapping proved closely linked to both the nature of the data (e.g. smooth vs. high contrast edges vs. noisy) and what the goal of the mapping was. I know of photography and graphics designers who still use the papers generated from this research, but mostly it seems to have been forgotten,
Rainbow color maps are occasionally useful, but for most cases they are dreadfully bad. Sawtooths are very good for many applications and we found that random walks, with appropriate parameters, were especially effective even though a bit of trial and error was required tor good results. A rainbow that was adjusted for the perception of the human visual system was a good general purpose mapping, but it looked quite a bit different from the normal, flat rainbow most commonly used both then and today.
FedEx packages are travelling through a confined system of checkpoints. Unless Christie wants to put checkpoints all around America and have everyone showing their papers to TSA agents on every public highway, it just won't work.
The day is young! This most likely means you have just not heard the latest comments from some other candidate. If all else fails (and it probably won't), you can depend on The Donald.
Very nice, but hardly new. Both ESnet (U.S. DOE research network) and Internet2, the national collegiate research network have been running at Nx100G to major research sites and the rest of the Internet for at least two years. They provide Internet service places like CalTech, MIT, the University of Califorrnia, Berkeley Lab and Fermilab. These are full production networks with ESnet already moving vast amounts of data from the LHC to the US for storage and dissemination to many public and private research facilities.
It's really amazing what you can do in a spreadsheet.
Several years ago I was involved with management of optical wavelength switching gear (DWDM) in conjunction with a large, national telcom. They had some very well designed tools with very nice GUIs to allow things like building an optical path. Things that require managing complex database and doing a lot of checking on availability of resources and validity of the circuit.
It was all written in Excel!
I was amazed at it all. Nothing looked at all like a spreadsheet. and it actually worked and seemed pretty maintainable. I'm sure that they would have been delighted to see this sort of things as the one issue was the time it took to update the screen when certain changes were made (re-calculation).
And exactly what were people committing into in 1980? :O
RCS was released in 1982, but SCCS goes back to 1972. In the latter part of the 70s it was dominant and available on IBM OS/360 systems and letter on AT&T Unix System III and V. It was not terribly difficult to move data from SCCS to RCS when it moved to a dominant system.
So managing a code base going back to 1980 is not at all unreasonable.
People who feel "offended" by an algorithm are batshit crazy.
No, for the most part they have no idea what an algorithm is. The deliberate "monkey" references used to refer to blacks touches a very painful part of many and, not even caring why, they are disturbed. They should not be, but they are.
In San Francisco there was (is?) no law against nudity in public. Last year the Board of Supervisors (the SF equivalent to a city counsel) voted to require those with an unclothed buttocks to cover any public seat with a towel or napkin before sitting. Many businesses also banned nudity and suggestive behavior was still illegal, but certainly you could not be charged because a child saw you while unclothed.
Exactly! People are conflating the original from Playboy (which I had) and the USC scan used by every facility in the world that was working on image processing... especially color processing. The famed image was only head and the top of the shoulder from the full centerfold.
The other images included "Drop" and "Baboon" as well as some I no longer remember. "Drop" was a glass of milk just after a drop had landed dead center, raising a drop of splash. Baboon was also mis-named. It was a male mandrill. Red nose and blue cheeks. It was the one we used most frequently.
Having worked in image processing and having made extensive use of the "standard" USC images including Lenna, I can assure you that the Lenna image was cropped at the shoulder. The Wikipedia article shows the image as encoded as an uncompressed 512x512 image.
USC errored in the image name, naming it "Lenna" when the model was correctly identified in the Playboy issue as "Lena Soderberg".
I'm confused. I have a T320. It's about three years old. With two minor changes, the "mock-up" picture is identiacl to my T520. The only differences I can see are the ugly "ThinkPad" logo which in no way is reminiscent of the old, multicolor IBM logo.and the status LEDs being moved from the bottom edge of the lid to the keyboard where they replace the useless "ThinkVantage" button.
Identical TrackPad and buttons. Identical fingerprint reader. Not very different. Makes me wonder what the latest ThinkPads look like, that a three year old system could be considered a "throw-back" to the old 700. They already brought back the most glaring "lost" feature when the new T450 restored the TrackPoint, a feature I consider essential as it "fixed" my RSI issues. (I just disable that silly touchpad.)
Words and phrases like 'hideous', 'food poisoning', and 'to hell with this'. The article needs to be withdrawn, edited, and resubmitted. Otherwise I can't take it seriously. Highly unprofessional.
Shouldn't this be labeled as "Funny"? I mean, this is slashdot. Do you really expect anything like "professional" editing?
FWIW, I find the words pretty appropriate. If you use the Internet, you better take them seriously.
Most Americans simply don't negotiate and even look on negotiation as a "bad thing". Last week there was a letter to one of the advice columns (I don't recall which) from someone who was upset that a friend was so ruse as to negotiate a better price on some item from a local merchant. Said that the negotiation was rude and embarrassing and that it was essentially stealing from the small merchant.
And the columnist agreed!
I was simply stunned. I am a terrible negotiator, but I know I should do so and never thought of it as rude. The vendor is welcome to say "No, the price is fixed."... and they almost never do so. In many cases the posted price is well over when the merchant needs to make a profit and has a "real" price that is acceptable.
Employers look at it the same way. If they can get you cheap, they are happy. At some point they will decide that you are not worth it. Negotiation is simply a matter of agreeing a a "price point" that is within the a range acceptable to both parties.That may be the empty set.
If you really want or need the job, you need to be less aggressive and make sure that the set is not empty. But a good negotiator can almost always reach a point that is better then the first offer by a significant amount.
Most stations are not open 24 hours. Updates are normally run at night when there are no customers.Even stations open around the clock, at night have light business loads, so taking two to four pumps off-line at a time may be quite reasonable. So some of these solutions should work. The ones to avoid are those that remove the air-gap to the Internet as these expose lots of potential issues.
The switch with VLANs looks like a reasonable approach.
Oh, and every gas station has ducts running to the pumps, so there won't be any exposed cables to trip over. Just be sure that the cables and how they are run comply with codes.
Weight is really not relevant to passenger cars and light-duty trucks(e.g. pick-ups). A big SUV may weigh 2.5 tons. An empty container on its carriage support will weigh in at 5.5 to 6.5 tons not including the tractor. That is why many (most?) states already charge trucks based on weight.
The difference between a hybrid or electric and a standard vehicle is noise and no passenger auto is heavy enough to make a significant impact on road wear if it is a road normally used for tractor-trailers (18-wheelers).
Weight-based fees for passenger vehicles really, really don't make much sense.
When I grew up in Colorado Alamosa disposed of treated sewage into the Arkansas River. Pueblo used Arkansas River water, treated it, and sent it right back into the river. La Junta took its water from the Arkansas, treated it and used it. It then treated the sewage and put it back into the river. Everyone seemed aware and untroubled by this simple fact: Everyone downstream from at least Alamosa was drinking some treated sewage and nobody bought bottled water.
Standard bathroom graffiti in Alamosa read "Flush twice! Pueblo needs the water!!!". In Pueblo you saw the same thing with La Junta substituted for Pueblo.
While I agree with the concept, that is often unwise. It makes the assumption that everyone wants to be treated the same way when this is often not true. It is especially likely to be untrue where psychological characteristics are as different as they are between genders.
It is also unwise to assume that they are always different or the same just because of a difference in gender. These facts make human interactions very tricky and leads to lots of confusion and stereotyping. It also does make life interesting.
Full disclosure: I was an Apple Core OS kernel team member at the time. I stole 7% of the kernel that runs on the things from Mach and BSD.
FTFY
Have you read the BSD license? It's kinda hard to steal something that is truly free. I respect and appreciate the GPL, but write code under BSD because I want my (pretty crappy) code to be free for anyone foolish enough to use it without restrictions.
Thank you so much. I wish this could be a scored 6!
Just to be perfectly clear, payola is illegal. It has been an on-going issue for decades, but most radio stations are NOT paid to play songs. When payments are made, they are normally to the DJ or program manager, not the radio station, itself.
Radio stations pay NO royalties to the artists. They do pay to the publisher and the author of the song through a licensing organization. In the US this is usually ASCAP American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) or BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). For decades the artists/performer has been held to receive "payment" in the form of promotion of the performance by air-play and deserving of no other compensation.
Streaming services (e.g. Pandora) claimed that they were providing the same promotional service as radio and should have the same exemption as radio, but the courts rejected this.
I'm a former DJ at a commercial station and was never offered payola. The boss (CEO) made it clear that anyone accepting payment to play any song would be summarily terminated. (I think he meant "fired", but he might have preferred a more drastic termination.)
You (probably under 125 Kg) + bicycle (probably under 20 Kg) vs even a compact car (probably over 1000 Kg... probably a LOT over). Guess who wins (e.i. lives).
As a frequent cyclist I am regularly amazed at the incredibly stupid things I see others do. Often because they don't know better (e.g. riding on the wrong side of the street) or because they are on power trip (e.g. it's legal to use the full lane even though it is wide enough to allow a car to safely pass).
The first rule of the road for every cyclist who wants to continue being one into his/her 70s is NEVER do anything unexpected by a car. You my end up dead and the car driver may have his/her life ruined because you 1) Don't know the rules of the road, 2) Don't care, 3) You ego and competitive instinct tell you to show them who's boss!
I wish drivers knew the rules, too. I have almost been hit twice because divers turned right in front of me without moving into the bike lane as required and I bet they don't know that they are supposed to do so. I lived to tell the tale because I assumed that the car (or, in one case, the bus) just might turn right without realizing I was there and was able to dodge them. Always, always assume the driver is on his/her phone or otherwise unaware you exist and has no idea of the rule of the road. You will be annoyed at times, but you will live longer (on average).
I live in Chile and we have free instantaneous wiretransfers which are required by law to be protected by 2 factor auth, Banks still make boatloads of money, not sure how the US can still be in the dark ages in this regard.
You answered your own question. Banks may make boatloads of money, but they always want bigger boats and more of them. Anything not required that costs money is simply not going to happen unless it is pretty sure to generate more money than it costs or is mandated by government action (wish is pretty unlikely, since big banks pretty much own that part of the government here).
The big banks got most of the minor restraints on risky investments put into place after the 2008 collapse removed last week. Legislation written by Citibank and probably mostly paid for by them as well.
FWIW, it is a clear violation of federal law to use ANY federal money to pay for alcoholic beverages. Likewise for lobbying. Some of the others may be, as well. The shirts are probably legal. Business expenses may or may not have been, depending on exactly what they cover, but are likely legal. Lots of things are "fuzzy".
IANAL or a procurement officer, but spent over 30 years dealing with federal procurement rules for contractors.
In California we are still releasing felons after little or no jail time due to lack of space. It sometimes is almost funny.
Recently Dorris Payne, an international jewel thief, was sentenced to four years for a $40,000 theft from a jewelry store in Palm Desert, California, a crime committed while on probation for a prior theft in Los Angeles. She was released by the sheriff after about a month as a "low -risk" offender (her thefts had never involved weapons) when there was no room available in the county jail. She was in the jail instead of prison because the prisons were so overcrowded that the governor ordered that most "low-risk" convicts be held in county facilities. Not that the county jails had room for them, either.
She was re-arrested for probation violation a few weeks later, but was released in a few days as there was still no room and probation violation does not change her "low-risk" status.
So she committed a crime, was released from LA, committed another in Palm Desert and is still not locked up. Seems like the system is neither protecting the public nor discouraging the criminal from continuing her life of crime.
Did I mention that Dorris Payne is 83? I don't see her as likely to become a model citizen in the future.
Clearly, California has no surplus of jail cells!
It's not automatic, but it's not rare. I worked on several telecom contracts worth many millions of USD for a federal agancy. Of the four times this basic contract was bid, for OC-3, OC12, and 10GE and most recently, 100GE including IRUs on the fiber, the award was only challenged once. A different bidder won on each re-bid.
The challenge no doubt cost the taxpayers a great deal of money and delayed deployment for almost a year. I am extremely thankful that it never happened again!
Bad caps are a common issue in cheap products of all sorts. Computers had lots of power supplies dying off a few years ago and CFLs have had the same issue. A couple of years ago I bought four CFLs. All died in under a week. I took one apart and found a failed capacitor. I assume all four were from the same production run and all had the same low quality but very cheap caps. All were Lowe's house brand and were far less expensive than the Philips or other CFLs and I'm sure that the components were the very cheapest that the manufacturer could find and probably with specs that were lower than any quality manufacturer would allow. I didn't check, so it is also possible that they were installed backwards, but they tool a little too long to die for this to be likely
My house is 18 years old and almost all of the original incandescent lights are still working fine.Not a single one of the 14 flood lights in the house has ever failed even though those in the kitchen are used quite a bit. I have replaced almost half of my ten CFLs, some more than once. None is over 3 years old
My biggest issue was that the ones I used were top-rated in Consumer Reports. They did not do any life testing nor did they tear down any units to look at the components. I just hope the much more expensive LEDs I have now installed have fewer issues. I'm sticking to name brands with these as well as CFLs. None of these has failed as of today.