What they don't tell you in engineering school, as you are quietly studying how to do boxed problems with every even answer out of the back of the book, is that most problems are ill defined or not defined at all. Some problems that you think are insignificant are, in fact, big and drive the design, and others that you think are huge; not so much. And that's just in identifying the problem. That says nothing about defining it, and it says nothing again about actually going about solving it.
Mechanical systems, I think, are more prone to this than problems in other engineering fields. With electronics, the main design problem that is ill defined is the issue of "noise" or "EMI". These are generally dealt with by guess-and-check; make the design using the best "design practices" that you can come up with, and check to see if it works. It's an ill defined problem, but the problem is not a design feature. In other words, it does not drive the design so much as constrain it. The only design issue is to mitigate the problem; there is no optimization; the less of it the better.
Mechanical systems, and thermal systems in particular, have all this design uncertainty as a driving force in the design. It is an optimization problem. You cannot just make fans bigger and bigger and the enclosure bigger and bigger to make everything cooler. Even if you could specify huge fans, there remains the problem of getting the airflow to where you need it. it's just not that obvious.
So, how to deal with this engineering uncertainty? That's the 64 million dollar question they don't really teach you in school.
There is guess and check. Effective but expensive. There is software. There is back of the envelope correlations or sophisticated design tools.
Right now I am stuck on a design. I don't know if it will work worth beans. There are lots of components and lots of integration and it is all very confusing. At some point I will just have to make the jump. See if it works.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Revolution
I've been around computers since I was in grade school. I wasn't in on the bad old days of the Commodores and Dos, but my family got our first computer before the internet, and our second computer connected via an external modem so we could download Netscape and search for mildly interesting stuff using Altavista. Both my family's first two computers were Macs. This was, so to speak, evolution of the computer number one. Mac brought the user interface to computers. I basically missed the whole command line obscenity of the first computers. I'm kind of glad.
When I entered college, my parents sent me off with a brandy new Dell that ran Windows 95. I still have this computer lurking in my garage right next to the cat food. Windows was a lot like Mac, and with it I got to examine all the wonders of nascent internet porn and the rise of AOL and malware. I surfed a lot of internet porn and wrote a lot of papers on that machine. It was great until spyware did it completely in towards the end of my undergraduate.
Entering grad school, I bought a windows XP laptop. I was disappointed from the start. 7.5lbs, it turns out, is heavy as a mutherfker, and that fancy 2.x gHz processor meant that the fans of that little thing never quit running and made more noise than a 747. The screen was totally unsuitable for viewing in other than indoor light, and the battery started out with an astounding 2 hour run time which diminished to a little over an hour by the time it was a few months old.
This was really the bad transitional days of computing. Firewalls were rare; nobody worried about spyware and everyone was paranoid about viruses. Now it's the flip. Firewalls are all pervasive on windows machines, and nobody really worries about viruses anymore. The internet was more than just an idyll curiosity; it was what you did on the computer. Google sold it's first stock as a public company and Amazon was all the rage.
Finally, the power supply of the little-big laptop that could-but-wouldn't died. It was a tragic death, probably from running the fans for triple the time the engineers intended. I rejoiced. Really, I did. Didn't even scavenge the latest data off it. Everything worth anything had been backed up on a different computer previously, so nothing of great importance was lost.
The very next day, I went to the local computer store and shelled out $1300 for an Apple Macbook, thus coming full circle back to the Mac of my childhood. I've been using it since. Nothing's changed much about the operating system, except that it is modern and the touch pad has gotten significantly better over my previous laptop.
I skipped the whole Apple iPhone thing; I'm a happy Verizon customer with a cheap and reliable (and mostly free) handset that satisfies all my mobile phone needs. I've never had any great notion of surfing the internet on the little handheld screens like that of the iPhone. Yes, it is better by far over the alternatives, but it only takes a one eyed piglet to rule the kingdom of the blind.
Similarly, I skipped out on the whole netbook craze, short lived as it may prove to be. It was appealing, having a computer that was light and portable, with long battery life, etc; but the software was nowhere near primetime for such a device. There were two flavors: Linix machines which started up fast but which seemed to require much more computer expertise than I was willing to devote to an operating system to get it to run smoothly, and old XP machines which ran an operating system that was on it's last legs and took forever to boot; it didn't even "sleep" cleanly, as my previous XP laptop proved again and again. I was drooling over the prospect of the Chrome OS, but it is still vaporware. Similarly, there was a netbook/tablet running Linix that was apealing, until I found it would fall over at the slightest provocation because the entire guts of the netbook is concentrated behind its screen. Badly engineered, in other words. Finally with some new processors and Windows 7, the netbook thing might just yet take off. But the fact remains that they are notebook computers lite, and if the computer manufacturers put all their eggs into that basket, they are hanging themselves with their own rope. All they'll do is cannibalize their sales of notebook computers, you know, the computers they actually make money on, as opposed to these netbooks that sell for next to nothing and make the manufacturer next to nothing in profit margin.
And now, the iPad comes along. With it, a revolution, I am sure. The initial response from the heavily tech crowd on the web was pretty much uniform derision. It's name sounds like a feminine hygiene product. It doesn't do anything you can't do on a different computer. You can't do CAD or Photoshop or type your next novel with it. In terms of specs, this new computer "thing" is a lightweight. Mr. Jobs mentioned the performance specs in vague terms exactly once in the launch presentation, and only to say that Apple had designed its own chipset for the device and that it is"fast". No mention of processor power or RAM or anything of that nature. This is the first clue that this is the "computer" that finally is everything we envisioned a computer to be, since the dark ages of Star Trek the Original.
Think about it: in every single sci-fi show on TV or in the movies, what do computers look like? They tend to come in two flavors: a "desk like" thing that people manipulate a buttonless display and either look at the desk or look at something on a wall, or a little thing that looks like a notebook that people look at and tap on.
What's the iPad? Well, it's none other than that little notepad like thing that we see in all the sci-fi shows from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica.
So why do I think this is revolutionary? Well, for starters, I saw a youtube video of a 1 year old manipulating pictures on an iPhone. That's right. What's a 1 year old most likely to do on a desktop or laptop? Probably eat the mouse, am I right? This is the same software, bigger screen. Second, this computer will change the way we think of "software". Right now software is something you load onto a computer. It runs on your computer, and when you are done you close it back up. "Apps" as the iPhone people call them, turn your computer into a tool to use for a specialized purpose. You run them one at a time. You wouldn't dream of using a screwdriver in one hand while you cut wood with a circular saw in your other hand. This attitude of "your computer becomes the app" (as opposed to the current "your app runs on your computer") will eliminate spyware and viruses for all time. No more secretive processes running in the background of grandmas computer and slowing it to a crawl while stealing her credit card number.
More importantly, it will finally allow for a way to "monetize" and tame the web. Right now, all us savvy web surfers are like tradesmen in the Northern Frontiers of old. Tough and fearless and knowledgeable of the Ways of the Web. We know how to find those pieces of information we desire in the thicket of websites. We know where the dark corners of the web are and we know who to trust and how to verify information we find in the wilderness. But not everyone knows how to do this, and not everyone cares to learn. "Apps" will allow each "place" on the internet to have a front door. Right now, there is a big, thick, barred gate at the entrance of the internet, separating what is on your computer from what is on "The Internet". That's the web browser, of course. Yes, everyone who is everything has his own little clearing of land that he can call his own, but you have to go to a central site to "search" for all these little clearings. There is no roadmaps, no directions. The area is too vast and the thicket is too thick to randomly navigate.
With an app, each and every business or information center that wants to be noticed will have its own application. It's a big ad in the yellow pages. The customer loads that application onto his iPad, and presto, the business or information center has a front door in the customer's hand. The customer sees the ad for the store in the "app center", loads the app, and walks into the store. No more using Google to search the wilderness for your store. No more putting "www." in front of the store name and ".com" behind it. This is like pushing a button and teleporting right to the store you want to shop.
This is profound. No more will the internet be a wilderness that you wander around. People who want to wander the wilderness still can, but those that have no interest, will just load an application that will teleport them directly to where they want to go. And the practical effect is that, instead of the internet being filled with crappy, but profligate information made worthless by being free, the apps give a way for creators of information to get paid for it. All the free blogs are still there. Those won't go away. But those people who write information that is worth selling can have a universal store to sell it. And for the reader, the ease of having a good-as-print magazine, journal, or book at your fingertips is well worth the cost of paying the author.
Finally, there is the whole "touch" thing. Apple has gone ahead and revolutionized the UI for the second time to keep pace with what technology can bring us. Can you imagine, instead of grabbing your mouse or putting your finger on a touch pad, you just point at the screen and... presto... you just grabbed the content of the screen and made it move and do what you want with it. Other computer manufacturers are stupid about this. I recently saw a, I think it was an HP, tablet. It had a touch screen and you could wiggle stuff around the screen with your finger. A cursor showed up when your finger touched down on the screen. But for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything. Turns out that instead of just selecting something with my finger (like a virtual button), I had to use my finger to "mouse over" to what I wanted to select, and then take my hand off the touchscreen and hit a button on the bezel to "select" something. Terrible. With the iPad... point and move things around. Tap on the virtual button and it does what you want.
It is now pretty apparent to me that Apple was simply using the iPhone as a transitional product to get to the fabled notepad computer. It jumped off an established, but still unexplored market (smartphones) and developed the operating system and the touchscreen the iPad would need. More importantly, it developed a huge base of applications for the iPhone, which it could then apply to the iPad. No more chicken and egg software problem where you have a computer that can't do anything because the software doesn't exist, and software that won't exist until the computer does. The iPhone got around the problem by being a phone and a web browser first, and a computer second. The iPad gets around the problem by using the iPhone as a leadout to give the new notepad computer a rich set of applications right out of the gate. Brilliant business strategy that you rarely see anymore.
The iPad will be a huge hit. There, I said it. It will transform the whole notion of what a personal computer should be and should do. Finally, we have a computer that truly everyone can use, from our eldest grandmother to our 1 year old kid. Who knows, maybe it'll singlehandedly put the shelves and shelves of computer how-to books and virus scan software out of business. Instead of studying "quizuple-core Intel XPE45i2j6ea" processors and counting RAM, we'll be comparing user interfaces and the quality of hardware and the applications that come with it. Instead of downloading anti-spyware/anti-bug/auto-update/pro-make-your-computer-work software from obscure and somewhat shady websites, we can go to an app store attached at the hip to our computer (you know, so we can be sure everything actually works) and download the application to turn our notepad into a magazine of our choosing.
Maybe, just maybe, the computer is all growed up now.
When I entered college, my parents sent me off with a brandy new Dell that ran Windows 95. I still have this computer lurking in my garage right next to the cat food. Windows was a lot like Mac, and with it I got to examine all the wonders of nascent internet porn and the rise of AOL and malware. I surfed a lot of internet porn and wrote a lot of papers on that machine. It was great until spyware did it completely in towards the end of my undergraduate.
Entering grad school, I bought a windows XP laptop. I was disappointed from the start. 7.5lbs, it turns out, is heavy as a mutherfker, and that fancy 2.x gHz processor meant that the fans of that little thing never quit running and made more noise than a 747. The screen was totally unsuitable for viewing in other than indoor light, and the battery started out with an astounding 2 hour run time which diminished to a little over an hour by the time it was a few months old.
This was really the bad transitional days of computing. Firewalls were rare; nobody worried about spyware and everyone was paranoid about viruses. Now it's the flip. Firewalls are all pervasive on windows machines, and nobody really worries about viruses anymore. The internet was more than just an idyll curiosity; it was what you did on the computer. Google sold it's first stock as a public company and Amazon was all the rage.
Finally, the power supply of the little-big laptop that could-but-wouldn't died. It was a tragic death, probably from running the fans for triple the time the engineers intended. I rejoiced. Really, I did. Didn't even scavenge the latest data off it. Everything worth anything had been backed up on a different computer previously, so nothing of great importance was lost.
The very next day, I went to the local computer store and shelled out $1300 for an Apple Macbook, thus coming full circle back to the Mac of my childhood. I've been using it since. Nothing's changed much about the operating system, except that it is modern and the touch pad has gotten significantly better over my previous laptop.
I skipped the whole Apple iPhone thing; I'm a happy Verizon customer with a cheap and reliable (and mostly free) handset that satisfies all my mobile phone needs. I've never had any great notion of surfing the internet on the little handheld screens like that of the iPhone. Yes, it is better by far over the alternatives, but it only takes a one eyed piglet to rule the kingdom of the blind.
Similarly, I skipped out on the whole netbook craze, short lived as it may prove to be. It was appealing, having a computer that was light and portable, with long battery life, etc; but the software was nowhere near primetime for such a device. There were two flavors: Linix machines which started up fast but which seemed to require much more computer expertise than I was willing to devote to an operating system to get it to run smoothly, and old XP machines which ran an operating system that was on it's last legs and took forever to boot; it didn't even "sleep" cleanly, as my previous XP laptop proved again and again. I was drooling over the prospect of the Chrome OS, but it is still vaporware. Similarly, there was a netbook/tablet running Linix that was apealing, until I found it would fall over at the slightest provocation because the entire guts of the netbook is concentrated behind its screen. Badly engineered, in other words. Finally with some new processors and Windows 7, the netbook thing might just yet take off. But the fact remains that they are notebook computers lite, and if the computer manufacturers put all their eggs into that basket, they are hanging themselves with their own rope. All they'll do is cannibalize their sales of notebook computers, you know, the computers they actually make money on, as opposed to these netbooks that sell for next to nothing and make the manufacturer next to nothing in profit margin.
And now, the iPad comes along. With it, a revolution, I am sure. The initial response from the heavily tech crowd on the web was pretty much uniform derision. It's name sounds like a feminine hygiene product. It doesn't do anything you can't do on a different computer. You can't do CAD or Photoshop or type your next novel with it. In terms of specs, this new computer "thing" is a lightweight. Mr. Jobs mentioned the performance specs in vague terms exactly once in the launch presentation, and only to say that Apple had designed its own chipset for the device and that it is"fast". No mention of processor power or RAM or anything of that nature. This is the first clue that this is the "computer" that finally is everything we envisioned a computer to be, since the dark ages of Star Trek the Original.
Think about it: in every single sci-fi show on TV or in the movies, what do computers look like? They tend to come in two flavors: a "desk like" thing that people manipulate a buttonless display and either look at the desk or look at something on a wall, or a little thing that looks like a notebook that people look at and tap on.
What's the iPad? Well, it's none other than that little notepad like thing that we see in all the sci-fi shows from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica.
So why do I think this is revolutionary? Well, for starters, I saw a youtube video of a 1 year old manipulating pictures on an iPhone. That's right. What's a 1 year old most likely to do on a desktop or laptop? Probably eat the mouse, am I right? This is the same software, bigger screen. Second, this computer will change the way we think of "software". Right now software is something you load onto a computer. It runs on your computer, and when you are done you close it back up. "Apps" as the iPhone people call them, turn your computer into a tool to use for a specialized purpose. You run them one at a time. You wouldn't dream of using a screwdriver in one hand while you cut wood with a circular saw in your other hand. This attitude of "your computer becomes the app" (as opposed to the current "your app runs on your computer") will eliminate spyware and viruses for all time. No more secretive processes running in the background of grandmas computer and slowing it to a crawl while stealing her credit card number.
More importantly, it will finally allow for a way to "monetize" and tame the web. Right now, all us savvy web surfers are like tradesmen in the Northern Frontiers of old. Tough and fearless and knowledgeable of the Ways of the Web. We know how to find those pieces of information we desire in the thicket of websites. We know where the dark corners of the web are and we know who to trust and how to verify information we find in the wilderness. But not everyone knows how to do this, and not everyone cares to learn. "Apps" will allow each "place" on the internet to have a front door. Right now, there is a big, thick, barred gate at the entrance of the internet, separating what is on your computer from what is on "The Internet". That's the web browser, of course. Yes, everyone who is everything has his own little clearing of land that he can call his own, but you have to go to a central site to "search" for all these little clearings. There is no roadmaps, no directions. The area is too vast and the thicket is too thick to randomly navigate.
With an app, each and every business or information center that wants to be noticed will have its own application. It's a big ad in the yellow pages. The customer loads that application onto his iPad, and presto, the business or information center has a front door in the customer's hand. The customer sees the ad for the store in the "app center", loads the app, and walks into the store. No more using Google to search the wilderness for your store. No more putting "www." in front of the store name and ".com" behind it. This is like pushing a button and teleporting right to the store you want to shop.
This is profound. No more will the internet be a wilderness that you wander around. People who want to wander the wilderness still can, but those that have no interest, will just load an application that will teleport them directly to where they want to go. And the practical effect is that, instead of the internet being filled with crappy, but profligate information made worthless by being free, the apps give a way for creators of information to get paid for it. All the free blogs are still there. Those won't go away. But those people who write information that is worth selling can have a universal store to sell it. And for the reader, the ease of having a good-as-print magazine, journal, or book at your fingertips is well worth the cost of paying the author.
Finally, there is the whole "touch" thing. Apple has gone ahead and revolutionized the UI for the second time to keep pace with what technology can bring us. Can you imagine, instead of grabbing your mouse or putting your finger on a touch pad, you just point at the screen and... presto... you just grabbed the content of the screen and made it move and do what you want with it. Other computer manufacturers are stupid about this. I recently saw a, I think it was an HP, tablet. It had a touch screen and you could wiggle stuff around the screen with your finger. A cursor showed up when your finger touched down on the screen. But for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything. Turns out that instead of just selecting something with my finger (like a virtual button), I had to use my finger to "mouse over" to what I wanted to select, and then take my hand off the touchscreen and hit a button on the bezel to "select" something. Terrible. With the iPad... point and move things around. Tap on the virtual button and it does what you want.
It is now pretty apparent to me that Apple was simply using the iPhone as a transitional product to get to the fabled notepad computer. It jumped off an established, but still unexplored market (smartphones) and developed the operating system and the touchscreen the iPad would need. More importantly, it developed a huge base of applications for the iPhone, which it could then apply to the iPad. No more chicken and egg software problem where you have a computer that can't do anything because the software doesn't exist, and software that won't exist until the computer does. The iPhone got around the problem by being a phone and a web browser first, and a computer second. The iPad gets around the problem by using the iPhone as a leadout to give the new notepad computer a rich set of applications right out of the gate. Brilliant business strategy that you rarely see anymore.
The iPad will be a huge hit. There, I said it. It will transform the whole notion of what a personal computer should be and should do. Finally, we have a computer that truly everyone can use, from our eldest grandmother to our 1 year old kid. Who knows, maybe it'll singlehandedly put the shelves and shelves of computer how-to books and virus scan software out of business. Instead of studying "quizuple-core Intel XPE45i2j6ea" processors and counting RAM, we'll be comparing user interfaces and the quality of hardware and the applications that come with it. Instead of downloading anti-spyware/anti-bug/auto-update/pro-make-your-computer-work software from obscure and somewhat shady websites, we can go to an app store attached at the hip to our computer (you know, so we can be sure everything actually works) and download the application to turn our notepad into a magazine of our choosing.
Maybe, just maybe, the computer is all growed up now.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Introduction
I am a Mechanical Engineer with the experience of a church mouse. I think about stuff and I want a place to write down what I think. Engineering. Politics. Sociology. I am curious about all of it.
I spent the first 30 years of my life reading about stuff. Endlessly. Now I want to create. Instead of learning what others are thinking, I want to write about what I am thinking. Learning is a self propagating process. I write about what I am thinking, and I read about what I think and think different thoughts. An echo chamber? I think not. An echo chamber is all about other people echoing what you are saying. And enforcing straying thoughts. The enforcement process is critical, and that is what a self-propagating thought-write process breaks. Here, I am free to explore ideas. Maybe have others comment on why stuff I come up with is bullshit. Argue with myself and allow myself the freedom to be wrong about things. Join in if you dare.
I spent the first 30 years of my life reading about stuff. Endlessly. Now I want to create. Instead of learning what others are thinking, I want to write about what I am thinking. Learning is a self propagating process. I write about what I am thinking, and I read about what I think and think different thoughts. An echo chamber? I think not. An echo chamber is all about other people echoing what you are saying. And enforcing straying thoughts. The enforcement process is critical, and that is what a self-propagating thought-write process breaks. Here, I am free to explore ideas. Maybe have others comment on why stuff I come up with is bullshit. Argue with myself and allow myself the freedom to be wrong about things. Join in if you dare.
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