The creators "invested" in foreign companies that would buy their product. They had realized that $1 of product sold was making them much more than that in the stock exchange...
Be cautious about calling their customer support if you have "bought" DRM stuff: you can be banned for any reason at any time.
I complained about a failed delivery (broken box, one item missing). They refunded me but then immediately put me on a watch-list, threatening to ban me if I ever complain again. I will never buy anymore on amazon.
I am from Europe and chairs are a bit less expensive here, but an "active" wheelchair is usually more than 2k$ anyway, often closer to 3k$. And some are much more than that (for instance if you want a soldered chassis)
You are missing the experience of being tied to a wheelchair for a complete day.
None of the chairs you have shown are suitable for daily use. Even the "Magnesium" one.
One of the most important point (beside being the right size) is to be able to move the center of the rear wheels just behind the center of gravity. Too far rear and you have very good stability (hospital chairs), but you need to use most of your strength just to be able to turn (and you take a lot of space for turning). Too far ahead and it becomes dangerous. So it must be adjustable. In theory this should be possible on a cheap wheelchair, but I have never seen it. Probably the weight ditribution is too different (most is on the rear wheel) that the chassis must be thought differently?
I am on a watch-list too because of a recent problem with a broken package with only one item out of two inside. It was clearly a too light packaging for a heavy item with sharp corners.
The only other problem I had was a warranty claim 5 years ago.
My account is not closed (but they "reserve the right to close it" anytime). I am glad I have no kindle or DRM stuff...
I tried to get an explanation, but just got a robot email.
I will never buy there anymore. Even if some stuff are hard to find elsewhere
When I was about 10, I was able to swim but I was not great at it.
For some reason (I think someone dived just in front of me), I needed to stop swimming and ended "vertical" in the water. It was quite unusual for me at the time. For a moment, I tried to go back to swim horizontally on the belly, without success. Then tried on the back, no success either. After a few tries, I began panicking like it is said the the video: I was just climbing an invisible ladder... A guard finally helped me reach the border of the pool and that was over.
After that, I tried to put me under the same circumstances: vertical in the water, 2 m from the border. And then convert to horizontal swimming. Every time it was easy. To this day, I still have no clue why I was not able to do that
+1
And usually, the one person in the meeting not using headphones does not feel the problem: he can speak all the time and be heard correctly, while the others cannot interrupt him while he is speaking
Just a fun anecdote on end-to-end testing I did 20 years ago while working on the compression of images.
Some parts of the algorithm were easy to test, others very hard. On the easy part was loading and saving the file. I tried to test as best as I could, but the lossy part was not really tested.
Then time to benchmark the algo on some images.
The results were kind of OK, but some images compressed much better than others at low bit-rate, while the content did not look much different.
On square images, everything was fine.
On rectangular ones, at high-bit rates it was somewhat fine, but strange patterns like ghosts of another part on the image started to appear for lower and lower bit rates.
Of course, I searched on the mostly algorithmic parts what was going on, and failed.
Only after a holiday break and fresh eyes did I found the root cause: inversion of height and width in some part of the loading AND saving.
I had "end to end" test of the loading and saving, but the error was symmetric, so undetected. Young engineer error...
"Refactor your codebase to put the related code together"
Of course it is a goal, but not always possible. You sometimes have two (or more) conflicting "relations" in the codebase. E.g.: you are dealing with taxes in various countries. Do you group by country or by kind of taxes (on sales, profits, earnings, energy, real estate...) ?
The right answer really depends on how your team is organized and how you are making changes.
In EU (and probably elsewhere), there are strict rules for the stability of power wheelchair. One such rule is "On a incline of x% (x chosen by the manufacturer), pushing for max speed from stop should not lift the front wheels"
To achieve that, the max acceleration must be quite low (software controlled), and the whole experience is sluggish, like trying to steer a car by pulling on rubber bands attached to the wheel.
From the moment I found a way to overcome this, I never went back. I know that I can hurt myself if I do something stupid, but I prefer this hypothetical risk instead of cursing 100 times a day because I cannot move how I want. It has been 10 years and I never got hurt.
I understand that such "high" risk device cannot be sold, but forbidding someone to change this is like inflicting a second handicap on him.
These shenanigans before displaying the final result can have quite a lot of psychologic effects.
Back when I started programming, I did simulate a jackpot machine in software (no money involved). The final probabilities were fair, but I added a twist while rolling the images: before stopping, the probability of having 2 or 3 of the same image was quite significant...
My younger brother was instantly hooked to it. The trick made him overestimate the probability of having 3 images the same, as he was seeing this pattern quite often just before stopping.
This made me realize of fucked-up casino can be, while still abiding by the rules
On the other hand, rebasing can create its own problems re: regression finding
If you rebase more than one commit, you can also have an intermediate commit which does not run fine, or even compile. This can happen silently, without conflict resolution while you rebase. Think a function call in trunk needs one additional parameter.
So you have a commit message saying "Protocol X tested successfully with Y", which was true when the code done and tested. After the rebase, it might not run anymore because of changes done in the trunk. You will probably notice it and correct it in a later commit, but good luck in 3 month when someone points a bug at protocol X and you want to re-run the test in this commit...
About touch buttons, I have seen once a lift with touch buttons for controls.
For accessibility, the floor were also written in Braille. I thought to myself: "nice, they thought about vision impaired people".
Then, a friend of mine, which has completely lost vision and can read Braille, jokingly said to me when he arrived: "Trying to find the right button, I probably send the lift to all floors!"
They claim a save of 400kW per sail, with a boat cruising at 22kts.
Let's do some math:
- 400kW is 400e6 J/s, or 400e6 N.m/s
- 22kts is 11.31m/s
So the forward force must be 400e6/11.31 = 3.5e7N, so around 3500 metric tons of force for a single sail.
And with a relative wind coming from the front usually, this means the side force will be much bigger than that.
Good writing is clearly useful and quite often mentioned. But good reading is very rarely talked about. I think it is even more important.
Too many people cannot maintain attention for more than a few seconds while reading. Or they read "what they want to read" instead of the actual text. Like I write a "list of things" and they read it like "a set of things", loosing the meaningful ordering of a list.
I tend to write concise documentation, but people always loose some important details that way. So I am now purposefully adding more text than strictly required to be sure important points are really understood.
Like a good teacher repeats at least 3 times the same matter, with a slightly different angle
The creators "invested" in foreign companies that would buy their product. They had realized that $1 of product sold was making them much more than that in the stock exchange...