[cabbeer]

> It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M.

That's a bit harsh. Most people don't understand technology on a functional level. Ask a "regular" person how programming, the internet or their mobile phone works and they won't be able to give you a technical explanation. In fact, most modern technology tries to hide the internal workings.. "it just works".

[pjc50]

People should be a lot more skeptical about crowdfunding anything they don't understand. It's not really a prepurchase and it's risky to treat it as such.

Heck, it's risky enough pre-ordering games from AAA studios.

[Pxtl]

Heck, ask a programmer what a MOSFET is.

[JustSomeNobody]

Or ask and EE what a closure is.

But seriously, some programmers will actually know what a MOSFET is.

[logfromblammo]

I am a programmer that knows what a MOSFET is. I had to know in order to pass intro to digital logic.

They are 4-connection devices, but usually source is connected to body. They come in n-type and p-type, and usually operate in enhancement mode, where the channel between source and drain opens when the signals to gate and body are different. With those, you can either pass a weak digital 0 or a strong 1, or a weak 1 and a strong 0, so in order to produce a digital output that has strong 0 or strong 1 for every possible input and doesn't "leak" power, you can combine the result of the 0 logic with the result of the 1 logic. Hence the term complimentary MOS (CMOS).

So a CMOS NOT gate has 2 MOSFETs: one n-type, and one p-type. A NAND gate has 4 MOSFETs, 2 of each type: the zero logic connected in series, and the one logic in parallel.

This knowledge--that I never really needed to write software for a living--was all building up to constructing a basic ALU using digital logic gate chips on breadboards with DIP input switches, LED outputs, and a manually-switched clock signal. I'm glad that I know it, but I'm mostly willing to trust the folks at Intel and AMD to do 64-bit ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV, and MOD correctly on integers.

Should I ever really need to, I could probably pick apart a very high-resolution image of a CMOS chip. I wouldn't necessarily be able to design such a chip, but I could eventually tell you what it does. And knowing what I know, I also have some idea that manipulating 32-bit floats on an 8-bit integer ALU is going to require much more complexity in the microcode or software.

That level of detail is not necessary for me to know that shaving with a laser is practically untenable in 2015. It's the sort of thing that I might expect in sci-fi as a hand-wavey sort of marker of a futuristic setting, but it will probably never happen. It's more likely that we'll have an epigenetic treatment that simply instructs follicle cells to either stop growing hair entirely, or to make the hairs they grow be pigmentless and reduced in diameter. Until then, steel blades will continue to work just fine.

Even there, I am still skeptical that five parallel blades are really better than one. So to me, when you propose that I shave with a laser, I will roll my eyes at you just as hard as if you suggested that I pay 40% more per shave to add a sixth blade and a magnet to my razor. Human hair is not evolving defenses against older shaving technology. You can still scrape your face with knapped flint if you needed to.

If people are stupid about laser shaves, it may be because they have been well primed for this nonsense by the advertisements of Schick and Gillette and their flexy, bendy, swivelling, lubricating, blinking, bleeping, 20-bladed shaving heads.

[jacquesm]

Not everybody got into programming on the soft side. But I agree with you that on average most programmers would not know what that is.

[TeMPOraL]

Especially today, now that most programmers aren't hobbyists who found a job matching their skills but people who explicitly learned to code because there's shitloads of money in the industry.

[asimilator]

I think you can be a professional programmer because it's your passion and still not know what a MOSFET is. Computing is a large subject.

[TeMPOraL]

Of course. My point is, people who started as geeks are statistically much more likely to know basic EE than people who explicitly chose to learn programming as a career.

[rnovak]

hashtag NotAllProgrammers? But I agree, the most fun I had in a job was working on embedded controllers and FPGA's.

[cwyers]

A Star Wars character?

[dplgk]

Something that prevented my subwoofer amp from overheating in the 90s?

[steckerbrett]

I don't agree, their demonstration video is enough without further domain experience to see that it is at a minimum ineffective at what it claims. If it was really supposed to be able to give you the smoothest shave ever, they would at least have a video without the participant flinching every time they burned themselves with the hot wire.

[homulilly]

There's a big difference between knowing something off the top of your head and doing some basic research before giving strangers your money.