Not useless. I design stuff that works. What do you do?
And the savings were spent on its doing all sorts of annoying stuff I never wanted it to do. That the dealer can't turn off.
Is much of that stuff actually deployed? Five more died today.
The stuff all these kids are doing is far less productive.
John
I design stuff that works. I have been running my own consulting company for the last 26 years. You don't hold a monopoly on productive work. You do, however, seem to hold a monopoly on poorly thought out, strongly held opinions.
Well, that is because your car was designed to please the most people in its market, not just you. If it really bothers you that your car does things you don't want it to do, commission a custom made car. You don't expect an off-the-rack suit to fit you perfectly, do you?
Yes, literally tons of it are deployed, and saving lives too.
It doesn't do a thing against Iranian made armor piercing shaped charges planted in trucks, driven by suicidal drivers, or strapped to suicide bombers.. which is what is doing most of the killing right now.
I bet you never "noodled about" with electronics as a kid. They are making an education out of something they find interesting. Why do you think that is a bad thing?
-Chuck
Key? Key? You mean you don't have an RFID tag ?:-)
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
I take your point John, but I'd have to say that from a pragmatic point of view there are a lot more jobs out there for folks who can get BASIC Stamps to blink LEDs than those who happen to be experts in designing LED flashers out of discrete components -- it really isn't useless. Any random "handheld widget" today is expected to have, e.g., Ethernet or WiFi connectivity, MP3 playback, a color LCD, non-volatile memory, etc., and while "assembling" all the software components to make this happen isn't that horribly difficult, it does still take plenty of time, and *someone* has to do it.
Universities are faced with the tough job of trying to balance how much "hard core" theory and background they teach kids with giving them high-level tools (such as Java programming and web page design classes... and I suppose TekBot classes... :-) ) that are valuable to the largest number of potential employers. I think a lot of problem stems back to the fact that these days pretty much everyone is expected to go through a four- or five-year college program, and the fact that relatively few jobs call for "hard core" knowledge means that the curriculum gets "dumbed down" to a certain extent; there's been a certain amount of convergence between the traditional college program and the traditional "vocational school" or "technical college" over the past couple of decades.
That being said, the traditional classes are still there in universities... even if they are now at the graduate level. And if you take a quick salary survey, I think you'll find that those who possess the traditional "hard" electrical engineering skills -- stuff like a solid understanding of electromagnetics, feedback, noise, timing analysis, etc. -- still command quite a premium in the workplace.
Yeah, but it's getting there. These are "hard" problems, after all, right? :-) Limited speaker-independent speech recognition (e.g., credit card numbers, a dozen or so commands for car heating/cooling/navigation systems, etc.) are commonplace today, everything talks, computer vision is improving all the time (the DARPA autonomous vehicle navigation contests seems to have spurred some research in this area), etc.
Thanks for your input,
---Joel
Another good example of successful domestic robots would be the Roomba!
They generally get quite good reviews on Amazon.
Now, if they can just make a new model one to clean Usenet of garbage, and another to clean dead links from search engines.
-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85. Michael A. Terrell Central Florida
Oh I have those things, but I leave them in a drawer. They're big and clunky and need batteries.
John
"Your vacuum cleaner ate my pants."
Cheers! Rich
You should have bought a Japanese car
My remote... one push, opens driver's door only. Push again within a few seconds, all doors are unlocked.
[snip]. [snip]"Immobilization" _feature_? What is that?
You should have bought a Japanese car ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
I know that German cars aren't as good, but I like the way they feel.
Mine too. Why do I have to push twice (or twist the key twice) when I always want all the doors to open?
I swear, the huge owners manual is mostly safety warnings. I think the car was designed by lawyers.
Most cars have that now. If the car thinks it's been broken in to (or maybe the driver isn't worthy?) it won't run.
I buy Japanese cars for the girls.
John
See
Great pickup line: "Hi, can I buy you a car?"
Cheers! Rich
On Tue, 15 May 2007 22:07:49 -0700, John Larkin wrote: ...
Scary.
Cheers! Rich Grise, Self-appointed Chief, USENET Spelling Police ;-)
A friend of mine used to do that. Then one day the doc diagnosed some heart rhythm problems ...
Tube radios are of remarkable robustness. The old Astor BPJ here in the office has lived in three continents now, is about 50 years old and all it needed was a new IF tube. Plus a wee bias modification because I was unable to find the exact same match and had to "Germanize" that stage.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
Thank you, Miss Grise. I'll be more cariful in the futurr.
John
Define 'deferred':
Girl Scouts jumping over a camp fire.
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