ENvironmentally Friendly Inter City Aircraft powered by Fuel Cells

"Denny" wrote in message
ups.com...
Then, they sold people on "SUVs" that may be the least practical
vehicles in urban environments. Today, they're left with an inventory
that
they can't give away, and Toyota et al are eating their lunch.

Neil- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Toyota has become an american corporation with overseas owners - in a
big part because labor in Japan is just too damned expensive picture
evil grin...

Back in the early 80's, the American auto industry was railing about how
Japanese cars cost less because their workers made less $$$ (or, yen, as it
were).

A study showed the American auto worker made something like $20.50 and hour,
and his Japanese counterpart made around $24 an hour.

Over the past couple of years their quality is slipping JD Powers
based on buyer complaints - must be those lazy american workers - or
maybe it is because Toyota's management is being pressed to improve
the profit margin because the Japanese bank/market monolith is
teetering on the edge of a huge meltdown...

Not anymore. It did lead to the NIKKEI collapsing back around '91, but
they're (slowly) coming out of it. The Japanese central bank did,
essentially, what the Federal Reserve did in the late 1920's in the US.


The american car companies do 'get it' for the most part... Their
curse is the legacy of having been big and the contracts they agreed
to in the past are now eating them... That is temporary and being
changed as fast as the laws will let them...


I have people I talk to daily who are GM employees / executives, and
those who are suppliers to GM... The suppliers are frantically moving
production from the USA to Mexico as is GM itself... Delphi Chassis
Saginaw is rapidly transferring its disc brake production south of the
border because congress continues to roll over for the UAW and refuses
to give the employer a fair shake...

IF you want to know who is to blame for jobs leaving the country just
look at the congress critter you voted in... The buck stops there as
the bucks continue to flee the country

In part...but also thank OSHA, EPA, and a dozen other alphabet soup
bureaucracies.

(and please don't anyone give me that strawman crap about what would happen
without the alphabet soup nonsense: if the 55MPH speed limit was to save
lives and gas, the equivalent would be to make the limit 15MPH).

"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
Jose wrote:
What is illegal on the federal level is crackpot
doctors and others selling pot as, pardon the pun, a roll your own
med.

... and what makes those doctors crackpot? The fact that they
prescribe marijuana?

Pretty much, yes. Most doctors don't go around making up their own
prescriptions.



Oh, Gawd! I'm havig flashbacks of "Reefer Madness", and "Up in Smoke" at the
same time!!!

John Theune wrote:

I have to disagree with your point of view that Software Engineering is
not engineering . I have both a BSCS and a MSCS and have worked at
both Fortune 5 companies and well as much smaller organizations. While,
just like in other engineering fields, it's possible not to follow a
rigorous development process, I have seen and worked within a process
that had all the hallmarks of a engineering process in other fields.
That you have not seen it does not mean it does not exist.

I'll agree to disagree. I thought the same as you until I got my EE
degree. There is simply no comparison. The Comp Sci degree was a walk
in the part compared to EE. And EE's design based on mathematical and
physical principles. I almost never used math when working as a
software developer.


As part of this thread I started looking in to the licensing of
Engineers and looking at the national standards I saw that there is no
licensing of the software engineering field. The closest I could find
was Electrical and Computer Systems but that was 70 directed to the
electrical aspects of designing the hardware with a small ( 30%) amount
devoted to software itself. It would seem that NCEES thinks software
is important enough to test for but not to license as a separate
category. Perhaps this will change but given that this board equates
surveying with engineering make me question just how relevant they are.

Did you look at Texas? I haven't followed this closely, but a few years
back they were planning to license software engineers.

Matt

ktbr wrote:
Well, when you consider that virtually everything we use today
involves software it is a dsicipline in its own right.

Ahem. I've written a fair amount software with no dominatrix involved at
all, so I know it can be done undisciplined.


;-)

ktbr wrote:

Well, when you consider that virtually everything we use today
involves software it is a dsicipline in its own right. It is a
vitally important component of any engineering process from design
and development, modeling, simulation, manufacturing, process control
(a pilot could not fly an F117 without the software systems), testing
and on and on.

A discipline, yes. An engineering discipline, no.


I've designed and developed both analog and digital hardware and
written the software to support it. I started out in hardware
and eventually over the years gravitated into software development
because (at least where I have worked) good software engineers
were always in high demand. Understanding the CPU architecture
is important to designing an efficient solution to any problem.

What is your degree in?


The same engineering principles apply whether you are designing
a software system or a hardware system and the best designs
involve a proper division of both disciplines, because most
most software is controlling or sensing some sort of hardware,
or interfacing with humans or other systems. Software is
very diverse and can be extremely low level (micro-coded devices),
mid level (operating systems and device drivers) and high level
(applications).

What are the software equivalent of Maxwell's equations?


Software engineering in terms of design and developing systems
is engineering (whether anyone likes it or not). Writing a few
macros for a spreadsheet is not engineering.... but that isn't
what were were talking about.

What is the fundamental difference between coding a macro and coding a
database routine?

Matt Whiting asked ... "What are the software equivalent of Maxwell's
equations?"

Knuth

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:

I'll agree to disagree. I thought the same as you until I got my EE
degree. There is simply no comparison. The Comp Sci degree was a walk
in the part compared to EE. And EE's design based on mathematical and
physical principles.

your CS degree didn't include any numerical analysis? or discrete math?

I almost never used math when working as a software developer.

you never did any dsp code? Some of the software developers I'm
working with now are doing a considerable amount of math (the
exact nature of this application is sensitive so I won't go into
details)

--
Bob Noel
(goodness, please trim replies!!!)

On Fri, 8 Jun 2007 19:33:28 -0600, "Jon Woellhaf"
wrote:

Matt Whiting asked ... "What are the software equivalent of Maxwell's
equations?"

Knuth

A stretch. "GOTO Seen Harmful"? K&R? I don' think that dog's gonna
hunt. You've gotta get down to Shannon, which I don't think answers
the question wrt programming.

If Swain had a contrary opinion, I'd listen to it.

Don

Matt Whiting wrote:


I'll agree to disagree. I thought the same as you until I got my EE
degree. There is simply no comparison. The Comp Sci degree was a walk
in the part compared to EE. And EE's design based on mathematical and
physical principles. I almost never used math when working as a
software developer.


FYI I have an EE degree... my minor was in CS. In the areas I have
worked I have actually found software more challenging than hardware
(and I've done both). Just because you never used your CS knowledge
to do much of anything complicated does not mean others don't.

Finally... controlling systems in real time demands that
you understand the engineering laws of electronics/physics
because you design the software to perform the calculations/transforms
or whatever else to produce to correct result... as well as
perform tasks that check the resulting action to insure it
is working then take corrective action if it doesn't.

It takes an excellent electrical engineer to design these
systems. You can marginalize it all you want.

Bob Noel wrote:


you never did any dsp code? Some of the software developers I'm
working with now are doing a considerable amount of math (the
exact nature of this application is sensitive so I won't go into
details)


Exactly. It's obvious Matt has never done any serious
design and development of bleeding edge software, so he
just calls software engineers 'geeks' in order to marginalize
the whole thing and make himself feel better.

Personally I've met just as many geek hardware guys as
software guys and I've worked in both environments.