To heck with diabetes treatments and charging USB devices in my ear -- I want the "electric eel" version of this -- "Don't mess with me Jaco, or I'll shake your hand!" -- or -- "Watch out, this index finger is set on stun."
Damn, I want to be a walking, talking, Tazer.
And.... I'm also thinking of pick-up lines that would be appropriate were the current routed.... elsewhere...
In Amazon's Android market, Amazon sets the pricing. You get a percentage of the price they set, with no recourse. Sometimes, they set the price at zero. There was a story on Slashdot not long ago (too lazy to search for it) where the developers were essentially screwed... on the day Amazon set the price to zero (without warning), they got a huge spike in downloads that crumpled their activation server, a huge load of support incidents, and zero revenue. The developers pulled out of Amazon's Android market -- it cost them too much to be there.
So if Amazon abuses Android ap authors, what are they going to do with book authors?
Depends on their design. All of our printing so far has been with ABS -- the stuff Lego is made of. Of course, there are a zillion formulations of ABS, since it is a blend of three polymers (acrylic: strong but brittle, butadiene: rubbery and adds resilience, styrene: cheap filler that doesn't screw it up to badly in modest amounts). But basically, the strength depends on the design. Bad designs don't survive. Which is actually an excellent learning experience -- I love it when my daughter has to iterate her Solidworks designs 2 or 3 times to get what she wants. Good designs are very strong.
Built a Makerbot Cupcake with my daughter, now age 12. We print a lot of stuff. I do robot parts. She learned the basics of Solidworks, and does doll house furniture, cookie cutters, gift boxes, and parts for robots that we build together. A 3D printer is great for kids in many ways. Since she was little, I've always told her: "The best toys are the ones you build yourself." and I'll spend much more freely on supplies at the craft store than crap from Toys-R-Us. 3D printers are just an extension of that theme.
Dickhead == Craig Barrett. Undid 25 years of Intel culture in less than a year. It took Otellini (for whom I have the greatest respect) almost two years to correct the Barrett fall out. But in the end, Intel pretty much makes decisions based on gross margin per wafer. They'll do strategic things for a while, but if the margin per wafer doesn't show up pretty soon, they kill the experiment. (Speaking of strategic, here's a fun game: The next time a salesman (or marketroid) tries to convince you to do some deal because "it's strategic", respond with "Oh, you mean it's no revenue." Enjoy deer-in-headlights face.)
That's the easy part. When you consider the altitude he reached, bringing down in the same state is a challenge. Telemetry is the easy part of rocketry.
Every aspect of that rocket was impressive, the construction, the flight profile, the telemetry, and especially the recovery. Total success.
Having lost more Estes rockets than I can remember in corn fields and cow pastures 40+ years ago, all I could think of all the way up was: "How the fsck is he ever going to find that thing again?" When they drove up to a totally intact rocket in the middle of the desert, whooping all the way, I could totally identify. That was a jaw dropping moment for me.
Me too. Grew up in tornado alley, and saw (and hid from) several. And saw neighbors houses and farms obliterated. For 20+ years I have lived 5 miles from the San Andreas fault. 30-40 minutes would be *huge* -- but I won't bother to nail anything down that wasn't already nailed down. I'd either go outside, clear of tall buildings, or find a strong door-frame to stand in, away from heavy things.
To the GP -- yeah, we know about it. But you are optimistic about how well people lash down their furniture. I'm pretty good, not perfect, about doing things like strapping tall furniture such as the china cabinet to the wall. But still, I'm sure my house is full of things that would fall down. About a zillion framed paintings that should be screwed to the wall, but aren't. Filing cabinets (which are *way* nasty because the drawers roll out and then the whole thing face-plants) that aren't bolted to the wall.... it goes on. But I would bet that a lot of my neighbors aren't even that good.
But from reading the article, this is all pretty speculative at the moment. It will be a long time before this effect is understood or even proved real.
Free speech is not absolute in the USA, either. Lots of case law around that. Political speech, by-and-large is protected in something close to the absolute. The Supreme Court has always taken a very dim view of attempts to curtail anything that could be considered political speech. Of course, you are not free of consequences -- you need to deal with result of what you say. But outside of contributions to the political discourse, however broadly construed, there are definite limits to free speech. "Hate speech", speech that contributes nothing to political discussion but advocates hatred, is certainly curtailed. "Commercial speech" comes under much regulation -- think false advertising, or regulations on prescription medication advertising.
Most USA-ians misunderstand what their freedom of speech really is -- it really means the government can't use censorship to protect itself from critics. Outside of that, there are definite boundaries.
As far as holocaust deniers go, I'm perfectly happy to let them make idiots of themselves. The other side gets to present their evidence as well. I don't think the government should be in the business of deciding truthiness.
Those words are from the preamble. They don't establish law, not being part of the articles. In any case, it is pretty clear that the authors of the constitution were enumerating limited powers of the federal government, and unless you can find the power listed, the federal government doesn't have it. That has been stretched pretty badly since the days of FDR. The *only* clause in the constitution that can be construed to allow Obamacare is the commerce clause, which gives the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. That clause has become the camel's nose under the tent that has enabled the federal government to grow like topsy since the beginning of the FDR administration.
I challenge you to find any part of the constitution that gives the federal government the power to coerce a citizen into buying a product from any person or company. I challenge you to go read the Federalist Papers and any other contemporaneous writings debating the adoption of the constitution and find in them anything that remotely anticipates the Federal government forcing a citizen to buy any particular product or service. To the extent that you find anything, I suspect it will be commentary of the form: "... and with this constitution, you have a guarantee that sort of thing will never happen..."
My ISP has this one right, I think. Port 25 and other well-known server ports that are popular among the SPAMinistas are blocked by default (on residential service lines). But opening them up is a simple matter of signing into a configuration page and clicking a button to open the port. They have a few words of warning on the web page, but don't stop you from doing it.
Let's be realistic, many customers are going to be in the "What's a port?" crowd. They are the ones who's systems are likely to get compromised and have the least idea how to fix it. People who say "I want to run SMTP on port 25." are capable of finding the button on the ISP's web site and clicking it. Also, the ISP runs statistical monitors on anybody who opens port 25. Because you found and clicked the button to open port 25, the ISP has at least half a chance that an e-mail saying: "Dude, do you know your SMTP outbound traffic just spiked up by 20X today, and that you are sending out X MB per day now?" is likely to be read by a sentient being.
Overall, I think they have the balance about right -- they don't get in your way, but they do things to minimize problems and workload caused by compromised customer systems.
That will never work. Too much overtime. It will burn people out. You have to have 3 shifts, and some week-end part-time shift work, or maybe 4 shifts on rotation. So, seems the me the best you could achieve is to have one fourth the population watching the three fourths that are off-duty.
Re:"Should start to worry"?
on
Arduino Goes ARM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure, and Intel has been worrying for over 15 years. But here is the thing... the #1 thing that matters at Intel is gross margin per wafer. Intel fills its fabs, and runs them throttle to the firewall 24x7. Every project is ranked by gross margin per wafer... fall below the cut-off line, and you either buy fab from somebody like TSMC, or go find a different project to work on. The Intel Atom is a successful attempt to create a power efficient part that meets the gross margin per wafer test. Go look at the margins of the ARM makers. I'll bet it doesn't match Intel's.
I overheard a very interesting+insightful conversation among vendors at the ARMTech conference a year or so ago. "We are all just vendors of value-added flash. Look at the die photos. It's a whole lot of flash memory, with a little bit of logic around the margins for a processor and peripherals in order to differentiate our flash from the other guys' flash and add some value."
Intel is doing what makes business sense for Intel. But they are watching. And Intel, big as it is, can turn on a dime, and has enough fab capacity to pave over with silicon any competitor that gets in it's boresight. That said, in the space where I work (embedded) ARM is taking over the world. It really makes zero sense to use an 8 bit uCtlr just about anywhere anymore, when you can get an ARM in the same size package and at nearly the same cost. Since flash dominates the die area in a microcontroller, 8-bit versus 32-bit logic is noise -- it has less cost impact than the package. There are a lot of Cortex-M3 parts in 48 pin packages now that cost only slightly more than 8 bit parts. (I should point out that there is huge difference between, an ARM Cortex-M3 and an ARM-A9, for instance an MMU.)
In the end, it comes down to MIPS and MFLOPS, and the die area and power required to do that much computation. When an ARM has enough functional units to match the MIPS and MFLOPS of an x86, it will take as much die area and power. At the complexity level of a Pentium IV, the added ugliness of the X86 instruction set is pretty much noise in the total die area and power. (In a past life I was an instruction decode and pipeline control logic design specialist -- I can tell you that x86 instruction decode is as ugly as it comes -- and in the day and age of out-of-order execution, that almost doesn't matter, except that because of all that ugliness x86 code is freakishly dense, which means the same size I-cache holds a lot more useful code. When you toss in the fact that the ugliness is also guarantees employment for instruction decode specialists, I'd call that a win:)
Yes, a Gentoo system that has fallen behind is a painful thing to update. And the reality is that a rolling release system is essentially un-QA-able. I've often thought that what Gentoo needed was 'sync points', where you have a reasonable guarantee of QA at the sync point, and the ability to move from one sync point to another without tears. If you fall behind, you may have to walk forward through several sync points, but heck, that's a more reasonable price to pay for falling behind than they way it is now. It seems like sync points could be added without giving up the rolling release of 'whatever' in between sync points. After using Gentoo, even fresh releases of Ubuntu seem like yesterday's stale bread.
But I'll tell you this.... I've found the people on Gentoo support forums to be helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly, with on-point advice. My experience with Ubuntu forums has been that people, when they *do* respond, are largely clueless and have reading comprehension problems because they often answer a question that I didn't ask.
Yes, exactly. I was going to say this. In order for robots to melt into the background in office or home environments, the robot has to adapt to *our* environment, not us changing around our world to fit the robots. I'm extremely picky about getting my computer set up just the way I like it, because computers should serve *me*, not the other way around. Same goes for robots. I don't want to rebuild my home or office for the convenience of robots.
I do a lot of homebrew robotics. I, and everyone else, brings robots to club meetings in a motley assortment of tubs, bins, and cartons, and big robots go int the back of pick up trucks. -- bah, how primitive. A home service robot needs to be easy to transport. That means it has to fit in my car, exactly where a human would sit, without any accommodation. It needs to get to the second floor by going up the stairs, not by some "robot service elevator" put in just for it. So I think in the end we need to have a robust bi-pedal robot platform that folds in the same places that humans do and is human scale, because the world is built to human scale and built for beings that fold where humans do. Robots will only be useful when they can operate in our world without us having to remodel the world for robots.
Bi-pedal robots aren't worth pursuing for anthropomorphism -- bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
It's much simpler in my town. We have "public safety officers" -- they are trained as both police and firemen, and get better pay than the surrounding communities because our town has fewer people on the payroll over all. So the paramedics drive the fire trucks to the fire, and the police driver their cruisers and grab a fire suit off the truck. So.... the secret is if you want to rob a bank, start a fire across town first:)
Does he not have the freedom of assembly? Does he not have the freedom to call for an assembly? What part of a water fight is not legal? If he was planning a non-crime, then what is the pre-crime? Can you be arrested for a pre-crime in England?
I'm older than you. And still learning new languages and new electronics, these days I'm building robots. My neighbor down the street is old enough that when he was a teenager, he had a television *that* *he* *built* *himself* *from* *scratch* because that is the only way you could get a television. There was one station in Philadelphia that he could watch that broadcasted 2 1/2 hours a week. Later, he was one of the designers of the ENIAC. Go to his house today, and you will find a Windows box, a Mac, and a Linux box running Ubuntu. He is still hacking -- this is a guy who was already a working engineer when WW II broke out.
I am shocked that you are asking the question. You have an attitude problem, not an age problem. I hope they pull the plug on my life support before I ever ask if I am too old to learn something new.
Slashdot Mirror
To heck with diabetes treatments and charging USB devices in my ear -- I want the "electric eel" version of this -- "Don't mess with me Jaco, or I'll shake your hand!" -- or -- "Watch out, this index finger is set on stun."
Damn, I want to be a walking, talking, Tazer.
And.... I'm also thinking of pick-up lines that would be appropriate were the current routed.... elsewhere...
In Amazon's Android market, Amazon sets the pricing. You get a percentage of the price they set, with no recourse. Sometimes, they set the price at zero. There was a story on Slashdot not long ago (too lazy to search for it) where the developers were essentially screwed... on the day Amazon set the price to zero (without warning), they got a huge spike in downloads that crumpled their activation server, a huge load of support incidents, and zero revenue. The developers pulled out of Amazon's Android market -- it cost them too much to be there.
So if Amazon abuses Android ap authors, what are they going to do with book authors?
Depends on their design. All of our printing so far has been with ABS -- the stuff Lego is made of. Of course, there are a zillion formulations of ABS, since it is a blend of three polymers (acrylic: strong but brittle, butadiene: rubbery and adds resilience, styrene: cheap filler that doesn't screw it up to badly in modest amounts). But basically, the strength depends on the design. Bad designs don't survive. Which is actually an excellent learning experience -- I love it when my daughter has to iterate her Solidworks designs 2 or 3 times to get what she wants. Good designs are very strong.
Yeasty Beaver?
Built a Makerbot Cupcake with my daughter, now age 12. We print a lot of stuff. I do robot parts. She learned the basics of Solidworks, and does doll house furniture, cookie cutters, gift boxes, and parts for robots that we build together. A 3D printer is great for kids in many ways. Since she was little, I've always told her: "The best toys are the ones you build yourself." and I'll spend much more freely on supplies at the craft store than crap from Toys-R-Us. 3D printers are just an extension of that theme.
Dickhead == Craig Barrett. Undid 25 years of Intel culture in less than a year. It took Otellini (for whom I have the greatest respect) almost two years to correct the Barrett fall out. But in the end, Intel pretty much makes decisions based on gross margin per wafer. They'll do strategic things for a while, but if the margin per wafer doesn't show up pretty soon, they kill the experiment. (Speaking of strategic, here's a fun game: The next time a salesman (or marketroid) tries to convince you to do some deal because "it's strategic", respond with "Oh, you mean it's no revenue." Enjoy deer-in-headlights face.)
That's the easy part. When you consider the altitude he reached, bringing down in the same state is a challenge. Telemetry is the easy part of rocketry.
That's manly.
Every aspect of that rocket was impressive, the construction, the flight profile, the telemetry, and especially the recovery. Total success.
Having lost more Estes rockets than I can remember in corn fields and cow pastures 40+ years ago, all I could think of all the way up was: "How the fsck is he ever going to find that thing again?" When they drove up to a totally intact rocket in the middle of the desert, whooping all the way, I could totally identify. That was a jaw dropping moment for me.
Well done, sirs.
Me too. Grew up in tornado alley, and saw (and hid from) several. And saw neighbors houses and farms obliterated. For 20+ years I have lived 5 miles from the San Andreas fault. 30-40 minutes would be *huge* -- but I won't bother to nail anything down that wasn't already nailed down. I'd either go outside, clear of tall buildings, or find a strong door-frame to stand in, away from heavy things.
To the GP -- yeah, we know about it. But you are optimistic about how well people lash down their furniture. I'm pretty good, not perfect, about doing things like strapping tall furniture such as the china cabinet to the wall. But still, I'm sure my house is full of things that would fall down. About a zillion framed paintings that should be screwed to the wall, but aren't. Filing cabinets (which are *way* nasty because the drawers roll out and then the whole thing face-plants) that aren't bolted to the wall.... it goes on. But I would bet that a lot of my neighbors aren't even that good.
But from reading the article, this is all pretty speculative at the moment. It will be a long time before this effect is understood or even proved real.
Free speech is not absolute in the USA, either. Lots of case law around that. Political speech, by-and-large is protected in something close to the absolute. The Supreme Court has always taken a very dim view of attempts to curtail anything that could be considered political speech. Of course, you are not free of consequences -- you need to deal with result of what you say. But outside of contributions to the political discourse, however broadly construed, there are definite limits to free speech. "Hate speech", speech that contributes nothing to political discussion but advocates hatred, is certainly curtailed. "Commercial speech" comes under much regulation -- think false advertising, or regulations on prescription medication advertising.
Most USA-ians misunderstand what their freedom of speech really is -- it really means the government can't use censorship to protect itself from critics. Outside of that, there are definite boundaries.
As far as holocaust deniers go, I'm perfectly happy to let them make idiots of themselves. The other side gets to present their evidence as well. I don't think the government should be in the business of deciding truthiness.
Those words are from the preamble. They don't establish law, not being part of the articles. In any case, it is pretty clear that the authors of the constitution were enumerating limited powers of the federal government, and unless you can find the power listed, the federal government doesn't have it. That has been stretched pretty badly since the days of FDR. The *only* clause in the constitution that can be construed to allow Obamacare is the commerce clause, which gives the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. That clause has become the camel's nose under the tent that has enabled the federal government to grow like topsy since the beginning of the FDR administration.
I challenge you to find any part of the constitution that gives the federal government the power to coerce a citizen into buying a product from any person or company. I challenge you to go read the Federalist Papers and any other contemporaneous writings debating the adoption of the constitution and find in them anything that remotely anticipates the Federal government forcing a citizen to buy any particular product or service. To the extent that you find anything, I suspect it will be commentary of the form: "... and with this constitution, you have a guarantee that sort of thing will never happen..."
My ISP has this one right, I think. Port 25 and other well-known server ports that are popular among the SPAMinistas are blocked by default (on residential service lines). But opening them up is a simple matter of signing into a configuration page and clicking a button to open the port. They have a few words of warning on the web page, but don't stop you from doing it.
Let's be realistic, many customers are going to be in the "What's a port?" crowd. They are the ones who's systems are likely to get compromised and have the least idea how to fix it. People who say "I want to run SMTP on port 25." are capable of finding the button on the ISP's web site and clicking it. Also, the ISP runs statistical monitors on anybody who opens port 25. Because you found and clicked the button to open port 25, the ISP has at least half a chance that an e-mail saying: "Dude, do you know your SMTP outbound traffic just spiked up by 20X today, and that you are sending out X MB per day now?" is likely to be read by a sentient being.
Overall, I think they have the balance about right -- they don't get in your way, but they do things to minimize problems and workload caused by compromised customer systems.
I wish I had mod points today. You have some very good ideas.
And here I am without mod points.
That will never work. Too much overtime. It will burn people out. You have to have 3 shifts, and some week-end part-time shift work, or maybe 4 shifts on rotation. So, seems the me the best you could achieve is to have one fourth the population watching the three fourths that are off-duty.
Sure, and Intel has been worrying for over 15 years. But here is the thing... the #1 thing that matters at Intel is gross margin per wafer. Intel fills its fabs, and runs them throttle to the firewall 24x7. Every project is ranked by gross margin per wafer... fall below the cut-off line, and you either buy fab from somebody like TSMC, or go find a different project to work on. The Intel Atom is a successful attempt to create a power efficient part that meets the gross margin per wafer test. Go look at the margins of the ARM makers. I'll bet it doesn't match Intel's.
I overheard a very interesting+insightful conversation among vendors at the ARMTech conference a year or so ago. "We are all just vendors of value-added flash. Look at the die photos. It's a whole lot of flash memory, with a little bit of logic around the margins for a processor and peripherals in order to differentiate our flash from the other guys' flash and add some value."
Intel is doing what makes business sense for Intel. But they are watching. And Intel, big as it is, can turn on a dime, and has enough fab capacity to pave over with silicon any competitor that gets in it's boresight. That said, in the space where I work (embedded) ARM is taking over the world. It really makes zero sense to use an 8 bit uCtlr just about anywhere anymore, when you can get an ARM in the same size package and at nearly the same cost. Since flash dominates the die area in a microcontroller, 8-bit versus 32-bit logic is noise -- it has less cost impact than the package. There are a lot of Cortex-M3 parts in 48 pin packages now that cost only slightly more than 8 bit parts. (I should point out that there is huge difference between, an ARM Cortex-M3 and an ARM-A9, for instance an MMU.)
In the end, it comes down to MIPS and MFLOPS, and the die area and power required to do that much computation. When an ARM has enough functional units to match the MIPS and MFLOPS of an x86, it will take as much die area and power. At the complexity level of a Pentium IV, the added ugliness of the X86 instruction set is pretty much noise in the total die area and power. (In a past life I was an instruction decode and pipeline control logic design specialist -- I can tell you that x86 instruction decode is as ugly as it comes -- and in the day and age of out-of-order execution, that almost doesn't matter, except that because of all that ugliness x86 code is freakishly dense, which means the same size I-cache holds a lot more useful code. When you toss in the fact that the ugliness is also guarantees employment for instruction decode specialists, I'd call that a win :)
???? Have you ever used Gentoo? What releases?
Yes, a Gentoo system that has fallen behind is a painful thing to update. And the reality is that a rolling release system is essentially un-QA-able. I've often thought that what Gentoo needed was 'sync points', where you have a reasonable guarantee of QA at the sync point, and the ability to move from one sync point to another without tears. If you fall behind, you may have to walk forward through several sync points, but heck, that's a more reasonable price to pay for falling behind than they way it is now. It seems like sync points could be added without giving up the rolling release of 'whatever' in between sync points. After using Gentoo, even fresh releases of Ubuntu seem like yesterday's stale bread.
But I'll tell you this.... I've found the people on Gentoo support forums to be helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly, with on-point advice. My experience with Ubuntu forums has been that people, when they *do* respond, are largely clueless and have reading comprehension problems because they often answer a question that I didn't ask.
http://www.elecraft.com/ The performance of which blows away anything that Heathkit or TenTec ever made.
here's one: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Microbial-Fuel-Cell-MFC-Part-II/
You can google up a bunch of alternatives, and buy simple kits if your budget runs to that. But the ingredients are cheap, you could save money kitting up a bunch yourself.
Yes, exactly. I was going to say this. In order for robots to melt into the background in office or home environments, the robot has to adapt to *our* environment, not us changing around our world to fit the robots. I'm extremely picky about getting my computer set up just the way I like it, because computers should serve *me*, not the other way around. Same goes for robots. I don't want to rebuild my home or office for the convenience of robots.
I do a lot of homebrew robotics. I, and everyone else, brings robots to club meetings in a motley assortment of tubs, bins, and cartons, and big robots go int the back of pick up trucks. -- bah, how primitive. A home service robot needs to be easy to transport. That means it has to fit in my car, exactly where a human would sit, without any accommodation. It needs to get to the second floor by going up the stairs, not by some "robot service elevator" put in just for it. So I think in the end we need to have a robust bi-pedal robot platform that folds in the same places that humans do and is human scale, because the world is built to human scale and built for beings that fold where humans do. Robots will only be useful when they can operate in our world without us having to remodel the world for robots.
Bi-pedal robots aren't worth pursuing for anthropomorphism -- bi-pedal robots are worth pursuing because they could fit easily into our world and disappear into the background.
It's much simpler in my town. We have "public safety officers" -- they are trained as both police and firemen, and get better pay than the surrounding communities because our town has fewer people on the payroll over all. So the paramedics drive the fire trucks to the fire, and the police driver their cruisers and grab a fire suit off the truck. So.... the secret is if you want to rob a bank, start a fire across town first :)
Does he not have the freedom of assembly? Does he not have the freedom to call for an assembly? What part of a water fight is not legal? If he was planning a non-crime, then what is the pre-crime? Can you be arrested for a pre-crime in England?
I'm older than you. And still learning new languages and new electronics, these days I'm building robots. My neighbor down the street is old enough that when he was a teenager, he had a television *that* *he* *built* *himself* *from* *scratch* because that is the only way you could get a television. There was one station in Philadelphia that he could watch that broadcasted 2 1/2 hours a week. Later, he was one of the designers of the ENIAC. Go to his house today, and you will find a Windows box, a Mac, and a Linux box running Ubuntu. He is still hacking -- this is a guy who was already a working engineer when WW II broke out.
I am shocked that you are asking the question. You have an attitude problem, not an age problem. I hope they pull the plug on my life support before I ever ask if I am too old to learn something new.
His way or the highway.
You're just now figuring that out about ESR?