In an AC or alternating current power line, the current flows first one way, then the other. The current, and/or the voltage if you want to think of it that way, literally changes direction (or from +V to -V) following some type of periodic or cycling wave: a square wave, or a sine wave.

The problem is, a lot of power sources that aren't large turbine or rotationally driven generators tend to produce DC or direct current - which does not alternate. Solar panels, batteries etc.

So what a power inverter does is convert a flat Direct Current into a sinusoidal - or at least periodic, repeating - wave. One does this with mechanically flipping switches or relays or with transistors (or derived digital logic circuits), which are really just silicon based switches. For half of the cycle it sends current one way, for the other half it sends current the other way. By designing the output of that circuit carefully with the right components you can essentially get a square wave. By adding removing some additional harmonics with additional switches and components ((diodes, resistors, capacitors)) you can change the shape of that square wave into a sine wave.

And all of those have plot holes big enough to fly an F-14 through and yet no one seems to care. :)

End users have a funny way of continuously challenging one's notion of "idiot".

As a technical writer, I can assure you that at least a dozen of these were returned with the excuse of "I thought it was USB-C"

Not a graphic designer but am friends with a few.

So the first part is you have to sit with the client and figure out whats wrong with their existing branding. Is it stodgy, old fashioned, out dated? If we revise it, are we going to alienate or lose what slice of our long-time customer demographic? what about the old branding can we retain in the revamp, and what can we toss? How many people relate to the "King", how many people find him super creepy. So... all of those "requirements" type meeting take maybe a few hundred hours - at $300/hr or more + expenses.

Then the designers go away and sketch up half a dozen new logos/brandings. Present to customer. Mind you, each one takes several days to prepare, its more than just the logo. Its how that logo appears on the letterhead, the website, the email footers, the actual bricks and mortar signage, the weekly newspring circular -it has to look good and convey the "message" of the new branding in ALL circumstances.

So each proposed new branding could take days or weeks to prepare. You make two dozen and present half a dozen to the customer. They hate every one. Back to the drawing board. And these are good designers who make $200+/hr - or at least that's what you charge the client for.

Go back and forth a few times, you've narrowed it down to 1-2 contenders. Now the focus groups. How does this new logo make you feel vs. the old one? Customer engagement research takes time and money.

So just the ideation here can run you many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and you haven't actually changed anything. You've finally picked the new look and feel of your brand. Now you go to actually make the change.

Sure, telling whoever prints your napkins and takeout bags to just ue the new logo is easy, and you'll consume the stock of old ones in about a week. The new logo doesn't cost any extra to print on a bag or napkin or paper cup than the old one. But now all of your locations have to change. The color scheme of all your interiors. Each location has a 40' lite up sign that needs to change - at $50k per and you have 4,000 locations nationwide. Who eats that? the franchisee or the chain? The franchisees fight back. Um no, Im not eating $200k to change my sign and redo my interior, the staff uniforms, the stupid forms that I use to schedule a bunch of high school kids just because you decided the Burger in Burger King needed to be revamped.

Suddenly you're looking at a tens of millions of dollars change. Seems less attractive. Maybe if we get Spike Jonze to do a Super Bowl commercial for us...

You, my friend, need to learn about Edward Bernays. The godfather of modern propaganda advertising.

Essentially - bacon producer hired him to boost flagging bacon sales. He got a bunch of doctors to say "eating bacon/eggs/bigger breakfast was GOOD". Publish study, write about it in newspaper. Voila. Doctor sez eat big breakfast with bacon and eggs -> people do it. (this was back when people trusted doctors).

Do you have the hair on your chest?

lol. My kids would have spotted this ruse a mile away. I only barely got away with shredded veggies in the spaghetti sauce.

The one exception would be for grilled cheese (with process cheese slices), cause no one turns down a grilled cheese sandwich. It could be process cheese grilled between two roofing shingles and they'd eat it.

>And advice?

Yeah: don't sit and play video games for very long. There's nothing wrong with not being able to focus on one thing for more than half an hour. Get a book, do some paint by number, whatever. Keep switching it up every half an hour.

Although.. if you can't focus for > 20m but you WANT to be able to, go get checked for ADHD. My 40+ lawyer GF only recently was diagnosed with ADHD, but now that she knows, its a complete game changer. Yeah, the ritalin or whatever shes on helps her focus a bit, but the tricks and mental exercises really help her focus on tasks for hours now. She still flips between mobile games, painting on her tablet, colouring books, knitting and reading books - all within a half hour period, but for work at least she can now focus for hours at a time.

You could also try gaming on a treadmill or a stationary bike. Maybe the not sitting part is just enough to allow your brain to focus on the game.

Its not downloading a billion bytes of data all in one go. Its downloading a patch. Then it has to uncompress the patch. This patch updates "cool_Level_12.dat" and replaces several textures and fixes a glitch where if you stand on a box in the corner you glitch through the floor. The patch has to copy the file, allocate new room for the updated stuff, then repackage/flow/defrag the file (maybe). So the individual patch for cool_level_12.dat was only 2.7MB, but the whole cool_level_12.dat is like 217MB. So that's a lot of file copying, decompression, compression going on. Now repeat that for all six thousand files that make up the game.

Now add in that perhaps some of the files being patched are operating system files, or are programs that are running. So, you update/patch the file. You stop the process that IS that file. You restart it (using the new version of itself). You check that it started/is working ok. You delete the old copy of itself (if you kept it.) If the new version doesn't start, you have to restore the old copy and restart the old version of itself.

All the 1 GB file depends on is a) how fast you internet connection can download the bits b) how fast your drive can store the bits that are received.

If you want holocaust movies but with some vengence thrown in, any movies about nazi hunters. Judgement At Nuremburg... there's several movies about the famous nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal. My favorite is THe Odessa File - I think the book is better than the movie (with a young John Voight), but its pretty good and has a justice twist at the end that makes you go "Fuck yeah!"

Well, I mean if you haven't already seen it, you should probably watch Schindler's List. Other hard hitting and award winning holocaust movies are in no particular order, The Pianist, Sophies Choice, The Diary of Anne Frank, Life is Beautiful (kindof holocaust periphery), Son of Saul, The Pawnbroker.

Pfft. Then I got an MP3 discman - six hundred MP3s on a burnt CD. But a 1/8th aux to cassette adapter for my car. :)

Its not necessarily, if used correctly. PRoblem is it was arbitrary and prone to abuse; it is (or was, no one uses it anymore) lazy programming in languages higher than assembly.

Usually we want to branch code execution based on some criteria.

IF condition THEN
 do these things
OTHERWISE
 do other things
END IF 
do some necessary cleanup

This way there's a controlled return from the branching. We only have two routes: do these things or the other things. There are no other options or possible routes for execution.

By controlling or containing the execution this way we know that regardless of whether we do these things or other things, we'll ALWAYS wrap up afterward with the necessary cleanup (which might be really important.)

If I throw a random GOTO in there,

IF condition THEN
 do these things
OTHERWISE
 do other things
 GOTO XANADU
END IF 
do some necessary cleanup

#XANADU 
 do some unrelated stuff
 get lost

unless I explicitly end that goto with another GOTO that returns me to where I left off, I might never return. We'll never do the necessary cleanup for example.

Using GOTOs allowed you to jump ANYwhere. I could jump into the middle of other branches I could jump out of loops willy nilly; yeah, this is still allowed with break statements but at least the break statement just exits the loop, a GOTO could warp you anywhere. So very powerful... but it also lets programmers be lazy. Code getting too complicated? Can't find a way to structure it properly so error and failure cases return you to someplace sane? Meh, bash a GOTO in there. Its like a magic code ticket that takes you to where you want to go with no (and by that I mean all the) consequences (unallocaed memory, initialized/uninitialized variables, who knows).

A GOTO is like a magic airline ticket that takes you anywhere in the world. Except when you get there you may not have any luggage. Or both feet.

Dude, my Sears knockoff Walkman took a cassette tape and four AA batteries. We're talking 200' of metallic oxidized tape on cheap plastic spools. That shit was janky AF. But it was our only choice.

And if you don't want to have a long ethernet cable snaking through your house, look into ethernet-over-power balens or powerline adapters- they start at ~$60 for a pair.

Though, really if you're going from one side of the house to another why not just go wireless? Unless its an older console that isn't wireless, even then get an ethernet to wireless adapter/access pt. I assert that unless you are god-tier ranked globally your play is not going to be significantly impacted by a few extra ms of latency from a wireless setup.

We are Back dude.

He also produced several tracks on her debut and plays guitar on a few including Rockets Tail (cmon you recognize that Gilmour guitar wail immediately) which happens to be my fav. KB song. I dunno if its Gilmour or that really phat Fairlight CMI sound. Urngh.

No musical connection but Froese was friends with Bowie and Iggy and Eno. Franke did the music for Babylon 5? Thats all I got. Naw, the Krautrocke scene tends to be fairly insultated.

Pink Floyd -> David Gilmour -> Kate Bush -> Peter Gabriel. :)

Got nothing for The Who tho.

The boss bought a new anti-theft system - the one with those little puffy white stickers? So we closed Sunday-Monday, got paid overtime for two whole days to put little puffy white stickers on literally everything. We were nearly done when one of us accidentally discovered that if you squish the puffy sticker it doesn't work.

Turns out there are two foil sheets in the sticker - one pillar puts out a high frequency sound that causes those sheets to vibrate and emit a different sound that is picked up by the other pillar. Squish em together they don't vibrate.

We showed that to the boss. He stares at the sticker for what had to have been 45 seconds... looks at each of us. "What do you want to keep that secret to yourself?" Oh, how bout $1/hr raise for all of us? (this was a long time ago, more like $3 now) "Done."

I have only recently found Mastadon. wow.

Wow. Good find! Why does it sound like it mastered on a potato tho.

Having said that, Six Degrees of Yes kinda covers most bands from the 70s and 80s.

Yaaassssss.

We did that with Tom Jones - The Lead And How to Swing It - his "I'm still relevant in the 90s" crossover album produced by Erasure? We put that on - anyone under 25 was like "that's cool." Yeah new Erasure produced album! "Whos that singing?" You know, the Whats New Pussycat guy. ANyone older than 25 was "Is that.... Tom Jones?" Yasss.

Think we sold two dozen copies that day.