Re: hyperfocusing. Wouldn't adult ADHD be useful in jobs where tasks are relatively short-timed? Like, say, in small-scale ("close" to the airport rather than over-the-ocean) air traffic control? You take the plane once it's handed to you, then before it's off the screen it either lands or you hand it off elsewhere. Isn't that a good match with ADHD?
I'm serious -- any ATCs with ADHD on Slashdot? Ping ping...
Hire a lawyer. If the prosecutor won't pick up the case, you can probably have a valid civil claim. Your family did suffer, after all. I'm sorry that you had to go through all that.
If teachers wanted you on ADHD meds, maybe you should have reported them to the prosecutors office for medical practice without license. They are not allowed to diagnose anyone, nor to suggest a course of therapy. I've found it's a good way to shut some people up who abuse their authority a bit much that way. They get quite scared.
Same here -- I never really liked school, until I finally moved to U.S. and started college there. What a change. Only then I realized that most of the education I had before was piss-poor. Notable exceptions were but a couple of teachers over the years, but in general it was a horrifying experience. And the teachers were but a part of the problem, the horrendous quality of textbooks and idiotic curricula were also to blame. Me and my wife both have occasional nightmares about school. And last we went to grade school was 15 years ago and change...
It feels really weird when our daughter enjoyed her kindergarten year -- none of us did. We're obviously very happy for her, but it wouldn't make us think twice if she didn't want to go to school or felt unhappy there -- for us it was the par for the course.
No, it's not that, but thanks. The page I refer to is a Ph.D. guy (too), his page is mostly about his company and its services, the blog is but a small part. The mandarin-knowing engineer is a chick. Methinks there's a link to it somewhere on screaming circuits blog, so I'll try digging it up again.
I presumed you fuck someone willfully. I doubt the company wanted to manufacture bad cards. As for registration/warranty -- I wasn't really commenting on that, either. Of course those requirements are a way of telling the customer to go away -- that's why I took to liking Apple, because their warranty has been quite fuss-free. I was commenting on the root cause of his problem -- a purely technical thing.
This is even easier! All you need is a stable timing source in the cellphone, and you don't need to track any locations. Merely measure the Doppler shift of a bunch of base stations, and you put a good lower limit on your velocity.
There are no standards and no safety compliance labs that examine those devices. As far as I'm concerned, those devices are safety critical and should undergo testing similar to safety critical medical devices.
The way it is, it's pretty much a free-for-all. The peddlers, um, vendors of those devices are in the same league as school textbook publishers. They do absolutely shittiest job that'll pass the scrutiny of a bunch of incompetents. And no, increasing the number of incompetents so as to get more ratings to average from doesn't increase the quality of the average. It's still shitty.
I'm all for such devices, but what you claim is par for the course, and unless there is strict regulation, and obligatory regulatory compliance, things won't change. Same applies to breathalyzers and their crapload of code. Oh, and voting machines too.
Thanks, that's informative. OTOH, I don't know how much else was there -- he/she claimed tuna+salad greens. How much protein do we get from "salad greens"?
The quote is a typical governmental non-committal BS. Surely if your diet is deficient in calcium or magnesium, then having it in the water is helpful. But then your diet is the problem to be addressed. I stand by my statement that water should not be treated like a source of any minerals when you are looking at the adequacy of your diet. If there are minerals there -- great, they can make it taste better. But don't count on them.
This seems to be just bad luck. You likely had cards from a bad batch. Large-scale manufacturing processes are quite apt at producing lots of scrap.
A guy I know used to co-own a printing shop. He used to say that sometimes they'd have a very expensive wastepaper production line. Same goes for printed circuit board assembly: all it takes to sink millions of dollars per hour into scrap at the end of the line is to run a poor reflow oven profile.
There is no reasonable way to make a graphics card "less robust" without putting real money into it. You seem to have no idea how mass electronics production looks. Those cards were likely coming at an average rate of one every few seconds off a big production line somewhere. Any sort of per-item tweaking has to be kept to a minimum to make it economical. The cards go through the assembly/reflow/clean, some are picked up for automated optical inspection of solder joints, then they are tested by an automated test cell that emulates the relevant busses, boots the card up and acquires the output video signal to check if it's OK, loads the flash with firmware, etc. Then a bunch of ladies attaches the brackets and packs them into boxes, and off they go.
The production line is far removed from the distribution channel. If a card like yours is failing, there's no way to digitally re-manufacture it.
No, the company didn't want to fuck you, nor did they do anything nefarious. The manufacturer -- likely a contract manufacturer -- messed up and you ended up with unreliable cards from the same batch. Or, maybe there was a thermal design issue -- either the board layout's interaction with reflow process, or runtime thermal management. That's all there is to it.
Now for well deserved ad-hominem: please refrain from making up conspiracy hypotheses (they ain't theories, damnit) when you have little clue about the involved technology. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Fuckups at electronics production lines are commonplace, and there are some very, very well paid consultants who can sometimes get 7 figure salaries doing "nothing much" but knowing an Asian language or two and traveling from place to place, explaining how to fix production lines whose output is part or all scrap. I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.
The babe's main claim to fame IMHO, apart from being hot and knowing Mandarin, is that she has a real understanding of the involved technology -- understanding in the Feynman sense. She doesn't treat SMT production lines like gods who need prayer and offering, nor does she anthropomorphize them ("the line is having a bad day today") -- contrary to some of the locals who run the show, who sometimes suffer from lack of training and don't really understand what's going on. When you understand, you can try making hypotheses as to what's wrong, tweaking things, and seeing if stuff improves. That's the definition of understanding, in this case. Otherwise, you pay for hot babes to come and help you out;)
What?! Either they are winding down as a company, or they are not. If BFG as a company is "staying in business", they have no excuse not to cover the warranty claims. I smell a well-deserved class action lawsuit if that's the case.
There were some news recently that optmists have better immune responses than pessimists. Thus there can be certainly truth to one claiming that immunomudulation can be effected by thought and feelings alone.
In high school, when we were looking for almost any excuse to skip school, me and quite a few of my friends could make ourselves get sick almost on a whim -- within 12-24 hours. And this wasn't a trick with pills, dehydration or any such thing. Regular diet, plenty of drinks, and we could literally wish to get sick, and we would -- typically we'd have nonspecific "cold" symptoms: headaches (sometimes pretty severe, with light/sound hypersensitivity), light fever (38C or thereabouts), runny nose. Of course we had plenty of exposure -- we took crowded public transportation to/from school, so it perhaps didn't take much in the way of immunosuppression to get the lingering bugs to announce their presence.
The whole blame-the-WiFi is just a convenient cover, it's a non issue.
We were quite a determined bunch -- I managed to drag it out so far as to get a unilateral sinus infection, a few times. The doctor thought that it may be caused in part by asymmetric airflow in the nose, caused by a skewed septum and the bone behind it. First I had two paranasal sinuses (sphenoidalis IIRC) flushed, and I mean flushed. After a minimal local subcutaneous anesthesia (pretty worthless), a big needle was pushed through the bone into each sinus, and a syringe with some liquid in it was attached, the liquid pushed and then sucked out. I heard this would be a good thing to undergo during interrogation resistance training, but apparently the go soft on people those days;) This obviously wasn't enough, so later I had the septum and a bit of bone behind it straightened up -- also with local anesthesia. I still recall the sound of the chisel working on the skull.
For those who haven't had such experience: the local anesthesia I had did nothing to numb the periosteum. The latter is rich in pain receptors.
It was in 11th grade methinks, and I've managed to get 51% attendance, with most absences excused. This was enough to graduate (one still had to pass all the tests, of course). I still have a wincing smile when I think about those times.
So as far as kids getting "sick" on schooldays: sure, they do because they want to, or because they are stressed out. No biggie. You'd think the school boards would have wised up to this somewhere in the middle of last century. Maybe they had, but forgot about it since... Sigh.
Wish I had a mod points -- who the heck moderated parent as troll?! I find mercury poisoning from a tuna diet quite believeable, heck if you eat more than a can of tuna a day you may be putting yourself at risk.
You need to eat quite a bit of tuna on a tuna-based diet; perhaps a pound per day?
Let's run some numbers.
EPA's limit is 0.1micrograms per kg body mass per day. So for a 70kg adult, the EPA limit is 7ug per day.
Now one pound of tuna is ~450 grams, at FDA average of 0.2ppm concentration in tuna, you get 90 micrograms, so you're 13 times over the limit. If you're unlucky and get fish close to FDA limit of 1ppm mercury concentration, you get 0.45 mg.
Out of 0.45mg of mercury per day, about 0.4mg will be accumulating in luckiest of circumstances (to be conservative, I'd just assume 100%). You'll be sick in short order.
You get plenty of those from food. Tap water is not an important source of minerals, save for iodine perhaps, unless you're on a water diet, that is.You get about half a gram of potassium from a single banana. Try adding the equivalent of that in a potassium salt to a glass of water and see how it tastes;)
Documentation is not a panacea, but is perhaps a good starting point. When you need to do changes, you're on your own of course, but to keep it running I'd say documentation shoudl be enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: hyperfocusing. Wouldn't adult ADHD be useful in jobs where tasks are relatively short-timed? Like, say, in small-scale ("close" to the airport rather than over-the-ocean) air traffic control? You take the plane once it's handed to you, then before it's off the screen it either lands or you hand it off elsewhere. Isn't that a good match with ADHD?
I'm serious -- any ATCs with ADHD on Slashdot? Ping ping...
Someone mod this up, please. What a fresh outlook on life. Kudos.
Hire a lawyer. If the prosecutor won't pick up the case, you can probably have a valid civil claim. Your family did suffer, after all. I'm sorry that you had to go through all that.
Oh well, I should have read one message further down the thread. Sorry for a redundant post on my part.
If teachers wanted you on ADHD meds, maybe you should have reported them to the prosecutors office for medical practice without license. They are not allowed to diagnose anyone, nor to suggest a course of therapy. I've found it's a good way to shut some people up who abuse their authority a bit much that way. They get quite scared.
Same here -- I never really liked school, until I finally moved to U.S. and started college there. What a change. Only then I realized that most of the education I had before was piss-poor. Notable exceptions were but a couple of teachers over the years, but in general it was a horrifying experience. And the teachers were but a part of the problem, the horrendous quality of textbooks and idiotic curricula were also to blame. Me and my wife both have occasional nightmares about school. And last we went to grade school was 15 years ago and change...
It feels really weird when our daughter enjoyed her kindergarten year -- none of us did. We're obviously very happy for her, but it wouldn't make us think twice if she didn't want to go to school or felt unhappy there -- for us it was the par for the course.
No, it's not that, but thanks. The page I refer to is a Ph.D. guy (too), his page is mostly about his company and its services, the blog is but a small part. The mandarin-knowing engineer is a chick. Methinks there's a link to it somewhere on screaming circuits blog, so I'll try digging it up again.
I presumed you fuck someone willfully. I doubt the company wanted to manufacture bad cards. As for registration/warranty -- I wasn't really commenting on that, either. Of course those requirements are a way of telling the customer to go away -- that's why I took to liking Apple, because their warranty has been quite fuss-free. I was commenting on the root cause of his problem -- a purely technical thing.
This is even easier! All you need is a stable timing source in the cellphone, and you don't need to track any locations. Merely measure the Doppler shift of a bunch of base stations, and you put a good lower limit on your velocity.
Creationism not making any useful predictions makes it not a theory. Case closed. Or so one would hope.
Creationism can be many things, but -- again -- not a theory. It really makes it easy that way.
Every organization with a rather singleminded agenda is bound to become overzealous.
* FSF excepted [ducks and scurries away]
There are no standards and no safety compliance labs that examine those devices. As far as I'm concerned, those devices are safety critical and should undergo testing similar to safety critical medical devices.
The way it is, it's pretty much a free-for-all. The peddlers, um, vendors of those devices are in the same league as school textbook publishers. They do absolutely shittiest job that'll pass the scrutiny of a bunch of incompetents. And no, increasing the number of incompetents so as to get more ratings to average from doesn't increase the quality of the average. It's still shitty.
I'm all for such devices, but what you claim is par for the course, and unless there is strict regulation, and obligatory regulatory compliance, things won't change. Same applies to breathalyzers and their crapload of code. Oh, and voting machines too.
Thanks, that's informative. OTOH, I don't know how much else was there -- he/she claimed tuna+salad greens. How much protein do we get from "salad greens"?
My point was the the GGP was suspecting alien-made crop circles, when it was just local kids goofing off in the field.
I didn't address the warranty issues at all.
The quote is a typical governmental non-committal BS. Surely if your diet is deficient in calcium or magnesium, then having it in the water is helpful. But then your diet is the problem to be addressed. I stand by my statement that water should not be treated like a source of any minerals when you are looking at the adequacy of your diet. If there are minerals there -- great, they can make it taste better. But don't count on them.
Find someone who knows how to use their soldering iron, and get the caps replaced ;)
Not everyone on Slashdot deals with customer returns, you know.
This seems to be just bad luck. You likely had cards from a bad batch. Large-scale manufacturing processes are quite apt at producing lots of scrap.
A guy I know used to co-own a printing shop. He used to say that sometimes they'd have a very expensive wastepaper production line. Same goes for printed circuit board assembly: all it takes to sink millions of dollars per hour into scrap at the end of the line is to run a poor reflow oven profile.
There is no reasonable way to make a graphics card "less robust" without putting real money into it. You seem to have no idea how mass electronics production looks. Those cards were likely coming at an average rate of one every few seconds off a big production line somewhere. Any sort of per-item tweaking has to be kept to a minimum to make it economical. The cards go through the assembly/reflow/clean, some are picked up for automated optical inspection of solder joints, then they are tested by an automated test cell that emulates the relevant busses, boots the card up and acquires the output video signal to check if it's OK, loads the flash with firmware, etc. Then a bunch of ladies attaches the brackets and packs them into boxes, and off they go.
The production line is far removed from the distribution channel. If a card like yours is failing, there's no way to digitally re-manufacture it.
No, the company didn't want to fuck you, nor did they do anything nefarious. The manufacturer -- likely a contract manufacturer -- messed up and you ended up with unreliable cards from the same batch. Or, maybe there was a thermal design issue -- either the board layout's interaction with reflow process, or runtime thermal management. That's all there is to it.
Now for well deserved ad-hominem: please refrain from making up conspiracy hypotheses (they ain't theories, damnit) when you have little clue about the involved technology. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Fuckups at electronics production lines are commonplace, and there are some very, very well paid consultants who can sometimes get 7 figure salaries doing "nothing much" but knowing an Asian language or two and traveling from place to place, explaining how to fix production lines whose output is part or all scrap. I wish I had the link to one example: there's one consulting company whose founder methinks writes a blog, the latter often featuring a rather hot, real engineer babe who knows Mandarin, and kicks ass at troubleshooting SMT production issues. My browser history doesn't go that far, otherwise I'd dig it up.
The babe's main claim to fame IMHO, apart from being hot and knowing Mandarin, is that she has a real understanding of the involved technology -- understanding in the Feynman sense. She doesn't treat SMT production lines like gods who need prayer and offering, nor does she anthropomorphize them ("the line is having a bad day today") -- contrary to some of the locals who run the show, who sometimes suffer from lack of training and don't really understand what's going on. When you understand, you can try making hypotheses as to what's wrong, tweaking things, and seeing if stuff improves. That's the definition of understanding, in this case. Otherwise, you pay for hot babes to come and help you out ;)
What?! Either they are winding down as a company, or they are not. If BFG as a company is "staying in business", they have no excuse not to cover the warranty claims. I smell a well-deserved class action lawsuit if that's the case.
There.
There were some news recently that optmists have better immune responses than pessimists. Thus there can be certainly truth to one claiming that immunomudulation can be effected by thought and feelings alone.
In high school, when we were looking for almost any excuse to skip school, me and quite a few of my friends could make ourselves get sick almost on a whim -- within 12-24 hours. And this wasn't a trick with pills, dehydration or any such thing. Regular diet, plenty of drinks, and we could literally wish to get sick, and we would -- typically we'd have nonspecific "cold" symptoms: headaches (sometimes pretty severe, with light/sound hypersensitivity), light fever (38C or thereabouts), runny nose. Of course we had plenty of exposure -- we took crowded public transportation to/from school, so it perhaps didn't take much in the way of immunosuppression to get the lingering bugs to announce their presence.
The whole blame-the-WiFi is just a convenient cover, it's a non issue.
We were quite a determined bunch -- I managed to drag it out so far as to get a unilateral sinus infection, a few times. The doctor thought that it may be caused in part by asymmetric airflow in the nose, caused by a skewed septum and the bone behind it. First I had two paranasal sinuses (sphenoidalis IIRC) flushed, and I mean flushed. After a minimal local subcutaneous anesthesia (pretty worthless), a big needle was pushed through the bone into each sinus, and a syringe with some liquid in it was attached, the liquid pushed and then sucked out. I heard this would be a good thing to undergo during interrogation resistance training, but apparently the go soft on people those days ;)
This obviously wasn't enough, so later I had the septum and a bit of bone behind it straightened up -- also with local anesthesia. I still recall the sound of the chisel working on the skull.
For those who haven't had such experience: the local anesthesia I had did nothing to numb the periosteum. The latter is rich in pain receptors.
It was in 11th grade methinks, and I've managed to get 51% attendance, with most absences excused. This was enough to graduate (one still had to pass all the tests, of course). I still have a wincing smile when I think about those times.
So as far as kids getting "sick" on schooldays: sure, they do because they want to, or because they are stressed out. No biggie. You'd think the school boards would have wised up to this somewhere in the middle of last century. Maybe they had, but forgot about it since... Sigh.
Wish I had a mod points -- who the heck moderated parent as troll?! I find mercury poisoning from a tuna diet quite believeable, heck if you eat more than a can of tuna a day you may be putting yourself at risk.
You need to eat quite a bit of tuna on a tuna-based diet; perhaps a pound per day?
Let's run some numbers.
EPA's limit is 0.1micrograms per kg body mass per day. So for a 70kg adult, the EPA limit is 7ug per day.
Now one pound of tuna is ~450 grams, at FDA average of 0.2ppm concentration in tuna, you get 90 micrograms, so you're 13 times over the limit. If you're unlucky and get fish close to FDA limit of 1ppm mercury concentration, you get 0.45 mg.
Out of 0.45mg of mercury per day, about 0.4mg will be accumulating in luckiest of circumstances (to be conservative, I'd just assume 100%). You'll be sick in short order.
You get plenty of those from food. Tap water is not an important source of minerals, save for iodine perhaps, unless you're on a water diet, that is.You get about half a gram of potassium from a single banana. Try adding the equivalent of that in a potassium salt to a glass of water and see how it tastes ;)
Documentation is not a panacea, but is perhaps a good starting point. When you need to do changes, you're on your own of course, but to keep it running I'd say documentation shoudl be enough.
That's where documentation comes handy. They did document the system enough so that a less-than-specialist could still keep it running, right?