In most forms of bulk goods transport the power unit can be decoupled from the part the goods ride in. Seems possible that might also work for ships.
892 karma · joined January 29, 2018
My sweet spot is leading a project from "no implementation spec but clear end goals" to a real supply chain shipping real products.
20+ years designing and building hardware, 10+ years building physical stuff in Shenzhen.
www.sizeabledesign.com www.mzjtechnology.com
Smart products. Most any physical device that runs firmware. Design concepts, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing, fulfillment. Experienced with firmware, PCB design, mechanical design, and manufacturing. I do a lot of work with California startups, including some you've heard of.
I can also help your company set up a manufacturing team in Shenzhen, or an engineering team in Islamabad/Shenzhen.
If you can't get a Chinese visa due to the border closure, I am available to manage technical issues with your Chinese suppliers when you can't fly out yourself.
Contact is in profile.
Unlike virtually all other email providers, Microsoft does not cooperate if you follow standard email practices. You can follow all their instructions, sign up for their monitoring tools, submit issue reports, try to build "reputation" and if you are self-hosting they will still have a high likelihood of silently dropping your emails after their server tells you it got them, or putting them in the recipients spam even after being marked as an approved sender.
Having the compose box fit itself to the formula size or give other indication that there is more to see is still a head-scratcher why they didn't do it.
It seems like just adding the ability to spread a calculation out over multiple lines and add some indentation would make the bugs everyone complains about go down by... a lot.
The thing about spreadsheets is you don't have to commission bespoke software. And just the value of that swamps everything else in the vast majority of cases.
In small businesses I doubt the success rate is anywhere near 50% if a non-technical person recognizes a business need for a software solution, hires someone to build it for them, and then it actually reaches a useful conclusion. But if you are numerate at all you can drive a spreadsheet. Not having to swim with the sharks for months or years while you hemorrhage cash is hard to appreciate for the sharks (us, the people who build technical things). Most small businesses and many large ones don't have anyone who can manage even contracting something like this out.
If things have gone on long enough that the problem is stable, clearly defined, and the costs of 3rd order effects like lack of revision control are losing enough money to justify the risk of a custom software project, sure, it needs to be done. But for many companies that risk will always be bigger than the ones that come with spreadsheets.
ERP systems are supposedly finished software that you deploy and tweak for particular business needs. The success rate on deploying those is waaaay below 100%, and the expenses are huge. If your company or department is non-technical the time for custom business software is usually when your hair is on fire and it's the only option.
Everything here sounds to me like "with a year or two of improvements, non-technical users might not run away screaming". I would love to use a federated chat protocol, but the reality is that XMPP isn't in the same league as other chat programs right now from a feature perspective, ease of installation, client availability, or user friendliness standpoint.
My company tried it, hard, for about 3 weeks. I paid something like $2000 in consultant and employee time to do that test. I was willing to deal with it because it was literally the only option in our case (we needed to avoid google push notifications). Once we realized we could make Zulip work by routing push notifications through a separate service we switched and almost everything about Zulip works smoother and with more useful features. None of these replies are convincing me that XMPP would work any better if I just knew more about how to install it right, etc. Again, I would love to use an open, federated chat protocol, but XMPP isn't useful right now in the ways I need it to be.
I spent over 2 days learning what was out there and installing Prosody myself, followed by giving up and hiring a guy with experience to do it for me, and it took him a solid day (spread out over 3) to get the basic system set up and mostly passing the list of recommended XEPs on the compliance tool at https://compliance.conversations.im/. Then it took another week of fiddling around to get everything mostly dialed in. Then we realized that the XMPP clients on iOS were unusable in a business situation (can't navigate to find old group chats, notifications sometimes don't work, message history sometimes didn't work) and had to move to something else.
Federation is a nice feature, but the rest of it needs to work well enough across iOS/Android/browser to not drive people away.
So if you want to, for example, chat with people in China and avoid WeChat it's a pretty solid choice. Or if you just want to avoid google services.
That said, the clients available on iOS are lacking features you would really need in a business context. Conversations on Android is pretty good out of the box.
Just spent a fun 2 days soldering a bunch of 0.1mm wires to boards and adding test sockets so we can sort out which supplier to pay 4X the previous price to vs which ones sent bogus or old oxidized stock.
I don't think we want a VR teleconference, we want to see each other.
Can you comment on how reliable it is?
It seems to have a limit of 24 users, and says it might not work on mobile past 10 users.
A line manager working near a top city might get that... that's about the same as an engineer with a couple years experience makes. A high level engineer might expect 30k per month. Foxconn pays about 12k per month for non-technical managers with 3-5 years experience.
If you are a technician who assembles parts you are probably getting a salary between 3500 - 8000 RMB per month (+ social insurance payments if you work for a nicer/bigger employer). Maybe as much as 12,000 if you have advanced skills, but usually at that point you would be managing people as well.
Even now I know factories that only export to the EU, or only ship to America because supporting 2 sets of complex regulatory compliance requirements isn't manageable given their team size.
I've seen so many go through that cycle, and if they aren't involved in an industry with strong reasons other than money to manufacture locally it invariably wastes time and talent, and often kills the company.
You can see the inverted chine here (the line running along the underside of the boat, at the edge of the flat bottom):
https://825355.smushcdn.com/1645402/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
CADR is the product of air flow and fractional removal efficiency, and it's the industry standard value if you want to compare performance of one air purifier to another. The CADR test usually makes separate measurements for dust, pollen, and smoke (particulates). It looks like they adapted the normal test procedure to measure the reduction in live/viable microbes.
However, in a few minutes of looking at their homepage I don't see anywhere they list a number in CFM of purified air, which is what CADR measures.
https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_file_download.cfm?p_downl... [Appendix A]
Setting a low price puts you in the hobby market, and hobby engineers are some of the most penny-pinching people out there. They will spend weeks working on something they could buy for $30 and at the end say they saved money.
If you are selling to businesses, those problems mostly go away and you can get real money as long as you make sure you deliver stuff that works, and in the time you said you would. Having an engineer make a new board revision will easily cost more than $1000 for anything but the most trivial boards.
Strangely close to the overall concept and selling points from my project a few years back. I talked with Nate in depth about it as I was getting ready to launch it and he seemed super interested, even going so far as to post it in their blog. Guess he really was interested.
Recently created files just... don't show up. This is a hard one to do an internet search for, and saves a surprising amount of time for some workflows if it works consistently.
1000 internet points to anyone who knows how to make it work as well as it did previously.
If you assume the vertical axis and gravity are aligned, over the distances our machines moved the deviation between the two is enough to matter when setting up the machine alignment. The measurements would only match if you accounted for the curvature of the earth.
It was fun building a robot bigger than most houses. We had to be careful to design it in small and light enough pieces that they could be safely transported to the final install location. Any time we talked to a supplier about a widget to go on the machines, it was always "What is the biggest X you make? OK, we need that one."
The wing assembly bay was built on a scale such that the curvature of the earth was an important factor in our machine install process.
Unless the designers are careful about controlling the results of their labor they won't be the ones "thriving", or even benefiting. It only works in certain niches where the technical aspects of production or market naturally exclude most other manufacturers.
Or what about designers who don't necessarily want to be in production just to make money?
Ask someone who has spent years and thousands of dollars developing something only to have a copy shop in Asia start selling their widget for half the cost a month after the design files get posted if they think that's a sustainable business model.
Would you frame the reasons they failed differently? If TikTok users and gamers needed long battery life and elegant scripting tools we would have them. But they don't.