SFC is really useful for a small set of problems. The major advantage of ladder, is it makes following whats going on in live system easy.

I don't think you understand the difference between peak and average volume. A solution which limited you from pushing peak all the time would decrease the overall quality of the product.

No, it is compromise engineering. Which is OK for a lot of consumer electronics. For example, most laptops won't have enough cooling to dissipate full load heat at maximum rated temperature. This isn't a design flaw, it is a compromise to allow the designer to get more peak performance out of the laptop(or more peak volume in a movie, for example). It is the same with, say gmail. Do you really think google could have supplied every user 1Gb of mail space at launch?

I personally don't do this sort of engineering, but I can see the reasoning. And if you are trying to push high volumes out of your laptop speaker, you probably should be carrying external speakers. There are physical limitations to systems designed to be portable.

Well, I haven't been banned, but my regularly scheduled mod points have not appeared. All I did was mod up some of the more polite and reasoned anti-beta posts... The "Fuck beta" posts are anatomically improbable, and likely less than helpful, but I ignored them and left them where they were.

I am a late joiner (7 digits), but was an AC for a long time before I registered. I await the outcome of this situation. As far as I can tell, beta isn't being forced on us yet, and if it is, well, perhaps it is time I left /. behind anyway. It has been fun. :)

As opposed to a bastard foreign hacker?

National Instruments does graphical programming in their motion control systems and it makes some sense, though it kind of sucks. Also PLCs are often written in ladder not text, unless your programmer has lost the plot a bit and thinks statement list is appropriate for everything (hint, it isn't).

I have found Japanese embedded software to be very well written. Even their programming interfaces. [rant]With the exception of Toshiba that makes PLC software from the 1900s which sucks worse than the /. beta interface (seriously, if you think beta is bad, write a complex system in TDP32. Really - black holes have nothing on PLC software without search and replace).[/rant]

Apart from it's annoying habit of logging me out and bland greyness, it it acceptable on the tablet. Still prefer the classic interface, but I can live with mobile.

I spent quite some time changing the Office 2012 menus back to normal text. Apparently it is easier with Visual Studio 2012(something in the registry), but I can't bring myself to take the time to move and every time I open it I feel like my eyes are on fire.... Still, .NET has some pretty cool stuff in it. And some pretty retarded stuff, but the workflow in developing for .NET is pretty good - whatever IDE you use.

There happens to be a fairly large amount of software used to control large synchronous machines. Heck, even on smaller scales a modern VSD probably has some form of basic embedded OS.

Huh? Where I live that is a good 120+beers. I don't know any 14 year olds with that capacity.

Wow. I pay R50 for 6 beers. Decent beer too.

It isn't big money nor is it a primary source of income, but it may be worth the time. $136 is easily beer money for a month, depending where you live. Or it could be redirected to his favourite charity. Either way, why not?