The Amp Hour #22 — The Hard Work Hypothesis
Posted by Chris Gammell on December 21, 2010 in Radio Show |
We wanted to try out a title similar to the style of The Big Bang Theory…we love it!
- Shoutout
- Another Ham-like video podcast called Amateur Logic. We like it! Thanks to the queen of science videos (Jeri) for the link!
- Dave got scooped! Afrotechmods did an AWESOME video about ultracaps. He arc welded a coin!
- ShoutDown
- Even though it’s Chris’ favorite news source, NPR recently used Dave’s Kindle teardown video without attribution! Booo.
- WotW
- Frank from (cold!) Finland
- View 1 of the bench
- View 2 of the bench (-1 point for not being in the shot!)
- Nathan from ASoberNewt (website, not a place)
- Frank from (cold!) Finland
- Follow Up
- More about last week’s discussion about PhD’s: they only make 3% more on average than those with a Master’s, according to a recent article from The Economist. Monetarily, PhD’s don’t seem worth it (though they may be otherwise)
- Discussion Points
- Is there a competitive advantage to being a squeaky wheel? Dave’s new videos got good responses from DigiKey and Maxim.
- Matt from the Antipasto Hardware Blog talks at length about the need for continued innovation in the Open Source Hardware Community.
- In the US, they are opening up the FM bands for the first time to non-commercial enterprises. Can Dave and Chris buy their way onto the airwaves?
- There is also more talk about the Nearfield Communication capabilities of cellphones in the near future, as led by Google. There’s an open standard, but how much will be accessible to the user/hacker/maker?
- More tech executive foolishness. Some were caught “consulting” while holding a high ranking position in a company. What a bunch of dopes!
- Dave doesn’t want to work anymore. He would much rather retire now and do electronics as a hobby, who’s in?
An early submission from @wa7iut:
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But Extech didn’t recall the killer meter, did they? And Microchip didn’t fix any issues with the PICkit 3, did they?
Frank from (cold!) Findland –> Finland
Perkele!
Ah shoot! I fixed that on one page and got it wrong on the other! I’m sorry! I’ll fix it!
About the salary of different people, in my country (Chile):
– A technician (out from high school): 400 to 600 USD/month
– A plain engineer (almost BS, like me): 1000 to 1200 USD/month
– A grad engineer (BS or MS): 2000 to 6000 USD/month
– PhDs, really don’t know, but mostly teaching at college and some research consulting: 2000+ USD/month
What, no discussion about DIY ICs?
It could well be that Dave already lost his “not in my lifetime” claim. These guys http://mrkimrobotics.com/ print transistors. If you get the PDF from that site and go to page 35, they are already going for a bistable inverter. Multiple transistors, fabed on one substrate, combined to provide a certain function, that is an integrated circuit in my book.
Thanks for having my workbench on the show
Good one!
Fascinating dialogs! Consider me a newly-found regular listener
I put this on in the background, and now I’m addicted, and have been listening to your other casts all day…
Thanks for the dialog on OSHW, and my post on the End of the OSHW Cambrian Age. The Cambrian Age could have been characterized by the absence of competitive evolutionary pressures, and in that excess there was found surplus functionality and creativity. Arthropods with hundreds of legs, stomachs on the outside, long funnel mouths – funky, different, odd, wasteful?… but creative. Life had just exploded, diversity thrived uninhibitedly. Introducing competitive pressure (levels of the food chain and predators) may be akin to modern market cost pressure. Price pressure is like a trilobite with sharp teeth – it forces lesser animal variations to evolve to be competitive. Force the price of arduino shields lower and lower, to mass production, and their flexibility and functionality diminish. Experimentation is restricted, degrees of freedom reduced. A DIY’er is more likely to throw on an extra accelerometer – just for the heck of it – while a company says, shave that $15 off in the name of gross margin. Sad!
@Dave… yeah the failure to cite you is a breach of Journalistic credibility. (I have a degree in journalism) Not citing you in that story is irresponsible journalism and not too surprising for NPR.
Agreed Eddie. I wonder how often NPR does this. My experience with them has not been good with them anyway.
Nearfield communications and cell phones is quite interesting. Here is a demo of what a cellphone could do with financial info and RFID. This demo is with an external reader but with an RFID communication tool in a cell it would be much less bulky. Unfortunately a lot of financial info is not encrypted even on your bank card.
http://www.wreg.com/wreg-electronic-pickpocketing-story,0,6289527.story
I saw the article in EE Times on “execs” divulging inside info as consultants. The titles of people mentioned in the article, though, are manager and director. There were no VPs or chief officers. My suspicion is that these information gathering companies pay modest “consulting” fees to rank-and-file workers at public companies. The people doing the gathering can piece together a larger picture out of the little bits of info the rank-and-file workers share.
I have seen analysts try to do this while visiting a public company by simply asking workers probing questions. This consulting stuff is the same type of thing but obviously way over the line of propriety.
If my initial suspicion is right, EE Times missed the point of this story by using “execs” in the title.