The Ware for July 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.
This is just one board out of a couple in the system, but I figure this should be enough for people to nail it, given the quick success rate of past competitions.
This is again a user-submitted ware, this time from an anonymous reader of the blog! It’s pretty cool actually to be getting ware submissions now, because I get to play the game a bit myself while reviewing and preparing the photos for posting :-).
The ware for June 2008, provided courtesy of xobs, is a “Kitchen Sync” expansion card from the ’90s, used with the Video Toaster. The Kitchen Sync is a sync generator for video signals, and it includes two independent time base correctors.
I love retro hardware like this — brings me back to the day when garage startups could really build and market hardware products that made a difference. Thanks for playing!
The winner for June 2008 is Stern! email me to claim your prize. Drew (winner from May 08) — I will send your prize out soon. Sorry it took so long, I recently got back from a long business trip to China and I’m slowly getting my head above water level.
The ware for June 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.
The flip side of the daughtercard is shown below:
Thanks to xobs for the wonderful piece of retro-Ware!
Sorry for the late posting again — I’ve been in China running around. If you ever find yourself on the way to visit the Foxconn compound near Shenzhen, I have one piece of advice for you: pack your own lunch. Until now, I’ve had pretty decent food in most of the factories I’ve visited (3CEMS actually has quite delicious food), but for some reason the food at Foxconn is awful and I’ve been ill the past two days.
The winner of Name that Ware May 2008 is Drew, who gave the first correct response identifying the device as a barcode scanner. It is a 3800 series linear barcode scanner by Hand Held Products. Drop me an email to claim your prize!
I was a bit surprised by the overall electronics complexity of the device, but I imagine that’s an artifact of using a camera-type sensor to do barcode recognition — they need a fairly powerful CPU on the inside to run the DSP algorithms to extract the barcodes from images taken by the sensor array that is bonded on the bottom side of the board (and carefully hidden from view in the photo because it would be way too easy to guess the device based on the sensor alone!). It’s an interesting turn on how barcode scanning used to be done — with a rotating mirror and a laser and a simple detector that demodulated the bits mostly in the analog domain. As a general philosophy, the idea of “wrapping a CPU around things” (in this case, cheap, noisy sensors) to create a system that is net more reliable and more versatile is a useful architectural paradigm.
Thanks to everyone who played!
Here’s an interesting question.
Suppose you had a household with two cars, and each car needs to be driven 10,000 miles per year. One car consumes 34 MPG, and the other car consumes 18 MPG. Since gas is expensive, you want to replace one car. Because of utility constraints, you have two choices:
Which car replacement would save you the most gas?
Normally, I consider myself not bad with quantitative comparisons like this, yet initially I picked the answer of replacing the 34 MPG car with the 50 MPG car based on the superior 16 MPG improvement. Another seemingly more analytical approach also leads to the same conclusion: 50 + 18 MPG giving a 34 MPG household average seems more efficient than 34 + 28 MPG giving a 31 MPG household average.
This very interesting article in Science, “The MPG Illusion” by Richard P. Larrick and Jack B. Soll at the Fuqua School of Business in Duke University (Vol 320, June 20, 2008, p. 1593), points out the mathematically obvious truth that gas used per mile is inversely proportional to miles per gallon, which means that you have a steeper slope at lower MPG ratings, and diminishing returns at higher MPG ratings.
(The above image is taken from the article, available here with subscription).
When you run the numbers, replacing the 34 MPG car with a 50 MPG (a 16 MPG improvement) car saves you 94.1 gallons per 10,000 miles, whereas replacing the 18 MPG car with a 28 MPG (a 10 MPG improvement) car saves you 198.4 gallons per 10,000 miles — more than double the savings.
Or, to give an even more clear-cut example, replacing a 5,000 MPG car with a 10,000 MPG car saves you just one gallon of gas, whereas replacing a 1 MPG car with a 2 MPG car saves you 5,000 gallons of gas, using a fixed mileage of 10,000 miles driven for comparison.
There are some important policy implications of this. Relatively small MPG improvements in the most gas-hungry vehicles pay off greater than larger improvements in already efficient cars (hence, it does make sense to offer tax breaks for modest improvements in SUVs versus tax breaks for hybrids, which typically replacing already gas-efficient sedans). Also, personal driving habits, especially for gas-hungry cars, can often times add or subtract a few MPG to a car’s efficiency on average. For example, a car that may get 25 MPG “average highway” will degrade to under 15 MPG if you gun it out of stoplights in city traffic. That’s a huge increase in gas consumed per distance driven, especially for the less efficient cars, whereas for more efficient cars it doesn’t hurt as much to goose the engine a bit.
Apparently the thinking that gas savings is linear with MPG is not uncommon. A survey of college students revealed that a majority of them shares this misconception. I’m not sure what the sociological term is for such a massively accepted factual inaccuracy, but it seems like a textbook case for how common wisdom can fail the common person. It’s also a good example of why you don’t want to put policies to a vote — people just don’t have the time to run the numbers, and simple numbers can be so simply deceptive, even with the best intentions. Good democracies are probably more about the people directly controlling principles (“conserve oil”), rather than the policies (“reward car makers that achieve the greatest fleet MPG delta”). Of course, that doesn’t address the problem of creating accountability between principles, policies, and politicians that make the policies to execute the principles.