Regardless of whether the underpaying allegations are true, Amazon keeping 60-75% of the sales price is absolutely egregious. People were absolutely up in arms about Apple's 30% app store cut a year ago.
2,472 karma · joined March 31, 2017
As far as I'm aware, the official Hasbro one went quite well: https://hasbropulse.com/products/heroquest-game-system
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
On every bid we sent them the #1 requirement was Proprietary Fit. There had to be some sort of IP lockout (always disguised as a valuable design feature, but it never was) to prevent end users from procuring replacement parts anywhere else. In many cases it even made the parts significantly worse, as useless bumps or ridges were added to the industry standard to make them physically incompatible.
The old model was we build a part for $8 and sell it to the end user for $10. Under Deere's new model, we build the part for $8, sell it exclusively to Deere for $11, and they sell it to customer for $16.
My former employer was very complicit in this behavior, but Deere was by far the most aggressive about and a big enough player to squeeze all their suppliers.
Edit: They pay all kinds of lip service to how this is better for the customer ("reliable supply chain", "Deere-guaranteed quality", etc) but that's only in their public PR. Behind the scenes it is 100% about securing a long term revenue source - customers pay out the ass for a piece of equipment, then have to keep coming back to Deere for 50 years for replacement parts.
Things that used to take 2-3 hours to plan started taking 6 weeks as management insisted on being deeply involved. Instead of infrequent project check-ins, 18 hours a week was blocked off to management updates. Shortly before I put in my 2 weeks I had project update meeting where my status was something like Accomplishments: held status update meetings on 11/1, 11/3, 11/8, 11/12, 11/15, and 11/18.
That job broke me and I just stopped caring. The new one is much better.
Wife has commented many times on the change in my personality, as I'm not ending most days furious and miserable.
Guess that's "Company Culture" for purposes of the poll.
A few jobs are missing, but the most recent (and therefore most relevant) is correct.
Maybe Omicron provides immunity to Rho (or whatever is coming), but it may provide no protection to Sigma.
On one hand, cleaning up plastic pollution is a fantastic thing. On the other, there is a tremendous amount of carbon currently locked up in plastics which is for all practical purposes inert. Releasing that into the atmosphere is yet one more thing that will accelerate climate change.
It also will require a massive shift in our material usage. Bacteria breaking down that plastic bag in the ocean is great. Bacteria setting in on construction, medical devices, or your NES is not so ideal.
Blade Runner is interesting as there are 3 different versions, all about the same length but with some very different scenes. Theatrical also has a terrible voice over which was later removed.
The Shining is one that gets better when shortened - most feel that the 119 minute European version is better than the 144 minute US cut.
Apocalypse Now is interesting - Redux (193 minute) is a slog compared to theatrical (147); but Final (182) is probably the best version and a great example of the balance needed.
There's also the video 'How Star Wars was saved in the edit' which has a lot of good information on what editing can do. The video has kindof been co-opted by the internet as definitive proof that George Lucas is a talentless hack, but it's really not that much different than what happens on every other film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEHRNS-Scrs
I feel like something is always beeping at me across countless services and just stresses me out.
Windows beeps every time I click anything now, every app wants to spam notifications every our, Jira, countless chat apps, email, even the credit card machines at Target have gotten more aggressive...
From experience, hard drives seem safe on the order of years; I've spun drives back up from the early 2000s and they are fully intact. The lifespan of burned optical media is/was counted in minutes. Various flash memory is somewhere in between - I've had all kinda of cheap flash drives die.
Even with the multiple media forms they need to be refreshed at some frequency, and I don't know how often that should be.
Random Vibration is usually characterized by a constant input of energy to the system at a range of frequencies - rocket motors, engine rpm + cylinder firing frequency, road noise, etc.
A somewhat imperfect analogy that I've heard is random vibration is analogous to playing white noise/pink noise/etc through a speaker. Shock is analogous to the horrific crackling and popping you get when you plug a guitar into an amplifier that's already on.
Because it's only a 4 day slip, they'll start with simulations to look for any systems that may have been damaged. If they don't see any issues assembly and launch will continue.
If simulations show that this may have damaged a component, we'll see a longer delay as they begin replacing systems.
It sounds to me like this is more of an unintended shock event (see zeeb's response below) that caused an oscillation at the natural frequency ("vibration") but they tortuously avoided using the word "shock".
This would result in a given shock response spectrum [1], which effectively can amplify the input if it hits any part's natural frequency - e.g. a 1G input shock could become a 5G response somewhere in the satellite. I assume this wasn't accounted for in design so they'll determine if this could have damaged any onboard systems.
Launch vibration has a well known Power Spectral Density [2] which effectively says how much energy is being input at every frequency. If they design the system so no parts have a natural frequency at a high-energy peak it's safe.
Shock and vibration are closely related, but very different in practice. It's all about natural frequencies and what frequencies the energy is being input at.
1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_response_spectrum
2) https://vru.vibrationresearch.com/lesson/what-is-the-psd/
I finally got all of our admin/root passwords into a password manager with sharing among job functions and our CTO as backup to ensure some level of continuity. After losing passwords to multiple production systems after someone leaving the company it was still a battle.
Stories can only be flagged, which as I understand can lead to bans/losing the privilege if it's abused.
For example, something like:
+3" dark brown frame (for walnut, wood texture would be a plus)
+2" left/right; +2.5" top, +3" bottom white mat board (reveals are not usually uniform in custom work)
I currently spend a lot of time mocking up these ratios in Gimp before starting work, something that automates it and shows it on the wall would be amazing.
Adding depth would be a nice touch too if that's possible, stretched canvas can stick out 1.5" or more.
Great work though, I like it so far and might be able to use it to help my mockups a bit already.
A 25 year old tractor design (probably out to 75+ year old tractors even) still has hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and tooling behind it. Molds or dies for a single part can easily reach into 6 figures, without taking into account the $10 million injection molding machine.
The simplifications you could do would be limited, as every design decision affects the placement and access to a dozen other parts.
Take a part like this, which is for a Deere 750 (small tractor) released in 1989: https://www.compactractorparts.com/tractor-parts/john-deere/...
I could model that in CAD in under an hour. Lining up manufacturing is a minimum 12 month process with preexisting relationships, and would take upwards of $250k to get in the door. This also doesn't take into account the "societal collapse" angle - post-apocalypse there's no way to make that yourself, and manufacturers in China would presumably no longer be an option.
I find it hilarious every time - they're made to be used and abused. I've told every one of them "if you actually manage to use it enough to damage it, I'll just make you another one", but they still sit there in pristine condition.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-LeadCheck-Instant-Lead-Test-S... (this actually seems expensive, I'm used to closer to $2-3 per stick)
We have an early 20th century house and run them over anything we're about to demo. So far we've been lucky, so likely a later renovation removed most of the lead that would have been there.
Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.
The real killer in Chennai is the humidity. The combined measure of heat and humidity in air is the “wet-bulb temperature”—the lowest temperature to which something can be cooled through evaporation from its surface. In dry air, even at temperatures well above 37°C—human body temperature—people can sweat to cool down. But at wet-bulb temperatures of 32°C and higher, “it becomes unsafe to perform most physical labour,” says Moetasim Ashfaq, an atmospheric physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Few people can survive a wet-bulb temperature above 35°C. In the past decade, wet-bulb temperatures in Chennai have regularly risen above 32°C. But for much of the past week, wet-bulb temperatures have repeatedly crossed 36°C—a fatal level.
It was effectively flat from 2012-2017, then small upticks in 2018 and 2019?
The second derivative of CO2 seems to show a huge decrease in the last few years.
"aog" always goes after "Lor" and before "san" (obviously made up example) - I couldn't tell you what the individual words meant or what the full sentence said; but I knew that those groups of letters belonged in that order.
I'm also a lapsed B2 in German and played around with that course a few years ago. 3 or 4 weeks ago I got an email that they finally accepted my correction on a blatantly incorrect translation, which had apparently been unfixed in one of their most popular courses for years.
Essentially, solar is great from 8am to 4pm, and California has replaced about half of their load during those hours with solar. However, they have negligible renewable capacity during other times of the day, including peak demand from 6-10pm.
There's a more up-to-date version of California's Duck Curve here: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...