Maybe they should take a look at the procedures in those professions and learn from that :-)
My designs have no radiation problems :-))
Here's a dose of reality: Our cable TV system leaks like a sieve. You can pick up cable stations on a protable TV with the antenna almost pushed in. The previous owner had cable TV. What did the guys do to hook him up? They slobbered coax all across the yard, on the surface, exposed to the elements and critters and hooves of deer and whatnot. It's still there, looks miserable. Sometimes they work on the system boxes and often when I walk down the street I see that the cover of the box on our lot has just been shoved on, not locked. A few stormy days later it's blown off and the electronic blocks in there sit in a pool of water. Then I empty it and put the lid on straight. We have no cable and I am not obligated to do that but I just can't see electronics waste away out of neglect.
The phone guys are a lot more professional IMHO though.
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Regards, Joerg
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Got any stats, like about a.b.s.e.? And don't count the spam and stuff.
Most servers have simply deep-sixed all alt.* groups. The result is rather striking. I can still receive the non-binary ones and just as one example alt.home.automation which used to be rather active until mid
2008 currently consists of two (!) threads. That's all there was in 30 consecutive days which is when they roll off my newsreader. Oh, the two threads combined consist of a grand total of three posts meaning one remains without anyone answering. Because there ain't nobody out there no more ;-)
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Regards, Joerg
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If you pay, you can get the binaries. The reason you need to pay is because of the huge amount of traffic.
Ofcourse the discussion groups are dying. A web-based forum is much easier to work with and you can add pictures and so on.
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On a sunny day (Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:56:09 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :
I agree, I participate in several web based forums and it is not a pleasant way to work. This whole browser based idea is just mainly crap. Unfortunately many newcomers to Internet never even heard of Usenet or IRC. They are pushed to *twitter* by the media, who are pushed to do that by the politics in power, to *break* the world wide communication between people, and, if possible, make every service a pay service.
In my view, in my country, you can sue the service provider (like Verizon), it is breach of contract, I would love to see a class action suit, but I am not on verizon so cannot help there. They are charging the same for less service, so ask for a lower monthly payment to start with.
I second that, use it myself as well now. No binaries though.
Just watch out that they don't have a spam spewer reputation or your posts might not propagate to all servers and thus may not be seen by all others. I mean, 10 Euros is per year and not per month. That sure ain't an arm and a leg.
One "free" service is via Google but we know what their reputation is WRT Usenet ...
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Of course they don't, but you don't let the phone company modify your designs.
If there is that much leakage report them to the FCC. Maybe the FCC will shut the system down and make them build it right. A complaint in the past brought a quick response. That was why we used the 'Sniffer' system to look for leaks in each company truck. If the alarm went off, the tech had to stop and investigate, or call the lead tech to meet them there. The fines from the FCC were quite high. Most leakage problems were cause by people stealing cable service.
If the system is as bad as you claim, file a complaint with the local government who gave them the franchise to operate. I have never seen a franchise that allowed a system to operate that way. They are told to fix their problems, or the franchise may be given to someone else at renewal time. If there are enough customers to pay the bills, someone will build a new system. If not, it will go dark.
Really? Try getting the phone company to fix what they don't consider a problem. Like one line in a group that is about -20 dB, compared to other lines. This was part of a block of lines used for a radio station call in program. That took several days, only to be told, I can hear a dial tone.
Or they send someone out to connect the phones for a new college campus, and disconnect the county Sheriff's dispatch system, two radio station's STL links, and part of a local airfield's radio system because their database is out of date.
Try calling on a friday afternoon when half your WATS lines die, only to be told that they can't get there till the following Friday and you are 15 minutes from the start of a Telethon.
How about when reporting a noisy phone line, and they ask you to speak louder, then tell you the line is OK?
When they drill a hole through the service entrance cable to a building, causing the business to be closed for a couple days, until repairs can be made?
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Huh? In medical and aero things don't get screwed up, else there'd be tons of lawsuits.
With the proper SOPs in place they won't modify the design of the cable company.
I don't mind if it leaks some. I've got other things to do than filing reports. Like designing electronics :-)
All I can say is that AT&T didn't do that. The DSL guy knocked on the door, saying "I don't need to come in for this but since you are an engineer I figured you might be interested in watching". I sure was. Another time when I called in a low line current they were here at
8:00am the next day, pretty much exactly when they said they'd be. Can't complain so far.
The best was the water utility. Found out what flooded a corner Saturday two weeks ago. Told the neighbor that I can't fix it and that it looks like a meter leak. He said he'd call right away. Started the barbie. 20 minutes later the coals weren't even hot yet and I heard a truck rumble up the street (remember it was Saturday evening). Turns out it was more complicated so they'd have to do it later. "Oh great" I thought. Lo and behold Monday bright and early a bigger truck pulls up, the clanging of some heavy tools is heard and 45 minutes later it's fixed.
Maybe you should start offering your service folks some coffee etc. :-)
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You didn't specify who you were talking about, and I read it as the cable company learning from the phone company.
They don't have to 'modify' anything. Foam filled CATV trunkline is very easy to damage. A wiremonkey hanging his ladder on the bundle of cables can ruin it. The phone company reworking a trunkline splice can put a lot of stress on the CATV trunkline and connections if they are on the same strand. The larger cross section of wire on a single strand will increase the effects of high winds and ice loading. The stress on the trunkline is increased when replacing a damaged or decayed pole. There is a lot of engineering involved that you've never worked with. Do you know that yo are not supposed to pull the cable off the spool by hand? Or that preformed bending blocks are used to form the loops at amplifier housings, power inserters, or taps? How about the 60 VAC 30 A modified sine wave power for the amplifiers. A loose connection on a powered trunkline can cause serious damage
So, you just want to complain? If that old coax is above ground one of two things happened. Either the original cable was damaged, or the home owner cheaped out and told the cable company that they would bury it, to save money. Cut the damn thing off and throw it away or call the cable company to remove all of it. It can't be reused, and will be removed if anyone wants cable in the future.
How do you offer coffee to someone screaming at you on the phone? As far as the problem at the radio station, there was hot coffee, tea, and donuts.
The utilities I've dealt with rarely got in a hurry. I needed to replace a service entrance cable on a friend's house. The utility said it would be a week or more before they could disconnect his service, and then three to five business days to turn it back on after the work was done. OR I could use one contractor who was authorized to do the work hot, and my friend would have to pay an extra $500 for three day service. The utility gave me a new meter base, so I bought the cable and hardware, then climbed a ladder to the service drop and hack sawed off the old wires. I pulled all the damaged wire and old meter base, then worked from the fuse box back to the drop. His electric was out less than one hour.
The gas company came though my neighborhood in Ohio and dug up every cutoff box, and raised them 1.5 inches above the ground. Mine was in the right of way on a highway, near a school. People drove over it, till it broke the old gas line to my house. I was informed that anything after their valve was my problem, but they had to charge me $75 to inspect it before service would be restored, and the average install required four inspections. The ground was frozen, and no one would touch the job, without a back hoe. Then I was informed that the gas and water service were installed in violation of each other, so it had to be relocated so that no part was within three feet of the other. That meant a new water service, as well. I was without gas or water for three weeks, rather than pay over $5,000 for $250 worth of materials.
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
That's violating procedure. In the same way that I can't step onto the wing of an aircraft with my ballroom dance shoes.
All that can be covered by procedures. And is, in my fields of work.
Yes.
Again, that's what procedures are for.
Mishaps can of course happen. But by adhering to standards those can be minimized.
An extreme example from my line of work: My front end module had to be able to connect to an ultrasound transducer array inside the heart of a rather sick patient. Meaning the slightest mishap can push him or her over the cliff. A defibrillation system from another company (meaning from other engineers whom I never met) was supposed to be also in the game. This thing dumps 5kV out of a 32uF capacitor. The system was not supposed to exhibit any leakage currents beyond UL2601 limits and to recover to fully operational within 10 seconds. It didn't need 10 seconds, in fact it didn't even flinch. Because I designed it to UL2601, and so did the other guys with theirs.
I did not complain. I just said that's how they laid it and IMHO they aren't supposed to.
He didn't. He said that's how they laid it, all he did was order the srvice. And it's by far not the only property with exposed cable.
Not so sure whether they'd remove it, but maybe.
That's a perfect example of what happens when people don't follow procedures and standards. And it is also why I said they could learn from the medical electronics guys.
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What could CATV learn from either, other than to price themseves out of the market?
Its allowed on telephone cables. When you lash hardline coax to the same strand, the TELCO doesn't chang its SOP.
Try to get any TELCO to modify their SOP to protect a company they consider a cometitior.
TELCO doesn't care about hardware they don't own. They don't want to share the poles, but are required to, by law.
Apples and oranges. Both are medical products, working under the same standards, and owned buy a single compnay when used.
If they don't, hook it to your bumper and rip it down. The 'F' fitting and coax are a weak point and the wire will either pull out, or snap the port off the tap if they used substndard hardware.
No, they changed their standard to require over 100,000 cutoff boxes to be raised after a fire at a school, and they couldn't locate the cutoff box. They had to shut off the gas for half of a city so the firefighters could put out the fire. It was up to the customer to make sure they protected the damn cutoff, but by law, I couldn't put anything in the state right of way to keep school busses and dump trucks from driving over it. The procedures are to protect the company, niot the customer.
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
How to follow procedure, avoid early deterioration and actually _save_ money. Very simple, IMHO.
Probably because they don't sit down together and hash out the proper SOP. Now, is that so difficult?
We in the medical field have no problem sitting around the same table to do that, even with competitors. In fact, that's _exactly_ how the DICOM standard came about where patient data and images can be exchanged across system boundaries. The CAD industry failed miserably in a similar attempt (EDIF).
And yeah, that cost us money to send our SW manager to the meetings in Chicago all the time. But it needed to be done. I sometimes asked him if he and the guy from Boston Scientific shot paper wads at each other :-)
I'd call such an attitude mismanagement. Time to think about personnel consequences at the upper levels. Seriously, in medical that would get you fired, and pronto.
Then it would be up to the county supes to tell them "Look, if you don't make this cooperation work we will pull the rug from underneath you and yank the monopoly status". Very simple, IMHO.
There is also computer stuff, under other standards. Works as well. Plus the stuff is often just leased.
[...]
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What does the medical field know about mnaintaining thousands of miles of coax that the cable industy doesn't? The MSO I worked for had over 10,000 active outlets, with a crew of six techs. If we didn't stay on top of everything, we would have needed 50+ to play catchup. Most problems were caused by drunk drivers, or suckouts where the temperature dropped a lot faster than the design allowed for. It would snap the shield of the coax when the foam insulated center shrank slower than the outer conductor. We had a few times with an eighty degree drop in an afternoon. Nothing availible could deal with that sudden change.
We used Raychem expanded ceramic connectors on the trunk and feeders. You used a propane torch to return them to the original size. They were about $25 each, instead of the older machined aluminum compression fittings that were about $10 each. Every hardline connector was covered with filled heat shrink tubing made for the business. It filled all the voids, right to the housing.
The crap you are seeing is typical of leased ownership, where the owner does maintaince, but just enough to make the sustem operate. They are letting it deteriorate, so they can wreck it out in a few years. It isn't typical of the industry.
builds
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have
Not my problem. You sit down and hash it out wiith them.
You compete at a different level. When TELCOs first enterd the CATV market they stated they were going to own the business. When it didn't pan out, they are doing whatever they can to cripple the current operators.
That has noting to do with different industries out to protect their assets.
They are the phone company. they don't give a damn about anyone else.
It isn't a monoply. It is a franchise. You can build a competing system if yopu have the money, and the time to go through the franchise process. It was done in a lot of cities.
Its still used by a single hospital or doctor's office. Doctors don't drag in their own MRI machines.
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
The network I was talking about is owned by the cable company.
[...]
What they state should not matter. What is in their monopoly or franchise contracts matters. And this needs to be enforced by the other side of the table, such as counties, but unfortunately often doesn't seem to be.
The the monopoly ought to be cut off.
See above. That warrants ending their monopoly.
For the customer it's the same thing. Especially if they stone-wall.
Ahm, just one example: When our machines had DICOM going there were regular exchanges between Erasmus-Hospital in Amsterdam and US hospitals using this very standard. The distance was over 4000 miles.
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EDIF is so-o-o-o bad I view it as a purposeful effort to _prevent_ transportability.
The "other side of the table" is made up of crooked politicians on the take :-(
[snip] ...Jim Thompson
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"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then
are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."
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Are you sure? They never advertise it when they don't own the hardware.
Have you ever read a CATV francise agreement with a govenment agency?
Show me one state that classifies a cable sysem as a monpoly.
How? What are you going to replace the current system with?
Then the customer is ignorant, which isn't uncommon. There are local, state and federal rgulations that a cable company has to comply with to keep a francise. A monopoly has no such restrictions.
You still don't get it. Each of those hospitals are medical equipment customers. They may use the same equipment as the other to treat patients but they aren't in the same building, and competing for the same patients.
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
No, but I expect the local elected leader to be diligent here. That's what we are paying them for. If we did everything ourselves we should not have to pay any taxes.
I do not care what they call it. If it's a one-company show blessed by the local powers that is a monopoly, in my eyes and those of our neighbors. No matter how you paint or turn it.
Have another company take it over if the current one doesn't live up to expectations. Now I am not saying that's the case here, it is just meant for situations where, for example, a company refuses to reasonably share while obligated to do so.
And you really believe entities live up to that?
What's that got to do with the technology? Fact is, the different technologies as well as the sharing arrangements work. Without requiring three feet distance from the oh so evil competitor.
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Do you think that politician understands either the way the TELCO or the CATV system operate?
Not by law, but you can't teach some people.
So, you think someone should seize their property and give it away? How European of you.
Prove that they don't. Its easier to stay in business by following the rules. The MSO I worked for had some high priced lawyers that understood the laws and set the company policies to comply
Jorge, I'm losing any respect you your engineering abilities. I've explained why its done, and it is done, whether you like it, or not.
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You can\'t have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
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