OMG I feel for this guy.

Oh god, how I have lived this. So. Many. Times.

They never showed how he quit immediately, move to the next place, found out it was exactly the same, and repeated this ad-infinitum until he shot himself in the head.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Grimm.

And also helping the client to establish their requirements.

This is clearly a client who has a vision but lacks the vocabulary to express their needs accurately. If you're incapable of using your expert knowledge to help your client achieve their vision, within the constraints of what's possible....then you don't just fail at engineering, you fail at life.

Don't forget that, as an expert, much of what you take for granted is a mystery or only vaguely understood by other people. If someone uses incorrect terminology or demonstrates an incomplete understanding of technology, then as a professional, it's your job to help bridge that gap without assaulting their dignity.

..And I loved the exchange at 4:30 where the client started to understand, but was cut off by the other consultants...

Actually, now I'm curious.

2 perpendicular lines.. easy

3? why not, just extend the third line along the z axis (of course any 2 representation of this wouldn't be perpendicular, but still)

Could you have 7? In some crazy n-dimensional space graph (ala a hypercube)?

Any maths geniuses want to weigh in on this?

Hey ChoasEngine, yep, you're right on the money. In a normal vector space, the dimensionality is pretty much defined by how many perpendicular (or orthogonal) lines you can have. So to get 7, you'd need a 7 dimensional space.

You can do it other ways, but the most common way of expressing things in a vector space is as multiples of the "standard basis", which is a bunch of lines all perpendicular to each other and one "thing" long, as you describe.

Mathematically speaking, there's nothing particularly interesting about 2, 3 or 7 dimensions, although you'd have a real hard time drawing lines in a 7 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional board.

Incidentally, a hypercube wouldn't cut it as it's only 4 dimensions. Maybe a wonder-mega-super-hypercube?

Sounds all too familiar.

*promote because of http://dilbert.com/strip/2021-09-24#comment-5546688225

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Thursday, March 27th, 2014 5:17am PDT - promote requested by ant.