Re:Hard at work, or hardly working?
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
One box of Corn Flakes is almost 5% of your monthly food budget.
I don't by $5 boxes of corn-flakes, they're not worth it.
Food usually costs me $25 or so a week. That buys me meals for lunch and dinner. First, I am only buying food for my self. Add an appropriate multiplier if you are supporting dependatns. Second, only about half of the food I buy is name-brand. In many cases, I can't taste or don't object to the differences between the name-brand and the store brand product. Third, when something I usually buy is on sale, I buy a little bit extra at the lower price.
Looking at my receipts for the last few weeks, I am averaging just under $25/week for food.
Anybody interested in amateur radio of field day in the Grand Haven/Spring Lake/Muskegon (Michigan) area can come visit the North Ottawa ARC field day site. It is located at Robbins township park (take 120th 1 mile north of M-45)
Re:Hard at work, or hardly working?
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Your numbers seem a bit high (you didn't mention how many people you were supporting. Now since I only have to support myself, things look a little better:
AFAIK, caffine does not affect the taste. I don't want to sound like a consipiricy theoist here, but it wouldn't surprise me if soft-drink makers intentionally make caffine-free recipes less appealing. After all, it kind of renders useless the advantages of caffinating your drinks if everyone is happy with the non-caffinated version.
Now, if they could make caffiene-free coke not suck, I'd be in business.
Caffine is an additive in soft-drinks, not a component of a critical ingrediant. Its not that they need to put caffine in soft-drinks, it that they want to put caffine in soft-drinks.
For most items, the MTBF is not how long you can expect an item to operate with out failures. For most MTBF calculations, half of the units will fail before 33% or so of the MTBF. (I don't have the derivation of this number in front of me, but I can probably dig it up if somebody wants it).
As far as the high MTBF's mentioned by the submitter, I can think of at least two perfectly valid methods that accuratly determine long MTBF's:
First, you have the theoretical MTBF. This is where you look at the chance of failure for each (important) component and mathematically determine how long a unit would be expected to survive.
Second, you can test the device to failure under accelerated environmental conditions (high temperature, over-voltage, excessive vibrations, etc.) and extrapolate from the accelerated failure testing the failure distribution under typical conditions.
Neither method is perfect, but better than assuming that because only 1 unit out of 100 failed in the first year, the product has an MTBF of 50.5 years.
Because too many votors vote single issue:
Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice
Lower Taxes vs. Increase/Improved Government Services
Gun Control vs. Gun Regulation
Labor vs. Management
etc.
Many people consistantly vote based on one or two issues. This creates an environment where all a candidate needs to do to get elected is aggree with the majority of votors on a couple of key issues.
1. Get your co-workers together, gather up your employement agreements, pool your money, and buy a couple hours of the local employment law attorney's time. S/He can tell you if what the company is doing is legal or not (primarily whether you still fit the definition of salaried employee in your area), and whether there are any ways you can turn down the company's demands without giving the company cause to termanate you (i.e. religion says I can't work on xday). Also find out what the laws says unempolyment benifits shoud you decide to quite, what provides cause for your employer to terminate you, and what your rights are should the company decide to terminate you.
2. Draft a letter which is signed by everybody involved and delivered in an anonymous fashion as possible to everybody above you in the chain of command. In this letter, state what is wrong with the current demands, anything usefull from the visit with the lawyer, and what you belive is a fair arraingment (maybe a reasonable amount of overtime with bonus/comp time/extra vacation) later.
Hopefully, this will allow you and the employer to come to a mutually benifical agreement regarding how this progress will proceed. If not, the advice from the lawyer will be to your advantage should you decide to quit or should you be fired after you decide to limit yourself to 50 or 60 hours a week instead of the 12/7 requested.
A 42V system will reduce weight. The weight of the generation and storage componenets will probably increase, but so will the amount of power availaible. The increase in availaible power will allow systems in the car which are presently fully mechanical to be replaced with lighter, cheaper, and more flexible electromechanical systems.
Its the same story for fuel economy. A 42V system won't automatically increase fuel technology. Instead, a 42V system enables other technologies, such as integrated starter-alternators, with will increase fuel economy and decrease emissions.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the automotive industry is driven by cost, weight, and styling (user experiance). Going from a 12V to a 36V/42V system achieves all of these.
If the brick says the buildings about to fall, what can the owners do?
I think the idea would be to detect movement of the brick relative to other parts of the building. This would allow the owner to detect and have the opportunity to correct any structural problems well before the building is in any danger of collapse.
The excuse that it helps firefighters is totally ridiculous, firefighters aren't going to have time to jack in to a network plug when they're trying to save lives.
Remember, not everybody who works for a fire department rushes into burning buildings to save people. Some people at the scene are going to set up a command center. Presumably, the command center would be equipped to monitor such 'smart' building materials and relay important information to firefighters in the building.
The other touted use it to sense vibrations. I don't know about you, but I know when there's an earthquake and when there's not, I don't need a brick to tell me.
After a major earthquake occurs, buildings need to be inspected to determine how much structrual damage has occured. Knowing the magnitude and direction of the vibrations sensed at various parts of the building could help the damage assessment process.
Re:There are no legitimate "privacy concerns"
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Scenario:
1. I buy new tires for my car at Walmart. Each tire has an RFID tag for legitimate inventory tracking purposes.
2. McDonalds installs an RFID tag reader that checks for a RFID tag in the front left tire while driving through the drive through.
3a. When McDonalds sees that RFID tag again, they are able to display on their order board items which I am likely to buy, based on my vehicle's previous orders. (Nothing particularly wrong here)
3b. When McDonalds sees that RFID tag again, they subtly change prices based on what they believe I will pay. (Bad Bad Bad)
From a privacy standpoint, nothing particulary evil has happened yet. McDonands knows my vehicle tends to order certain products, but they don't know who I am.
4. A large data warehouse firm starts collecting RFID sales information from companies like Walmart and McDonalds. The companies agree because either they are well paid, or they recieve access to the database in return for contributing to it. The RFID tag in my tire allows the firm to tie me (based on the information on the check/credit card I used to buy the tires) with the items I later purchased at stores which could put an RFID tag close to my tire (most likely drive-throughs, mechanics, and similar places).
5. My Health/Life insurance is cancelled after the database indicates that my vehicle has made too many trips to McDonalds.
6. My auto insurance rates go up because I frequently visit the MicDonalds in a bad part of town.
Now, I'm not saying that any of this would happen automatically just because of RFID tags in tires or other consumer products. The problem it that I am aware of nothing which would prevent this scenario from occuring.
We need to keep broadcast television (and radio) for the same reasons we need to keep the postal service: to guarantee every citizen has affordabile access to basic services. Where I live, the least expensive cable plan is twenty-something dollars a month, and includes local network affiliates plus C-SPAN, public-access, (and not-surprisingly two home-shopping channels). If money is tight, there are better things to spend $250/year on. Broadcast television and radio ensure that I will always have access to news and educational children's programming (and of course all the other useless crap found on television), even if I cannot afford a cable subscription.
And here is a real one, from the public change-log of Alter Aeon:
The undead count Tarrant brought forth a hithero unknown and unexpected set
of powers last night, and used them to convince an entire army of Dentin's
minions to assist him in a noble cause. Before the night was through, an
ancient dragon surrounded by Deep mysteries had fallen. Dentin's minions
have been... disciplined appropriately, and it seems unlikely that
incidents of this nature will occur again.
It makes plenty of sense. Lets say you have a theater with 100 seats. Lets also assume that a particular screening of a film fills 75 of the 100 seats. Any money you can bring in for the remaining 25 seats increases my profit (or decreases my loss).
The trick is you still want to make the people who want to see the movie regardless pay full price.
Also, IIRC in some (most?) cases, the licensing is by the size of the venue not the number of attendees. At least that was the case when student government showed films on campus at school.
That reminds me of a funny experiance in high school. One of my classes (an AP class) was randomly selected to take a "drug use/risky behavior survey" administered, IIRC, by some student volunteers from the local university. Anyway, none of us really wanted to take the survey, so as we walked down to the room where they were giving the survey we decided we should see how quickly we could get kicked out of the survey. I think we lasted about ten minutes. The administrators started loosing when one (white) girl demanded that there be an African-American choice for ethnic background since she was born in Africa. They finally lost it when we started discussing (by shouting accross the room) how bongs and other objects from the survey worked. I don't think the survey people were too happy, but the AP teacher thought it was pretty funny.
Can someone explain the second provision of this to me?
I've NEVER understood why a device should have to "accept interference received that causes undesired operation." This means the device cannot be shielded against interference? What on Earth for? Is this a way to let the gubmint cheat?
In general, it means that the operator of a radio transmitter is not responsible for the effects of the radio waves he is transmitting so long as the signal he is transmitting has the correct frequency content and power levels. In other words, if your neighbor's ham radio station (assuming the ham radio station is using legal power levels on legal frequencies) causes your television to turn on and off, it not your neighbor's fault, but rather the fault of your television's manufacturer for not including adequate shielding.
In fact, the signing works nicely in your favor, since nobody can undercut you on price. Or they can, but they too have to pay the L500, in which case they'd have to either 1) charge as much as you or 2) hate you enough to take an intentional loss. Both are a lot of hassel. Seems to me like you just win.
Not quite, unless I compleatly mis-understand the way this instance of code-signing works. Lets say that Bob has a piece of GPL'ed software avaiaible on his website. Bob makes three files availaible for download: a source tarball, a binary distribution, and a signed binary distribution. In order to cover the cost of code-signing, Bob requires a payment of $25 to download the signed version. Joe pays Bob $25 to download the signed binary. Now, as he is allowed to redistrute Bob's work under the GPL, Joe posts Bob's signed binary package on his own website and allows anyone to download it for free. Bob sees no further downloads of the $25 signed version and never re-coups the $500 it cost him to sign the code in the first place.
I can see two possible solutions for Bob:
1. Bob Obtain the software from the software's copyright holders under a licence which would allow Bob to prevent redistribution of the signed binary version.
2. Bob can write his own software and release the source and normal binary under the GPL, but release the signed binary under some other licence.
Lots of items have expiration dates. In many cases, it may even be illegal (or leave you open to a lawsuit) for a store to sell an item past its expiration date (think meat) or to use an item past its expiration date (think sterile medical products). The difference is that in almost every case, nothing is forcing the end user not to use the item past the expiration date. You can always put those expired batteries in your MP3 player if you only want a few hours use. You are also free to eat expired meat if you so choose. If you are crazy (or desperate) enough, you can even use expired medical products on yourself.
HP, however, seems to have chosen to make the expiration date manditory. Don't care about degraded print quality? Too bad, buy a new cartiridge. In my mind, it would be perfectly ok for HP to do what you mention compaq and sun have done: Warn the user that the cartiridge has reached the end of its life-expectancy so the user can make an informed decision regarding whether to replace the cartiridge or to continue using it.
From a business standpoint what's to stop a shoplifter from just doing a kill command on desired merchandise?
Yes, a kill command would weaken the ability for RFID tags to be used to prevent shoplifiting. But you know what? Determined thieves would find a way to disable the tags with or without the kill command. The issue is whether the ability to stop casual shoplifters is more important than the ability for typical consumers to choose to inactivate tags in items they own.
Re:GPL has anti-DRM built in?
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
I think the situation would be the opposite: Create binaries which would only run under a signed kernel (or module). The binaries would not have to be release open source, so they could not be as easily circumvented.
About a year ago, my university put a policy in place which made it a violation of the acceptable use policy to have any copyrighted material publically availaible. This, according to the administration, was due to a threatening letter from the BSA. See the announcement. I would definetly say that schools are feeling pressure to "control" piracy on their networks.
Note that at about this same time, I had been running a similar indexing service on a spare computer in my dorm room. I eventually stopped maintining the index because it took too much effort, and I was getting a bit nervous about what appeared to be http and smb spidering of the dorm network by the computer center.
Linux doesn't need swap to run. I don't typically turn on swap on my desktop linux box, because the amount of physical memory present is normally pleanty to hold all running programs while still providing a decent file-cache.
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One box of Corn Flakes is almost 5% of your monthly food budget.
I don't by $5 boxes of corn-flakes, they're not worth it.
Food usually costs me $25 or so a week. That buys me meals for lunch and dinner. First, I am only buying food for my self. Add an appropriate multiplier if you are supporting dependatns. Second, only about half of the food I buy is name-brand. In many cases, I can't taste or don't object to the differences between the name-brand and the store brand product. Third, when something I usually buy is on sale, I buy a little bit extra at the lower price.
Looking at my receipts for the last few weeks, I am averaging just under $25/week for food.
Actually, I just moved to the Grand Haven area a few weeks ago, so I'm still learning where all the landmarks are.
First radio post!
Anybody interested in amateur radio of field day in the Grand Haven/Spring Lake/Muskegon (Michigan) area can come visit the North Ottawa ARC field day site. It is located at Robbins township park (take 120th 1 mile north of M-45)
Your numbers seem a bit high (you didn't mention how many people you were supporting. Now since I only have to support myself, things look a little better:
Rent: $555/month (800sq.ft, w/garage, 1/2mi from work, nice area)
Food: $100/month
Taxes: $650/month (including sales, telephone fees, etc.)
Auto: $25/month (not counting repairs or payments)
AFAIK, caffine does not affect the taste. I don't want to sound like a consipiricy theoist here, but it wouldn't surprise me if soft-drink makers intentionally make caffine-free recipes less appealing. After all, it kind of renders useless the advantages of caffinating your drinks if everyone is happy with the non-caffinated version.
Now, if they could make caffiene-free coke not suck, I'd be in business.
Caffine is an additive in soft-drinks, not a component of a critical ingrediant. Its not that they need to put caffine in soft-drinks, it that they want to put caffine in soft-drinks.
For most items, the MTBF is not how long you can expect an item to operate with out failures. For most MTBF calculations, half of the units will fail before 33% or so of the MTBF. (I don't have the derivation of this number in front of me, but I can probably dig it up if somebody wants it).
As far as the high MTBF's mentioned by the submitter, I can think of at least two perfectly valid methods that accuratly determine long MTBF's:
First, you have the theoretical MTBF. This is where you look at the chance of failure for each (important) component and mathematically determine how long a unit would be expected to survive.
Second, you can test the device to failure under accelerated environmental conditions (high temperature, over-voltage, excessive vibrations, etc.) and extrapolate from the accelerated failure testing the failure distribution under typical conditions.
Neither method is perfect, but better than assuming that because only 1 unit out of 100 failed in the first year, the product has an MTBF of 50.5 years.
why oh why are such idiots elected to office?
Because too many votors vote single issue: Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice
Lower Taxes vs. Increase/Improved Government Services
Gun Control vs. Gun Regulation
Labor vs. Management
etc.
Many people consistantly vote based on one or two issues. This creates an environment where all a candidate needs to do to get elected is aggree with the majority of votors on a couple of key issues.
1. Get your co-workers together, gather up your employement agreements, pool your money, and buy a couple hours of the local employment law attorney's time. S/He can tell you if what the company is doing is legal or not (primarily whether you still fit the definition of salaried employee in your area), and whether there are any ways you can turn down the company's demands without giving the company cause to termanate you (i.e. religion says I can't work on xday). Also find out what the laws says unempolyment benifits shoud you decide to quite, what provides cause for your employer to terminate you, and what your rights are should the company decide to terminate you.
2. Draft a letter which is signed by everybody involved and delivered in an anonymous fashion as possible to everybody above you in the chain of command. In this letter, state what is wrong with the current demands, anything usefull from the visit with the lawyer, and what you belive is a fair arraingment (maybe a reasonable amount of overtime with bonus/comp time/extra vacation) later.
Hopefully, this will allow you and the employer to come to a mutually benifical agreement regarding how this progress will proceed. If not, the advice from the lawyer will be to your advantage should you decide to quit or should you be fired after you decide to limit yourself to 50 or 60 hours a week instead of the 12/7 requested.
A 42V system will reduce weight. The weight of the generation and storage componenets will probably increase, but so will the amount of power availaible. The increase in availaible power will allow systems in the car which are presently fully mechanical to be replaced with lighter, cheaper, and more flexible electromechanical systems.
Its the same story for fuel economy. A 42V system won't automatically increase fuel technology. Instead, a 42V system enables other technologies, such as integrated starter-alternators, with will increase fuel economy and decrease emissions.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the automotive industry is driven by cost, weight, and styling (user experiance). Going from a 12V to a 36V/42V system achieves all of these.
If the brick says the buildings about to fall, what can the owners do?
I think the idea would be to detect movement of the brick relative to other parts of the building. This would allow the owner to detect and have the opportunity to correct any structural problems well before the building is in any danger of collapse.
The excuse that it helps firefighters is totally ridiculous, firefighters aren't going to have time to jack in to a network plug when they're trying to save lives.
Remember, not everybody who works for a fire department rushes into burning buildings to save people. Some people at the scene are going to set up a command center. Presumably, the command center would be equipped to monitor such 'smart' building materials and relay important information to firefighters in the building.
The other touted use it to sense vibrations. I don't know about you, but I know when there's an earthquake and when there's not, I don't need a brick to tell me.
After a major earthquake occurs, buildings need to be inspected to determine how much structrual damage has occured. Knowing the magnitude and direction of the vibrations sensed at various parts of the building could help the damage assessment process.
Scenario:
1. I buy new tires for my car at Walmart. Each tire has an RFID tag for legitimate inventory tracking purposes.
2. McDonalds installs an RFID tag reader that checks for a RFID tag in the front left tire while driving through the drive through.
3a. When McDonalds sees that RFID tag again, they are able to display on their order board items which I am likely to buy, based on my vehicle's previous orders. (Nothing particularly wrong here)
3b. When McDonalds sees that RFID tag again, they subtly change prices based on what they believe I will pay. (Bad Bad Bad)
From a privacy standpoint, nothing particulary evil has happened yet. McDonands knows my vehicle tends to order certain products, but they don't know who I am.
4. A large data warehouse firm starts collecting RFID sales information from companies like Walmart and McDonalds. The companies agree because either they are well paid, or they recieve access to the database in return for contributing to it. The RFID tag in my tire allows the firm to tie me (based on the information on the check/credit card I used to buy the tires) with the items I later purchased at stores which could put an RFID tag close to my tire (most likely drive-throughs, mechanics, and similar places).
5. My Health/Life insurance is cancelled after the database indicates that my vehicle has made too many trips to McDonalds.
6. My auto insurance rates go up because I frequently visit the MicDonalds in a bad part of town.
Now, I'm not saying that any of this would happen automatically just because of RFID tags in tires or other consumer products. The problem it that I am aware of nothing which would prevent this scenario from occuring.
We need to keep broadcast television (and radio) for the same reasons we need to keep the postal service: to guarantee every citizen has affordabile access to basic services. Where I live, the least expensive cable plan is twenty-something dollars a month, and includes local network affiliates plus C-SPAN, public-access, (and not-surprisingly two home-shopping channels). If money is tight, there are better things to spend $250/year on. Broadcast television and radio ensure that I will always have access to news and educational children's programming (and of course all the other useless crap found on television), even if I cannot afford a cable subscription.
And here is a real one, from the public change-log of Alter Aeon:
The undead count Tarrant brought forth a hithero unknown and unexpected set of powers last night, and used them to convince an entire army of Dentin's minions to assist him in a noble cause. Before the night was through, an ancient dragon surrounded by Deep mysteries had fallen. Dentin's minions have been... disciplined appropriately, and it seems unlikely that incidents of this nature will occur again.
Which brings up another question: Is NASA's infrastructure even capable of supporting to shuttles flying at once?
It makes plenty of sense. Lets say you have a theater with 100 seats. Lets also assume that a particular screening of a film fills 75 of the 100 seats. Any money you can bring in for the remaining 25 seats increases my profit (or decreases my loss). The trick is you still want to make the people who want to see the movie regardless pay full price. Also, IIRC in some (most?) cases, the licensing is by the size of the venue not the number of attendees. At least that was the case when student government showed films on campus at school.
That reminds me of a funny experiance in high school. One of my classes (an AP class) was randomly selected to take a "drug use/risky behavior survey" administered, IIRC, by some student volunteers from the local university. Anyway, none of us really wanted to take the survey, so as we walked down to the room where they were giving the survey we decided we should see how quickly we could get kicked out of the survey. I think we lasted about ten minutes. The administrators started loosing when one (white) girl demanded that there be an African-American choice for ethnic background since she was born in Africa. They finally lost it when we started discussing (by shouting accross the room) how bongs and other objects from the survey worked. I don't think the survey people were too happy, but the AP teacher thought it was pretty funny.
Can someone explain the second provision of this to me?
I've NEVER understood why a device should have to "accept interference received that causes undesired operation." This means the device cannot be shielded against interference? What on Earth for? Is this a way to let the gubmint cheat?
In general, it means that the operator of a radio transmitter is not responsible for the effects of the radio waves he is transmitting so long as the signal he is transmitting has the correct frequency content and power levels. In other words, if your neighbor's ham radio station (assuming the ham radio station is using legal power levels on legal frequencies) causes your television to turn on and off, it not your neighbor's fault, but rather the fault of your television's manufacturer for not including adequate shielding.
In fact, the signing works nicely in your favor, since nobody can undercut you on price. Or they can, but they too have to pay the L500, in which case they'd have to either 1) charge as much as you or 2) hate you enough to take an intentional loss. Both are a lot of hassel. Seems to me like you just win.
Not quite, unless I compleatly mis-understand the way this instance of code-signing works. Lets say that Bob has a piece of GPL'ed software avaiaible on his website. Bob makes three files availaible for download: a source tarball, a binary distribution, and a signed binary distribution. In order to cover the cost of code-signing, Bob requires a payment of $25 to download the signed version. Joe pays Bob $25 to download the signed binary. Now, as he is allowed to redistrute Bob's work under the GPL, Joe posts Bob's signed binary package on his own website and allows anyone to download it for free. Bob sees no further downloads of the $25 signed version and never re-coups the $500 it cost him to sign the code in the first place.
I can see two possible solutions for Bob:
1. Bob Obtain the software from the software's copyright holders under a licence which would allow Bob to prevent redistribution of the signed binary version.
2. Bob can write his own software and release the source and normal binary under the GPL, but release the signed binary under some other licence.
Lots of items have expiration dates. In many cases, it may even be illegal (or leave you open to a lawsuit) for a store to sell an item past its expiration date (think meat) or to use an item past its expiration date (think sterile medical products). The difference is that in almost every case, nothing is forcing the end user not to use the item past the expiration date. You can always put those expired batteries in your MP3 player if you only want a few hours use. You are also free to eat expired meat if you so choose. If you are crazy (or desperate) enough, you can even use expired medical products on yourself.
HP, however, seems to have chosen to make the expiration date manditory. Don't care about degraded print quality? Too bad, buy a new cartiridge. In my mind, it would be perfectly ok for HP to do what you mention compaq and sun have done: Warn the user that the cartiridge has reached the end of its life-expectancy so the user can make an informed decision regarding whether to replace the cartiridge or to continue using it.
From a business standpoint what's to stop a shoplifter from just doing a kill command on desired merchandise?
Yes, a kill command would weaken the ability for RFID tags to be used to prevent shoplifiting. But you know what? Determined thieves would find a way to disable the tags with or without the kill command. The issue is whether the ability to stop casual shoplifters is more important than the ability for typical consumers to choose to inactivate tags in items they own.
I think the situation would be the opposite: Create binaries which would only run under a signed kernel (or module). The binaries would not have to be release open source, so they could not be as easily circumvented.
About a year ago, my university put a policy in place which made it a violation of the acceptable use policy to have any copyrighted material publically availaible. This, according to the administration, was due to a threatening letter from the BSA. See the announcement. I would definetly say that schools are feeling pressure to "control" piracy on their networks.
Note that at about this same time, I had been running a similar indexing service on a spare computer in my dorm room. I eventually stopped maintining the index because it took too much effort, and I was getting a bit nervous about what appeared to be http and smb spidering of the dorm network by the computer center.
Linux doesn't need swap to run. I don't typically turn on swap on my desktop linux box, because the amount of physical memory present is normally pleanty to hold all running programs while still providing a decent file-cache.