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February 26
More on More on Body Armor
In my February 11 entry on Body Armor I discussed the report that our military men who had purchased Pinnacle Dragon Skin Body Armor had been required to remove it in favor of approved armor and speculated that the DoD was in someone’s pocket.
Correspondent P. D. MacGuire tells me on good authority that:
Pinnacle has a GSA issued purchase number for the Dragon Skin Armor, and the DoD is buying as much as Pinnacle can make for Special Forces aps. The general issue body armor is pretty damn good, by the way, and the research facility in Quincy is working on something much better and lighter. I think the one of the reasons that this order might have come down - rather than officers on the scene turning a blind eye to it - is that scammers on eBay, etc., are selling ceramic plates that are crap.
In that same entry I say that
The report concludes by mentioning that “Currently nine U.S. generals stationed in Afghanistan are reportedly wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin body armor, according to company spokesman Paul Chopra.
P. D. corrects the report on this score as well:
There aren't 9 US Generals in Afghanistan. The Canadians have one or two and the Germans have three or four and we have another three at most.
We thank P.D.M. for these clarifications.
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Don Knotts
Back in November, in noting the death of Skitch Henderson, I reflected on the entire crew from the old Steve Allen Show. At that point the only members of that marvelous cast who remained alive were Bill Dana, Tom Poston and Don Knotts.
Now we’re down to two. Don Knotts died at age 81 Friday, February 24 of lung cancer. We’ve lost three of that old crew in a few short months - Knotts, Henderson and Louis Nye.
In that November piece I say that “My friend Ric has a laserdisc of some of the great Steve Allen comedy routines. Steve introduces one of them by pointing out that the real surprise of the bit is the guest actor in the routine - one of the last people you’d expect to be funny, but he’s hilarious. It is Charlton Heston with Steve’s usual suspects in a skit about the filming of scene for a Western movie.”
In that bit, Heston is interacting with Knotts. Heston’s character keeps screwing up the scene and having to start over again and again (which is the comic setup). After several of these errors, Knotts has begun to make errors as well and in frustration shouts out in that piercing high voice, “I can’t work with him!” The idea of a Don Knotts refusing to work with a Charlton Heston is just wonderful, and seeing him say it is even more wonderful.
Knotts started out with Steve Allen as the “nervous” Man in the Street and he played it for all it was worth. He was a funny man.
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February 25
How’s Your Deferred Compensation?
Mine is a little light. But Jerald G. Fishman’s is doing fine, thanks.
Mr. Fishman is CEO of Analog Devices, Inc. in Norwood, MA. The company’s amendments to its first quarter 10-Q noted that late in 2005 they paid him what they owed him in deferred comp: $144.7 million. He was not alone. Fishman, Ray Stata, the chairman of the company ($67 million) and several other executives withdrew a total of $253 million (see note 15 in the 10-Q) in the company’s fiscal first quarter. That’s a quarter of a billion in compensation that stockholders had no way of knowing about ahead of time.
And the guy doesn’t even play professional basketball or star in movies.
The 10-Q states that the company experienced a lowering of its current liabilities and that “The decrease in current liabilities was primarily the result of a $230.2 million decrease in the deferred compensation plan liability primarily as a result of withdrawals by plan participants in response to certain provisions of the American Jobs Creation Act.” I won’t try to explain how any of this has anything to do with job creation. I will simply reiterate that for stockoholders this was one of those “Surprise! Surprise!” moments you sometimes encounter in life - one where you say, “Oh, thanks so much for decreasing a quarter billion dollar liability I didn’t know I had!”
You can view the details of the transactions in the proxy statement submitted with the 10-Q. And you can sit down with your calculator and try to figure out if all the non-executive employees of ADI combined “earned” $253 million. Or if there aren’t some countries that have GDPs lower than that.
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February 24
The Computer That Computes When It’s Not On
This should come as no surprise to any of you, and is probably just another ho-hum piece of ordinary technological news. But what the hell. I’ll report it anyway.
The science journal Nature reports in its online February 22, 2006 edition that researchers at the University of Illinois have created a computer that can give an answer when it’s not turned on. It also computes without running a program.
According to the report, “They have created a kind of quantum computer using light beams, and find that it can find a particular item in a database without actually looking for it.” Onur Hosten and his colleagues say that the computer performs “ 'counterfactual' quantum computation: a way of probing the outcome of an event by looking at situations in which it didn't actually happen.”
The device “uses the laws of quantum mechanics to perform many calculations at once where a conventional computer could do them only one at a time. This drastically cuts the time a quantum computer takes to find the answer.
This is made possible by the fact that quantum objects, such as individual atoms or photons of light, can be placed in 'superposition' states, mixtures of states that are mutually exclusive in everyday objects. A quantum switch, for example, could be simultaneously on and off.”
However, if you remember Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Prinicple - ”The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.” - you will wonder, as I did, how any answer from such a computer could be trusted. Well, it is a problem. The article says that “quantum computation doesn't invariably give the right answer.”
Now I would have told them to try the quantum Zeno effect had I been asked. Well, wouldn’t you know it - they did just that! The result amounts to changing the probability of a particular outcome simply by looking for it. Of course! This is how any resourceful person finds something, or not. It sometimes works the other way too, as we all know. If you lose something, what you need to do to find it is not to look for it. But I digress.
These clever scientists “created a simple 'quantum computer' from laser beams, mirrors and light detectors, which encodes information in the quantum states of photons. In effect, they put a single photon in a superposition of states in which it both is and isn't fed into an optical 'black box' that processes its quantum state according to an algorithm. They then look at the photon to see whether the answer to the calculation is encoded in it.
The team took advantage of the Zeno effect in probing the 'non-running' states of their computer, in which the photon didn't pass through the black box, thereby increasing the probability of finding the answer.”
From what I’m reading, Intel won’t be providing chips to Dell anytime soon so that you and I can buy one of these babies.
I will tell you this, though: this is one of those developments that - despite my making fun of simply understanding it - is a leap (some cal them quantum leaps, but I won’t) from one energy state - binary digital computing - to an entirely different energy state, one that will have enormous effects that we can’t even begin to imagine.What fun these people must be having.
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February 23
Back from the Road
I’ve been absent. Inexcusable. But I’ve been quite busy. Sorry for the long hiatus.
Too much limo driving. That’s what I do part-time. Some long trips,lots of short trips. The small company I work for is unusual in that our drivers and affiliated drivers will gladly travel to a big-time sports or other events to act as “private car” chauffeurs for our clientele or for associated companies in other cities, companies whose drivers do not do travel engagements. While I do some of the traveling, mostly I stay behind and handle the work for our local business. Our guys were away for several days across this past weekend and that time and the several days before were extremely busy. I need to buy a good notebook so that I can update this blog during driving down times. I am in the process.
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February 11
More on Body Armor - The DoD is In Someone’s Pocket
Now comes a report that the services are requiring troops who privately purchase a particularly effective type of body armor made by Pinnacle with the brand name Dragon Skin to remove it and not to carry it to their points of deployment. The story was broken by DefenseWatch. Most recently, according to the story:
The soldiers, who are currently staging for combat operations from a secret location, reported that their commander told them if they were wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin and were killed their beneficiaries might not receive the death benefits from their $400,000 SGLI life insurance policies. The soldiers were ordered to leave their privately purchased body armor at home or face the possibility of both losing their life insurance benefit and facing disciplinary action. . . .
On Saturday morning a soldier affected by the order reported to DefenseWatch that the directive specified that "all" commercially available body armor was prohibited. The soldier said the order came down Friday morning from Headquarters, United States Special Operations Command (HQ, USSOCOM), located at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. It arrived unexpectedly while his unit was preparing to deploy on combat operations. The soldier said the order was deeply disturbiing to many of the men who had used their own money to purchase Dragon Skin because it will affect both their mobility and ballistic protection.
And here’s where we can begin to wonder who is in whose pocket:
Recently Dragon Skin became an item of contention between proponents of the Interceptor OTV body armor generally issued to all service members deploying in combat theaters and its growing legion of critics. Critics of the Interceptor OTV system say it is ineffective and inferior to Dragon Skin, as well as several other commercially available body armor systems on the market. Last week DefenseWatch released a secret Marine Corps report that determined that 80% of the 401 Marines killed in Iraq between April 2004 and June 2005 might have been saved if the Interceptor OTV body armor they were wearing was more effective. The Army has declined to comment on the report because doing so could aid the enemy, an Army spokesman has repeatedly said.
Aid the enemy? If our guys wear this more protective material the terrorist win? Or is it that the inferior crap our men and women have been complaining about for two years (when they’ve gotten any body armor at all) is part of a sweetheart contract? One do wonder, don’t one. How high up, one also wonders, is this coming from? Here’s more:
One of the soldiers who lost his coveted Dragon Skin is a veteran operator. He reported that his commander expressed deep regret upon issuing his orders directing him to leave his Dragon Skin body armor behind. The commander reportedly told his subordinates that he "had no choice because the orders came from very high up" and had to be enforced, the soldier said. Another soldier's story was corroborated by his mother, who helped defray the $6,000 cost of buying the Dragon Skin, she said.
The report concludes by mentioning that “Currently nine U.S. generals stationed in Afghanistan are reportedly wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin body armor, according to company spokesman Paul Chopra. Chopra, a retired Army chief warrant officer and 20+-year pilot in the famed 160th "Nightstalkers" Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), said his company was merely told the generals wanted to "evaluate" the body armor in a combat environment.”
So it’s OK for the brass to wear this stuff. But the cannon fodder?
Looks to me as if the tenor of Rumsfeld nastiness has permeated the general command. Despite this entire administration’s protestations and their smarmy “concern” for our troops, they make clearer every day that they really see this was and the troops they’ve sacrificed in it only as tools in their efforts to reward their big-business buddies.
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February 10
Stuff and other occurrences
Heard from a radio traffic reporter a couple of days ago: “There’s a couple of stuff happening on the highways.”
That same morning I was heading out on a limo pickup and stopped at a local quick-in - quick-out store for newspapers and coffee. The night manager, noting my limo sedan, asked, “You driver?” I replied that I am. “I drive too,” he averred. “But I have accident.” Pointing to his chest he said, “Accident with my aorta. But OK now. You need driver?” I did check with our small company’s owner. She could find no openings for a person with such qualifications.
February 2
Excuse Me, but Your Subordination Didn’t Quite Work
From today’s Chicago Tribune, in a report about one of the scandals in Cicero, IL:
The ruling in federal court is the latest twist in a two-year legal drama that began when Gross sued for back pay but soon mushroomed into a police-hiring scandal.
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February 1
A Site Fraught with Clear & Present Danger
My nefarious son sent me this link, which is a tool of the creatures of the underworld or possibly diabolical freemasons. It is a site intended to suck your precious time, money and home space away from you. I’ve warned you. It’s your own damned fault if you go here.
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Could It Be That Saddam’s Chief Judge . . .
is the late Telly Savalas? True, wire services call him Chief Judge Raouf Rashid Abdel-Rahman, but he was heard yelling “CROCKER!” during the trial.
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Service in These Times
I just talked to a friend who related this experience at a CompUSA store.
I walked in looking for an external hard drive. I wasn’t approached by a sales person, so I found one, or so I thought. I fought down my reluctance to talk to him because he looked like a basset hound, and I haven’t found basset hounds to be knowledgeable about computer stuff. But anyway, I said, “Excuse me, I’m looking for the external hard drives. Could you tell me where they are?”
“What are you looking for?” he asked with no change of expression and in as flat a voice as you could imagine.
“External hard drives. Could you direct me to them?”
“What are you looking for?” he asked again.” I’ll get one from behind the counter.”
“Well,” I said, my own voice hardening just a bit and enunciating more clearly. “I want to look at them and compare them. Do-you-have-a-display-on-the-floor?”
“What kind of drive are you looking for?” Same affect. “I’ll get one down.”
“I want to compare them, so I’d like to look at several of them”
“I have to get one from behind the counter.”
Most of the time he was not looking at me. I debated with myself about bending down so that I could look up into his face and say, “HEY! Wake up, there! Listen to me.” But instead, I turned on my heel and left the store.
I went across the street to Best Buy. Not a sales person to be found, but it didn’t matter. Their shelves were more than half empty. They had very little inventory. So I didn’t even bother.
I must be insane. Because I stopped at yet another Best Buy nearer my house. Inside the store, three sales clerks paraded past me - two of them arm in arm prancing down the aisle - and completely ignored me when I hailed them to get help. I hailed them again and they continued on their way. I finally found a clerk who was willing to help, even friendly, but he was unable to do anything for me because the store has no inventory.
These experiences contrast with (but in one respect coincides with) two trips I made recently to a Circuit City store. We got my wife a new cell phone and a few days later I got a new one too. The young man who waited on us each time was efficient, informed, informative, friendly, and very capable.
However, during the session for my wife’s phone, while my wife waited for the clerk to configure her phone I wandered off to the TV section to look for - or at least look at - a replacement for one of our TVs which is defunct. I had a few questions about one of the sets, so I walked over to a floor person who didn’t look like he was otherwise engaged to ask him about it. Mistake. In retrospect, I think he might have been closely related to the CompUSA basset hound. No information. No affect. No interest in helping. I’m not exactly sure, now that I think about it, why he was in the store. I decided not to continue the conversation, instead getting the model of TV off the card so that I could research it on the Internet and think about buying somewhere else.
I think that the cell phone stand in that Circuit City store is a Verizon concession within the Circuit City store, since the clerk’s card lists only Verizon on it. This probably explains the better level of service. My experience with Verizon’s sales people on the phone and in stores has been very good. They are well trained and, like our guy at the Circuit City Verizon concession, capable and informed and dedicated to serving the customer.
So what explains the uniformly bad service at electronic stores these days?
This sort of thing seems to go in cycles. When stores aren’t doing all that well, they hire help they don’t vet or train, then put the help before the public without paying much attention to how they treat that public. And on top of it all, they screw down the display inventory. And then they wonder why sales are going down.
You might think that I took this story from one of those bad service ads you see on TV. I did not, although I wonder now if the ad producers are cruising these stores and just imitating what they see (or even worse: if some sales people are getting their idea of how to treat the public from such ads. I mean, they have to get their training somewhere.).
I want to say something to our nation’s electronic and computer equipment retailers - CompUSA, Best Buy, Micro Center, Circuit City and the rest of you. Here it is:
Do I have your attention? Good.
I’m sure you must be having financial or profitability issues. Your poorly stocked shelves tell me that. But do you really think that poor help and visible lack of inventory is a solution?
If you do, hear this: It’s a going-out-of-business plan!. Are you that frightened and that stupid that you think this is a good way to act with your customers?
I’ve worked for people like you. Intensely frustrating (can you tell?). So incompetent that they cut sales, marketing, and inventory in the hope that they can increase profitability via the cost-cutting. But it never occurs to them that without sales they have no revenues , so can’t possibly have a profit!
I don’t know. Perhaps the other side of this is that you don’t deserve to remain in business and are proving it. Just in case you do go belly-up, if you’re that bad at this business you should find another line of work. Just make sure that it doesn’t involve people or selling stuff.
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January 29
Archiving
I received an acerbic and very pointed hint from one of my readers to the effect that Overtones had become “very long,” and asking if, in fact, I’m doing a “broadsheet” rather than an honest, classic blog.
As a result (and because I am nothing if not reader-sensitive) I’ve created an archive for Overtones. At the end of each month (or as near to that time as I can come) I will archive each prior month and will keep the archive indefinitely. I will index each month with appropriate links and will, over time, create an overall index. I have not yet fixed the links and anchors in the archives. I will do that as soon as I can.
I will now go lick my wounds.
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For prior months of Overtones,, please see the archive pages
November, 2005
December, 2005
January, 2006
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