Category: History

Identify the Problem, Part 3. Eagle PCB is no more.

Impulse Buys: Can a Company Make This Mistake?

Is it possible for entire companies to make impulse buys? To buy something, like an entire other company, because “it looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no idea what they actually plan to do with it? I think it is possible. I think it does happen.

But when I buy something which “looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no actual idea what I plan to do with it, that’s just me. That piece of gear can sit on my shelf for years with no harm or inconvenience to anyone else. I can eventually decide to throw it away. And there will be no harm to or inconvenience to anyone else.

When a company is bought, left to molder for years, and is eventually thrown away, there’s a whole user base which is affected.

Customer Relations: Did Something Change?

It used to be a trope about customer relations and marketing that it was far easier to retain happy customers than to get new ones. And that an angry customer will tell far more people about their complaints than a satisfied customer will tell about their happinesses. What happened to these tropes? Have they been repudiated? Have they been disproven? I don’t know.

I do know customers of a company get very angry when that company is killed off by a parent organization for no good reason. And those customers generally do not see “we wanted to launch our own homegrown version” as a good reason to kill of an existing company and product which worked just fine.

So, what question was the parent company trying to answer when it originally bought the company it later killed? I don’t know, but I’m not sure the people who advocated and approved the acquisitions know either.

Maybe Caution Will Return

Way down on my list of books to read is Tepper’s The Myth of Capitalism (I might have the title wrong, I’m not going to check it right now). It’s about how many industries have become monopolies, monopsonies, or oligopolies. Meaning, how many industries have become dominate by six or four or fewer large companies who own the majority of other companies in the industry. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about the book, and one question was “what causes this?” The answer was “we’re not sure, but it seems to happen more when interest rates are low for a long time.”

And interest rates were low, for almost 15 years. They are now rising. Will we see more entrants and startups in industries dominated by a few players? I certainly hope so. Maybe the trend of buying up companies on impulse, to kill them a few years later, will cease. I certainly hope that happens too.

What generated this whole rant was the article “They Used to Be a Big Shot, Now Eagle PCB Is No More” by Jenny List, dated June 9 2023, in Hackaday. The article is informative (as List’s articles always are; I enjoy reading her work). The comments are worth reading too.

Cutting Edge Technology, Back In The Day: Slide Rules

I’ve been busy enough the last couple of weeks I’m off my writing schedule. I try to put up one post a week with an interesting technology link.

Today, I’m writing about technology which was revolutionary and cutting edge, but is now seen as obsolete. And that is slide rules.

Slide rules are based on logarithmic scales. They turn multiplication and division into addition and subtraction.

That was the simplest slide rule scales, there were other scales on slide rules too, for different mathematical functions.

The Oughtred Society is a group devoted to slide rules. If you’re interested in slide rules, that site is a good place to start.

(Nope, I still haven’t looked up correct citation rules for online links in an online post.)

Thoughts About Technology: Technology Isn’t Magic, But Humans Are.

As I’m writing this in early February, 2023, ChatGPT is all over the news. It’s all over the tech podcasts and news sites. I’ve even seen a newsletter for copywriters advertising a class for writing copy with ChatGPT.

More reasons why technology is not magic.

I’ve seen this at least twice and maybe three times before. A few years ago it was machine learning. Long before that, in the 1990s it was fuzzy logic. I think there was another AI (Artificial Intelligence) alleged breakthrough in the two thousand zeroes.

Each time it’s going to replace humans and each time it doesn’t. Each time the hype and hysteria fade and frequently there are some fairly embarrassing faceplants. For machine learning, after all the breathless hype about amazing image recognition, several models were broken by taking recognized pictures and changing a couple of pixels. I’ll repeat that, machine learning recognition of items in photographs was broken by changing just a few pixels. In one example, a toy turtle was labeled a gun after a few pixels were changed.

Yes, there a few successes. Facial recognition has progressed by leaps and bounds. There are also dedicated efforts to finding ways to mess it up, including specialized makeup and specialized eyeglass frames. What wasn’t mentioned was how much facial recognition is hampered by face masks, which have now become normalized in most of the world and are still mandatory in many places.

Getting back to ChatGPT, the current media darling, there’s already been multiple examples of ChatGPT being asked to write an article and getting basic information about the topic wrong.

Two already known circumstances where AI and machine learning fail:

  • They can’t understand context, and
  • They can’t understand or recreate humor. At all.

There’s probably more.

Humans Do Amazing, Almost Magical Things, All the Time.

Meanwhile, every time researchers try to copy something humans do all the time with technology, it turns out it’s really hard.

Robots transitioned to stationary or wheeled or bug-like decades ago because walking is really hard. We actually go through a series of controlled falls when we walk. I think there’s something like seven different points of stability and balance in our bodies when we walk, which we don’t notice but programming into robots is really difficult.

The first Avatar movie cost so much in part because James Cameron developed whole new headgear to watch and record the actors’ eyes and tongue while acting. He did this because eye and tongue movements are two things computer animation still couldn’t replicate convincingly, so he recorded that from the actors to add into the animated characters.

We can look at pictures that are fuzzy, pixelated, or poorly focused, and still recognize the object.

From what I’ve seen, ChatGPT is useful for quickly producing a lot of text that then needs to be edited and reviewed by a human. And that’s only if the person asking the question does a very good job of setting the parameters. And only if the person editing the response already knows the topic.

Technology isn’t magic, no matter how much we keep trying to convince ourselves it is.

Technician Tuesday: Two surprises in old technology

Recently I mentioned to some younger friends that certain types of art reminds me of computer screensavers. My friends mentioned they had never really seen the point of screensavers. They were surprised when I told them the purpose is in the name: “screensaver.” Older computer and television monitors would permanently burn an image into the screen if that image was constantly on the screen. A screensaver would vary what was shown on the screen so it would save the screen.

I was surprised to recently read that FM, meaning frequency modulated. radio was much easier with vacuum tubes. The comment I read was FM radio could be set up with far fewer vacuum tubes than it currently takes with modern solid-state technology.