It's all about degrees of disaster. If there's a real disaster, I wouldn't give a rodent's behind about my electronics and I too would be happy with my emergency stash of food and water.
You think so now, but you need recovery plans as much as immediate survival materials and equipment. Getting back to normal life is the real goal after a disaster.
I've been involved in several disaster recovery efforts, including earthquakes, floods, fires, and tsunamis. Each of those events had their own challenges, but there were some clear and consistent ways you can prepare to improve the eventual outcome.
1. Don't be there.
Seriously, this is the best option if there's ANY warning at all, or even post-disaster if you're mobile. Have and share a plan with pre-established criteria for getting out. Know what you're going to pack, what you'll protect in place (eg, plastic wrapped tools etc), and where you're going to go well before any threat is on its way. Stick to the plan.
2. Communications.
In every scenario so far, the most robust means of communicating and getting help has been SMS.If you can keep your phone charged for the duration, your chances of getting help (initially from first responders, then from community and family) is vastly improved. SIM cards are surprisingly robust, but have more than one phone available (eg, an old handset in sealed in plastic). Most importantly, have a car charger or two for your phone. Even wrecked cars can top up a phone battery.
3. Social Networking.
Stay in touch with friends and neighbors. If you're absent minded or mostly antisocial, have a list/schedule of people (in robust storage, and preferably hardcopy) to touch base with every month or two.
4. Entertainment.
Don't underestimate the importance of this. Boredom and depression can be devastating, so plan on ways to keep yourselves informed and relatively cheerful.
5. Documents.
Surprisingly, this has mattered less than I expected as recovery efforts generally take document loss into account. Having said that, things like insurance records etc are worth having copies located in several places (eg, with family or left at work).
Disasters are inherently somewhat unpredictable, but human needs are not. You can make life a lot easier for yourself if you choose to.
I've just installed a 2.5 kW Solar system on my house in Western Australia, at a cost of just over $2500. Based on initial readings, output from the unit looks like being between 3,500 to 5,000 kWh/year. My electricity provider charges between 30 and 45c per kWh, and pays 8c per kWh for electricity fed back into the grid.
So my payback time for the initial investment is somwhere between 1 and three years if I consume mostly self-generated power. The panels and inverter I've installed have a 25 year warranty,
How does this not make sense?
And I'm not alone in this, Australia faces an unprecedented oversupply of energy, with no new energy generation needed for 10 years. Coal power stations are sutting down, and even new gas power stations are being mothballed as they are unable to compete.
Nobody knows for sure (except certain corporate lawyers) what these patents entail.
They do now. The Chinese Government released details of all 310 Microsoft patents used in Android licensing agreements last month. You can download the list here: http://images.mofcom.gov.cn/pe... (warning: docx)
That could be another reason why Samsung is now willing to contest the extortion. Very few of the patents are novel or non-obvious.
Which confirms what I thought about this market all along, that it was foolish developers chasing nickels in place of dollars.
And I'm fine with that, as long as the market remains a competitive Darwinian pool.
The nature of any rapidly expanding ecosystem is that there will be a multiplicity of variously capable denizens that'll be culled to the fittest survivors, particularly as resources become scarcer. Apple's app store is transitioning from that explosive expansion phase and is now hitting the resource ($) limits as iOS loses ground against their competitors. Other app stores will follow suit as they also reach saturation point, and that's - potentially - a good thing.
The only reason it could become a negative is if App store owner/managers promote products for their own reasons instead of letting competition cull the weakest.
Read the next paragraph. I've quoted it below for you.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now.
You had me at "3D Printed Titanium Jaw Implants". Awesome!
It's cool, but not really news.
I was doing some work in Royal Perth Hospital sometime around 2008, and saw a small, beautifully detailed metal skull on one of the managers' desks. I asked him about it and was told he'd taken an MRI of his own skull and had it printed quarter-sized in sintered titanium. It was the best paperweight I've ever seen.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now. There's even a few commercial madical 3d printing companies around AU (Anatomics is one).
It's great that SA is making jaws for people now though.
I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.
It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.
ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.
No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.
No. Just no. That's pure and slick as goose fat spin control. Businesses simply don't work that way.
That stuff didn't happen because Microsoft decided to spend the next decade and a half focused on embracing, extending and extinguishing or just f***ing killing and just f***ing burying their competitors instead of making good products.
With toxic corporate citizenship at their heart, they stacked standards committees instead of making a better Office product. When online security and malware became a problem, instead of improving and securing their colander-like OS they funded a feral and failing software company to attack a community-built competitor. When that failed, they wielded 235 patents as a FUD-bludgeon, and sold more to a 3rd party patent troll. When it became clear they couldn't compete in the mobile space, they used some questionable patents to extort money from manufacturers using a competing OS. Their customers suffered high costs and poor products because, whenever possible, they chose to litigate instead of innovate.
That's why they now have 14% market share and are laying off thousands of workers. As soon as there were viable alternatives, ex-Microsoft customers fled to them in droves.
It's a VB6 program running on a single PC, supposedly for security reasons. The system is highly manual and failure prone enough that they're probably too embarrassed to release the code.
The system was developed internally by the AEC in 2001, when an upgrade to Windows 2000 rendered an existing COBOL-based application the commission was using to tally-up union elections incompatible with its standard operating environment. It was re-written as a Microsoft Visual Basic application and runs on Microsoft SQL.
You could use windtraps to increase humidity and use the electricity to pump the resulting water to your sietch water stores. Maybe not necessary on earth now, but who knows...
I knew the shit would hit the fan. All those experts are either complete, utter fools - or they were outright lying to all of us!
They were lying.
Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.
Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.
I have a machine of a similar vintage running an age-old copy of RHEL. I keep it, but the chances of me firing it up are slim to none, because I can fire up VMWare Workstation with an older OS release.
I still have an Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation that I used for 3D/video editing back in the late '90s. It cost around $15,000 new, with dual PII 300MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM and dual 80GB 10,000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0. It's still set up to dual boot NT4 and Debian 2.2, and I occasionally fire it up (if only to to remind myself what it was like to hear the jet-engine whine as those those drives spool up to speed).
It still feels very responsive with that old OS/software combination, so an old version of Linux on a cheap SBC should perform well enough. It will need to be an x86 based box to run OP's software though, so the (ARM based) Raspberry PI is out. Some of the Vortex86 based kits could be worth trying, though I suspect they'd fall over on driver support. They can be had for less than $40, and can run contemporary Linux so worth trying just for the fun of it.
It's hard to say how well it would cope with drivers though
In the olden days, they'd round them all up, lock them in a barn and set it on fire.
Or harpoon them from ships and render their blubber for oil.
If the Europeans were sensible, they'd erect statues of Cap'n Ahab in every capital city, legalize chubby-hunting as a sustainable biofuel harvesting method, and watch with glee as a combination of terror fueled adrenaline and frantic waddling from danger shrunk the waistlines of all but the most irredeemable behemoths to non-disabling proportions. Better still, if manufacturers fitted the harpoons to cars, I have no doubt that the average Citroen, Peugeot, Fiat or small VW could be run for several weeks on the fruits of just one venture onto the streets of Brussels or any other large European city.
Citizens of the world, start petitions, start lobby groups. This needs to happen now, to save our environment and improve the scenery in our streets and supermarkets..
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about degrees of disaster. If there's a real disaster, I wouldn't give a rodent's behind about my electronics and I too would be happy with my emergency stash of food and water.
You think so now, but you need recovery plans as much as immediate survival materials and equipment. Getting back to normal life is the real goal after a disaster.
I've been involved in several disaster recovery efforts, including earthquakes, floods, fires, and tsunamis. Each of those events had their own challenges, but there were some clear and consistent ways you can prepare to improve the eventual outcome.
1. Don't be there.
Seriously, this is the best option if there's ANY warning at all, or even post-disaster if you're mobile. Have and share a plan with pre-established criteria for getting out. Know what you're going to pack, what you'll protect in place (eg, plastic wrapped tools etc), and where you're going to go well before any threat is on its way. Stick to the plan.
2. Communications.
In every scenario so far, the most robust means of communicating and getting help has been SMS.If you can keep your phone charged for the duration, your chances of getting help (initially from first responders, then from community and family) is vastly improved. SIM cards are surprisingly robust, but have more than one phone available (eg, an old handset in sealed in plastic). Most importantly, have a car charger or two for your phone. Even wrecked cars can top up a phone battery.
3. Social Networking.
Stay in touch with friends and neighbors. If you're absent minded or mostly antisocial, have a list/schedule of people (in robust storage, and preferably hardcopy) to touch base with every month or two.
4. Entertainment.
Don't underestimate the importance of this. Boredom and depression can be devastating, so plan on ways to keep yourselves informed and relatively cheerful.
5. Documents.
Surprisingly, this has mattered less than I expected as recovery efforts generally take document loss into account. Having said that, things like insurance records etc are worth having copies located in several places (eg, with family or left at work).
Disasters are inherently somewhat unpredictable, but human needs are not. You can make life a lot easier for yourself if you choose to.
I shouldn't have to point out that conspiracy theory forums have been largely right about US government surveillance and espionage activities..
I'm pretty sure casual computer users still need to pay tax.
Then use MyTax. That'll work for Android as well as Linux computers. E-Tax is a dinosaur.
https://www.ato.gov.au/Individ...
The scary thing about Linux
There's more than one Linux, and it's very easy to choose a stable distro that doesn't live on the bleeding edge.
Android is an OS for toys, it doesn't count.
Yes it does.
https://play.google.com/store/...
No, it was a tailored system using Renesolar panels installed by Westsun Solar.
PV doesn't make sense at any scale.
I've just installed a 2.5 kW Solar system on my house in Western Australia, at a cost of just over $2500. Based on initial readings, output from the unit looks like being between 3,500 to 5,000 kWh/year. My electricity provider charges between 30 and 45c per kWh, and pays 8c per kWh for electricity fed back into the grid.
So my payback time for the initial investment is somwhere between 1 and three years if I consume mostly self-generated power. The panels and inverter I've installed have a 25 year warranty,
How does this not make sense?
And I'm not alone in this, Australia faces an unprecedented oversupply of energy, with no new energy generation needed for 10 years. Coal power stations are sutting down, and even new gas power stations are being mothballed as they are unable to compete.
http://www.aemo.com.au/Reports...
Nobody knows for sure (except certain corporate lawyers) what these patents entail.
They do now. The Chinese Government released details of all 310 Microsoft patents used in Android licensing agreements last month. You can download the list here: http://images.mofcom.gov.cn/pe... (warning: docx)
That could be another reason why Samsung is now willing to contest the extortion. Very few of the patents are novel or non-obvious.
You mean it's just like the market outside the app stores then?
Which confirms what I thought about this market all along, that it was foolish developers chasing nickels in place of dollars.
And I'm fine with that, as long as the market remains a competitive Darwinian pool.
The nature of any rapidly expanding ecosystem is that there will be a multiplicity of variously capable denizens that'll be culled to the fittest survivors, particularly as resources become scarcer. Apple's app store is transitioning from that explosive expansion phase and is now hitting the resource ($) limits as iOS loses ground against their competitors. Other app stores will follow suit as they also reach saturation point, and that's - potentially - a good thing.
The only reason it could become a negative is if App store owner/managers promote products for their own reasons instead of letting competition cull the weakest.
nick-nack on some guy's desk == medical implant
Read the next paragraph. I've quoted it below for you.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now.
You had me at "3D Printed Titanium Jaw Implants". Awesome!
It's cool, but not really news.
I was doing some work in Royal Perth Hospital sometime around 2008, and saw a small, beautifully detailed metal skull on one of the managers' desks. I asked him about it and was told he'd taken an MRI of his own skull and had it printed quarter-sized in sintered titanium. It was the best paperweight I've ever seen.
Cool factor aside, they've been scanning patients' actual bones, optimising them in software and printing titanium replacements (mostly hip joints) there for almost a decade now. There's even a few commercial madical 3d printing companies around AU (Anatomics is one).
It's great that SA is making jaws for people now though.
I use ODF but no-one else does because MS Office doesn't properly support it, I'm crippling my ability to share documents around purely for ideological reasons.
Microsoft OSs are down to 14% market share.
It simply makes no sense to continue using their outdated lockin-inspired formats. The world needs to transition to document editing formats that're portable across whatever computing devices users want to buy.
ODF was designed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium to be that set of formats in 2005, and was only derailed by an intense and deeply corrupt effort by Microsoft. It's incredibly sad that we've had to wait for almost a decade for governments to finally start the transition.
I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format,
Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/
Fuckwit.
No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.
No. Just no. That's pure and slick as goose fat spin control. Businesses simply don't work that way.
That stuff didn't happen because Microsoft decided to spend the next decade and a half focused on embracing, extending and extinguishing or just f***ing killing and just f***ing burying their competitors instead of making good products.
With toxic corporate citizenship at their heart, they stacked standards committees instead of making a better Office product. When online security and malware became a problem, instead of improving and securing their colander-like OS they funded a feral and failing software company to attack a community-built competitor. When that failed, they wielded 235 patents as a FUD-bludgeon, and sold more to a 3rd party patent troll. When it became clear they couldn't compete in the mobile space, they used some questionable patents to extort money from manufacturers using a competing OS. Their customers suffered high costs and poor products because, whenever possible, they chose to litigate instead of innovate.
That's why they now have 14% market share and are laying off thousands of workers. As soon as there were viable alternatives, ex-Microsoft customers fled to them in droves.
Does the thing run only on Windoze 8 ?
Window anyway.
It's a VB6 program running on a single PC, supposedly for security reasons. The system is highly manual and failure prone enough that they're probably too embarrassed to release the code.
The system was developed internally by the AEC in 2001, when an upgrade to Windows 2000 rendered an existing COBOL-based application the commission was using to tally-up union elections incompatible with its standard operating environment. It was re-written as a Microsoft Visual Basic application and runs on Microsoft SQL.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/...
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/...
Why on EARTH would you want to scale this up??
You could use windtraps to increase humidity and use the electricity to pump the resulting water to your sietch water stores. Maybe not necessary on earth now, but who knows...
I was getting rather sick and tired of the Internet slowly being divided into two forms of traffic:
Popcorn Time.
What exactly was the expected outcome again?
audio quid ueteres olim moneatis amici,
"pone seram, cohibe." sed quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor.
I knew the shit would hit the fan. All those experts are either complete, utter fools - or they were outright lying to all of us!
They were lying.
Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.
Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.
I have a machine of a similar vintage running an age-old copy of RHEL. I keep it, but the chances of me firing it up are slim to none, because I can fire up VMWare Workstation with an older OS release.
I still have an Intergraph TDZ 2000 workstation that I used for 3D/video editing back in the late '90s. It cost around $15,000 new, with dual PII 300MHz CPUs, 256MB RAM and dual 80GB 10,000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0. It's still set up to dual boot NT4 and Debian 2.2, and I occasionally fire it up (if only to to remind myself what it was like to hear the jet-engine whine as those those drives spool up to speed).
It still feels very responsive with that old OS/software combination, so an old version of Linux on a cheap SBC should perform well enough. It will need to be an x86 based box to run OP's software though, so the (ARM based) Raspberry PI is out. Some of the Vortex86 based kits could be worth trying, though I suspect they'd fall over on driver support. They can be had for less than $40, and can run contemporary Linux so worth trying just for the fun of it. It's hard to say how well it would cope with drivers though
In the olden days, they'd round them all up, lock them in a barn and set it on fire.
Or harpoon them from ships and render their blubber for oil.
If the Europeans were sensible, they'd erect statues of Cap'n Ahab in every capital city, legalize chubby-hunting as a sustainable biofuel harvesting method, and watch with glee as a combination of terror fueled adrenaline and frantic waddling from danger shrunk the waistlines of all but the most irredeemable behemoths to non-disabling proportions. Better still, if manufacturers fitted the harpoons to cars, I have no doubt that the average Citroen, Peugeot, Fiat or small VW could be run for several weeks on the fruits of just one venture onto the streets of Brussels or any other large European city.
Citizens of the world, start petitions, start lobby groups. This needs to happen now, to save our environment and improve the scenery in our streets and supermarkets..
Since the OP asked in parentheses for spectrum analyser suggestions, he seems to be interested in cheap measurement instruments in general.
The best option for students needing cheap and versatile measuring equipment. would be the Red Pitaya. http://redpitaya.com/?skip_int...
It's not as cheap as OP wants, but it's a far better learning tool than a half-assed knock off.
Now, sans firearm, it's just a matter of a tiger trap and patience.
In "Africa, a South American jungle, or the Arctic", that would geological-level patience...