FPGA Central

On Jan 24, 3:07*pm, Tim Wescott <t...@seemywebsite.com> wrote:
> At the risk of polluting sci.engr.control with cross-posted, slightly OT
> material:
>
> I have had clients send me contracts asking me to indemnify them against
> any and all damage caused to their company by my work. *(FYI, according
> to my $6/minute lawyer, "indemnify" means "insure", and I'm not an
> insurance company).
>
> Everything I do is in the form of fairly abstract analysis and design,
> and it either gets embodied into software by my clients' software
> engineers, or I do just the algorithms which then get embedded into my
> clients' software. *So the performance of _anything_ I do is completely
> at the mercy of my clients' engineering process -- and I've only worked
> for one company, as a consultant, who really had a "good" software
> quality process (and they had to, 'cause the FDA looked over their
> shoulder).
>
> So I could easily see a situation where I do everything right, my client
> screws up the implementation, and I find myself sitting in front of a
> jury of 12 hairdressers, trying to explain software quality practices vs.
> good algorithms.
>
> As I see it, for every right way to embody my work in software, there is
> an infinite number of wrong ways.
>
> Since there just has to be an infinite number of _right_ ways to embody
> my work in software, it leads to the math question:
>
> What sort of infinity is the number of wrong ways to do software, since
> for any given problem there's an infinite number of right ways to solve
> it, and for any given right solution there's an infinite number of wrong
> solutions?
>
> Is it just Aleph 1 (whose definition I dimly remember), or is it Aleph 2,
> or some other infinity? *I _think_, assuming that there are an infinite
> _integer_ number of ways (right and wrong) to do it, then its the same
> infinity both ways (there's a clever and easy proof showing that a 2D
> infinite grid of points has a 1:1 mapping onto a 1D line of points).
>
> So, what do _you_ think?
>
> --http://www.wescottdesign.com

It is ultimately up to them to come up with some sort of verification/
qualification process to test out their system prior to selling it or
delivering it to their customer.

My knee jerk reaction is to tell them to go jump off a bridge (but
that iseasy for me to say). If I were in your situation, I would not
offer to indemnify them (Are you pockets that deep?). I would offer
to help them to define their qualification process so that *THEY* can
feel good (and safe) about what they ultimately deliver. If their
engineers cannot make a tradeoff about how much verification/
qualification they need to do then they are pretty lame.