Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Blackberry Handhelds and The Federal Government Being Exempt from The Shutoff

The Federal Government, and from what I read NTP, both want to exempt the Federal Government workers from being affected if an injunction is granted in the patent infringement lawsuit.

Now the Federal Government I can see why - every Congress person and lots of other Federal workers would be shut off. But Congress could care lees if private firms lose money if they are shut off. The NTP wants the Feds to continue because if they get shut off Congress would get involved since NO member of Congress could use their Blackberries®.
 
Exempting the US Government would be wrong - it would re-enforce a precedent that certain classes of people are exempt from onerous or ruinous rules.

The US Government (and especially California) has been going after companies and making rules that causes all sorts of damage - yet exempt their own people or institutions from having to go by those same rules.

Run-a-way patent lawsuits is just one example that the US Congress has refused to address. The Federal Government has not not done anything to stop the purposeful "patent shopping" firms from suing to earn money off of previously unmarketed patents - which means the US Government should suffer just like private citizens and private companies will.

Maybe if Congress gets shut off then they will wake up and fix problems.

Congressional leaders can use their Blackberries to e-mail their staff to work on that legislation  - in 2012.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Hot and Cold Water In the Republican and Democratic Parties

On the old two facuet systems that have separate hot and cold valves when you adjust the hot and cold water do turn up the cold when the water is too hot or turn down the hot water adjustment?

Which method you use can also be ascribed to the Republican and Democratic political parties.

The Republicans tell people to turn down BOTH at the same time in order to fix the problem - which of course it does not, while the Democratic party would install a larger hot water heater to fix the problem - and neither does it. Both parties actually avoid fixing the real problem while doing appearing to fix it.

The right tempature is always a RATIO of hot and cold water. The perfect tempature always varies by person using the water so there never is a one tempature will work for all.

When Republicans shrill to cut the funds for every program that directly deals with people in the United State each and every time to save money the Democrats say that more money is needed to for health, education and welfare. The first two is funding areas are valid for the long term (20 to 50 years later) will return the investment, giving more money into welfare system to just support people has never fixed the underlying problem that put them there.

How does a person become a "hot water is too hot so turn so turn up the cold to make it right thereby waste both" type person? They want to to build a bigger water heater to fix the problem when the hot water runs out. (Democrats)

Are you a person who puts flow restrictors on all the pipes and then still complain that the water is not right when one facuet is turned up too high by accident? (Repubican)

Government is always a moving RATIO and should never be fixed. The current US Government style (last 50 years) is to always lock in a FIXED manner the solution to the problem being addressed - and after some 80 years it should be apparent that it does not work.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Knowing When to Duck

There was a saying in WWII - "When the British shoot, the Germans duck, when the Germans shoot, the British duck, when the Americans shoot, everybody ducks....."

Friday, February 03, 2006

People's Height and the International Portland Auto Show

It seems that car designers must live on Gulliver's Island - everything is on the wrong scale. Maybe it is Gilligan's Island, the way they really do the styling of the car.
You can tell the true globalization of the industry - everything is being done to a one size fits all perspective. Car heights are getting lower, and the headroom in 98% of the cars are designed for people who top out at 5' 10" in height - basically the height of the designers in Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, England (well, England I think has only 1 car manufacturer left, and it is mostly owned by others).
They design the cars there and then ship them everywhere else.
Most designs are geared to the US Market - but not really the consumer's market but the California MPG and emissions rules that have to be met in order to sell cars there. Thus, a rule in California gets applied to all other places in the US since it is cheaper to build to one spec than to two.
I sat in $100,000 cars down to $12,000 - and all but 4 had the same problem - no headroom. Put in a sunroof (moon roof is what they call them - but is there enough moonlight to read in a car with darkened glass?) and they build INTO the passenger area taking away 1 1/2 to 2 inches of headroom.
Out of the 37 vehicles I sat in - Even a Hummer - only 4 had more than two finger's width of headroom above my head. The $34,000 Saab was by far the best - high seats making it easy to get in and out of and high headroom while still being pretty low to the ground. Most cars had my head touching the top or I had to tilt sideways when sitting upright.
Forget buying any sports car - the roll bar / windscreen top is AT my eye level in them - so there is 3 inches of other stuff to block view below that.
People have been getting TALLER since the 1930s about .5 inches every 15 years or so in the US. (discounting all the people who emigrated here since the 1960s. most immigrants came from SE Asia or Mexico where their average height is around 5'2" - 35 million arrivals in last 20 years skews the height of pre-existing population.)
Kitchens heights are still based on the height of people IN THE 1920s!
Simple trends to see - but car builders - and house builders - seem to be blind and living on Gulliver's Island.
 

Thursday, February 02, 2006

KEMA and using words to mask and justify reasons to Reorganize

KEMA http://www.kema.com/ is an International company that goes into companies, looks at how they do things, then tells them how to go about fixing whatever they do.
 
I've read only a few reports produced by them, but it seems like they ensure that the answers given already fulfill the goals of what is wanted by the people to hire them and then justify what is about to be done.
 
Generic examples:
Under a table of current processes they entered entries like
"Need to create a central process" - did not define at all what processes are like NOW
"No central plan to prioritize" - did not state how priorities are resolved now and why it needs to change
"People assigned on an ad-hoc manner to projects" - where are NOT people assigned in an ad-hoc manner?
"People assigned to many different tasks" - they downsized and got rid of people to save money and combined jobs and now they complain that a single person is assigned to too many different distinct functions? (Not a fault of KEMA, but they should have stated "Downsizing and elimination of jobs results in overworking of a single individual to the point that expertise is eventually lost." Since Big business funds them they will never say that since it would imply they would recommend HIRING people and KEMA is brought in to justify FIRING people.
 
"Need to create a central system" - not at all describing the different systems in PLACE at all - just stating a "NEED" then saying as a result "Central system created"
 
They ended up putting down all these "needs" in the existing process columns - which sounds more like they just put in what the people who hired them WANTED to do and after paying thousands of dollars for an outside person to write it up comes back and state "See, our needs are now documented!!!"
 
Sorry when someone says "Current Process" I never knew the word "need" was to be used in describing it.
 
This predetermining the outcome of an "objective" study  stuff has been going on ever after the first time and motion studies were done back in the 20s. This is where they found out that just by watching people they work better. In one study they turned up the light intensity and people worked better. They then turned DOWN the lights and the people worked better!

To see a consequence of not doing good work in the allocated time watch Schnidler's list where in a factory a NAZI officer times a person creating parts for a mess kit, counts the number completed then tries to shoot him for not working fast enough. Ignoring the pleas of the person that he had been gone for 3 1/2 hours on another work assignment and had only worked there for an hour before the inspection.
 
At least in the US we don't get physically shot - only mentally - when these studies are done.
 

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Hot to Clean up the Web: Google Reads only Standard Compliant Pages and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2

MS Released Internet Explorer (IE) 7 Beta 2 to the public this week, and stated that they did not implement many standards into the browser because if they did then so many web pages would break.
 
Well, Microsoft should stop saying they are a technology company then and let someone else lead.
 
One reason so much bad code is out there is that the browsers have been written to "keep on goin'" -- to render a page no matter what and guess what should happen when it finds invalid code.

Thus all our browsers mask the coding problems in pages. This has been true since day 1.

MS, and the other browser makers could implement a toggle switch in the browser configuration that a user could set as to what version they wanted to render to. HTML 2, 3, 4, XML. Now set at XML, a single bad character on a page stops everything and blocks a page from ever being rendered (per specs!).
 
Now since Microsoft is unwilling to build into the IE engine valid standards, they should let a true web leader like Google come out and state that only complete valid HTML pages would be crawled and placed in their index - and you'd see how fast all the web page designers and companies who had written to IE only - some truly invalid code - would be cleaned up to be valid HTML and the IE 7 browser "features" that MS left in IE7 for designers would be of no consequence at all!