Blind faith: engineers cannot afford it

Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director
Let me share a story from my first technical internship when I was in high school back in the 1970s. I was working in the engineering department of a pump company. Our analytical tools were simple calculators – and a new “computer”, with keyboard, screen, and printer.
Only one of the [...]

Onboard speed-power management – a "feel good" solution?

Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director
Here’s my contention:
onboard speed-power management (SPM) systems are nothing more than a “feel-good” solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.
OK, now that I have that out of the way, let me fill in some details…
A problem that doesn’t exist?
What is a problem? Dictionaries define it as “a question proposed [...]

Commercial software for academic purposes

Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director
Primum non nocere. “First, do no harm.”
This phrase is a basic principle of the medical profession. The practitioner is reminded to carefully consider if the application of their craft might do more harm than good.
I wish that university professors and administrators would keep this phrase in mind when deciding on [...]

Care and feeding of your security key

Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director
Every so often, we get a call from a customer that they broke their security key (i.e., dongle, hardware lock). Back in the days of printer port keys, this was an infrequent event. In fact, we only had three or four printer port keys returned, and only one was legitimately [...]

Replies to PropExpert Survey Comments

Periodically, we ask our software customers for feedback by way of a “user survey”. We recently conducted such a survey for our PropExpert users, and the responses are now coming back to us. The respondents from this round of surveys offered up some particularly interesting comments, critiques, and suggestions, so we felt it would be [...]

In-House Software: Risk or Asset?

Miscellaneous Musings from the Technical Director
You read Stephanie’s article from her trip to the SINAVAL show, in which she did her own musing about in-house software. For decades, HydroComp has commanded a market niche where our biggest competitive product is a potential customer’s own in-house developed software. This may seem like an enviable position, but [...]