I have a great follow-on idea: How about writing a perfect OS, so patches are never needed?
Seriously, even your cellphone is complex enough to need bugfixes via firmware updates. Better testing would be nice, but until then, I'd prefer fixable bugs over unfixable ones.
However, nothing sucks worse than having a bug that you know can be fixed, and a manufacturer who's abandoned the product line. That's the argument for open firmware, where the users can support their own devices long after the commercial incentive to do so has dried up.
People who put a big "Upgradable firmware to support future features!" on the box, then fail to add support for *anything* after the product hits shelves, should be the subject of vicious consumer protection lawsuits. (IOMega HipZip and your "phantom vorbis firmware", I'm looking at you!)
3.3 was great for floppy-based systems. They added support for hard drive partitions over 32 meg, in 4.0 I believe. 4.01 was largely forgotten, and 5.x added good memory tools, himem and emm386. The 6.x series was mostly about doublespace/drivespace, which was Microsoft's take on Stacker.
Somewhere in there, I think with 5.0, the interactive Qbasic editor, also known as Help, also known as Edit, came on the scene. It brought with it mouse-awareness, and funny things like clickable links in the helpfile.
Anyway, as far as video goes, I recall seeing a parallel-portframe grabber that worked fine under DOS on a 286. Actually you didn't want to use it on a multitasking OS because of interrupt latency! Various versions exist, with the Dirt-Cheap Frame Grabber being the simplest.
The review also blames the single-chip FPGA for the lack of ECC RAM support, and other things. Hello? If there's demand, I'm sure those things can be added in the future without changes to the board, unless that pesky ECC notch key in the slot prevents the module from fitting...
Personally, I'm baffled as to why this thing isn't shaped like a drive. If everything that needed power took up a PCI slot, we'd run out of slots pretty quickly. Let it eat power from a drive connector!
We use one over at the Toughbook wiki to keep track of details of various machines.
I've been looking for a good table manipulation tool. Wiki tables like the HardwareComparison quickly grow out of control. A way to sort and filter records, show and hide columns, an define alternate views for tabular data, would be great.
I picture sort of a webmail-like interface. Perhaps the data shouldn't live in the wiki page at all, but in a real database back-end with the appropriate interface(s) for adding and editing records.
In some projects I work on, the bosses email a "tracker" spreadsheet back and forth, where each site has a row, and each stage or activity has a column. They sort and filter the spreadsheets to get a picture of progress. One challenge is getting the data in, since it comes from dozens of different field techs, shippers, other companies, and arbitrary other events. Another challenge is making sure everyone has the most updated version, since emailing a file around is effectively file-level locking, so no more than one person can be working at once.
A central store like a database, with web interfaces that any Excel weenie could use, would alleviate much of the trouble. A hybrid of spreadsheet functions, database query tools, and wiki-like markup, could be really powerful. Anyone know if such a thing might exist, or if such projects might be in the works?
USB adapters have the virtue of not suffering signal loss from cable length. Hawking makes a nice one with a 6dBi directional panel on it. Glue a suction cup to the adapter, stick it in the window for RF-transparent positioning, and snake the USB cable back to wherever the laptop sits.
That was my point exactly: NTP is most useful within a site, on a LAN. But a radio system, be it Navstar or Galileo GPS signals, or WWVB, or CDMA, is a better way to bring the timebase into the site itself. A WAN link isn't deterministic enough. (I'll admit to knowing nothing about QoS. Could it help?)
GSM and other systems that use TDMA as a radio access method can tolerate more timing trouble than CDMA. As far as I know, a TDMA site doesn't need a good master clock, since timing slips between sites are unimportant. So, the signal from a GSM site isn't necessarily any more accurate than the limits of the radio band allocation.;) In practice, they do have GPS-disciplined clocks, but they're not critical to the operation of the network.
CDMA, however, falls apart in some very ugly ways if the sites lose sync. So they go to great pains to ensure ultra-stable and reliable timing at each site. Installers program the GPS receiver to compensate for the timing skew in the antenna cable, for instance. (Ever wanted to know the velocity factor for a dozen different types of coax?) The handsets have to play the sync game too, so it's fairly easy to use an existing chipset to pluck microsecond-accurate timing out of the air.
Of course, the CDMA cellular network derives its timing directly from a GPS-stabilized clock, and local clock standards that reference a CDMA receiver are available. These work in almost any building short of a full faraday cage. (And some of them can hook directly to a network and serve NTP!)
Also, the 1pps output of a $75 GPS unit is considerably more accurate than NTP if your network is subject to *any* sort of variable delay, which of course packet-based networks are.
Not that NTP isn't useful, just don't expect submillisecond accuracy out of it.
Like any other internet legislation, this is only enforceable within the US. A good chunk of the annoyance comes from overseas. I'd guess most of those sexbots come from zombies, otherwise they'd be easy to ban. And zombies can be anywhere.
(I'd love to see a "percentage of machines vulnerable to old 'sploits, by country" ranking.)
If the machine can somehow behave in a way that doesn't piss people off, why not put it in that mode all the time?
On the other hand, if there's a way to telepath "Skip the wizards and guides, just give me all the options" into the machine, I'll take that. Let it smell newbies coming and dumb the interface down for them.
C'mon, let me just suck in the whole band from 88-108MHz and separate the stations in software. Then I'd only need one "tuner" for a whole fleet of clients, and everybody could pick their own program.
And monitoring every station's RDS feed simultaneously would be a fun trick.
The story behind Quarantine was that a chemical added to a city's water supply to make people docile had backfired due to bacteria already present in the reservoir. The city was now full of aggressive psychopaths, and was sealed off in order to "burn itself out".
You play a taxi driver in the quarantined city, splitting your time between carrying fare-paying passengers, running over pedestrians, launching missiles, and carving up other vehicles with the giant sawblade on your front bumper.
The logo was a stylized biohazard logo, with an inner circle to resemble a steering wheel, and a little asymmetric tail for the letter "Q". Find the logo at 3dgamers.
I'm waiting for the wireless version.
on
The USB Wristband
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriously, the memory wristwatches are a neat idea, but tethering your wrist to the side of the computer while you move data is not. And removing the watch every time sounds like it would suck.
With WirelessUSB coming down the pike, and ultrawideband radio boasting some impressive energy efficiency at short range, how long until we see this? For that matter, a Bluetooth version should be possible now, but at 1mbps raw data rate, moving anything but text files would be painfully slow. Hopefully WUSB will make it practical.
Amen! The 10x-zoom Olympus C2100UZ spoiled me on image stabilizers. I'm addicted to long zoom, and anything more than 3x is simply useless without stabilization. After the Oly's precariously placed mode knob liberated itself from the body, I got a Canon S1 IS, which lacked macro mode but served me well until the S2 came out.
Allow me to summarize my experience with the three models I know well:
The Olympus C2100UZ's CCD was cleaner, perhaps because it only boasted 2.1MP, each sensor element was larger and noise might've been less conspicuous? The huge lens's wide aperture meant short exposures in almost any light, which combined with the stabilizer to make tripods totally silly for anything but astrophotography. The images always had smooth tone, sharp edges, good contrast, and none of the grainy mess I've come to expect from the Canons. With the exception of the mode wheel, the Olympus body was solid, handsome, and simple, with thoughtful button placement and good balance. The fixed lens offers a standard 49mm thread for filters. The curious use of a second topside status LCD for certain settings was obviously just a film company showing some trepidation about the digital world. Software-wise, the interface was utilitarian and easy enough, but sluggish and lacking in creature comforts. Olympus' choice of the dead-end SmartMedia format was a giant misstep, followed by their choice of the dead-end xD format in more recent cameras.
The Canon PowerShot S1 IS is a totally different animal. With a motorized telescoping lens, it's downright petite compared to the Olympus's giant pop-can. How they wedged a stabilizer and a 10x zoom into that mechanism is anyone's guess. The aperture's a little narrower though, so the S1 frequently wants exposure times of 1/20 or 1/13 in typical room lighting, relying on the stabilizer for what should be easy shots. It's a very capable stabilizer though, and I can easily do 1/8 handheld as long as the subject's not moving. Unfortunately, there's a lot of grain and noise in the image even at these shutter speeds. Packing 3.2 MP into a small sensor makes it pretty cruddy, I guess. The interface is a dream to use, very responsive, with all the options you'd expect and very little clutter. The plastic body is less satisfying to hold, and doesn't fit the hand as well as I'd like, and some button placement is just baffling. With a CF slot that'll accomodate type-II cards and microdrives, Canon's doing some things right. The lens takes a moment to extend after power-on, and it doesn't present a standard thread for adding filters. An optional hood gives you such a thread, but negates the camera's compactness.
For the S2, Canon added Macro mode, which had been absent from the S1, and boosted the 10x optical zoom to 12x. There's actually a "supermacro" mode too, in which the camera will happily focus on a fingerprint on the lens, if you leave one for it to find. Bumping the sensor to 5 MP didn't noticeably increase the noise, but the files tend to eat storage, so get a big card. The memory card format changed from CF to SD, not my favorite but at least it's still mainstream. Recording movies really tests the limits of the card, but to find this sort of movie capability you're generally looking at DV tape, not solid-state cards. Initially I thought the addition of stereo microphones was a gimmick, but while watching some movies I recorded at the airshow, I reconsidered! One could bootleg concerts with this camera. The S2's interface deviates little from the S1, but adds voice-recorder mode, so you don't need to take a picture just to enable the mic. Startup lens-extend time has been reduced, and I think it focuses a little faster too. Overall, I've been extremely happy with the S2.
To reiterate the parent poster's plea: Go to a store and play with some stabilized cameras! With no zoom, they make very little difference, but run that sucker out to 10x and watch your shaky, bouncy, trembling hands suddenly get very steady at the push of a button. I don't even carry a tripod in the car anymore, it's simply a waste of space.
Next thing you know, they'll say we're addicted to newfangled things like microwaves (nevermind that they're more efficient than stoves), pasteurized milk (reduces delivery costs by keeping longer), and imported vegetables available year-round (improves nutrition)!
Yeah, that internet access, it's just a fad like the automobile. Nobody ever does anything useful with it, so clearly any dependence should be trivialized with the word "addiction".
Or just bring glasses with tinted lenses to separate the colors for you. Remember the old game "password"? I've been thinking about doing business cards like that...
There were these two freaks, one grad student and one freshman, who ended up rooming together at the entrance to my lair. I swear one of them was just like that! Big attitude, never took anything seriously, he spent a lot of time trying to convince women that he had a brain and a penis. The other one was a nice kid, kinda dorky but then who am I to talk? He ends up hooking up with this hyper girl down the hall, and the two of them.. well, let's say I had to turn my server fans up all the way to cover up the noise. All week!
Combining patents is a very good point. Personally I've had the opposite experience, Maxtor failures and Seagate quality, but that just shows you the wonders of insignificant sample sizes.
Let's hope the merged company can produce even better products, not by laying people off, but by overcoming intellectual property barriers that previously existed between the two companies.
Not all humans hear the same range! I meant to reference the original article in my earlier post, but the link was slow in coming. As is commonly known in audiologist circles, we lose our sensitivity to high pitches as we age. What's ultrasonic to one human might be annoying as hell to another. The 15.625kHz whine of a TV set drives me nuts, but most folks over 30 can't hear it.
The usual 44100Hz sampling rate of most soundcards and recording devices limits them to a 22050Hz frequency. (Nyquist's limit.) Considering that most children can hear up to about 20KHz, and we're becoming music consumers at a younger and younger age, that doesn't leave much headroom for such a noise. Could it be done? Probably. Would I hear the difference? Likely.
I've been suggesting this ever since learning about the encoded patterns that make dollar bills uncopyable.
I haven't had time to play with it yet, but I'd laugh pretty hard if people couldn't print hardcopy pictures of me wearing a certain shirt. (Oh man, my next drivers' license photo would be a fiasco. "I don't know *why* the printer spits out a purple page!")
And if they're reasonably large, they probably have options with local food stores to buy things at quantity discount. Why would you buy a few cans of food at the per-can price, when they could combine cash donations and get it at the per-pallet price? Furthermore, cash is easily converted into whatever type of food they need at the moment. Giving them specific types means they have to store them up until they have enough of whatever to make a batch of something.
Of course, if you work for a food producer of some sort, it would be huge if you could help arrange a deal with your local food bank.
For the longest time, I thought the Red Cross was, too. Big cross, you know?
It was only the recent publicity about the new "Red Crystal" logo that clued me in. Drives me nuts that people said the cross logo was no big deal and "had no religious connotation". Bullshit! It's a fairly recognizable religious symbol!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a great follow-on idea: How about writing a perfect OS, so patches are never needed?
Seriously, even your cellphone is complex enough to need bugfixes via firmware updates. Better testing would be nice, but until then, I'd prefer fixable bugs over unfixable ones.
However, nothing sucks worse than having a bug that you know can be fixed, and a manufacturer who's abandoned the product line. That's the argument for open firmware, where the users can support their own devices long after the commercial incentive to do so has dried up.
People who put a big "Upgradable firmware to support future features!" on the box, then fail to add support for *anything* after the product hits shelves, should be the subject of vicious consumer protection lawsuits. (IOMega HipZip and your "phantom vorbis firmware", I'm looking at you!)
3.3 was great for floppy-based systems. They added support for hard drive partitions over 32 meg, in 4.0 I believe. 4.01 was largely forgotten, and 5.x added good memory tools, himem and emm386. The 6.x series was mostly about doublespace/drivespace, which was Microsoft's take on Stacker.
Somewhere in there, I think with 5.0, the interactive Qbasic editor, also known as Help, also known as Edit, came on the scene. It brought with it mouse-awareness, and funny things like clickable links in the helpfile.
Anyway, as far as video goes, I recall seeing a parallel-port frame grabber that worked fine under DOS on a 286. Actually you didn't want to use it on a multitasking OS because of interrupt latency! Various versions exist, with the Dirt-Cheap Frame Grabber being the simplest.
The review also blames the single-chip FPGA for the lack of ECC RAM support, and other things. Hello? If there's demand, I'm sure those things can be added in the future without changes to the board, unless that pesky ECC notch key in the slot prevents the module from fitting...
Personally, I'm baffled as to why this thing isn't shaped like a drive. If everything that needed power took up a PCI slot, we'd run out of slots pretty quickly. Let it eat power from a drive connector!
We use one over at the Toughbook wiki to keep track of details of various machines.
I've been looking for a good table manipulation tool. Wiki tables like the HardwareComparison quickly grow out of control. A way to sort and filter records, show and hide columns, an define alternate views for tabular data, would be great.
I picture sort of a webmail-like interface. Perhaps the data shouldn't live in the wiki page at all, but in a real database back-end with the appropriate interface(s) for adding and editing records.
In some projects I work on, the bosses email a "tracker" spreadsheet back and forth, where each site has a row, and each stage or activity has a column. They sort and filter the spreadsheets to get a picture of progress. One challenge is getting the data in, since it comes from dozens of different field techs, shippers, other companies, and arbitrary other events. Another challenge is making sure everyone has the most updated version, since emailing a file around is effectively file-level locking, so no more than one person can be working at once.
A central store like a database, with web interfaces that any Excel weenie could use, would alleviate much of the trouble. A hybrid of spreadsheet functions, database query tools, and wiki-like markup, could be really powerful. Anyone know if such a thing might exist, or if such projects might be in the works?
It's very hard to search for "the Search", so if you could provide a link, that would be very helpful.
I agree with your point though, and this is where the pledge to "do no evil" really meets the road. We'll see!
USB adapters have the virtue of not suffering signal loss from cable length. Hawking makes a nice one with a 6dBi directional panel on it. Glue a suction cup to the adapter, stick it in the window for RF-transparent positioning, and snake the USB cable back to wherever the laptop sits.
I thought the "Beagle search" had already been completed.
:)
Really, how much more time does this issue need?
That was my point exactly: NTP is most useful within a site, on a LAN. But a radio system, be it Navstar or Galileo GPS signals, or WWVB, or CDMA, is a better way to bring the timebase into the site itself. A WAN link isn't deterministic enough. (I'll admit to knowing nothing about QoS. Could it help?)
;) In practice, they do have GPS-disciplined clocks, but they're not critical to the operation of the network.
GSM and other systems that use TDMA as a radio access method can tolerate more timing trouble than CDMA. As far as I know, a TDMA site doesn't need a good master clock, since timing slips between sites are unimportant. So, the signal from a GSM site isn't necessarily any more accurate than the limits of the radio band allocation.
CDMA, however, falls apart in some very ugly ways if the sites lose sync. So they go to great pains to ensure ultra-stable and reliable timing at each site. Installers program the GPS receiver to compensate for the timing skew in the antenna cable, for instance. (Ever wanted to know the velocity factor for a dozen different types of coax?) The handsets have to play the sync game too, so it's fairly easy to use an existing chipset to pluck microsecond-accurate timing out of the air.
Of course, the CDMA cellular network derives its timing directly from a GPS-stabilized clock, and local clock standards that reference a CDMA receiver are available. These work in almost any building short of a full faraday cage. (And some of them can hook directly to a network and serve NTP!)
Also, the 1pps output of a $75 GPS unit is considerably more accurate than NTP if your network is subject to *any* sort of variable delay, which of course packet-based networks are.
Not that NTP isn't useful, just don't expect submillisecond accuracy out of it.
Like any other internet legislation, this is only enforceable within the US. A good chunk of the annoyance comes from overseas. I'd guess most of those sexbots come from zombies, otherwise they'd be easy to ban. And zombies can be anywhere.
(I'd love to see a "percentage of machines vulnerable to old 'sploits, by country" ranking.)
If the machine can somehow behave in a way that doesn't piss people off, why not put it in that mode all the time?
On the other hand, if there's a way to telepath "Skip the wizards and guides, just give me all the options" into the machine, I'll take that. Let it smell newbies coming and dumb the interface down for them.
On the other hand, if you thought video tombstones were cool, just wait 'til you see what the Optical Society cooks up for this guy's grave!
C'mon, let me just suck in the whole band from 88-108MHz and separate the stations in software. Then I'd only need one "tuner" for a whole fleet of clients, and everybody could pick their own program.
And monitoring every station's RDS feed simultaneously would be a fun trick.
The story behind Quarantine was that a chemical added to a city's water supply to make people docile had backfired due to bacteria already present in the reservoir. The city was now full of aggressive psychopaths, and was sealed off in order to "burn itself out".
You play a taxi driver in the quarantined city, splitting your time between carrying fare-paying passengers, running over pedestrians, launching missiles, and carving up other vehicles with the giant sawblade on your front bumper.
The logo was a stylized biohazard logo, with an inner circle to resemble a steering wheel, and a little asymmetric tail for the letter "Q". Find the logo at 3dgamers.
Seriously, the memory wristwatches are a neat idea, but tethering your wrist to the side of the computer while you move data is not. And removing the watch every time sounds like it would suck.
:)
With WirelessUSB coming down the pike, and ultrawideband radio boasting some impressive energy efficiency at short range, how long until we see this? For that matter, a Bluetooth version should be possible now, but at 1mbps raw data rate, moving anything but text files would be painfully slow. Hopefully WUSB will make it practical.
And then we get to worry about security again.
Amen! The 10x-zoom Olympus C2100UZ spoiled me on image stabilizers. I'm addicted to long zoom, and anything more than 3x is simply useless without stabilization. After the Oly's precariously placed mode knob liberated itself from the body, I got a Canon S1 IS, which lacked macro mode but served me well until the S2 came out.
Allow me to summarize my experience with the three models I know well:
The Olympus C2100UZ's CCD was cleaner, perhaps because it only boasted 2.1MP, each sensor element was larger and noise might've been less conspicuous? The huge lens's wide aperture meant short exposures in almost any light, which combined with the stabilizer to make tripods totally silly for anything but astrophotography. The images always had smooth tone, sharp edges, good contrast, and none of the grainy mess I've come to expect from the Canons. With the exception of the mode wheel, the Olympus body was solid, handsome, and simple, with thoughtful button placement and good balance. The fixed lens offers a standard 49mm thread for filters. The curious use of a second topside status LCD for certain settings was obviously just a film company showing some trepidation about the digital world. Software-wise, the interface was utilitarian and easy enough, but sluggish and lacking in creature comforts. Olympus' choice of the dead-end SmartMedia format was a giant misstep, followed by their choice of the dead-end xD format in more recent cameras.
The Canon PowerShot S1 IS is a totally different animal. With a motorized telescoping lens, it's downright petite compared to the Olympus's giant pop-can. How they wedged a stabilizer and a 10x zoom into that mechanism is anyone's guess. The aperture's a little narrower though, so the S1 frequently wants exposure times of 1/20 or 1/13 in typical room lighting, relying on the stabilizer for what should be easy shots. It's a very capable stabilizer though, and I can easily do 1/8 handheld as long as the subject's not moving. Unfortunately, there's a lot of grain and noise in the image even at these shutter speeds. Packing 3.2 MP into a small sensor makes it pretty cruddy, I guess. The interface is a dream to use, very responsive, with all the options you'd expect and very little clutter. The plastic body is less satisfying to hold, and doesn't fit the hand as well as I'd like, and some button placement is just baffling. With a CF slot that'll accomodate type-II cards and microdrives, Canon's doing some things right. The lens takes a moment to extend after power-on, and it doesn't present a standard thread for adding filters. An optional hood gives you such a thread, but negates the camera's compactness.
For the S2, Canon added Macro mode, which had been absent from the S1, and boosted the 10x optical zoom to 12x. There's actually a "supermacro" mode too, in which the camera will happily focus on a fingerprint on the lens, if you leave one for it to find. Bumping the sensor to 5 MP didn't noticeably increase the noise, but the files tend to eat storage, so get a big card. The memory card format changed from CF to SD, not my favorite but at least it's still mainstream. Recording movies really tests the limits of the card, but to find this sort of movie capability you're generally looking at DV tape, not solid-state cards. Initially I thought the addition of stereo microphones was a gimmick, but while watching some movies I recorded at the airshow, I reconsidered! One could bootleg concerts with this camera. The S2's interface deviates little from the S1, but adds voice-recorder mode, so you don't need to take a picture just to enable the mic. Startup lens-extend time has been reduced, and I think it focuses a little faster too. Overall, I've been extremely happy with the S2.
To reiterate the parent poster's plea: Go to a store and play with some stabilized cameras! With no zoom, they make very little difference, but run that sucker out to 10x and watch your shaky, bouncy, trembling hands suddenly get very steady at the push of a button. I don't even carry a tripod in the car anymore, it's simply a waste of space.
Heh. Glad I searched the thread before posting!
Next thing you know, they'll say we're addicted to newfangled things like microwaves (nevermind that they're more efficient than stoves), pasteurized milk (reduces delivery costs by keeping longer), and imported vegetables available year-round (improves nutrition)!
Yeah, that internet access, it's just a fad like the automobile. Nobody ever does anything useful with it, so clearly any dependence should be trivialized with the word "addiction".
Or just bring glasses with tinted lenses to separate the colors for you. Remember the old game "password"? I've been thinking about doing business cards like that...
There were these two freaks, one grad student and one freshman, who ended up rooming together at the entrance to my lair. I swear one of them was just like that! Big attitude, never took anything seriously, he spent a lot of time trying to convince women that he had a brain and a penis. The other one was a nice kid, kinda dorky but then who am I to talk? He ends up hooking up with this hyper girl down the hall, and the two of them.. well, let's say I had to turn my server fans up all the way to cover up the noise. All week!
Combining patents is a very good point. Personally I've had the opposite experience, Maxtor failures and Seagate quality, but that just shows you the wonders of insignificant sample sizes.
Let's hope the merged company can produce even better products, not by laying people off, but by overcoming intellectual property barriers that previously existed between the two companies.
Not all humans hear the same range! I meant to reference the original article in my earlier post, but the link was slow in coming. As is commonly known in audiologist circles, we lose our sensitivity to high pitches as we age. What's ultrasonic to one human might be annoying as hell to another. The 15.625kHz whine of a TV set drives me nuts, but most folks over 30 can't hear it.
The usual 44100Hz sampling rate of most soundcards and recording devices limits them to a 22050Hz frequency. (Nyquist's limit.) Considering that most children can hear up to about 20KHz, and we're becoming music consumers at a younger and younger age, that doesn't leave much headroom for such a noise. Could it be done? Probably. Would I hear the difference? Likely.
I've been suggesting this ever since learning about the encoded patterns that make dollar bills uncopyable.
I haven't had time to play with it yet, but I'd laugh pretty hard if people couldn't print hardcopy pictures of me wearing a certain shirt. (Oh man, my next drivers' license photo would be a fiasco. "I don't know *why* the printer spits out a purple page!")
And if they're reasonably large, they probably have options with local food stores to buy things at quantity discount. Why would you buy a few cans of food at the per-can price, when they could combine cash donations and get it at the per-pallet price? Furthermore, cash is easily converted into whatever type of food they need at the moment. Giving them specific types means they have to store them up until they have enough of whatever to make a batch of something.
Of course, if you work for a food producer of some sort, it would be huge if you could help arrange a deal with your local food bank.
For the longest time, I thought the Red Cross was, too. Big cross, you know?
It was only the recent publicity about the new "Red Crystal" logo that clued me in. Drives me nuts that people said the cross logo was no big deal and "had no religious connotation". Bullshit! It's a fairly recognizable religious symbol!