It's not necessarily just an OS-related problem. I dare you to try to put 60GBs of RAM into your favorite Linux box. What's that, you can't do it? But... Linux doesn't mind having multiple gigabytes of swap... What about putting that swap on a 60GB external ram-drive?
This idea has been used for decades. The C64 had ramdrives of up to 8MBs available that did just this, even though the base system could not have more than 64K of system RAM onboard.
Actually, from what I have read about the FRAM technology, the difference between it and core memory is essentially the same as between SRAM chips and banks of hand-wired transistors: It's on an IC.
The basic principle is more or less the same for both technologies, but since FRAM is made on an IC, it doesn't need millions of hand-wirings to put together. Fast, small, cheap, mass-producable core memory. I like it.
From what I have read, linux's Logical Volume Management (LVM) system gives you the advantage of RAID while still letting you expand your storage. If I were going with the multiple HDD method, I would be using it.
That said, I'm looking at a DVD-R drive. While the rewritable DVD's don't work everywhere, the non-rewritables work almost anywhere, and DVD-R discs can be as cheap as $0.70 each (DVD+R's are several times more expensive). This falls well below the $1/Gig for HDD storage, and they are very conveniently removable.
What is the point of having a larger on-disk buffer, when you can just use an operating system that buffers disk efficiently? I'm no linux zealot, but I notice a HUGE difference in caching efficiency between the two.
I have 256MB of main system RAM, which while not huge, should give plenty of area for disk cache. The difference that I have seen is that Linux will agressively swap out unused applications to make room for the disk buffer (while windows will generally only swap out things to make room for more applications, at least as of Win98). As a result, my HDD hardly ever moves when I am in linux.
I recently upgraded the size and downgraded the speed of my HDD (the old one died and this was cheap). I don't notice any real performance difference, although the extra 20GB came in handy.
Thanks for your reply... I'm not about to argue anything you've said because I've lived through everything you mentioned, except for the whole "government caring" bit. The "do what I say or you get medicated" is all too common a ploy in "modern parenting".
It makes one wonder how, in a society as apparently modern as ours, parents have given up on the act of parenting.
Actually, that government responsibility doesn't go far. What happens to the children who recieve all the physical necessities of life and aren't beaten or molested, but are abused in other ways?
That's right... The government doesn't care.
(And anyone who claims that emotional abuse or neglecting to show affection does not have a serious effect on a child is deluding themself).
I purchased an old Hitachi/Intergraph 20" monitor a couple years ago. It must weigh 150lbs. The PLL gets a little cranky sometimes if you jump between the wrong two modes, and some modes will form a faint red vertical stripe.. but other than that it is an excellent display.
It can't do more than 1000 lines reasonably, but I got 2000x1000 out of it (yes that is a distorted aspect, it's quite amusing to use at that resolution). Of course, at this resolution the "standard vga" video cable starts showing its true colors (oooh, ripple on lines of sharp contrast!), and one of those seperate-channel RGB cables would help a lot...
A friend of mine and I discuss this quite often. It involves a balance between the increasing ability of people to kill enourmous amounts of people and the motivation to do so. We long ago reached the point where large governments have the power to eradicate all life on earth. The capability of the individual keeps rising.
Stopping the access to the technology would require such things as destroying the internet and other worldwide mass-communications. Essentially, the technology won't go away. Police states are never 100% effective, which means that as soon as a technology like, say, bioweapons or antimatter ends up in the hands of average people, if someone has a motivation to use it, they will.
The only way to stop this threat is to stop the motivation. Secure people generally do not commit crimes. If you have nothing to fear (poverty, hate crimes, etc) then you will be less likely to do these things. As the ability of individuals to secure weapons of mass destruction increases, we have to start thinking about making our society more content.
There are other etchants, many much, much more effective. Acid/peroxide is one of the cheapest agressive etchants I have ever worked with. I used to mix it up for about $3/gallon (you ALWAYS mix right before you use it, since the peroxide doesn't really like being in contact with acid and dissipates rather quickly). It can take between 5 minutes to a half hour to etch in ferric chloride. Acid/peroxide will do it in 30 seconds to a minute or so, meaning less undercutting, finer traces, less washout, etc.
The nice thing about it is that, unlike Ferric Chloride, there are ways of reclaiming acid/peroxide systems. I used hydrochloric/peroxide, since it was the cheapest and safest (concentrated HCl hardly itches if you spill it on yourself, the 25% peroxide is a lot worse). In this system, if you dumped in some standard Lye (sodium hydroxide), the copper all precipitates out as a brown sludge (copper hydroxide), and you're just left with a mixture of salt water and peroxide, which decomposes to salt water when left open. The copper hydroxide isn't as hard to deal with as it sounds. If you're running a copper sulphate/sulphuric acid plating system, you can just dump it into the plating system.
Actually, you missed the secret of the really high-volume people. Photoresist is actually primarily for rapid prototyping, not production. Due to the harsh nature of etchants, there are very few compounds that are both photosensitive and resistant to them. Most of them are quite dangerous.
The most serious problem comes in from the really high-end etching systems. Photoresist is fine with ferric chloride, but when you start using something like an acid-peroxide etchant, it will actually eat many "resist" inks. The resist pens become TOTALLY useless, for example.
And so this is where the old technique of serigraphy comes in. This is the "screen-printing" that makes the name Printed Circuit Boards. The resist ink used on the actual board is usually just some form of lacquer, which holds up well to even the harshest etchants. A stencil is prepared on a screen, usually through a photographic process. Since the screen resist doesn't have to deal with the same harsh chemicals, it is generally much more environmentally conscious and cheaper than PC-Board photoresist.
I actually set up to do this method myself, in a semi-hobby context. I had some previous experience with serigraphy, and the acid/peroxide system was cheaper, far more effective, and much easier to dispose of than the ferric chloride. On the flip-side, it will eat virtually anything metallic and smells aweful (it isn't much of a health hazard except in the sulphuric/peroxide system, but should be ventilated nonetheless), so it's not for the faint of heart.
If you thought the 88-pin TQFP's were bad... try some BGA's. The higher integration of some chips, like the new system-on-a-chip ones, make the actual design a lot friendlier to the amateur... But they are almost all in BGA packages.
Thankfully, the pin pitch is often a little bit easier to deal with, so it's not QUITE as difficult for making boards.... As long as you're willing to make multilayer boards.
The problem is SOLDERING the damn things! The balls are UNDER the package, facing the board, with no accessible places to work with. Some sort of area heating is required to solder them at all (normal hobby methods include hot-air heat guns and little temperature-controlled ovens).
Worse still, you have to hope that you have the chip aligned correctly. This is normally done via xray, but most of us don't have access to xray machines (although there was that "radio tube xray machine" thing around...).
As electronics get more and more integrated, they become less and less friendly to amateurs.
Check out a local key or engraving store. Nowadays, even a small one will often have a computer-controlled engraving machine. The depth and/or breadth of cutting will probably mean that you will have to buy your own milling bits, but these things still appear to be able to handle cutting traces in copperclad.
As for drilling the PCB holes, I found that a good set of second-hand carbide bits, a dremel drill press, and a thin center punch could provide nearly perfect results. You *MUST* center-punch with the carbide bits, though, or they might start to "walk" across the board, which due to their brittleness could get quite expensive. Presumably the engraving machine can cut a nice pit in the surface to serve the same function, even though they often lack the force to actually drill the hole.
When a web browser connects to a page, it (can) send a line called "Accept-Encoding" that describes what compressions it can understand. For instance, Konqueror sends "Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, gzip, identity".
Presumably, identity is standard uncompressed text. The others indicate its willingness to accept gzipped files from the webserver.
Since HTML is text, you have a GUARANTEE of 1/8th space savings. Since HTML tends to use a lot of similar codes, the space savings are, in all likelihood, far greater. Since on dialup, the latency of compression is trivial in comparison to the limitations of bandwidth, this may help substantially.
Web-server compression makes sense to me.
Then again, there are PPP extensions for compression now too. These would have a similar benefit.
Combined with both an off-site connection proxy and an on-site data proxy (this is what their webpage suggests they base their technology on), you get the enhancement they claim, more or less (not for compressed files or raw data transfer though).
Why are so many "geeks" nowadays afraid of a 2N2222? I built a circuit to do this with my C128's User Port when I was 12. Transistors aren't all that frightening.
When working with a +-5V logic signal like the parport, just put some 1K input resistors on some 2N2222 or BC547's, and hook the LED with a 220 ohm resistor into the collector path.
If the LED's require more current (like a blue LED does) recalculate the 220 ohm by using ohms law of (5V - 0.7V [transistor drop] - (whatever the LED forward voltage is listed at)) / (LED typical forward current). Simple really. For something more robust, you could even use a current-source circuit, but these can be a little tricky for a beginner.
Peroxide is EXTREMELY unstable. While a leak has some immediate effects, it leaves very little in the way of harmful byproducts. After a very short time (often HOURS), there will be nothing left but water. Of course, plenty of things will be oxidized in the process.
Since iodine catalytically breaks down peroxide, it is relatively harmless if it lands in the ocean. The halflife would be quite short.
As for reasons for using peroxide, liquids are denser than compressed gasses. It really is that simple.
That would require a fundamental improvement in battery technology. Lithium-Ion is very close to the theoretical peak for chemical storage cells, and even then, Li-Ion doesn't charge that quickly.
Most electrics use either Lead-Acid (really cheap), NiCd (cheap) or NiMH (good efficiency and cheap). Lithium is just too expensive, although it does have the potential of pushing electrics over that fine line that is performance.
Fuel cells (especially methanol-fueled ones) probably have the most potential for clean, high-performance, convenient cars at the moment. Compressed hydrogen is obvious, but poses an explosion hazard during a collision.
Now, for real science-fiction fare, there is talk about using stabilized metallic hydrogen (now that metallic hydrogen has been verified to exist) as a fuel source...
Actually, I understand that there is a substantial amount of voltage... The current isn't much, but a decently long wire can produce a few watts. There can be enough power generated by a short wire to power a digital clock.
Free energy is a very real thing, although you would require a VERY long wire to get more than 50W or so.
Brass won't support its own weight, the wire would snap... Nanotube is possible, though.
I would almost expect that the deionization of the part of the ionosphere being drained would limit the conduction, and prevent this from being all that useful as a weapon.
The ionosphere contains a TREMENDOUS amount of power... Our use probably would not substantially effect it.
On the flip side, even miniature holes in the ionosphere could stand to spew all sorts of hard radiation on the surface, so you are essentially correct, even slight depletion would be bad.
Actually, as far as I understand its mission, the High Energy Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) is designed to play with the ionosphere in similar ways. Despite the many pseudo-scientific, fantastic and fraudulent claims of what HAARP really does, it is currently active and is the biggest ionospheric research station on the planet. For those not familiar with its design, it is a set of vertically directed, monodirectional microwave antennas set up in high-power pulse configuration. It is a tremendously powerful transmitter, and has been heard by ham's all over the world. There have been concerns (although they are not entirely realistic) that it could ionize a pathway to the ionosphere and cause an extremely powerful electric discharge.
I admit this is the first time I have ever heard the suggestion of ionospheric power before, although the "free energy" people are quick to point out that a long vertical wire at any altitude will produce a small amount of power (essentially by acting as an antenna to all the RF radiation, natural and manmade).
These devices have cameras so that the pharmacist can do the same thing. This is designed more for large pharmacies that employ many pharamcists than the smaller ones. There is still a need for at least one human pharmacist.
Honestly, this is not the most impressive form of automation I've heard of, it was bound to happen and sounds pretty obvious to me. Warehouse management tasks (and that includes microwarehouses like in pharmacies) can be done quickly and accurately by machines, in a properly designed system.
This is news?
Re:Robots and mistakes
on
Robot Pharmacists
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Barcode reading errors are extremely rare with a proper lase reader. The only way the robot would mismatch barcodes is if the bottles were labelled incorrectly, and that would be a human error. They still put cameras to catch such glitches though, so the pharmacist should still notice.
As for the question of resources, if these machines cost a half million dollars each, I'm willing to bet that they are nearly as good as what the drug manufacturers use.
I would expect, although I'm not sure, that a half-million dollar piece of medical equipment would be jam packed with batteries in case of a power failure. In the unlikely occurance of a jam, or a natural disaster taking down most of the electronics (this sounds rather like a straw-man argument to me), there has been a relatively good track record with extra staff. The recent network packet storm in a major hospital comes to mind, everyone was busy but service was not particularly degraded, even with the network completely out of commission.
Besides this, for a regular pharmacy, delays of a day or two to get a prescription filled are not unusual in some cases. Only in emergency cases is this a mission-critical system, and emergency drugs are usually available in places other than the main dispensory.
Towards the end it says they use a digital camera to take pictures of the filled bottles so the pharmacist can check that it's the right kind of medication.
And humans make plenty of mistakes. No human is going to get 9 9's, but designed to medical tolerance, these machines might. The phone company manages, after all.
You could always instrument a person so you can keep a reading of all their blood levels at all times, that would provide a rough idea. With advances in MEMS and implant technology, this might even be possible now.
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This idea has been used for decades. The C64 had ramdrives of up to 8MBs available that did just this, even though the base system could not have more than 64K of system RAM onboard.
The basic principle is more or less the same for both technologies, but since FRAM is made on an IC, it doesn't need millions of hand-wirings to put together. Fast, small, cheap, mass-producable core memory. I like it.
That said, I'm looking at a DVD-R drive. While the rewritable DVD's don't work everywhere, the non-rewritables work almost anywhere, and DVD-R discs can be as cheap as $0.70 each (DVD+R's are several times more expensive). This falls well below the $1/Gig for HDD storage, and they are very conveniently removable.
I have 256MB of main system RAM, which while not huge, should give plenty of area for disk cache. The difference that I have seen is that Linux will agressively swap out unused applications to make room for the disk buffer (while windows will generally only swap out things to make room for more applications, at least as of Win98). As a result, my HDD hardly ever moves when I am in linux.
I recently upgraded the size and downgraded the speed of my HDD (the old one died and this was cheap). I don't notice any real performance difference, although the extra 20GB came in handy.
It makes one wonder how, in a society as apparently modern as ours, parents have given up on the act of parenting.
That's right... The government doesn't care.
(And anyone who claims that emotional abuse or neglecting to show affection does not have a serious effect on a child is deluding themself).
I purchased an old Hitachi/Intergraph 20" monitor a couple years ago. It must weigh 150lbs. The PLL gets a little cranky sometimes if you jump between the wrong two modes, and some modes will form a faint red vertical stripe.. but other than that it is an excellent display.
It can't do more than 1000 lines reasonably, but I got 2000x1000 out of it (yes that is a distorted aspect, it's quite amusing to use at that resolution). Of course, at this resolution the "standard vga" video cable starts showing its true colors (oooh, ripple on lines of sharp contrast!), and one of those seperate-channel RGB cables would help a lot...
Stopping the access to the technology would require such things as destroying the internet and other worldwide mass-communications. Essentially, the technology won't go away. Police states are never 100% effective, which means that as soon as a technology like, say, bioweapons or antimatter ends up in the hands of average people, if someone has a motivation to use it, they will.
The only way to stop this threat is to stop the motivation. Secure people generally do not commit crimes. If you have nothing to fear (poverty, hate crimes, etc) then you will be less likely to do these things. As the ability of individuals to secure weapons of mass destruction increases, we have to start thinking about making our society more content.
The nice thing about it is that, unlike Ferric Chloride, there are ways of reclaiming acid/peroxide systems. I used hydrochloric/peroxide, since it was the cheapest and safest (concentrated HCl hardly itches if you spill it on yourself, the 25% peroxide is a lot worse). In this system, if you dumped in some standard Lye (sodium hydroxide), the copper all precipitates out as a brown sludge (copper hydroxide), and you're just left with a mixture of salt water and peroxide, which decomposes to salt water when left open. The copper hydroxide isn't as hard to deal with as it sounds. If you're running a copper sulphate/sulphuric acid plating system, you can just dump it into the plating system.
The most serious problem comes in from the really high-end etching systems. Photoresist is fine with ferric chloride, but when you start using something like an acid-peroxide etchant, it will actually eat many "resist" inks. The resist pens become TOTALLY useless, for example.
And so this is where the old technique of serigraphy comes in. This is the "screen-printing" that makes the name Printed Circuit Boards. The resist ink used on the actual board is usually just some form of lacquer, which holds up well to even the harshest etchants. A stencil is prepared on a screen, usually through a photographic process. Since the screen resist doesn't have to deal with the same harsh chemicals, it is generally much more environmentally conscious and cheaper than PC-Board photoresist.
I actually set up to do this method myself, in a semi-hobby context. I had some previous experience with serigraphy, and the acid/peroxide system was cheaper, far more effective, and much easier to dispose of than the ferric chloride. On the flip-side, it will eat virtually anything metallic and smells aweful (it isn't much of a health hazard except in the sulphuric/peroxide system, but should be ventilated nonetheless), so it's not for the faint of heart.
Thankfully, the pin pitch is often a little bit easier to deal with, so it's not QUITE as difficult for making boards.... As long as you're willing to make multilayer boards.
The problem is SOLDERING the damn things! The balls are UNDER the package, facing the board, with no accessible places to work with. Some sort of area heating is required to solder them at all (normal hobby methods include hot-air heat guns and little temperature-controlled ovens).
Worse still, you have to hope that you have the chip aligned correctly. This is normally done via xray, but most of us don't have access to xray machines (although there was that "radio tube xray machine" thing around...).
As electronics get more and more integrated, they become less and less friendly to amateurs.
As for drilling the PCB holes, I found that a good set of second-hand carbide bits, a dremel drill press, and a thin center punch could provide nearly perfect results. You *MUST* center-punch with the carbide bits, though, or they might start to "walk" across the board, which due to their brittleness could get quite expensive. Presumably the engraving machine can cut a nice pit in the surface to serve the same function, even though they often lack the force to actually drill the hole.
Presumably, identity is standard uncompressed text. The others indicate its willingness to accept gzipped files from the webserver.
Since HTML is text, you have a GUARANTEE of 1/8th space savings. Since HTML tends to use a lot of similar codes, the space savings are, in all likelihood, far greater. Since on dialup, the latency of compression is trivial in comparison to the limitations of bandwidth, this may help substantially.
Web-server compression makes sense to me.
Then again, there are PPP extensions for compression now too. These would have a similar benefit.
Combined with both an off-site connection proxy and an on-site data proxy (this is what their webpage suggests they base their technology on), you get the enhancement they claim, more or less (not for compressed files or raw data transfer though).
When working with a +-5V logic signal like the parport, just put some 1K input resistors on some 2N2222 or BC547's, and hook the LED with a 220 ohm resistor into the collector path.
If the LED's require more current (like a blue LED does) recalculate the 220 ohm by using ohms law of (5V - 0.7V [transistor drop] - (whatever the LED forward voltage is listed at)) / (LED typical forward current). Simple really. For something more robust, you could even use a current-source circuit, but these can be a little tricky for a beginner.
Since iodine catalytically breaks down peroxide, it is relatively harmless if it lands in the ocean. The halflife would be quite short.
As for reasons for using peroxide, liquids are denser than compressed gasses. It really is that simple.
That said, anyone who decides to try is taking their life into their own hands.
Most electrics use either Lead-Acid (really cheap), NiCd (cheap) or NiMH (good efficiency and cheap). Lithium is just too expensive, although it does have the potential of pushing electrics over that fine line that is performance.
Fuel cells (especially methanol-fueled ones) probably have the most potential for clean, high-performance, convenient cars at the moment. Compressed hydrogen is obvious, but poses an explosion hazard during a collision.
Now, for real science-fiction fare, there is talk about using stabilized metallic hydrogen (now that metallic hydrogen has been verified to exist) as a fuel source...
Free energy is a very real thing, although you would require a VERY long wire to get more than 50W or so.
I would almost expect that the deionization of the part of the ionosphere being drained would limit the conduction, and prevent this from being all that useful as a weapon.
On the flip side, even miniature holes in the ionosphere could stand to spew all sorts of hard radiation on the surface, so you are essentially correct, even slight depletion would be bad.
Actually, as far as I understand its mission, the High Energy Active Auroral Research Project (HAARP) is designed to play with the ionosphere in similar ways. Despite the many pseudo-scientific, fantastic and fraudulent claims of what HAARP really does, it is currently active and is the biggest ionospheric research station on the planet. For those not familiar with its design, it is a set of vertically directed, monodirectional microwave antennas set up in high-power pulse configuration. It is a tremendously powerful transmitter, and has been heard by ham's all over the world. There have been concerns (although they are not entirely realistic) that it could ionize a pathway to the ionosphere and cause an extremely powerful electric discharge.
I admit this is the first time I have ever heard the suggestion of ionospheric power before, although the "free energy" people are quick to point out that a long vertical wire at any altitude will produce a small amount of power (essentially by acting as an antenna to all the RF radiation, natural and manmade).
These devices have cameras so that the pharmacist can do the same thing. This is designed more for large pharmacies that employ many pharamcists than the smaller ones. There is still a need for at least one human pharmacist.
Honestly, this is not the most impressive form of automation I've heard of, it was bound to happen and sounds pretty obvious to me. Warehouse management tasks (and that includes microwarehouses like in pharmacies) can be done quickly and accurately by machines, in a properly designed system.
This is news?
As for the question of resources, if these machines cost a half million dollars each, I'm willing to bet that they are nearly as good as what the drug manufacturers use.
I would expect, although I'm not sure, that a half-million dollar piece of medical equipment would be jam packed with batteries in case of a power failure. In the unlikely occurance of a jam, or a natural disaster taking down most of the electronics (this sounds rather like a straw-man argument to me), there has been a relatively good track record with extra staff. The recent network packet storm in a major hospital comes to mind, everyone was busy but service was not particularly degraded, even with the network completely out of commission.
Besides this, for a regular pharmacy, delays of a day or two to get a prescription filled are not unusual in some cases. Only in emergency cases is this a mission-critical system, and emergency drugs are usually available in places other than the main dispensory.
Towards the end it says they use a digital camera to take pictures of the filled bottles so the pharmacist can check that it's the right kind of medication.
And humans make plenty of mistakes. No human is going to get 9 9's, but designed to medical tolerance, these machines might. The phone company manages, after all.
You could always instrument a person so you can keep a reading of all their blood levels at all times, that would provide a rough idea. With advances in MEMS and implant technology, this might even be possible now.