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In Reply to: Re: SM want it all? posted by Soundmind on November 17, 2006 at 17:14:39:
Jeez, the next time I step inside an airplane, I'm going to think about all that avionics software (aka computer programs), keeping that plane in the sky.... Our lives at the mercy of those "make-believe engineers".....By the way, I do not know a degreed software engineer who never took calculus.
Follow Ups:
It's a simple fact that people who live their lives in a cyber fantasy world may not want to accept. In their make believe world, they can program images to do anything. In the real world, many of their ideas if implimented would sink like a lead balloon. That's because regardless of what their degree or title is, they are NOT engineers.
"It's a simple fact that people who live their lives in a cyber fantasy world may not want to accept. In their make believe world, they can program images to do anything. In the real world, many of their ideas if implimented would sink like a lead balloon. That's because regardless of what their degree or title is, they are NOT engineers."So let's say software engineers are no longer called engineers.... What difference would it otherwise make?? The planes will fly the same as before, our computers will function the same as before, our audio equipment will perform the same as before....
And one's technical opinions will be the same as before....
Because everybody's technical backgrounds and expertise will be the same as before.
Todd, Soundmind attacks at what he considers 'chinks in our armor' much like my dad did with me when we were discussing politics. My dad would always 'wave the flag' and say: "Are you for or against me?" What a waste of energy. :-(
In my case: I have a degree in Physics with a minor in electronic engineering. Therefore, I have not taken each and every course that Soundmind may have taken, but I went back to university after several years of practical experience in electronics engineering, to get what I missed. Sometimes, as I tried to explain to Soundmind, I seem to have unconventional definitions of what has been apparently standardized by the engineering society (I have been a full member of the IEEE for more than 40 years, but that doesn't seem to count) and for this, I have been criticized by some engineers as not knowing 'engineering concepts'. This is nonsense! Soundmind criticized me for saying that the risetime is ambiguous, when the low pass filter type and number of poles in the rolloff is not known.
Well, there really is a difference between an 'ideal brickwall filter' and an early elliptical filter used by CD players.
For the record, a simple 6-12dB rolloff is best.
You don't think like any of the countless thousands of engineers, electronics or otherwise I've ever met. You don't solve problems the same way they do, you don't react the way they do, you don't think along the lines they do. If any engineer I've ever known stumbled onto something he thought was superior to anything he'd ever seen, heard of, or done himself, he'd make a determined effort to find out why just as I've urged you to do, not just because he'd be curious about it but because once he understood it, he could bottle it, refine it, and make a lot more money out of it. He might even patent it, sell the patent, license it, or manufacture it himself if he were enterprising enough. But you don't. You seem content to continue stumbling around in the dark hoping lightening will strike again. Considering you have such a fine laboratory with all of those fancy expensive instruments, I have to wonder why. You seem to go off on wild tangents from fermi velocity of electrons in wires to obviously flawed and useses arguements in master's thesis papers of decades ago without proving anything even to yourself. You seem unfocused and satisfied to waste time on a message board like this one. It just doesn't add up as far as I can tell. Will you forever be stuck in Matti Otala's shadow spouting off on slew rate which is thirty year old news? Is that as good at it gets for you? Is the world you live in so encapsulated?
You really have a 'thing' about Fermi velocity, don't you?
Your mentioning of it in a discussion of wires some years ago cost you all respect I had for you. It's so far off the wall that it puts you in the same league as May Belt in my book, but she is much more entertaining than you are. I hope she posts again soon. At least she is completely unpredictable. I never would have imagined anyone would consider the way they water their houseplants would affect the performance of their audio systems. With all of your fancy test equipment and technical resources, why didn't you think of that first? My problem with that is finding fluoridated water, I have a well and the water very pure, practically no fluorides. I wonder if adding fluoridated toothpaste to it would help. I'll have to ask her. You don't get access to that kind of resource every day even around here.
Would you like to tell me how electricity actually flows?
I wish I could but the truth of it is, nobody knows. There are plenty of theories, the most prominent one be the quantum theory of electrons being promoted to higher energy states into what are termed conduction bands under the influence of externally applied fields or acquiring additional energy by undergoing a collision by a photon or other particle but nobody knows for sure. One of the most fascinating things about electricity IMO is that there is no proof that it actually exists at all, only inference from observation of indirect evidence and logical deduction. Nice trick question though. Now about that fluoride.....Do you think the color of the flowerpot or planter matters????? How about whether it is plastic or clay?????
*
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
"I have been criticized by some engineers as not knowing 'engineering concepts'. This is nonsense!"I've been criticized too, but don't take it personally. I think there are too many people here who are overly concerned about how they're perceived as engineers or technical gurus. So much so that they'll go as far as discrediting others to bolster that impression. The topic of discussion often becomes roadkill whenever this occurs.
The problem is that such behavior is often associated with either the inability or lack of confidence to simply explain technical concepts and ideas. And even people without a technical background pick up on that.
I criticized you for attributing your own error to me and my correction of it to yourself. I don't criticize people for making technical errors. Most scientists and engineers inevitably do. I criticize them for being liars about it. Criticizing an idea is NOT the same as criticizing a person except when in that person's mind, his ego is so committed to him always being right that he will lie to preserve his illusion of himself. Do I have to dredge it up again? Haven't you been sufficiently embarrassed by it to just let it go? Is this going to become a monthly ritual?
Look Soundmind, You try to make 'liars' and 'fools' out of anyone who disagrees with you. While I might overlook something, I would not 'lie' on this website or any other. It would be pointless.
"Look Soundmind, You try to make 'liars' and 'fools' out of anyone who disagrees with you"You did a fine job of that all by yourself, you didn't need any help from me.
When you first switched sides 180 degrees, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and considered that you might simply have forgotten what you had said a few days earlier and that you'd made a mistake but this is the second time you've brought it up since. You can't seem to give it a rest and get it behind you can you so here it is again.
Soundmind, I have no idea of what you are talking about, and I really don't care.
Were I in your shoes I would too. But then again, I'd never get into that fix, when I make a mistake and it's pointed out to me, I simply admit it. Since I KNOW I am not god, I accept that I am fallible. So if you do want it to go away, why do you keep provoking me to bring it up again? BTW, it's been hardly two months. That doesn't seem like a very long time to not know what I am talking about...or are you "exagggerating" again?
I was never one to want to bring up credentials and it was only recently that I felt forced to. I believe that what ones says or doesn't say especially in this kind of forum should rise or fall on its own merits. It's a false arguement to say "I am right because I am an engineer and you are wrong because you are not." In fact I find it reprehensible and I certainly hope that I never gave anyone the impression that I felt that way. However, when people enter a technical discussion which is what most of this particular forum is about where complex technical matters are at issue and they cannot back up their views with widely accepted physical facts or the types of technical arguements those who have been trained accept to draw conclusions with, then it is impossible for the discussion to proceed any further at least with that individual. An equally reprehensible attitude is; "I think what I think and therefore I am as right as anyone because everyone is entitled to an opinion and since all men are created equal, the validity of all arguements is also equal" just doesn't cut it. E-Stat brought this discussion up I think, and I know John Curl had a discusion with Audiotubeguy or someone about it. E-Stat asserted his qualifications to state what is a valid and not valid arguement because he is a software engineer. That's how this matter of whether software engineers are engineers in the usually accepted sense as electrical, mechanical, civil engineers are came up and how I came to examine it. I think I have added elsewhere that not only do non engineers often (but not always) lack the detailed training to be familiar with most of the technical arguements germaine to a technical issue, but engineers in one field of specialization are often little or no more schooled than non engineers when the issue is somewhere outside their own area of expertise. So we do have to be careful about that. Often, as was the case with the discussion of Fourier analysis and the equivalence of FR and transient rise time, people who have no background in this special area of mathematics which EE students are forced to digest and regurgitate endlessly take strong exception to arguements which are quite frankly beyond question. And worst of all, for them it becomes an emotional, not a technical issue. How do you tell them gently but convincingly that they are out of their depth? It's a truth some people just can't accept.
E-Stat brought this discussion up I think...We already know you cannot remember what you have said. Or have figured out how to use the search engine. The scene is familiar. I question the simplistic conclusions drawn by a few engineers (as have others here). Do you acknowledge that such is the case? No! You take out your engineer dick, swing it around and look for reactions.
"So you also have disdain for engineers. All engineers or just electrical engineers?"
I suspect you don't remember those comments of yours either. There is much you can learn from the real audio engineers here who don't regularly make such a fool of themselves.
rw
"There is much you can learn from the real audio engineers here who don't regularly make such a fool of themselves"When one begins posting here, perhaps you will be right. Remember, while I was trained as an engineer, audio is not my specialized field of expertise. In this area, I am only a hobbyist. However, I am familiar with the methods engineers use and the scientific principles they rely on to do their work. Had I been sufficiently interested, I could have become one. That career path was open to me but in a visit to an IEEE show around 1967 while I was a student, my eyes opened up to the world and its possibilities and audio when put into perspective is an insignificant part of it. Had high fidelity sound systems never come into existance, the world's amusements and toys might be diminished but in real substance, it would have been no worse off for the lack of it.
When one begins posting here, perhaps you will be right.you choose to insult Dan Banquer and Tom Danley? You could learn from both of these guys as to why your faith in THD is unfounded.
Remember, while I was trained as an engineer, audio is not my specialized field of expertise.
We know. We know. Not everyone has your memory difficulties. You're a power management guy who has singlehandedly spent millions of dollars on Belden cable. You went to Stevens Institute of Technology. (BTW, do you know what their # 1 accolade is as found on the achievements page? Look it up!) Yamaha stole your intellectual property in developing their DSP-1, but you couldn't afford to take them to court. The wondrous result of your greatest achievement was that - no one complained. Truly motivating story.
"And eperience [sic] bore it out as no complaint was ever traced to a problem with this cable installation."
rw
And you are a super computer programmer whose path to audio nirvana is giant electrostatic speakers which look like room dividers or dressing screens driven by hot bottle vacuum tube amplifiers designed in the 1950s and resurrected by designers who can't come up with descent solid state equipment or use negative feedback theory as an effective design tool. When you're not trolling here, you are a babysitter at a playpen for mental midgets where the most challenging subject is which of Costco's current offerings of HT bargains is the best choice.Tom Danley designs and sells highly efficient constant directivity loudspeakers for commercial installations. Dan Banquer repeats the same standard electrical engineering fare we all learned and have come to trust. When I hear someone present a new idea which seems relevant and truely innovative, I'll sit up and take notice of it...whether it comes from an electrical engineer or a sanitary engineer....or even from a software engineer. I think I'll the sanitary engineers will keep me waiting less time than the software engineers. At least they know the smell of garbage when they encounter it.
"It's a false arguement to say 'I am right because I am an engineer and you are wrong because you are not.'"While this is true, some of us here have gotten the impression that you use this premise, not necessarily to judge who's correct or incorrect in specific technical matters, but to disqualify opinions of those whose credentials you deem as insufficient. Regardless of whether some of those opinions may otherwise be valuable to the readers here.
For several years I wouldn't even let it be known that I was an engineer. I seem to have been challenged perpetually by people who call themselves subjectivists, sometimes waving their credientials and accolades like a trophy banner. After one particular one or two of them kept making jackasses out of themselves over and over again, that was it. E-Stat is a troll who is always looking for a fight and always winds up with a bloody nose. He's no engineer no matter what his title or degree says he is, he's a glorified computer programmer. He doesn't know any more about electrical engineering concepts than the man in the moon. If he wants to keep shooting his stupid mouth off, I'll keep jamming both his feet into it.If people want to get themselves involved in mathematical issues then they had better know the math. That includes people who were trained as physicists 45 years ago and forgot what they were taught. If they didn't learn it in school or somewhere else it becomes obvious, yet they often persist bandying around terms they know nothing about, technical concepts they've only read about in ad copy, not textbooks, so what do you expect to happen, people who actually do know and they have engaged in an arguement to shut up and say nothing because it might offend them? When it comes to matter of fact technical issues which have long been established, there is no value to anyone except someone who has something to sell or to someone who doesn't want to feel bad because he paid money to buy it to even pretend that it might be true.
After you've dealt with enough frauds in your life, you get a nose for it. I was once banned here for a week for suggesting that something wasn't what its proponents pretended it was. Do you remember the incident? Months later, it appeared that this individual apparantly had bought off the shelf equipment, rebranded it unaltered with his own name on it, marked it up 100%, and sold it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. That revelation didn't come from me but from the people who bought it without asking the tough questions I did but got no answers to. I never did hear the final outcome of it and I'm not going to pursue it but I'm sure those who bought into it and were later disapponted remember it all too well. And yes, I did by over one million dollars of wire myself for my own projects and no, I did not rely solely on my own education to form opinions about wire, I got it straight from the horses mouth, a Belden factory rep before Belden discovered audiophiles were a niche market they might try to enter.
Actually there's a whole new generation of airplanes which do rely on software to fly. Search for "unstable aircraft". Or "Segway", which completely depends on some interesting software to work.
I am well aware that planes like the B2 bomber for example are aerodynamically unstable air foils which require a computer to make constant corrections to its trim configuration to keep it airborn and flying smoothly. That does not change the fact that what keeps it in the air in the first place are aerodynamic principles and engines. In this case as I have just pointed out in another posting, the programmer writes software at the direction of and to the satisfaction of the aerodynamics design engineer whose mathematical models define what the programmer must achieve. Left to his own devices to solve the problem without the aerodynamics engineer to supply his expertise, the plane would never leave the ground. The successful implimentation is therefore the result of aerodynamic engineering with assistance from another discipline, computer programming. The programmer actually engineered nothing.BTW, this points out another distinction between computer programming on the one hand and engineering and pure and applied mathematics on the other. The engineer and mathematician are confronted with open ended problems which do not start off with the knowledge that a solution exists. Programmers can be certain however that they can successfully write a program to solve any problem once it is defined. It only becomes a matter of how much memory, how many instructions, and how much time and cost it takes to develop the solution.
Airplanes flew just fine decades before the first modern digital computer was ever conceived of. I am not discounting the importance of computers or software but it is not engineering in the common usage of the term people who prepare for a profession in engineering through formal training would use. Writing software for an application, testing it, debugging it is engineering only in the loosest sense of the term such as when a landscape architect engineers the trees and shrubs around a house to achieve a desired effect. A formal education in engineering requires a four year program of calculus and other higher mathematics which must be mastered to understand and use engineering concepts, physics, chemistry, material science, statics and dynamics, thermodynamics, and fluidics among others. All real engineers MUST pass these courses as pre-requisites to more specialized engineering studies for their particular field of interest. Computer programmers do not require most or any of these courses and you can tack the word engineer on to their title, even the degree they are conferred but that doesn't change the reality of what they know and don't know. E-Stat is living proof of this each time he makes an ignorant statement like he just did.
To me, engineering is a discipline responsible for creating "systems that work": machinery which achieves a desired result, using scientifically valid foundations. In this sense, software development is an engineering process just as much as creating a bridge or an oil refinery.There are some types of software - DSP for example - where the math is essential and reasonably "advanced". There are others, especially applications constructed from reusable components, which can be built effectively without needing much theoretical depth. But don't imagine that the theoretical foundation is irrelevant; if you want to implement a database system, or a compiler, or a concurrent system, from low-level parts then you really need to be aware of the decades of specialized research in those areas. The math and the models are different from physical systems, but no less important.
Two good (old) examples:
http://www.acm.org/classics/nov95/toc.html
http://library.readscheme.org/servlets/cite.ss?pattern=Ste-76aAll "real" software engineers need to know this stuff. Just like other forms of engineering, the final test is a reality check: does it work?
Audio is like software. Most of the "real engineers" in this business work at the building-block vendors, creating ASRCs or DACs or opamps or whatever - where the math is very important - and their work enables others to build systems without worrying about some of the theoretical detail. Like software, it's possible to create small and simple things too (SET amps, for example); but even there, if you don't know the physics (of transformers, impedance and phase, the Miller effect, and so on) you'll go far astray. Like software, the ideal result is an illusion which "works".
So can we get off the ad-hominem accreditation-bashing, please, and just assume everyone here wants to look for novel and interesting and effective ways to create more convincing illusions?
When this topic first came up, I gave it a lot of thought and I have concluded that so called Software Engineering is not true engineering. Here's why. First of all, engineers have to deal with the real world, whether on a macro or micro level. Computer programming is a pure abstraction like mathematics. It is often ancillary to engineering but it is not engineering itself any more than pure mathematics is. It isn't even "engineering lite" the way industrial engineering is. There are real areas which are not always thought of as engineering per se but which are true engineering such as biomolecular engineering and nano technology but software engineering is not in that class because it doesn't deal directly with the real world. Engineers may use programming or even hire so called software engineers to help them but the software development itself is not engineering. It is also NOT mathematics. It takes a great deal of time and effort for people who have a special "bent" to learn engineering or mathematics which is why there are relatively few engineers and even fewer mathematicians but loads of computer programmers some of whom are called "software engineers." Some software engineers may take rudimentary or initial courses in some engineering studies such as physics or calculus but some software engineers don't as was pointed out by one contributor who said that there are two year community colleges which offer software engineering programs. But even for those who get a smattering of it, it's hardly the same thing.About the closest programmers come to engineering is the mathematical modeling of the real world which software can emulate. They translate mathematical models into computer instructions but they don't develop the models themselves. For example a Programmable Logic Controller is an industrial computer which controls real world processes such as running machinery, even entire buildings but the interface to the real world and sometimes the programming is done by trained electrical and mechanical engineers. Software engineers may assist them with the programming but left to their own devices to impliment a project which requires a PLC, they are out of their depth having neither the training nor experience to handle it. Likewise, may DSP circuits may use what was called "hard wired logic" on one coast and "firmware" on the other which is to say no software set or it may use programmable software. The programming in firmware was built into the electrical circuit itself, often using boolean algebra, not computer programming. Real Engineers can work for Software engineers as well. In the development of a new CPU computer chip, the software engineer will define the logic requirements of the chip, it's up to electrical engineers and materials engineers to devise the circuit and translate it into a physical reality.
Sorry again E-Stat, still no cigar.
"Likewise, may DSP circuits may use what was called 'hard wired logic' on one coast and 'firmware' on the other which is to say no software set or it may use programmable software. The programming in firmware was built into the electrical circuit itself, often using boolean algebra, not computer programming."This is not correct.....
DSP uses real source code. A DAC for CD playback, for example, uses code which convolves the input signal with a mathematically-depicted impulse response (FIR filter), and sends an output is mathematically-precise data of greater word length and sample rate. The executable may be permanently burned into a chip's ROM, but it's still code that is written, debugged, refined, compiled, and linked.
Firmware is software downloaded to programmable ROM within a chip or on a circuit board, and is what enables a self-contained circuit to run without the use of an external disk drive or additional software. And firmware is upgradeable. The firmware on CD ROM drives is often updated. And again, it starts as source code.
Goes to show how little some electrical engineers know about programming. Now if Programmers could just accept how little they know about electrical engineering.....BTW, I grew up in an analog world. I didn't want to accept the dominance of the digital world. But I had no choice. Not only does it work, it works better and ignoring that fact is a fatal mistake. Even many contol systems now use DDR.
Such didn't exist in 1962 when you were in college. None of us are particularly concerned about your acceptance of the concept. :)rw
I didn't enter college until 1965. I those days I learned IBM machine language and Fortran 2. Once I learned flowcharting, it became obvious to me that you could learn to use any software by just learning the rules of the instruction set and syntax for that program language. To me, it is probably the most boring thing I could think of but to each his own. I could care less about devising do loops or programs with ten million lines of code but for some people that's a real turn on.
That is what SE is all about. You begin by analyzing a particular (in my case, business) problem and design a solution. There was a time that supply chains were handled with folks who were directed around a warehouse picking stuff by a piece of paper. Afterwards, they returned the piece of paper and someone else recorded the results . They picked and/or recorded the wrong stuff. Their day was fraught with redundant movement and inaccuracy.Warehouse management systems were developed by sofware engineers to completely address that problem. The solution is not only composed of various hard- and software components, but more importantly a complete change in the process workflow as a result of the analysis. Merely automating inefficient processes worsens the problem. Products are barcode scan verified for accuracy. Goods are picked in efficient "waves" to optimize the material handler's time. Two leaders in hard core logistics, Wal-Mart and the DOD, are now fully RFID compliant. That is a further evolution of the concept that involved yet another level of completely rethinking the process and arriving at various new components (both hard and sofware based) to fulfill the new process flow. Coming to a store or grocery near you in the not to distant future. The implications of RFID technology are enormous.
rw
What a coincidence. Around 1975 or 1976 I had to find a course for visiting engineers from the Taiwan Power Company who wanted to learn computerized inventory control (no bar codes yet in those days.) Apparantly keeping track of spare parts for power plants and distribution equipment all over the island of Taiwan was a problem.) Of three potential vendors, Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto, McDonald Douglas McAuto in St Louis, and one in Boston (was it Arthur Anderson?) we selected Stanford. I was only too glad I didn't have to take the course it myself.I also like problem solving. But not that kind of problem. It doesn't interest me in the least. Just keeping track of my own things is already too hard. BTW, most of the consultants I've seen who proposed and had business solutions implimented fell flat on their faces. I've come to the conclusion that good people will overcome any handicap no matter how bad the system they work under is while bad people will never succeed no matter how good their system is. Selection of the right people is far more crucial to business success than selection of the right system which is of marginal importance. It can make life harder or easier but it is not a determining factor in success or failure of an enterprise. When the boss is a jackass, nothing else matters.
I was just finishing up on how you like to make $hit up and here you go with yet another installment!Around 1975 or 1976 I had to find a course for visiting engineers from the Taiwan Power Company who wanted to learn computerized inventory control (no bar codes yet in those days.)
The real story is that the first bar coding system was installed in 1969 by Computer Identics. Crude, but effective. The first retail use was by Marsh Grocery in Troy, MI back in 1974. The Smithsonian has the pack of Wrigley's gum that was the scanned first.
Selection of the right people is far more crucial to business success than selection of the right system...
Sometimes, sometimes not. One of the benefits of WMS systems is that the accuracy and efficiency do NOT rely upon the expertise of the workers. Training can be accomplished in hours, not days or weeks when you have to possess product knowledge to work effectively. Would you rather rely upon the lady at the grocery checkout to key in the prices for everything? Not I!
rw
See, we are more equal than I thought :> )BTW, when is this new automated checkout system coming on stream? I had expected it to appear about two years ago. And do you know they will be able to drive by your house and find out that you still haven't eaten that box of Cheerios you bought three years ago...or at least you still have the box. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!
Cool.Industy experts say about five years. The primary challenge is getting the costs of the tags down. Currently in volume they are about $.20 - the magic number is said to be around a nickel and imbedded where the consumer is unaware that the tag exists. Some unexpected challenges were found. Bottled water, for example, apparently restricts the reception. Go figure. They didn't theorize that issue.
And do you know they will be able to drive by your house and find out that you still haven't eaten that box of Cheerios you bought three years ago...or at least you still have the box. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU!
That is exactly what I was referring to. Stolen goods will be able to call out their presence.
rw
The sources I heard reporting it some years back said each tag would cost around 0.1 cents. What happened? $.20 is rediculous. BTW, I heard a program about a guy in England, a CEO who had a chip embedded under the skin in his arm. When he walked into his office at night, all the lights would turn on in whatever area he was in. I've thought about putting a chip in each of my dogs. Haven't decided yet.
SM: ""I've thought about putting a chip in each of my dogs.""Why?? Can't they reach the light switch??
Cheers, John
They still have light switches where you work?
SM: ""They still have light switches where you work? ""Yah, the physicists refused the implants, and there weren't enough dogs around to turn the lights on for them..:-)
Go figure..
Cheers, John
No infra red motion detectors used for occupancy sensors to save money on the electric light bills? No automatic after hours shutoff of lighting? How did your facilities manage to escape the local energy saver gestapo?
sm: ""
No infra red motion detectors used for occupancy sensors to save money on the electric light bills? ""Quite a few have been tried, then abandoned. Seems that the biggest problem with them was whenever somebody remained at their computer long enough, the lights would shutoff on their own. And some just failed in service.
Now, we just turn them off when we walk outside the office.
sm: ""
No automatic after hours shutoff of lighting? How did your facilities manage to escape the local energy saver gestapo? ""Again, we just shut them off.
Alas, our lighting bill is not really that significant w/r to the other loads here. Just putting a 15 Mw power supply on standby far exceeds the light useage here.
We do shut much off when the summer peaks require it, it's a contractual arrangement with the local utility.
Cheers, John.
ps...yes, putting implants in physicists would be easier, but..oh well.
"Quite a few have been tried, then abandoned. Seems that the biggest problem with them was whenever somebody remained at their computer long enough, the lights would shutoff on their own"I only had that experience once. It seemed the occupant had died.....Just kidding.
"And some just failed in service."
That's what your company gets for buying those cheap Chinese made units. Next time try one which is UL listed :> )
"Alas, our lighting bill is not really that significant w/r to the other loads here"
That didn't seem to bother them where I worked. The facilities managers were determined to get credit for saving money on lighting no matter how much it cost. Hey, they had to find something to put down on their annual performance reviews to justify a raise. There was precious little else they had.
"We do shut much off when the summer peaks require it, it's a contractual arrangement with the local utility."
We had that option and for cutbacks on AC as well but we rejected it. We didn't think anyone from the outside should tell our scientists and engineers when it was time to sweat...or when to keep them in the dark either.
Consider the fact that an RFID tag consists of an antenna, memory and substrate (some are more sophisticated and offer full read/write capability).Here is the perspective from only two years ago: 2004
Heres's a more recent evaluation mentioning the elusive nickel objective: 2006
This link begins with an ad - click the "skip" button to read.
rw
I tried unsuccessfully to find the program in BBC's archives. That's where I heard this number of 0.1 cents per unit. Either they got it wrong or they were projecting far into the future.
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