jeroen94704

As an addition to this, if the bad news will have a big impact on whoever you are delivering it to, just tell them the bad news and then sit back and wait for them to start talking.

Reason: If you tell someone they are being let go, whatever you say immediately after that won't get processed. Give them time to let it sink in and get over the first shock. They'll start talking/asking questions when they're able to.

It may be worth adding that EMC compatibility is only one step in getting your product ready for market introduction. Depending on the category of the product (consumer, medical, automotive, industrial, high-power, wireless etc etc) there may be many more tests you need to pass and many more standards you need to adhere to before you are allowed to sell your product.

Yes, you do need to take it into account, but even so, there are no guarantees you _are_ going to pass the first time around. EMC is as much dark art as it is engineering, and some things you simply cannot predict up front. We always tell our customers we do the best we can up front, but to expect EMC issues nonetheless.

It's interesting then what makes Gilstrap so energetic in his efforts to keep those patent-cases coming. Assuming there are no direct monetary payments from patent trolls coming his way, what is is incentive? Does he get "favors" from patent trolls, or does he have a relatives or friends who benefit from his practices? Always follow the money, is what I heard :).

This is part of the standard FDA procedure. It starts with a formal warning letter (they send out many of those each year, for varying degrees of severity), and give the company a chance to address the non-conformities and violations. If a company fails to address the issues found, further action is taken, as evidenced by this bit from the end of the letter:

"Correct the violations cited in this letter promptly. Failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice including, without limitation, seizure and injunction. Unresolved violations in this warning letter may also prevent other Federal agencies from awarding contracts."

I've recently browsed through these warning letters for educational purposes (they're all publicly published on the FDA website), and this is by far the sternest letter I've seen.

> Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a > congested wifi channel was unreal.

Exactly. As I said in another comment, we did a test in a very busy office space and didn't loose a single bit of data @ several 100kbit/s over a week transmitting continously. We could see it hopping on the sniffer.

I am currently in the process of developing a BT based embedded system, and in my experience Bluetooth is extremely resilient to the crowded 2.4 GHz space. It has very good and fast frequency hopping, so it maintains a connection even in the presence of several WiFi access points covering all but a small portion of the 2.4 GHz band. We ran a test in our office which has many access points and laptops/phones, and even an alarm system that uses 2.4 GHz. At a distance of 10m between central and peripheral (with several dry-walls in between) we didn't lose a single bit over a full week of continuous data transmission at several 100 kbit/s.

There are limits of course. At some point the 2.4 GHz band is so saturated nothing low power gets through. But so far, I am pleasantly surprised by the reliability.

All this was done using BT 4.2 though, so maybe that helps.

How big a job is customizing all this to work on a different board? At work we use iMX6-based SoM's on custom baseboards, and so far have stuck to Linux. But we'd like to experiment with Android, just to see if that is a viable/interesting option for embedded systems.

There is a fairly well known Dutch pilot whose last name literally translates to "brick".

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether that is an example of nominative determinism or not.

The locale and language are system settings. My point is that applications and websites have no business second guessing those system settings based on location.

For the system-level settings, those are always part of the OS install process. So either an end-user building their own system, a commercial system builder or downstream provider like a phone company will have to set it to some value during installation. Location doesn't enter into it.

Apart from travellers, there's people who don't want to deal with the often atrocious and incomplete translations provided by sites and applications.

"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults"

No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

_every_ computer these days has perfectly serviceable language and locale settings. These settings should be the definitive source for any application to decide how to present language/locale-dependent information to you. If an application shows you distances in miles, either:

1) The application ignores the language and locale settings altogether and always uses english/miles. 2) The application does look at the language setting but ignores the locale setting and decides that "english language" implies "distance in miles" 3) The application does the right thing, and your computer is actually set to a locale that uses miles for distance.

Note that none of these scenario's are fixed by looking at the physical location of your computer.