"... and suggested they might send me one of their magazines (USD $10) as a thank-you"
You had my vote right up until this point. Being a pompous ass to people telling them where they went wrong and to give you stuff for your services is just idiotic. Get off your high horse and realize that helping people out shouldn't come with a reward. No, you don't have to tell him about the bug. But that's better than telling him about it and demanding compensation.
Talk about being a pompous ass, assuming that I was on a high horse, and telling me how to act. I identified the bug *and* provided them with the solution. Gratis. I demanded nothing. I did not withold the solution. Along with the problem identification and code to fix it, I made a carefully-worded suggestion of how the shop might express gratitude for fixing something as serious as a shopping cart bug.
I remember reading a Slashdot comment last year suggesting that even placing something as small as a Google Ad on the frontpage would be enough to generate the year's worth of revenue. Because Wikipedia is so popular, might it not be sustainable to introduce ads with a free opt-out? Nobody who doesn't want to see ads is exposed to them, and those that don't opt out, whatever minority they are, could sustain the site.
Slippery slope argument. In other words, this small amount of advertising that you can readily turn off is OK. Next year, it's a little more intrusive, and then more, and more. Finally the central repository of knowledge is not Wikipedia, but WikiCocaCola.
Try not getting your news from corporate/network sponsored television for a month, and listen to NPR and the BBC (and read them online, if you wish) instead. Then view one of the standard network news broadcasts. You will, I suspect, react like many thinking people and shudder at what corporate sponsorship does. Keep knowledge libre and fund it directly without the middle man of corporate sponsorship.
If you (speaking to the larger audience, rather than the parent poster) can't bring yourself to pay for a service that you use on a regular basis and have direct benefit from, then I have only two words: grow up.
One of the unwritten issues here is that in the Greek society, the idea that the customer is always right does not hold true. Customers can, and often are, berated by the stores, not because of any inherent evilness, but because that's just the way things are. In Greece, where the economy, before it collapsed recently, was still primarily cash-based, most transactions were between individuals. Stores are primarily mom-and-pop operations, although that is changing, and the mentality between a customer and the seller is still very much one individual to another. Couple that with a society where macho-ness (manga in slang Greek) is valued, it's easy to imagine a shopkeeper and an individual getting their horns locked.
I've experienced this myself (BTW, I'm of Greek descent, living in the US) when dealing over the net with Greek companies; I found a reasonably serious bug in a company's web site, provided a solution (without being asked), and suggested they might send me one of their magazines (USD $10) as a thank-you. Based on the vitriol spewing forth from the site owner, you would think that I was trying to rob them and had caused the bug myself (the bug was that their shopping cart wasn't detecting if javascript was running, and when it was disabled still produced a valid cart order, but with incorrect values)
No, a news organization can't have a view point and still be a news organization. Well, not quite, a news organization can't set out to have one and still be a news organization.
So, let me guess; you're kind of young, and an American who's never been outside the country, except perhaps on vacation to Mexico?
Although less and less true these days, in every major European city, there are a multiplicity of newspapers, each with an explicit political bent. A less broad-minded reader will just stick to his honeypot, but many people will read more than just one newspaper each day. The newspapers, in turn, tend to be much thinner than you see in the US, so it is not unreasonable to do so.
The least biased news source of our time used to be the International Herald Tribune (back when it was more-or-less independent, and the editorial seat was in Paris); it would source articles from many other newspapers, translate as appropriate, and publish a worldly and even-handed daily. I remember reading articles with bylines even from Pravda (the Soviet mouthpiece). The only bias I could find was that the IHT tended to report more on tomatoes than one would expect. These days, when it's explicitly the international version of the New York Times, that global perspective is gone. Perhaps the BBC is the only remaining thing that's close to unbiased, but I'm having my doubts these days. I have heard good things about Al Jazeera, surprisingly enough, but it seems like the only way to be properly informed is still to pay attention to many news outlets.
If you're thinking that digital photography lacks the "continuous" qualities that film has, think again. All of our recording media is, at some level, discrete. The difference is that film is not digital.
Ah, but film is digital. Single grains of silver halide are the fundamental capture element, and once a given grain absorbs a photon, through magic I don't quite recall that involves cascading electrons through the crystal, the entire grain changes state from unexposed to exposed. The density for a given region and color layer is determined by how many of the grains in the area were exposed. It's very, very digital, just not spatially regular.
What are they going to do if the card itself bites the dust? Having a spare card is going to be important, too. Getting two spares will allow someone to reverse engineer one of them. eBay and other surplus houses are great for that.
Places that charge high costs for seemingly simple systems (like $75K for a lathe controller; or $32K for an eye tracking system, like in my lab) charge that much because they have low volume and, in my experience, a one-man shop can do a pretty damned good job of creating the equivalent product for much, much less, if he's willing to work for normal wages. Look at it this way: $75K is about wages and overhead for one person for one year... I have to believe that something simple like a lathe controller can be built from scratch in well under a year.
If the original manufacturer is out of business, then it might be that no one owns the intellectual property any more. If you were really motivated, you could check with the state attorney general's office where they were incorporated to look at their business documents; they might include a means for disposition of property under the condition of dissolution. It's a long shot, though.
Otherwise, there might be an enthusiast support group for people who have similar equipment. I'm guessing you already spent a bit of time on a web search? If you reply with the particulars, I'd be happy to lend a hand.
But I think your estimate of about $10 is about right for building a new system for the lathe owners. Sounds like they're good for now, but disaster is coming if they don't plan for a full replacement system when that ISA card fails. Again, I agree you've given them excellent advice, but would suggest it needs to go one step further for a critical system like that.
It sounds like you gave the kid, and company excellent advice. Especially to spin up the backup system once a month to make sure it still functions.
But relying on old hardware as a backup is going to bite them eventually. You should also advise them that they need to have a migration plan forward to more modern hardware that, while doable on a more leisurely schedule, should definitely be completed soon. The only old hardware that I would trust for a mission-critical application would be original IBM brick outhouse PC hardware, and even then, only if the capacitors have been replaced, and there are at least two backup boxes behind it that have been similarly restored.
25+ year old consumer-grade computer hardware does not have that much longer before it will fail, as they catastrophically discovered.
For those that don't have access to a walk-in oven, the NuWave-style dehydration convection ovens are generally preferred, not least because they're exactly the right size for a 2-inch tape roll. That's what we used for old music tracking masters anyways.
Used bench-top sized scientific / industrial ovens are pretty inexpensive on eBay. Blue-M ovens are what my father used, and he always bought the best tools he could find (and that's the reason I also have a Blue-M oven in my lab). Couple one of those with a calibrated lab thermometer, and you have an oven that's accurate to about 1C over an indefinite period from just above ambient to about 300 C (varies by model). Good stuff. Well worth it if you need to slow bake something of value.
I keep everything on-line. The amount of stuff I keep is coincidentally always substantially less than the current batch of reasonably priced large hard drives.
And the file above? From 1986, if memory serves. I wrote it while working at MIT, and it became the basis of the Attraction screen saver in Linux (JWZ's version that's in the screen-saver package doesn't reflect the slow gracefulness of the original, though; someday I need to submit a patch to fix that). It's a Lisp file from a TI-Explorer Lisp Machine (named RTS-23) that was my desktop box in the late 80s.
I realize that not everyone generates the amount of data I do, and many generate much, much more, or have responsibility for potentially restoring much, much more, but for me, always keeping my stuff on spinning media has worked really well. Given the recent explosion of digital photography and ripping my entire CD collection, that means I've got about 2TB these days, but that costs only a handful of hundred dollars with the local and remote RAID backup systems so why screw around with tape or more complex systems?
Once you reach moderate proficiency, improving your speed will not improve your productivity much. If a novelist writing 1000 words per day were able to type infinitely fast, he or she could save maybe an hour per day.
Clearly the author is not living in the same world I am. Or anyone I know, for whom an extra hour a day would mean a significant and substantial boost in productivity or efficiency. One hour per day? For people who work 10 hours per day (to keep the numbers pretty), that would be an extra 10% productivity. For someone paid hourly, that's a raise of 10%. It's like getting more than an extra MONTH of work done every year. Or, flipped around, the ability to take an additional month of free time per year (more-or-less) and still get the same amount of work done or get paid the same annualized wage.
In my world, that's not something readily dismissed.
But, in reality most people wouldn't be able to type infinitely fast. And measuring the number of completed words, even with the posited factor of 2 for edits, is short sighted. Factoring things like email in addition to my programing output and paper writing output, and CLI typing on top of that, I'm probably closer to four or five thousand words per day. Although most of my time is still spent thinking, being able to reduce the time spent typing even by 20% would mean a lot. (Hell, I'm well on my way to talking myself into a bit of speed training.) The biggest boon, though, would be in being able to think faster since less of my time would be spend on starting and stopping my train of thought to type.
You've neglected to factor that in many instances, the shephard employee can anticipate when the current transaction at a given register will be done and launch the next customer early enough to completely cover the additional latency of getting there an preparing for the transaction.
Single queues to multiple checkouts work well when the number of checkouts is small and they're close together, and it especially helps if there's a tendency for occasional customers to take much longer than the average. (This happens when there are price checks, arguments over prices, or [in airports] itinerary changes.) It isn't a reasonable option for a WalMart with 40 registers.
And you've actually done the theoretical study of this? People have. Many people. There's even a subspecialty of operations research / computer science / psychology called Queueing Theory.
And the answer really is that a single line works best, even when you include all of the other factors for nearly every situation. If you have a prompter who can anticipate shortly before a given teller will be free, they can even eliminate the travel latency to get from the line to the teller. Naturally, there is an upper limit for fanout, but then it is still the case that a larger queue feeding multiple tellers is more efficient. Always. It is never, ever more efficient to have one line per teller. Ever.
Please, please, please, someone tell the people at US Passport Control about this. The prompter agent always seems to work to keep the small queues in front of each control agent as long as possible when they should be close to zero at all times.
The US Post Office seems to understand the idea, for which I am grateful. Most banks understand this idea as well.
... but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent,...
Right. Of course. Electronic stuff has never, ever been counterfeited. "Ultimate deterrent" is, I suspect, a hyperbole here deserving of a Princess Bride style rebuke.
My son's Kindle has this problem... I removed the cover the other day and it has not had it sense. I just broke out the multimeter, I was unable to get an electrical path even when scraping the paint on the hooks.
I would suspect, then, that the cause is static discharge from the cover through the insulated hooks on the cover that are mechanically intimate with the power contacts on the kindle.
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
And unless the metal we assume exists between the hooks were exceedingly thin, or the spots where the paint was rubbed off exceedingly small, 2 ohms would not be a reasonable resistance for a wire of that length. If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the distance between the two hooks in the Kindle cover, has a resistance that is below the threshold of measurability on the meter (0.1 Ohm).
While this fellow might have discovered the actual problem, the photo and text from the linked article do not suggest he's done it the way he thinks he has.
Wow. All I can say is, please do not design any airplanes, power distribution, or life-critical systems. You clearly are far from qualified with that level of understanding of system stability and how it is affected with feedback. Seriously, don't.
PID systems are used everywhere. Even in guidance systems (if you recall, the first cruise missiles had a problem with long-term error accumulation because they didn't have an integral term in the control system). Now not every system needs all three P, I, D terms; it depends on where the system poles are. And, it turns out, that with an inverted pendulum, the inherently metastable system cannot be made strictly stable with just a P term. Ever designed a feedback network around an op-amp with a capacitor? That would be a D term. Ever used a chopper-stabilized op-amp to eliminate offset? That would be a non-linear approach to an I term.
If you insist otherwise, then, please, show us your incredible design that can handle the inverted pendulum system with only the P term. That would be purely resistive feedback, because anything reactive would embody either an I or a D term or both. Really. Post a video. I want to see it.
Let's say I take a canvas (or heavier plastic) bag with me to the grocery store... I can reuse my canvas bag for decades... So the investment in creating the canvas or heavier plastic bag means it is suitable for more reuses... Reduce trumps reuse.
This example is precisely a re-use scenario because you are re-using the canvas bag many times. That is the only factor driving the total reduction of raw materials. Swapping canvas for plastic merely increased the number of re-uses required for parity since the materials consumption for canvas is much higher.
If it came from advertising dollars, that money would ultimately be reflected in a increase in the cost of products.....the total cost for you, out of pocket, will be much higher than if you just send Wikipedia money
You forget that advertising costs are distributed over millions of widgets that a company may make and sell. A single individual will never pay more out of pocket. Millions depend on wikipedia. These same millions will see the ad and pay just a fraction of a cent more in the product cost. To me, this is fair. Some non-intrusive advertising will actually be a very good model for wikipedia as long as it doesn't influence the content.
No, I'm perfectly aware of the distribution of advertising dollars over everyone's cost. That means that people who do not use Wikipedia end up paying for it. How is that fair?
It also means that the money goes to lining the pockets of the middlemen. How is that fair?
The only fair approach is for people to pay directly for the service. Unfortunately, we expect web sites to provide service for free, making it quite difficult to set up a popular subscription-based service. But that would be the fair model.
If you think that advertising dollars do not influence editorial content, be it a web site, magazine, or newspaper, then you are naive indeed.
I believe the "reduce" mantra refers to not using said item in the first place. Your "percent reduction" anecdote is well constructed, but in your 33% less scenario you've used one "bad" bag. In the similarly anecdotal "reduce" scenario, you use a paper or other biodegradable bag in its place, and you've used zero "bad" bags.
Reduce means conserve. If I'm replacing the use of plastic bags with the use of paper ones, then I'm still consuming a large amount of raw materials and using them not nearly to their fullest. If I replace each plastic bag with a paper one, I'm still using the same number of bags. If I reuse each bag *just* *once* then I've cut my overall consumption of materials by HALF.
Re-use is far more powerful than reduce. Show me another method that has nearly as much impact in the total amount of consumed goods. A minor change in behavior -- re-using each bag *just* *once* -- cuts in half the total consumption. Think of your phone/heating/cable/internet bill being cut in half. That's an astonishing reduction.
*Just* *once*. Re-use your items *just* *once*.
That should be the mantra. The global consumption of plastic bags / paper bags / cardboard boxes / whatever would get cut in half. Please show me another method that has so profound an impact for such a small change in behavior.
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
That is precisely the sort of attitude that gets us enhanced pat-downs and video cameras monitoring our every move.
I use Wikipedia frequently, and made a donation. Did you?
Here's a hint: the money to run Wikipedia comes from somewhere. If it came from advertising dollars, that money would ultimately be reflected in a increase in the cost of products, but because the conversion of money in your pocket through a retailer's payment processing system to the manufacturer's accounts receivable to the marketing department budget to an advertising agency to an adbuy at Wikipedia is horribly inefficient, the total cost for you, out of pocket, will be much higher than if you just send Wikipedia money. The only difference is you won't be obviously, immediately aware of it.
Please, donate directly.
For related reasons, when you donate money to a charitable or non-profit organization, don't take the gifts. That just increases their cost of acquiring your money, making your donation less efficient (and reducing the amount you can deduct on your taxes because the US government considers that a sale of goods and your donation is just the excess above fair market value for the gift you received). Just give the money.
Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
This is a commonly held myth that can be corrected with the following very simple thought experiment: as an individual, I use a certain number of plastic bags each month. If I am careful and pack the bags better, I'll use perhaps 10 or 20 percent fewer. If I use each bag just *twice* instead of once, I've reduced my consumption of bags 50%. If I manage to use each bag *three* times instead of once, my use drops to 1/3 of previous.
Re-use is a far, far more powerful method than conservation.
So, re-use those boxes from Amazon; re-use those bags from the grocery store; re-use the containers your food comes in! You'll save money too, for not having to buy empty new containers made of exactly the same stuff (besides, you've already paid for the containers that your Amazon delivery came in, or your grocery bags, or your food containers... it's built into the cost of those goods).
The difference is that the original story is posted by kdawson, so no registered users will see it, because we've all blocked him from the front page. This one is posted by Taco, so we'll see it.
What, kdawson is still working at Slashdot? Amazing. If Taco has any smarts at all, he'd let kdawson go. No one I know reads his drivel.
Starting the axis a non-zero values is entire reasonable when you are looking at relative changes, rather than absolute. In this presentation, the primary concern was the relative values between countries, not the absolute value. Starting at a non-zero axis is entirely defensible. Moreover, the axes are explicitly stated.
Why are you supposing that all of your suggested corrections to income were not done? There is no direct evidence either way.
Logarithmic axes should be used when the data dictate they are appropriate, not when your feelings of how the data should be distributed say so. In this case, using a logarithmic horizontal axis makes the data approximate a straight line (note: I said *approximate*), so whether you think money is linear or not, the effect of income appears to be based on an exponential, not linear scale. Paraphrasing what I wrote in another post, you need to pay attention to the data, and not what you want the data to say.
Lastly, seeing someone excited about a subject that's as dry as statistical analysis is a good thing. We need more scientists and mathematicians who are excited about their field when making presentations to the public. We need a lot more of them.
in between the life expectancy and wealth. some countries have achieved similar life expectancy with the rich west, despite being on the left hand side of the graph.
Which graph were you looking at? There is a very strong correlation since the Industrial revolution, that's why the dots all tend to line up along a curve following the diagonal. If there was no correlation, then the dots would be distributed in one or more purely horizontal bands. They are not. They are, instead, lined up along a very nice curve.
The correlation was lower before the Industrial Revolution, and has lessened in recent years as health care in general, including nutrition and reduction of infant and maternal mortality in specific, have been globally improved. Saying that there is little relevance between wealth and life expentency is seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than paying attention to the facts.
But holychrist, Congo is now back in the stone age thanks to the relentless wars there. The video also provides a marvelous indication of how profound the 1812 influenza epidemic was.
Do you know anything about how they work, or are you just shitting on something you don't understand?
I have implemented similar identification protocols and never had to include a seconds-long timeout which, I strongly suspect, is what drives most of the delay in, say, getting an IP address from a Wifi base station, or from the local cell tower. It takes microseconds to form and send a packet. If it only takes a few hundred milliseconds to fetch a web page from a site that knows what it's doing all of which is going across the net and not the last hop to your device, then why does it take anything close to *seconds* -- let alone the minutes mentioned in the original posting -- to do an initial negotiation?
There are probably other possibilities, but a standard construct that I've seen time and time again in code I've reviewed is like:
START: broadcast_im_here(); while (less than one second has elapsed) do
if reply_waiting()
set_local_id();
break;
end; end; goto START if no_id_was_allocated();
But the one-second timeout is on the wrong order of magnitude if you look at the distribution of response times. In one system I'm intimately familiar with, the time spend on making connections and the subsequent short communication was far, far too long. Looking at the distribution of time spent in a loop like the stylized one above, most connections were very established very quickly, with a nice tail-off for longer delays. But the longer delays didn't decay fast enough, and thus most of the time was spend on less than 5 percent of the connections. We implemented a better, much shorter timeout before issuing a retry, and the system got much significantly without descending into ID-request storm.
The point is, as programmers, we often think in human-scale times -- one, two, five or even ten seconds is a reasonable timeout for humans. But for machines that operate at a fundamental timescale that's six orders of magnitude faster, it's like trying to order a cup of coffee and giving up after a month because the person behind the counter didn't hear you. Yes, the process still works, but it's horribly inefficient. While I am not familiar with Wifi, 3G, 4G negotiations, etc., in my experience timeout thresholds are often not just a little too long, but vastly too long. When my home AP takes 10 seconds to give my laptop an IP address when there are no other devices around, something's wrong in the protocol design.
Slashdot Mirror
"... and suggested they might send me one of their magazines (USD $10) as a thank-you"
You had my vote right up until this point. Being a pompous ass to people telling them where they went wrong and to give you stuff for your services is just idiotic. Get off your high horse and realize that helping people out shouldn't come with a reward. No, you don't have to tell him about the bug. But that's better than telling him about it and demanding compensation.
Talk about being a pompous ass, assuming that I was on a high horse, and telling me how to act. I identified the bug *and* provided them with the solution. Gratis. I demanded nothing. I did not withold the solution. Along with the problem identification and code to fix it, I made a carefully-worded suggestion of how the shop might express gratitude for fixing something as serious as a shopping cart bug.
I remember reading a Slashdot comment last year suggesting that even placing something as small as a Google Ad on the frontpage would be enough to generate the year's worth of revenue. Because Wikipedia is so popular, might it not be sustainable to introduce ads with a free opt-out? Nobody who doesn't want to see ads is exposed to them, and those that don't opt out, whatever minority they are, could sustain the site.
Slippery slope argument. In other words, this small amount of advertising that you can readily turn off is OK. Next year, it's a little more intrusive, and then more, and more. Finally the central repository of knowledge is not Wikipedia, but WikiCocaCola.
Try not getting your news from corporate/network sponsored television for a month, and listen to NPR and the BBC (and read them online, if you wish) instead. Then view one of the standard network news broadcasts. You will, I suspect, react like many thinking people and shudder at what corporate sponsorship does. Keep knowledge libre and fund it directly without the middle man of corporate sponsorship.
If you (speaking to the larger audience, rather than the parent poster) can't bring yourself to pay for a service that you use on a regular basis and have direct benefit from, then I have only two words: grow up .
One of the unwritten issues here is that in the Greek society, the idea that the customer is always right does not hold true. Customers can, and often are, berated by the stores, not because of any inherent evilness, but because that's just the way things are. In Greece, where the economy, before it collapsed recently, was still primarily cash-based, most transactions were between individuals. Stores are primarily mom-and-pop operations, although that is changing, and the mentality between a customer and the seller is still very much one individual to another. Couple that with a society where macho-ness (manga in slang Greek) is valued, it's easy to imagine a shopkeeper and an individual getting their horns locked.
I've experienced this myself (BTW, I'm of Greek descent, living in the US) when dealing over the net with Greek companies; I found a reasonably serious bug in a company's web site, provided a solution (without being asked), and suggested they might send me one of their magazines (USD $10) as a thank-you. Based on the vitriol spewing forth from the site owner, you would think that I was trying to rob them and had caused the bug myself (the bug was that their shopping cart wasn't detecting if javascript was running, and when it was disabled still produced a valid cart order, but with incorrect values)
No, a news organization can't have a view point and still be a news organization. Well, not quite, a news organization can't set out to have one and still be a news organization.
So, let me guess; you're kind of young, and an American who's never been outside the country, except perhaps on vacation to Mexico?
Although less and less true these days, in every major European city, there are a multiplicity of newspapers, each with an explicit political bent. A less broad-minded reader will just stick to his honeypot, but many people will read more than just one newspaper each day. The newspapers, in turn, tend to be much thinner than you see in the US, so it is not unreasonable to do so.
The least biased news source of our time used to be the International Herald Tribune (back when it was more-or-less independent, and the editorial seat was in Paris); it would source articles from many other newspapers, translate as appropriate, and publish a worldly and even-handed daily. I remember reading articles with bylines even from Pravda (the Soviet mouthpiece). The only bias I could find was that the IHT tended to report more on tomatoes than one would expect. These days, when it's explicitly the international version of the New York Times, that global perspective is gone. Perhaps the BBC is the only remaining thing that's close to unbiased, but I'm having my doubts these days. I have heard good things about Al Jazeera, surprisingly enough, but it seems like the only way to be properly informed is still to pay attention to many news outlets.
If you're thinking that digital photography lacks the "continuous" qualities that film has, think again. All of our recording media is, at some level, discrete. The difference is that film is not digital.
Ah, but film is digital. Single grains of silver halide are the fundamental capture element, and once a given grain absorbs a photon, through magic I don't quite recall that involves cascading electrons through the crystal, the entire grain changes state from unexposed to exposed. The density for a given region and color layer is determined by how many of the grains in the area were exposed. It's very, very digital, just not spatially regular.
What are they going to do if the card itself bites the dust? Having a spare card is going to be important, too. Getting two spares will allow someone to reverse engineer one of them. eBay and other surplus houses are great for that.
Places that charge high costs for seemingly simple systems (like $75K for a lathe controller; or $32K for an eye tracking system, like in my lab) charge that much because they have low volume and, in my experience, a one-man shop can do a pretty damned good job of creating the equivalent product for much, much less, if he's willing to work for normal wages. Look at it this way: $75K is about wages and overhead for one person for one year ... I have to believe that something simple like a lathe controller can be built from scratch in well under a year.
If the original manufacturer is out of business, then it might be that no one owns the intellectual property any more. If you were really motivated, you could check with the state attorney general's office where they were incorporated to look at their business documents; they might include a means for disposition of property under the condition of dissolution. It's a long shot, though.
Otherwise, there might be an enthusiast support group for people who have similar equipment. I'm guessing you already spent a bit of time on a web search? If you reply with the particulars, I'd be happy to lend a hand.
But I think your estimate of about $10 is about right for building a new system for the lathe owners. Sounds like they're good for now, but disaster is coming if they don't plan for a full replacement system when that ISA card fails. Again, I agree you've given them excellent advice, but would suggest it needs to go one step further for a critical system like that.
It sounds like you gave the kid, and company excellent advice. Especially to spin up the backup system once a month to make sure it still functions.
But relying on old hardware as a backup is going to bite them eventually. You should also advise them that they need to have a migration plan forward to more modern hardware that, while doable on a more leisurely schedule, should definitely be completed soon. The only old hardware that I would trust for a mission-critical application would be original IBM brick outhouse PC hardware, and even then, only if the capacitors have been replaced, and there are at least two backup boxes behind it that have been similarly restored.
25+ year old consumer-grade computer hardware does not have that much longer before it will fail, as they catastrophically discovered.
For those that don't have access to a walk-in oven, the NuWave-style dehydration convection ovens are generally preferred, not least because they're exactly the right size for a 2-inch tape roll. That's what we used for old music tracking masters anyways.
Used bench-top sized scientific / industrial ovens are pretty inexpensive on eBay. Blue-M ovens are what my father used, and he always bought the best tools he could find (and that's the reason I also have a Blue-M oven in my lab). Couple one of those with a calibrated lab thermometer, and you have an oven that's accurate to about 1C over an indefinite period from just above ambient to about 300 C (varies by model). Good stuff. Well worth it if you need to slow bake something of value.
my-desktop:/home/me> cp /home/me/machines/mit/rts-23/hacks/attraction.lisp .
I keep everything on-line. The amount of stuff I keep is coincidentally always substantially less than the current batch of reasonably priced large hard drives.
And the file above? From 1986, if memory serves. I wrote it while working at MIT, and it became the basis of the Attraction screen saver in Linux (JWZ's version that's in the screen-saver package doesn't reflect the slow gracefulness of the original, though; someday I need to submit a patch to fix that). It's a Lisp file from a TI-Explorer Lisp Machine (named RTS-23) that was my desktop box in the late 80s.
I realize that not everyone generates the amount of data I do, and many generate much, much more, or have responsibility for potentially restoring much, much more, but for me, always keeping my stuff on spinning media has worked really well. Given the recent explosion of digital photography and ripping my entire CD collection, that means I've got about 2TB these days, but that costs only a handful of hundred dollars with the local and remote RAID backup systems so why screw around with tape or more complex systems?
Once you reach moderate proficiency, improving your speed will not improve your productivity much. If a novelist writing 1000 words per day were able to type infinitely fast, he or she could save maybe an hour per day.
Clearly the author is not living in the same world I am. Or anyone I know, for whom an extra hour a day would mean a significant and substantial boost in productivity or efficiency. One hour per day? For people who work 10 hours per day (to keep the numbers pretty), that would be an extra 10% productivity. For someone paid hourly, that's a raise of 10%. It's like getting more than an extra MONTH of work done every year. Or, flipped around, the ability to take an additional month of free time per year (more-or-less) and still get the same amount of work done or get paid the same annualized wage.
In my world, that's not something readily dismissed.
But, in reality most people wouldn't be able to type infinitely fast. And measuring the number of completed words, even with the posited factor of 2 for edits, is short sighted. Factoring things like email in addition to my programing output and paper writing output, and CLI typing on top of that, I'm probably closer to four or five thousand words per day. Although most of my time is still spent thinking, being able to reduce the time spent typing even by 20% would mean a lot. (Hell, I'm well on my way to talking myself into a bit of speed training.) The biggest boon, though, would be in being able to think faster since less of my time would be spend on starting and stopping my train of thought to type.
You've neglected to factor that in many instances, the shephard employee can anticipate when the current transaction at a given register will be done and launch the next customer early enough to completely cover the additional latency of getting there an preparing for the transaction.
Single queues to multiple checkouts work well when the number of checkouts is small and they're close together, and it especially helps if there's a tendency for occasional customers to take much longer than the average. (This happens when there are price checks, arguments over prices, or [in airports] itinerary changes.) It isn't a reasonable option for a WalMart with 40 registers.
And you've actually done the theoretical study of this? People have. Many people. There's even a subspecialty of operations research / computer science / psychology called Queueing Theory.
And the answer really is that a single line works best, even when you include all of the other factors for nearly every situation. If you have a prompter who can anticipate shortly before a given teller will be free, they can even eliminate the travel latency to get from the line to the teller. Naturally, there is an upper limit for fanout, but then it is still the case that a larger queue feeding multiple tellers is more efficient. Always. It is never, ever more efficient to have one line per teller. Ever.
Please, please, please, someone tell the people at US Passport Control about this. The prompter agent always seems to work to keep the small queues in front of each control agent as long as possible when they should be close to zero at all times.
The US Post Office seems to understand the idea, for which I am grateful. Most banks understand this idea as well.
... but adding electronic circuits programmed to confirm the note's authenticity is perhaps the ultimate deterrent, ...
Right. Of course. Electronic stuff has never, ever been counterfeited. "Ultimate deterrent" is, I suspect, a hyperbole here deserving of a Princess Bride style rebuke.
My son's Kindle has this problem... I removed the cover the other day and it has not had it sense. I just broke
out the multimeter, I was unable to get an electrical path even when scraping the paint on the hooks.
I would suspect, then, that the cause is static discharge from the cover through the insulated hooks on the cover that are mechanically intimate with the power contacts on the kindle.
First, his meter's reading 2 Megaohms, not 2 Ohms. I guess he's not much of an "Electronics Person".
Second, it would appear that he's measuring conductivity though his body to achieve that number. Both of his fingers are touching the probe tips.
And unless the metal we assume exists between the hooks were exceedingly thin, or the spots where the paint was rubbed off exceedingly small, 2 ohms would not be a reasonable resistance for a wire of that length. If the spots where the paint was rubbed off were small enough that the contact resistance was 2 ohms, then they would be difficult to find with the probes. Metal at macroscopic sizes conducts quite well. A quick check with my handy Fluke 179 shows that a clip lead, roughly the same length as the distance between the two hooks in the Kindle cover, has a resistance that is below the threshold of measurability on the meter (0.1 Ohm).
While this fellow might have discovered the actual problem, the photo and text from the linked article do not suggest he's done it the way he thinks he has.
Wow. All I can say is, please do not design any airplanes, power distribution, or life-critical systems. You clearly are far from qualified with that level of understanding of system stability and how it is affected with feedback. Seriously, don't.
PID systems are used everywhere. Even in guidance systems (if you recall, the first cruise missiles had a problem with long-term error accumulation because they didn't have an integral term in the control system). Now not every system needs all three P, I, D terms; it depends on where the system poles are. And, it turns out, that with an inverted pendulum, the inherently metastable system cannot be made strictly stable with just a P term. Ever designed a feedback network around an op-amp with a capacitor? That would be a D term. Ever used a chopper-stabilized op-amp to eliminate offset? That would be a non-linear approach to an I term.
If you insist otherwise, then, please, show us your incredible design that can handle the inverted pendulum system with only the P term. That would be purely resistive feedback, because anything reactive would embody either an I or a D term or both. Really. Post a video. I want to see it.
Let's say I take a canvas (or heavier plastic) bag with me to the grocery store... I can reuse my canvas bag for decades... So the investment in creating the canvas or heavier plastic bag means it is suitable for more reuses... Reduce trumps reuse.
This example is precisely a re-use scenario because you are re-using the canvas bag many times. That is the only factor driving the total reduction of raw materials. Swapping canvas for plastic merely increased the number of re-uses required for parity since the materials consumption for canvas is much higher.
If it came from advertising dollars, that money would ultimately be reflected in a increase in the cost of products.....the total cost for you, out of pocket, will be much higher than if you just send Wikipedia money
You forget that advertising costs are distributed over millions of widgets that a company may make and sell. A single individual will never pay more out of pocket. Millions depend on wikipedia. These same millions will see the ad and pay just a fraction of a cent more in the product cost. To me, this is fair. Some non-intrusive advertising will actually be a very good model for wikipedia as long as it doesn't influence the content.
No, I'm perfectly aware of the distribution of advertising dollars over everyone's cost. That means that people who do not use Wikipedia end up paying for it. How is that fair?
It also means that the money goes to lining the pockets of the middlemen. How is that fair?
The only fair approach is for people to pay directly for the service. Unfortunately, we expect web sites to provide service for free, making it quite difficult to set up a popular subscription-based service. But that would be the fair model.
If you think that advertising dollars do not influence editorial content, be it a web site, magazine, or newspaper, then you are naive indeed.
I believe the "reduce" mantra refers to not using said item in the first place. Your "percent reduction" anecdote is well constructed, but in your 33% less scenario you've used one "bad" bag. In the similarly anecdotal "reduce" scenario, you use a paper or other biodegradable bag in its place, and you've used zero "bad" bags.
Reduce means conserve. If I'm replacing the use of plastic bags with the use of paper ones, then I'm still consuming a large amount of raw materials and using them not nearly to their fullest. If I replace each plastic bag with a paper one, I'm still using the same number of bags. If I reuse each bag *just* *once* then I've cut my overall consumption of materials by HALF.
Re-use is far more powerful than reduce. Show me another method that has nearly as much impact in the total amount of consumed goods. A minor change in behavior -- re-using each bag *just* *once* -- cuts in half the total consumption. Think of your phone/heating/cable/internet bill being cut in half. That's an astonishing reduction.
*Just* *once*. Re-use your items *just* *once*.
That should be the mantra. The global consumption of plastic bags / paper bags / cardboard boxes / whatever would get cut in half. Please show me another method that has so profound an impact for such a small change in behavior.
Isn't there a big empty space down the left side of most pages? What is the difference between it being blank or there being an advertisement there.
That is precisely the sort of attitude that gets us enhanced pat-downs and video cameras monitoring our every move.
I use Wikipedia frequently, and made a donation. Did you?
Here's a hint: the money to run Wikipedia comes from somewhere. If it came from advertising dollars, that money would ultimately be reflected in a increase in the cost of products, but because the conversion of money in your pocket through a retailer's payment processing system to the manufacturer's accounts receivable to the marketing department budget to an advertising agency to an adbuy at Wikipedia is horribly inefficient, the total cost for you, out of pocket, will be much higher than if you just send Wikipedia money. The only difference is you won't be obviously, immediately aware of it.
Please, donate directly.
For related reasons, when you donate money to a charitable or non-profit organization, don't take the gifts. That just increases their cost of acquiring your money, making your donation less efficient (and reducing the amount you can deduct on your taxes because the US government considers that a sale of goods and your donation is just the excess above fair market value for the gift you received). Just give the money.
Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
This is a commonly held myth that can be corrected with the following very simple thought experiment: as an individual, I use a certain number of plastic bags each month. If I am careful and pack the bags better, I'll use perhaps 10 or 20 percent fewer. If I use each bag just *twice* instead of once, I've reduced my consumption of bags 50%. If I manage to use each bag *three* times instead of once, my use drops to 1/3 of previous.
Re-use is a far, far more powerful method than conservation.
So, re-use those boxes from Amazon; re-use those bags from the grocery store; re-use the containers your food comes in! You'll save money too, for not having to buy empty new containers made of exactly the same stuff (besides, you've already paid for the containers that your Amazon delivery came in, or your grocery bags, or your food containers ... it's built into the cost of those goods).
The difference is that the original story is posted by kdawson, so no registered users will see it, because we've all blocked him from the front page. This one is posted by Taco, so we'll see it.
What, kdawson is still working at Slashdot? Amazing. If Taco has any smarts at all, he'd let kdawson go. No one I know reads his drivel.
Taco, you listening?
Starting the axis a non-zero values is entire reasonable when you are looking at relative changes, rather than absolute. In this presentation, the primary concern was the relative values between countries, not the absolute value. Starting at a non-zero axis is entirely defensible. Moreover, the axes are explicitly stated.
Why are you supposing that all of your suggested corrections to income were not done? There is no direct evidence either way.
Logarithmic axes should be used when the data dictate they are appropriate, not when your feelings of how the data should be distributed say so. In this case, using a logarithmic horizontal axis makes the data approximate a straight line (note: I said *approximate*), so whether you think money is linear or not, the effect of income appears to be based on an exponential, not linear scale. Paraphrasing what I wrote in another post, you need to pay attention to the data, and not what you want the data to say.
Lastly, seeing someone excited about a subject that's as dry as statistical analysis is a good thing. We need more scientists and mathematicians who are excited about their field when making presentations to the public. We need a lot more of them.
in between the life expectancy and wealth. some countries have achieved similar life expectancy with the rich west, despite being on the left hand side of the graph.
Which graph were you looking at? There is a very strong correlation since the Industrial revolution, that's why the dots all tend to line up along a curve following the diagonal. If there was no correlation, then the dots would be distributed in one or more purely horizontal bands. They are not. They are, instead, lined up along a very nice curve.
The correlation was lower before the Industrial Revolution, and has lessened in recent years as health care in general, including nutrition and reduction of infant and maternal mortality in specific, have been globally improved. Saying that there is little relevance between wealth and life expentency is seeing what you want to see in the data, rather than paying attention to the facts.
But holychrist, Congo is now back in the stone age thanks to the relentless wars there. The video also provides a marvelous indication of how profound the 1812 influenza epidemic was.
Do you know anything about how they work, or are you just shitting on something you don't understand?
I have implemented similar identification protocols and never had to include a seconds-long timeout which, I strongly suspect, is what drives most of the delay in, say, getting an IP address from a Wifi base station, or from the local cell tower. It takes microseconds to form and send a packet. If it only takes a few hundred milliseconds to fetch a web page from a site that knows what it's doing all of which is going across the net and not the last hop to your device, then why does it take anything close to *seconds* -- let alone the minutes mentioned in the original posting -- to do an initial negotiation?
There are probably other possibilities, but a standard construct that I've seen time and time again in code I've reviewed is like:
START:
broadcast_im_here();
while (less than one second has elapsed) do
if reply_waiting()
set_local_id();
break;
end;
end;
goto START if no_id_was_allocated();
But the one-second timeout is on the wrong order of magnitude if you look at the distribution of response times. In one system I'm intimately familiar with, the time spend on making connections and the subsequent short communication was far, far too long. Looking at the distribution of time spent in a loop like the stylized one above, most connections were very established very quickly, with a nice tail-off for longer delays. But the longer delays didn't decay fast enough, and thus most of the time was spend on less than 5 percent of the connections. We implemented a better, much shorter timeout before issuing a retry, and the system got much significantly without descending into ID-request storm.
The point is, as programmers, we often think in human-scale times -- one, two, five or even ten seconds is a reasonable timeout for humans. But for machines that operate at a fundamental timescale that's six orders of magnitude faster, it's like trying to order a cup of coffee and giving up after a month because the person behind the counter didn't hear you. Yes, the process still works, but it's horribly inefficient. While I am not familiar with Wifi, 3G, 4G negotiations, etc., in my experience timeout thresholds are often not just a little too long, but vastly too long. When my home AP takes 10 seconds to give my laptop an IP address when there are no other devices around, something's wrong in the protocol design.