I never could really understand how this companies-should-self-regulate could work, and up to this day it didn't really prove to work. If companies are let to roam freely, then there's really nothing (good or bad) you can really expect from them, and even if one seems OK, they can change their policies from one second to the next and you're screwed.
I think the intent is that there'd be industry standards, with their own best practices, standards body, and compliance testing. Things like movie ratings and OpenGL compliance are self-regulated.
In There is no equivalent to Christianity's "do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself" in China. So, why the hell care what your employer is paying you to do?
Right, the West is so different. That explains our wonderful state of economy.
The word is "empthy", look it up. It's something universal to all humans.
Actually, isn't the very definition of psychopath "someone who lacks empathy"?
Chapulines must be very well cooked prior to consumption, because, as with other grasshoppers, they may carry nematodes that can infest human hosts.
In 2007, several American media reported concerns over lead contamination in products imported from Zimatlán, a municipality in Oaxaca, including chapulines[3]. In California, an investigation among community residents in Monterey County showed a larger risk for lead poisoning on people who either were from or reported eating food imported from Zimatlán.
You're also advised to well-cook pork (trichinosis). And substitute mercury for lead, and apply it to tuna.
I went to a local German deli once and they sold cans of chocolate-covered grasshoppers. A small can was $75, so if you market it right, people will not only eat bugs, they'll pay a premium.
Not me, however. Name it anything you want. Call it "candy hoppers" or "vita-munchies", but for me, bugs have too many spiky little parts, often have an off-putting smell, and the only chitin I voluntarily consume is in mushrooms. Grubs might be better, but I can't get excited about them, either.
No, "queue". After all, this is Slashdot!:-) (yo hablo espanol solimente un pocito, and I don't write it well, either)
Not only that, but the message editor is in cahoots. I punctuated properly, but when I posted it, the results were missing the leading inverted question mark!
... because they don't know what the software market was like before them.
A good CAD setup including workstation and licenses could be $100K. A mainframe to handle your accounting could be $6000 per month.
Personal computing - IBM, Microsoft, and Apple - demolished the old model which was low volume, buggy software at high prices. I have no illusions about their intentions, they've made more money than any emperor. But I do appreciate what they created.
I know what the software market was like. I supported a software product that we had bought for $60,000 1980 dollars initial fee and $5K a month to run on a million-dollar mainframe. But when I put together my first personal computer (long before there was a "PC"), I spent $2-3K on the hardware, so speding tens of thousands for personal sofware was not something people could or would do. Fortunately, they could make it up on volume.
Give Microsoft credit, but not too much credit. My first C compiler ran under MS-DOS on a Z-80 and cost about $45 from the Software Toolkworks. And was actually less buggy than most more expensive compilers I've purchased since. Borland helped keep prices down, too.
But perhaps the biggest contributor for keeping personal software afforable was something called "GNU". That's right. I was using copylefted software on MS-DOS years before Linux was released. Honorable mention should also go to Ward Christensen who not only was instrumental in getting PC-to-PC modem transmission to the major leagues, but also did a set of very useful utilities that quite remarkably resembled the Norton Utilitities. Except that Norton was as yet unheard-of. Microsoft could rarely be accused of larcenous pricing, but there were a lot of other sources that probably helped keep them honest. More or less.
Which? The Pi or the Arduino. The Pi is targeted specifically towards Linux. The Arduino's standard OS is a real-time process controller, and I'm not sure how much external beefing up (RAM, etc.) it would take to make a Linux machine out of it.
For most of us, I think it would be less work - and probably cheaper - to leave them to their separate specialties.
The headline is a bit misleading. They did not convert a Wifi station to a spy device, but created a completely separate device to interpret Wifi signals and their reflections in a building.
Well, actually they converted a Wifi station to HALF of a spy device.
Nice rationalization for a wallhack there. Personally, I think even in the case of a zombie apocalypse you have to have *some* standards. Otherwise, what is the difference between you and a zombie?
After all, they could use it to make a box cutter and then hijack the plane.
Maybe not a box cutter -- it has a spring in it -- but you could make a knife; Plastic is incredibly hard, and skin is incredibly soft. It only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut skin. Hell, I can snap a credit card in two and that makes a crude, but effective, slashing weapon. The idea that only metal is dangerous is pretty stupid. But then, this is the TSA we're talking about.
Actually, just purchase any random item packaged in a plastic anti-theft "laceration package" and use it. Those things shed more blood than a planeload of terrorists.
It was my understanding that the Pi was more of a hobbyist/educational market -- it's not for people who want a cheap computer (which is what your android device is) but for people who want a REALLY POWERFUL Arduino. Find me an Android device with SPI/I2C/OneWire. Or with GPI/O pins in general. I know there are devices to do that, but what kind of cost is that adding to your Android phone. Plus your phone seems cheaper because it's contract-free -- but that's only a benefit if you plan to use it in a way that it can still be your phone. I was considering a Pi for a barbot (though I'll probably just use my old laptop and an MSP430 for I/O) -- I'm certainly not building my phone into my bar...
I'm afraid I can't agree on that. Firstly, because I believe that the stated goals of the RPi's developers was quite explicitly a "cheap computer to facilitate learning" and secondly because the RPi isn't nearly as well suited for primitive hardware hacking as the Arduino.
I have designed Arduino circuits to serve as solar charge controllers, scan punched cards and operate home automation systems. I have run a Raspberry VM (don't have the hardware yet) that emulates an IBM System/370 mainframe computer (via Project Hercules) and acts as a direct replacement for one of my older webservers running Apache/PHP and MySQL database client.
Actually, I'm seriously thinking of using a Raspberry Pi as a scheduler and smart control interface to an Arduino X-10 automation controller.
Ever try to tell a Libertarian that has drunk the kool-aide that their free market liberty is swapping big government inefficiency [ineffectiveness which protects all of us -- read Heinlein] for a Darwinian construct that has no moral or ethical foundation?
Except that Darwin knew better. "Survival of the fittest" as interpreted by ideologues assumes that only the biggest, baddest, nastiest and most selfish will succeed. No cute little kittens or butterflies for them. No altruism for the sake of the whole (species) at the expense of the individual.
Free markets aren't usually stable even absent external (e.g. government) meddling. They tend to degenerate into monopolies thanks to positive feedback processes. Or, more succinctly: "Nothing Succeeds like Success".
#1 argument against solar: What about when it's dark?
Well? What about when those freight cars full of coal stop rolling in? Or those loads of fissionable fuel? Not many power plants sit on their very own mine, so in order to function smoothly, they need to keep stockpiles of fuel on hand. Arguably, the best way to store solar energy has yet to be determined, but giving up and wringing one's hands isn't going to do anything.
What land use is lost when you paper the countryside with solar panels? None, in cases like my neighborhood where we have roof space otherwise unexploited. In fact, if every watt solar that cooks our attics around here was converted to electricty, we'd have a significant surplus to ship to the high-density dwellers.
Photovoltaics lose efficiency as temperature rises. But temperature itself indicates energy. Find ways to harvest it and you're not only cool the PV units, you'll have that much more energy to play with. Plus, it lowers the local A/C bills because it's not getting into the attic (again, using roof-mounted systems). If nothing else, put a solar water heater underneath the PV equipment.
As for China killing PV business, between China and India, pretty much every domestic business has been killed to some extent or other. Except maybe for financial wheeling and dealing.
Solar has problems, but once upon a time, the Captains of Industry saw problems as opportunities. Now they just wail about how doing anything would "destroy jobs" and ruin quartely profits and how we have to keep on doing the same old things no matter how unsustainable.
Form an organization. Raise money. Hire a lobbyist. Donate money to candidates who agree with you and run ads against candidates who disagree with you.
Lose horribly to well-funded PACs with hidden deep-pocket donors who can afford to run extensive and expensive media saturation campaigns telling the voters how their candidates are "more conservative" than your candidates. As though being "more conservative" or "more liberal" was all that was required to represent the voters' best intererests.
21st Century America, post Citizens United. One Dollar, One Vote. Ayn Rand would be so proud.
We're letting our decisions about renewables to be driven by pie-in-the-sky imagery we've seen in movies and TV shows, not by what actually works. PV solar is pretty much the worst energy generation technology we have right now (without subsidies it costs about 7-8x as much as coal per kWh), making it really only cost-effective if you're completely off the grid (e.g. mountain weather stations which need power for electronics inside). But solar water heaters aren't as sexy so people never consider them. The only real drawback is that mounting all that water on your roof can be problematic in terms of weight and insurance premiums (though it helps reduce cooling bills), so mounting it in or over the backyard frequently works better.
7-8x sounds a little high for these days. Plus, I'm sure it depends on what scale you want to operate at. Coal almost certainly scales better, but conversely, generating a couple of hundred watts instead of a couple of million probably costs more with coal than PV. Locally, PV is pretty much standard for mobile traffic signs and fixed flashing displays. Presumably that set of PV-powered billboards on I-4 down near Tampa have amortized themselves, having been there for decades. PV is not - and may never be - a total solution, but like gas-powered refrigerators, it's as much about supply and demand as anything else. And I don't particularly like "total" anything. When "total" fails, you're "totally" screwed. Hence my researches.
I am told by someone older than I am that when he first moved to the area, a cistern up on the roof was his sole supply of hot water and it worked very well. It's true that some reinforcement is required, but solar pool heaters are almost universal around here.
You're doing it wrong, then. Even Android Java is portable at the source level as long as you stay away from the the Android-specific packages and keep to the basics.
You can't be all things to all people, but Sun did a fairly good job of making something that did a reasonable approximation while at the same time hooking efficiently into the native platform OS.
Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else. By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again. I can guarantee it. I, personally, really love it as it is, especially how easily extensible it is. I don't know another desktop that allows so many customization options through extensions like that. You can really change near everything with a little tweak and you can write one yourself in minutes.
I didn't even notice when Gnome 2 took over.
Unlike Gnome 3, it didn't remove about 4 major desktop features that I use all day long each and every day with no way to restore them.
We all know the old adage about a civilised society being just three missed meals away from barbarism. In the modern world, I wonder whether something similar could be said for the power supply. And might broadband ever fall into the same camp?
Been there, did that. So, for that matter, did Virginia, more recently.
Hurricane blew by. Power went out. Stayed out 4 days. These were the things we missed:
1. Refrigeration - we had a full load of groceries, so we crammed everything we could into an ice chest and grilled the rest. 2. HOT WATER!!!! 3. Cooking electricity 4. Air Conditioning 5. Lights 6. Power for the electronics
Afterwards, we looked into alternatives. R/Vs operate with gas-powered fridges, which are actually simpler and quieter than their electric brethren. But, being a specialty item, the prices are ridiculous.
2. Hot water was actually not that big a problem. Put a large jug in the garage and it'll be 110F in a day. Locally, solar experts actually recommend roof-mounted solar water heaters as the #1 way to save on energy costs, since hot water is one of the biggest consumers of energy.
3. charcoal BBQ grill. Although I bought a propane camp stove afterwards.
4. Fortunately, the first day or two after a storm is relatively cool. After that, the humidity and temperature soared to about the same levels as much of India is recording. Not pleasant, but, like much of India, we didn't have A/C when I grew up anyway. A solar-powered fan gave a little temporary relief.
5. I brought in the solar landscape lights. Afterwards I developed a keen interest in high-brightness LEDs, which were beginning to approach 1 candlepower. Newer units are even brighter, so that problem is no longer a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1 is to find the people that made the PDF and beat them bloody with the Spec Manual for the PDF format.
But isn't the spec manual a PDF?
I never could really understand how this companies-should-self-regulate could work, and up to this day it didn't really prove to work. If companies are let to roam freely, then there's really nothing (good or bad) you can really expect from them, and even if one seems OK, they can change their policies from one second to the next and you're screwed.
I think the intent is that there'd be industry standards, with their own best practices, standards body, and compliance testing. Things like movie ratings and OpenGL compliance are self-regulated.
But. But. But. The Free Market!!!!
In There is no equivalent to Christianity's "do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself" in China. So, why the hell care what your employer is paying you to do?
Right, the West is so different. That explains our wonderful state of economy.
The word is "empthy", look it up. It's something universal to all humans.
Actually, isn't the very definition of psychopath "someone who lacks empathy"?
We only loose them if they were tighter than specification to begin with.
(Seriously, why is the lose/loose typo so damned common here? I see it more than mixing up its/it's or there/their/they're.)
Well, its because if you give people free reign, they loose their lose change.
A delicacy among Oaxacans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapulines
Though I would note the following:
You're also advised to well-cook pork (trichinosis). And substitute mercury for lead, and apply it to tuna.
I went to a local German deli once and they sold cans of chocolate-covered grasshoppers. A small can was $75, so if you market it right, people will not only eat bugs, they'll pay a premium.
Not me, however. Name it anything you want. Call it "candy hoppers" or "vita-munchies", but for me, bugs have too many spiky little parts, often have an off-putting smell, and the only chitin I voluntarily consume is in mushrooms. Grubs might be better, but I can't get excited about them, either.
Heck, it's hard enough to feed me asparagus!
Spelling != language.
que?
No, "queue". After all, this is Slashdot! :-) (yo hablo espanol solimente un pocito, and I don't write it well, either)
Not only that, but the message editor is in cahoots. I punctuated properly, but when I posted it, the results were missing the leading inverted question mark!
Spelling != language.
que?
... because they don't know what the software market was like before them.
A good CAD setup including workstation and licenses could be $100K. A mainframe to handle your accounting could be $6000 per month.
Personal computing - IBM, Microsoft, and Apple - demolished the old model which was low volume, buggy software at high prices. I have no illusions about their intentions, they've made more money than any emperor. But I do appreciate what they created.
I know what the software market was like. I supported a software product that we had bought for $60,000 1980 dollars initial fee and $5K a month to run on a million-dollar mainframe. But when I put together my first personal computer (long before there was a "PC"), I spent $2-3K on the hardware, so speding tens of thousands for personal sofware was not something people could or would do. Fortunately, they could make it up on volume.
Give Microsoft credit, but not too much credit. My first C compiler ran under MS-DOS on a Z-80 and cost about $45 from the Software Toolkworks. And was actually less buggy than most more expensive compilers I've purchased since. Borland helped keep prices down, too.
But perhaps the biggest contributor for keeping personal software afforable was something called "GNU". That's right. I was using copylefted software on MS-DOS years before Linux was released. Honorable mention should also go to Ward Christensen who not only was instrumental in getting PC-to-PC modem transmission to the major leagues, but also did a set of very useful utilities that quite remarkably resembled the Norton Utilitities. Except that Norton was as yet unheard-of. Microsoft could rarely be accused of larcenous pricing, but there were a lot of other sources that probably helped keep them honest. More or less.
sez uncle Larry...
Aren't they just going to have to turn around and give it to Google?
Not to mention: can it run Linux?
Which? The Pi or the Arduino. The Pi is targeted specifically towards Linux. The Arduino's standard OS is a real-time process controller, and I'm not sure how much external beefing up (RAM, etc.) it would take to make a Linux machine out of it.
For most of us, I think it would be less work - and probably cheaper - to leave them to their separate specialties.
The headline is a bit misleading. They did not convert a Wifi station to a spy device, but created a completely separate device to interpret Wifi signals and their reflections in a building.
Well, actually they converted a Wifi station to HALF of a spy device.
They simply created the other half.
Nice rationalization for a wallhack there. Personally, I think even in the case of a zombie apocalypse you have to have *some* standards. Otherwise, what is the difference between you and a zombie?
Brainsss!
After all, they could use it to make a box cutter and then hijack the plane.
Maybe not a box cutter -- it has a spring in it -- but you could make a knife; Plastic is incredibly hard, and skin is incredibly soft. It only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut skin. Hell, I can snap a credit card in two and that makes a crude, but effective, slashing weapon. The idea that only metal is dangerous is pretty stupid. But then, this is the TSA we're talking about.
Actually, just purchase any random item packaged in a plastic anti-theft "laceration package" and use it. Those things shed more blood than a planeload of terrorists.
It was my understanding that the Pi was more of a hobbyist/educational market -- it's not for people who want a cheap computer (which is what your android device is) but for people who want a REALLY POWERFUL Arduino. Find me an Android device with SPI/I2C/OneWire. Or with GPI/O pins in general. I know there are devices to do that, but what kind of cost is that adding to your Android phone. Plus your phone seems cheaper because it's contract-free -- but that's only a benefit if you plan to use it in a way that it can still be your phone. I was considering a Pi for a barbot (though I'll probably just use my old laptop and an MSP430 for I/O) -- I'm certainly not building my phone into my bar...
I'm afraid I can't agree on that. Firstly, because I believe that the stated goals of the RPi's developers was quite explicitly a "cheap computer to facilitate learning" and secondly because the RPi isn't nearly as well suited for primitive hardware hacking as the Arduino.
I have designed Arduino circuits to serve as solar charge controllers, scan punched cards and operate home automation systems. I have run a Raspberry VM (don't have the hardware yet) that emulates an IBM System/370 mainframe computer (via Project Hercules) and acts as a direct replacement for one of my older webservers running Apache/PHP and MySQL database client.
Actually, I'm seriously thinking of using a Raspberry Pi as a scheduler and smart control interface to an Arduino X-10 automation controller.
Hopefully before Apple sues you for it.
Well. avoid rounded corners, then!
But too many people would rather only listen to facts that they agree with.
Ever try to tell a Libertarian that has drunk the kool-aide that their free market liberty is swapping big government inefficiency [ineffectiveness which protects all of us -- read Heinlein] for a Darwinian construct that has no moral or ethical foundation?
Except that Darwin knew better. "Survival of the fittest" as interpreted by ideologues assumes that only the biggest, baddest, nastiest and most selfish will succeed. No cute little kittens or butterflies for them. No altruism for the sake of the whole (species) at the expense of the individual.
Free markets aren't usually stable even absent external (e.g. government) meddling. They tend to degenerate into monopolies thanks to positive feedback processes. Or, more succinctly: "Nothing Succeeds like Success".
#1 argument against solar: What about when it's dark?
Well? What about when those freight cars full of coal stop rolling in? Or those loads of fissionable fuel? Not many power plants sit on their very own mine, so in order to function smoothly, they need to keep stockpiles of fuel on hand. Arguably, the best way to store solar energy has yet to be determined, but giving up and wringing one's hands isn't going to do anything.
What land use is lost when you paper the countryside with solar panels? None, in cases like my neighborhood where we have roof space otherwise unexploited. In fact, if every watt solar that cooks our attics around here was converted to electricty, we'd have a significant surplus to ship to the high-density dwellers.
Photovoltaics lose efficiency as temperature rises. But temperature itself indicates energy. Find ways to harvest it and you're not only cool the PV units, you'll have that much more energy to play with. Plus, it lowers the local A/C bills because it's not getting into the attic (again, using roof-mounted systems). If nothing else, put a solar water heater underneath the PV equipment.
As for China killing PV business, between China and India, pretty much every domestic business has been killed to some extent or other. Except maybe for financial wheeling and dealing.
Solar has problems, but once upon a time, the Captains of Industry saw problems as opportunities. Now they just wail about how doing anything would "destroy jobs" and ruin quartely profits and how we have to keep on doing the same old things no matter how unsustainable.
right, because if it couldn't work with a $500,000,000 grant, it will obviously work the next time without any grant, right? oh wait.
Well, isn't that supposed to be why we keep flogging trickle-down economics?
Keep trying! It will work eventually!
The law of supply and demand
More like the law of Risk and Reward.
Form an organization. Raise money. Hire a lobbyist. Donate money to candidates who agree with you and run ads against candidates who disagree with you.
Lose horribly to well-funded PACs with hidden deep-pocket donors who can afford to run extensive and expensive media saturation campaigns telling the voters how their candidates are "more conservative" than your candidates. As though being "more conservative" or "more liberal" was all that was required to represent the voters' best intererests.
21st Century America, post Citizens United. One Dollar, One Vote. Ayn Rand would be so proud.
We're letting our decisions about renewables to be driven by pie-in-the-sky imagery we've seen in movies and TV shows, not by what actually works. PV solar is pretty much the worst energy generation technology we have right now (without subsidies it costs about 7-8x as much as coal per kWh), making it really only cost-effective if you're completely off the grid (e.g. mountain weather stations which need power for electronics inside). But solar water heaters aren't as sexy so people never consider them. The only real drawback is that mounting all that water on your roof can be problematic in terms of weight and insurance premiums (though it helps reduce cooling bills), so mounting it in or over the backyard frequently works better.
7-8x sounds a little high for these days. Plus, I'm sure it depends on what scale you want to operate at. Coal almost certainly scales better, but conversely, generating a couple of hundred watts instead of a couple of million probably costs more with coal than PV. Locally, PV is pretty much standard for mobile traffic signs and fixed flashing displays. Presumably that set of PV-powered billboards on I-4 down near Tampa have amortized themselves, having been there for decades. PV is not - and may never be - a total solution, but like gas-powered refrigerators, it's as much about supply and demand as anything else. And I don't particularly like "total" anything. When "total" fails, you're "totally" screwed. Hence my researches.
I am told by someone older than I am that when he first moved to the area, a cistern up on the roof was his sole supply of hot water and it worked very well. It's true that some reinforcement is required, but solar pool heaters are almost universal around here.
Java has never been that portable anyway.
You're doing it wrong, then. Even Android Java is portable at the source level as long as you stay away from the the Android-specific packages and keep to the basics.
You can't be all things to all people, but Sun did a fairly good job of making something that did a reasonable approximation while at the same time hooking efficiently into the native platform OS.
Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else. By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again. I can guarantee it. I, personally, really love it as it is, especially how easily extensible it is. I don't know another desktop that allows so many customization options through extensions like that. You can really change near everything with a little tweak and you can write one yourself in minutes.
I didn't even notice when Gnome 2 took over.
Unlike Gnome 3, it didn't remove about 4 major desktop features that I use all day long each and every day with no way to restore them.
We all know the old adage about a civilised society being just three missed meals away from barbarism. In the modern world, I wonder whether something similar could be said for the power supply. And might broadband ever fall into the same camp?
Been there, did that. So, for that matter, did Virginia, more recently.
Hurricane blew by. Power went out. Stayed out 4 days. These were the things we missed:
1. Refrigeration - we had a full load of groceries, so we crammed everything we could into an ice chest and grilled the rest.
2. HOT WATER!!!!
3. Cooking electricity
4. Air Conditioning
5. Lights
6. Power for the electronics
Afterwards, we looked into alternatives. R/Vs operate with gas-powered fridges, which are actually simpler and quieter than their electric brethren. But, being a specialty item, the prices are ridiculous.
2. Hot water was actually not that big a problem. Put a large jug in the garage and it'll be 110F in a day. Locally, solar experts actually recommend roof-mounted solar water heaters as the #1 way to save on energy costs, since hot water is one of the biggest consumers of energy.
3. charcoal BBQ grill. Although I bought a propane camp stove afterwards.
4. Fortunately, the first day or two after a storm is relatively cool. After that, the humidity and temperature soared to about the same levels as much of India is recording. Not pleasant, but, like much of India, we didn't have A/C when I grew up anyway. A solar-powered fan gave a little temporary relief.
5. I brought in the solar landscape lights. Afterwards I developed a keen interest in high-brightness LEDs, which were beginning to approach 1 candlepower. Newer units are even brighter, so that problem is no longer a problem.
6. OK, at this point the serious suffering began.