Martin,
I owe you an apology for how I treated you during last week's thread. Though I disagreed with you, you didn't say anything that deserved being insulted. I rashly formed a negative, and inaccurate, image of the type of person you were and didn't treat you with respect. I failed miserably at being open minded during my first few posts and ended up instead being condesending. Naturally you were upset, but you handled things more graciously than I did.
So a long overdue, "I'm sorry Martin."
Regards, Vinh
Since I can't help myself, I'll comment on something I noticed during last week's ill fated thread. Martin made the comment that an engineer's job is to deal with what ever crazy product specs get thrown at them. After thinking about it, I guess if you work on a huge project, where your part of the design is just one small box among hundreds, it's probably pointless to argue about the specs you are given. Good luck finding the person who created the specs. And you'd have even less luck convincing them to change their minds because the specs they gave you are a results of specs someone else gave them. Add to the fact that defense contractors have to work in secrecy, you'll always be kept in the dark. In the end all you can do is accept each assignment as a challenge to solve, and pray that someone in upper management is more enlightened than you.
I guess those of us on smaller teams have the luxary of arguing over specs, if we don't like what we hear. In fact it's our job to do a sanity check on whatever we're told to do. But, it's probably not the right attitude to have on a news group. It's not practical to expect a person to explain the entire context of their question to our satisfaction. We just have to assume they know what they are doing.