We try. Most people seem to vote for those with the most "microphone time", backed by the media. Geez, I get so frustrated on how we sheeple do whatever the microphone men of the media hock up into the little chrome stick.
I have been hoping so much that the internet would offer so many alternatives to the megacorp media that their megadollars would not be able to buy elections. I would much rather see a record of how the politician used his pen and his vote. I note businesses keep records of who keeps their promises ( Equifax, TRW, TransUnion, ChoicePoint, etc. ) and I would see databases of CongressCritters along with their "credit score" of how effectively they serve the public-at-large. A congresscritter wagging his pen for a corporation wanting special-interest law passed to guarantee private monopolization would quickly see his credibility rating zonked. The laws already existing which hold credit rating agencies harmless for defamation of character should be sufficient for holding politicians to their word as well.
But so far, we simply seem like sheep, going wherever the media-men shepherds herd us... including into the shearing room when its friggen cold outside.
We had a table we could move by motor, x and y. The motors were connected to a analog computer ( yes, that old. An EAI 580 IIRC ). Even that primitive computer could balance a broom on the table, moving it anywhere we told it to go, keeping the broom upright ( or we could move it by nudging a bit on the broom, kinda like how you operate a Segway). For all practical purposes, this was the predecessor to the Segway.
Not a one of us in the class could balance that thing as well as the computer ( when properly programmed ) could.
Now, where I think the computer is going to have a helluva problem is in dealing with people, who do the damndest things, like suddenly opening car doors or stepping out into traffic before even looking. Think kid on skateboard. Human intuition leads us to suspect human carelessness whenever we see certain behaviours, especially kids playing nearby or a freshly stopped or entered car. If the computer suspected everything as behaving as erratically as a human behaves, it would have to drive extremely slowly to make up for its lack of insight of which car door is likely to spontaneously open right into onflowing traffic. Even fully alert humans often find this situation unsolvable, with a collision the inevitable result.
One thing the computer has going for it is much faster response times. It would probably be able to bring the car to a complete stop much faster than a human could, leaving the human driving the car behind the robot car with quite a predicament on his hands. Tailgater Beware! We will probably shortly see lots of snub-nosed BMW's.
Now, if all the cars were under computer control, aka " the left hand knows what the right hand is doing", this looks quite do-able. Having to deal with humans, and our completely illogical algorithms, should be enough to drive anyone trying to design a computer algorithm to accommodate it completely buggy.
We "technology guys" ( and our patrons ) have been the enabler for our generation to escape the situations described in the Bible and other history texts. I do not mean to intone religious themes here, but look at this book as a history text of living conditions of generations past. Life has NOT been comfortable for most of us.
I look at even the kings of antiquity, and even they - as royalty - have nowhere near, and I mean nowhere near, the level of creature comforts I have, and I am not a rich guy. My dollar-store glass beer mug would have been considered a crystal chalice of great value. Even kings did not have as much as a proper toilet and paper. No electricity. No refrigeration. No motors. Even the lowest of us live better than royalty of antiquity as far as I can tell... ( except for social standing ). The only thing separating our conditions is the application of technology.
History books show us having to do all sorts of unthinkable things and live through much very unpleasant adversity and misery.
I believe I have lived through the pivotal generations which have transformed human existence from pure animalistic survivalism to the ability for each of us to enjoy and savor life. My fathers had the worst of it, laying the foundation ( industrial revolution ).
I hear what you are saying about longer days. But then, how long was my grandfather's "farm day" where all the work on the farm was manual, no electricity, no refrigeration, and all the work was done by man and mule?
Technology has freed us from a lot of the drudgery where we no longer need to grow our own food, rather we can play our guitar and fight over rights over who gets to hear it. We can now afford leagues of lawyers to hear our endless bickering over the most trivial of issues. We as a human race are finally getting to the point of each of us being able to do whatever it is we want to do... be creative in whatever way we create. Nothing says that creativity has to be technically inclined - it can be music, art, ( or my favorite art, cuisine ), architecture, landscaping. Each of us seems to have a burning desire to do something. The application of technology frees our time so we can do our dream.
This knowledge of technology and how to apply it is the crown jewel of human accomplishment.
Cherish it and teach it to your children, lest ye return to the days of history.
I think you got it. Machines will end up with all the dreary drudgery repetitive mindless work which supports our infrastructure. This was done by the "proletariat" of old days, leaving the enjoyment of the efforts of their labor to the bourgeoisie.
The machines become the proletariat, producing our food, making our things, cleaning up after us, getting rid of our trash. We just tell the men who design the machines anything we desire, and those of us proficient in machinery describe to CAD machines the instructions for making it.
This opens up a whole new realm of leisure for us. We get to spend our days socializing and doing pleasant things, hopefully enjoying what few days our biological systems are designed to last.
Being I just came off the flu ( a four-roll special, if measured in spools of toilet paper ), I for one was very thankful for the comforts of electric blankets, flush toilets, and machines which toiled through the night making cans of chicken soup and rolls of TP.
I can guiltlessly assign work to a machine I would have a hard time justifying I ask a living, breathing, feeling human being to do. I would not even ask an animal to do it. I see all sorts of stuff in history books ( and the Bible ) of people being required to perform all sorts of unthinkable labors, of which they reaped no benefit. Being I am in technology myself - and deal regularly with embedded processing - it is my goal to make some device with the sole purpose of making life easier for us. I think everyone who designs this stuff has the same intention.
But like anything else, technology, like fire, can be used to warm the house or destroy the building, but its not the fault of the fire.
I do not fear technology, but I do fear the misuse of technology.
We seem to be looking for something to blame the current economic malaise on. Its not technology causing this one folks... its Tax Law. In computer parlance, we have a bunch of legal short-circuits in the system. This system can work a helluva lot better than it is as soon as we patch the program to produce desired outputs rather than enriching a few by crony capitalism. Right now, the law incentivizes hoarding and greed. A few changes in tax law is all that is needed to fix this. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, but some of the software is poorly written, causing resource hogging..
Yes. as humans, we are NOT identical. Our physical traits vary. So do our psychological traits. Its not just us, either. Talk to anyone who has raised animals. I have raised kittens. Some kittens are loveable. Some are skittish. Some come out just plain wild.
I found out about this several years ago when new management took over at the old aerospace company I used to work for. A serious clash of personality types resulted as my former supervisors ( old-school engineers ) were replaced by men of the suit and tie... MBA's.
I did not last long. We had completely different value systems. I was the artist type and wanted it done just right; they were business oriented and were optimizing for maximum quarterly profit.
I was laid off. Just as good. I am pretty sure I would have gone crazy if I had been kept around, as I was too stubborn to just walk away.
I was convinced I was crazy, so I went to the local community college and talked to the dean of psychology, and told him I wanted to be evaluated - and I flat did not trust anyone in the medical profession who had a fiduciary incentive in the outcome.
I told him my story, and he recognized what happened. He set up a array of tests ( Myers-Briggs, Keirsey, and a couple others ) that presented hundreds of situations and queried how I would handle it. All on the computer.
It took me several days to go through the long version ( the shorter versions are available on the internet - the ones I got took several hours each to complete ).
It turns out psychologists have been able to classify personality types into different categories, just as hair color, eye color, skin color have categories. I am strongly INTP and have asperger traits. Its not a malfunction as much as it is a descriptor. It explained why I have absolutely no interest in sports, or why I would consider a thermodynamics book far more interesting than a bestseller novel.
I think a lot of us here on Slashdot have similar attributes, as this site - by its nature and content - caters to our type. I would bet few of us give much of a damm about the Super Bowl, but would find a new way of lighting a building worth a read.
We think "they" are nuts, crazy, completely oblivious to reality. "They" think the same about us.
Take Malthus... he talked hundreds of years ago about mankind reproducing so much he overshoots the capacity of this planet to support us - resulting in a massive die-off. I fear this too. Or something called "Peak Oil". I've seen the production curves and thoroughly understand the logistic equation the depletion curves are based on, and it scares the hell out of me. Yet "normal people" seem to take this in stride.
I sure wish cities would hire guys like you to work on their traffic lights.
I highly question whether or not anyone pays any attention at all to the timings of these things; It seems that they would have more luck getting anyone who has ever milked a cow to design one, as they would have some inner sense as to how timing results in smooth flow. Improperly time your efforts and you get no milk and infuriate the cow.
You may wish to consider the Everready lithium AAA cells ( available in stores like WalMart ). They have a very long shelf life, and I have yet to see one of these leak. They are kind of pricey though. Their attribute of long shelf life goes unused when you use them for most applications, but for things like test instruments, remote controls, calculators, and other low-drain and low use items, its nice to know that set of differential probes you use once a year or so will work when you need them.
Another thing, I store my collection of lithium cells in my test equipment and remotes. I know that in the event of a natural disaster and I really need a battery for my flashlight or radio, I know where some are.
I was reading this thread with baited breath, as I own about a dozen old Gardner-Denver wirewrap guns - the black ones - about 40 years old. Every darned one of them have the little nylon clutch broken, and replacement parts nowhere to be found. It appears I bought the last clutch assemblies to be found anywhere from a company who took over the line from Gardner-Denver - and those NOS ( New Old Stock ) parts did not last all that long. They were old and brittle. Simple little plastic part.
I would love to make a drawing of this little clutch part and have Kinko's make me a dozen or two of them in some modern high strength fluoropolymer. Those were really nice wirewrap guns, used the sub-C NiCd cells which are still common today. I have not had any tools yet that felt as sturdy as those old Gardner-Denvers. The new stuff feels so cheap and underpowered in comparison. ( Note: those old Gardner-Denver tools were NOT cheap! It took nearly an old 60's style aerospace or oil company budget to afford them! Back in the 60's, it was a good week's salary for one of them. )
AND boots with extra insoles (the poor man's version of lifts?)
Now, that could just as well have been ME. I deliberately put layers of paper held in place with duct tape under a plastic insole in my shoes to hold my feet at about 10 degrees angle because of some problem in my ankle. I am very flatfooted, and without that cheap orthotic, I do not go very far. The orthopedist will sell me an orthotic that does exactly the same thing for about $200. I notice traveling even a few feet over an angled surface if its slanted the wrong way.
I do not blame the authorities for questioning shoes full of filler. In the past, real bombs have been placed in shoes. It would be foolhardy to ignore historical facts.
Now, the watch thing.... if the watch looks like it might be a bomb, can you blame them? If I tried to carry a piece of luggage aboard a plane that I made from a 12 inch pipe nipple and two end caps, do I think for one minute they would let me board? I do not think I could even walk in public for one minute with that thing assembled like that. Neither would I blame them.
This is no time to be teasing the authorities trying to protect the public. Making threatening devices is no joke.
If I tried to board a plane with a suitcase full of batteries, wires, and switches, I better have a damn good reason for doing so. A damn good reason.
Ok... now that you guys are talking about how you us of the older generation handled this problem... let it be known that kids will be kids regardless of the environment.
In my day, fifty years ago, we had this old discarded washing machine in a vacant lot. Lots of trees, so it was well secluded. We kept our tittie mags in it. Old stained tittie mags. No telling what filth was on them, but we didn't give a damn. All of us knew about the washing machine, as at least it would keep our tittie mags out of the weather. What risks did we take as horny teens out in a secluded area away from anyone taking care of natural drives - "child predators" could have had a field day seeding our washing machine with new porn just to watch us do what we did when we saw it. Someone was always leaving new tittie mags in, and I would too if I found one. I sure as hell could not bring it home!
If there was one thing the parents seemed to tolerate, it was the tittie mags receiving the brunt of the horny guy's attention, not their daughters.
Today's parents might breathe a sigh of relief knowing those natural urges are being satisfied in their private home, not in a secluded back alley, covered in the remains of who knows who's "stuff".
Another thing... kids aren't the only ones who do what someone else doesn't want them to do. Remember "prohibition"? Its a helluva lot easier to pass a law than it is to enforce it. Especially if it goes against natural drives.
I think there is a lot of wisdom is looking the other way when certain things happen. Is anyone getting hurt? If this is not coming out of anyone else's hide, then I feel its best to ignore it. Its just an itch that needs scratching. No big deal.
If you succeed in removing the natural sexual drives from your young'uns, you can look forward to a future with no grandchildren. Count your blessings.
But why on earth would you want to prevent original documentation from being distributed?
That precisely is what puzzles me. Why in blue blazes would a company want to hinder customers researching or trying to learn to use their products? The fact someone bothered to host the company's literature for free says a lot, yet Toshiba's reaction to it says even more.
What's next - Texas Instruments suing AllDataSheet.com for hosting a PDF of a TI SMPS chip?
Or Tektronix suing over someone photocopying an old 545 O'scope manual?
I can't even begin to list all the products I have been introduced to by copies of manufacturer's data sheets hosted on arduino forums. People would put a pdf on their local server because a lot of companies keep changing their link address, making links subject to failure should the corporate entity re-organize their site.
Legally, I have to agree that Toshiba does have claim to their documentation, but I do think they are lacking a lot of horse sense. I wonder who was lucky enough to find a boss who would actually pay to have him make his company look like a horse ass....
I note some countries attract lots of financial business because they set themselves up as "tax havens", shielding cash flows from the heavy taxation levied by some governments.
Other countries will set themselves up as manufacturing havens, allowing production without being forced to obey some other sovereign's rules.
There will be constant law enforcement activity trying to keep people from running this countries surplus of goods into countries controlled by politicians who passed law making production of those goods illegal in their country. This will result in an outflow of wealth from countries crippled by counterproductive law.
Yet more countries will print money to pay for importing what they no longer can make themselves. Eventually economics will do them in. Their leaders will sell off their country's resources one by one to keep themselves in power, while enacting law after law to keep their tenacious hold on monopolistic power; monopolies based not on economics, but politics.
Call me jaded.... but I know I learned everything I know from my teachers and disassembling things I found. Using that, I was able to reassemble things in different ways to do different things. I remember building my first phonograph, radio, telephone, etc. Will our next generation be limited to assembling fast food? I am finding the only decent "toys for nerds" are now originating outside the US, As far as I can see, the US has already crumbled to the greed of the few enforced by a Congress voted in power by obedient sheep who vote for who they are told to vote for.
I have a few of these I got from China. Its amazing how much sound I can get driving these with a single 18650 lithium cell. Sure not as loud as my bigger class T amps, but about as loud as that vacuum-tube radio I had as a kid ( 50L6 output... remember 'em?).
I have been tracking low-power stuff as I intend one day to go off-grid, but I do not want to give up my creature comforts to do so.
I think Tri-Path was on the right path with their "Class-T" design. Its a lot like a bipolar switching power supply with a fast output voltage setpoint ( the speaker is the load ).
You hit on one of my curiousities. The article mentions the accretion disk rotating in the same direction as the spin of a black hole.
The incoming mass has inertia, which will spin up the black hole as its pulled in.
There appear to be two huge forces at work... gravitational, electric forces, and centrifugal force. One is trying to hold everything together, the other is trying to blow it apart.
Its a pet theory of mine that what we know as the "big bang" is actually the result of a massive black hole, overspun as it consumed the universe before it. A severe case of indigestion, if you will.
My evidence is that the observed universe appears full of rotational inertia, and if everything blew out from a point, where did the rotational inertia come from?
I think your parent was pointing out that this technology can also be "weaponized", so as to be used to cause an innocent target to have incriminating evidence logged against them.
With the technological advances we have today, "Reddy Kilowatt" is being pressed into service as a very inexpensive 24/7 security watchman serving the interests of whoever instantiated him. If I am going to willingly have one of these watchmen instantiated in my vehicle, I also want it to summon armed enforcement in the event my vehicle is being violated or summon help in the event of a road emergency, from flat tire to hijacking..
Done right, this technology will make car theft a thing of the past. Being I am getting older myself ( and saw my neighbor succumb to a heart attack away from home ), it would be comforting to me to have a "emergency" button in my car that would hail law enforcement for me in the event I needed them.
I guess if you consider the problems you would have calibrating an analog version, along with the display interface, the digital stuff has become more practical than the old analog stuff we grew up with. Did you forget all those trimpots we always had to design in because we never knew the exact parameters of our parts?
Those old analog panel meters are now quite expensive. As well as being fragile, and never were much better than 2% accurate. The cheapest 3 1/2 digit display you get today blows them out of the water.
Personally, I enjoyed this article - as I build a lot of heat transfer controllers - and I find it very interesting what others are doing.... Not to say I would do it the same way, but others often find some way around a situation that has stymied me in the past.
I am very interested in when people start controlling compressor speed via variable-speed three-phase drives. Some washing machines already use these pancake-like motors to completely eliminate the transmission, controlling the motor speed and direction directly from a microcontroller so as to seamlessly shift the motor function between agitate and spin. I have been waiting with baited breath for a refrigeration compressor made in that manner so I can optimize the refrigeration process for whatever heat transfer I can get into the evaporator coil and out of the condenser coil. The only control point I now have is either flat all-or-nothing from the compressor and limited control of the thermal expansion valve. With finer control of heat exchanger temperatures, I can control not only air temp but also the humidity.
Articles like this constitute a design snippet to show a usable part of a larger system.
Well, isn't it kind of natural to feel "left out" when you see someone else get something and you didn't?
Geez, I would not even do that to my cats. If I feed one and don't feed the other one, I am guaranteed a fullbore catfight, and I will probably lose one cat.
It is really insulting to see bonuses distributed among management for their skill of getting me to work for peanuts.
It really makes me feel really stupid and taken advantage of to put in long hours, only to see someone else reap the benefit.
And to add insult to injury, the other guy got the benefit for the skill of talking me into the long hours. At that point I am finally so disgusted I can not keep my mind on my work - I just feel like a stupid patsy. I figure I am in the wrong place, unappreciated and unneeded, and ready to leave at the first opportunity, and let the suited and tied shakers of the hand make the damm thing work.
They seem to have gobs of money and authority - maybe they can go to the machine, wave their pens and threaten a bad review if the machine won't fix itself.
Slashdot Mirror
We try. Most people seem to vote for those with the most "microphone time", backed by the media. Geez, I get so frustrated on how we sheeple do whatever the microphone men of the media hock up into the little chrome stick.
I have been hoping so much that the internet would offer so many alternatives to the megacorp media that their megadollars would not be able to buy elections. I would much rather see a record of how the politician used his pen and his vote. I note businesses keep records of who keeps their promises ( Equifax, TRW, TransUnion, ChoicePoint, etc. ) and I would see databases of CongressCritters along with their "credit score" of how effectively they serve the public-at-large. A congresscritter wagging his pen for a corporation wanting special-interest law passed to guarantee private monopolization would quickly see his credibility rating zonked. The laws already existing which hold credit rating agencies harmless for defamation of character should be sufficient for holding politicians to their word as well.
But so far, we simply seem like sheep, going wherever the media-men shepherds herd us... including into the shearing room when its friggen cold outside.
I remember a control systems class at university.
We had a table we could move by motor, x and y. The motors were connected to a analog computer ( yes, that old. An EAI 580 IIRC ). Even that primitive computer could balance a broom on the table, moving it anywhere we told it to go, keeping the broom upright ( or we could move it by nudging a bit on the broom, kinda like how you operate a Segway). For all practical purposes, this was the predecessor to the Segway.
Not a one of us in the class could balance that thing as well as the computer ( when properly programmed ) could.
Now, where I think the computer is going to have a helluva problem is in dealing with people, who do the damndest things, like suddenly opening car doors or stepping out into traffic before even looking. Think kid on skateboard. Human intuition leads us to suspect human carelessness whenever we see certain behaviours, especially kids playing nearby or a freshly stopped or entered car. If the computer suspected everything as behaving as erratically as a human behaves, it would have to drive extremely slowly to make up for its lack of insight of which car door is likely to spontaneously open right into onflowing traffic. Even fully alert humans often find this situation unsolvable, with a collision the inevitable result.
One thing the computer has going for it is much faster response times. It would probably be able to bring the car to a complete stop much faster than a human could, leaving the human driving the car behind the robot car with quite a predicament on his hands. Tailgater Beware! We will probably shortly see lots of snub-nosed BMW's.
Now, if all the cars were under computer control, aka " the left hand knows what the right hand is doing", this looks quite do-able. Having to deal with humans, and our completely illogical algorithms, should be enough to drive anyone trying to design a computer algorithm to accommodate it completely buggy.
We "technology guys" ( and our patrons ) have been the enabler for our generation to escape the situations described in the Bible and other history texts. I do not mean to intone religious themes here, but look at this book as a history text of living conditions of generations past. Life has NOT been comfortable for most of us.
I look at even the kings of antiquity, and even they - as royalty - have nowhere near, and I mean nowhere near, the level of creature comforts I have, and I am not a rich guy. My dollar-store glass beer mug would have been considered a crystal chalice of great value. Even kings did not have as much as a proper toilet and paper. No electricity. No refrigeration. No motors. Even the lowest of us live better than royalty of antiquity as far as I can tell... ( except for social standing ). The only thing separating our conditions is the application of technology.
History books show us having to do all sorts of unthinkable things and live through much very unpleasant adversity and misery.
I believe I have lived through the pivotal generations which have transformed human existence from pure animalistic survivalism to the ability for each of us to enjoy and savor life. My fathers had the worst of it, laying the foundation ( industrial revolution ).
I hear what you are saying about longer days. But then, how long was my grandfather's "farm day" where all the work on the farm was manual, no electricity, no refrigeration, and all the work was done by man and mule?
Technology has freed us from a lot of the drudgery where we no longer need to grow our own food, rather we can play our guitar and fight over rights over who gets to hear it. We can now afford leagues of lawyers to hear our endless bickering over the most trivial of issues. We as a human race are finally getting to the point of each of us being able to do whatever it is we want to do... be creative in whatever way we create. Nothing says that creativity has to be technically inclined - it can be music, art, ( or my favorite art, cuisine ), architecture, landscaping. Each of us seems to have a burning desire to do something. The application of technology frees our time so we can do our dream.
This knowledge of technology and how to apply it is the crown jewel of human accomplishment.
Cherish it and teach it to your children, lest ye return to the days of history.
I think you got it. Machines will end up with all the dreary drudgery repetitive mindless work which supports our infrastructure. This was done by the "proletariat" of old days, leaving the enjoyment of the efforts of their labor to the bourgeoisie.
The machines become the proletariat, producing our food, making our things, cleaning up after us, getting rid of our trash. We just tell the men who design the machines anything we desire, and those of us proficient in machinery describe to CAD machines the instructions for making it.
This opens up a whole new realm of leisure for us. We get to spend our days socializing and doing pleasant things, hopefully enjoying what few days our biological systems are designed to last.
Being I just came off the flu ( a four-roll special, if measured in spools of toilet paper ), I for one was very thankful for the comforts of electric blankets, flush toilets, and machines which toiled through the night making cans of chicken soup and rolls of TP.
I can guiltlessly assign work to a machine I would have a hard time justifying I ask a living, breathing, feeling human being to do. I would not even ask an animal to do it. I see all sorts of stuff in history books ( and the Bible ) of people being required to perform all sorts of unthinkable labors, of which they reaped no benefit. Being I am in technology myself - and deal regularly with embedded processing - it is my goal to make some device with the sole purpose of making life easier for us. I think everyone who designs this stuff has the same intention.
But like anything else, technology, like fire, can be used to warm the house or destroy the building, but its not the fault of the fire.
I do not fear technology, but I do fear the misuse of technology.
We seem to be looking for something to blame the current economic malaise on. Its not technology causing this one folks... its Tax Law. In computer parlance, we have a bunch of legal short-circuits in the system. This system can work a helluva lot better than it is as soon as we patch the program to produce desired outputs rather than enriching a few by crony capitalism. Right now, the law incentivizes hoarding and greed. A few changes in tax law is all that is needed to fix this. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, but some of the software is poorly written, causing resource hogging..
Yes. as humans, we are NOT identical. Our physical traits vary. So do our psychological traits. Its not just us, either. Talk to anyone who has raised animals. I have raised kittens. Some kittens are loveable. Some are skittish. Some come out just plain wild.
I found out about this several years ago when new management took over at the old aerospace company I used to work for. A serious clash of personality types resulted as my former supervisors ( old-school engineers ) were replaced by men of the suit and tie... MBA's.
I did not last long. We had completely different value systems. I was the artist type and wanted it done just right; they were business oriented and were optimizing for maximum quarterly profit.
I was laid off. Just as good. I am pretty sure I would have gone crazy if I had been kept around, as I was too stubborn to just walk away.
I was convinced I was crazy, so I went to the local community college and talked to the dean of psychology, and told him I wanted to be evaluated - and I flat did not trust anyone in the medical profession who had a fiduciary incentive in the outcome.
I told him my story, and he recognized what happened. He set up a array of tests ( Myers-Briggs, Keirsey, and a couple others ) that presented hundreds of situations and queried how I would handle it. All on the computer.
It took me several days to go through the long version ( the shorter versions are available on the internet - the ones I got took several hours each to complete ).
It turns out psychologists have been able to classify personality types into different categories, just as hair color, eye color, skin color have categories. I am strongly INTP and have asperger traits. Its not a malfunction as much as it is a descriptor. It explained why I have absolutely no interest in sports, or why I would consider a thermodynamics book far more interesting than a bestseller novel.
I think a lot of us here on Slashdot have similar attributes, as this site - by its nature and content - caters to our type. I would bet few of us give much of a damm about the Super Bowl, but would find a new way of lighting a building worth a read.
We think "they" are nuts, crazy, completely oblivious to reality. "They" think the same about us.
Take Malthus... he talked hundreds of years ago about mankind reproducing so much he overshoots the capacity of this planet to support us - resulting in a massive die-off. I fear this too. Or something called "Peak Oil". I've seen the production curves and thoroughly understand the logistic equation the depletion curves are based on, and it scares the hell out of me. Yet "normal people" seem to take this in stride.
Who is to say who is crazy?
I would go one step further and publish the legal documentation received... including the sender's name, email, and company affiliation.
A further link will show the law invoked, and which congressmen voted it in.
posting to kill a bad moderation. sorry. my bad - laptop slipped.
I wonder how a RTOS like Micrium's uCOS holds up to this.
I sure wish cities would hire guys like you to work on their traffic lights.
I highly question whether or not anyone pays any attention at all to the timings of these things; It seems that they would have more luck getting anyone who has ever milked a cow to design one, as they would have some inner sense as to how timing results in smooth flow. Improperly time your efforts and you get no milk and infuriate the cow.
( You can tell where I was raised here ).
You may wish to consider the Everready lithium AAA cells ( available in stores like WalMart ). They have a very long shelf life, and I have yet to see one of these leak. They are kind of pricey though. Their attribute of long shelf life goes unused when you use them for most applications, but for things like test instruments, remote controls, calculators, and other low-drain and low use items, its nice to know that set of differential probes you use once a year or so will work when you need them.
Another thing, I store my collection of lithium cells in my test equipment and remotes. I know that in the event of a natural disaster and I really need a battery for my flashlight or radio, I know where some are.
Thanks for the post, Ken.
I was reading this thread with baited breath, as I own about a dozen old Gardner-Denver wirewrap guns - the black ones - about 40 years old. Every darned one of them have the little nylon clutch broken, and replacement parts nowhere to be found. It appears I bought the last clutch assemblies to be found anywhere from a company who took over the line from Gardner-Denver - and those NOS ( New Old Stock ) parts did not last all that long. They were old and brittle. Simple little plastic part.
I would love to make a drawing of this little clutch part and have Kinko's make me a dozen or two of them in some modern high strength fluoropolymer. Those were really nice wirewrap guns, used the sub-C NiCd cells which are still common today. I have not had any tools yet that felt as sturdy as those old Gardner-Denvers. The new stuff feels so cheap and underpowered in comparison. ( Note: those old Gardner-Denver tools were NOT cheap! It took nearly an old 60's style aerospace or oil company budget to afford them! Back in the 60's, it was a good week's salary for one of them. )
Just my personal observation....
People who wear ties do this as well.
Now, that could just as well have been ME. I deliberately put layers of paper held in place with duct tape under a plastic insole in my shoes to hold my feet at about 10 degrees angle because of some problem in my ankle. I am very flatfooted, and without that cheap orthotic, I do not go very far. The orthopedist will sell me an orthotic that does exactly the same thing for about $200. I notice traveling even a few feet over an angled surface if its slanted the wrong way.
I do not blame the authorities for questioning shoes full of filler. In the past, real bombs have been placed in shoes. It would be foolhardy to ignore historical facts.
Now, the watch thing.... if the watch looks like it might be a bomb, can you blame them? If I tried to carry a piece of luggage aboard a plane that I made from a 12 inch pipe nipple and two end caps, do I think for one minute they would let me board? I do not think I could even walk in public for one minute with that thing assembled like that. Neither would I blame them.
This is no time to be teasing the authorities trying to protect the public. Making threatening devices is no joke.
If I tried to board a plane with a suitcase full of batteries, wires, and switches, I better have a damn good reason for doing so. A damn good reason.
Ok... now that you guys are talking about how you us of the older generation handled this problem... let it be known that kids will be kids regardless of the environment.
In my day, fifty years ago, we had this old discarded washing machine in a vacant lot. Lots of trees, so it was well secluded. We kept our tittie mags in it. Old stained tittie mags. No telling what filth was on them, but we didn't give a damn. All of us knew about the washing machine, as at least it would keep our tittie mags out of the weather. What risks did we take as horny teens out in a secluded area away from anyone taking care of natural drives - "child predators" could have had a field day seeding our washing machine with new porn just to watch us do what we did when we saw it. Someone was always leaving new tittie mags in, and I would too if I found one. I sure as hell could not bring it home!
If there was one thing the parents seemed to tolerate, it was the tittie mags receiving the brunt of the horny guy's attention, not their daughters.
Today's parents might breathe a sigh of relief knowing those natural urges are being satisfied in their private home, not in a secluded back alley, covered in the remains of who knows who's "stuff".
Another thing... kids aren't the only ones who do what someone else doesn't want them to do. Remember "prohibition"? Its a helluva lot easier to pass a law than it is to enforce it. Especially if it goes against natural drives.
I think there is a lot of wisdom is looking the other way when certain things happen. Is anyone getting hurt? If this is not coming out of anyone else's hide, then I feel its best to ignore it. Its just an itch that needs scratching. No big deal.
If you succeed in removing the natural sexual drives from your young'uns, you can look forward to a future with no grandchildren. Count your blessings.
Ham Radio. 6146. Morse code.
Not far behind 'ya!
That precisely is what puzzles me. Why in blue blazes would a company want to hinder customers researching or trying to learn to use their products? The fact someone bothered to host the company's literature for free says a lot, yet Toshiba's reaction to it says even more.
What's next - Texas Instruments suing AllDataSheet.com for hosting a PDF of a TI SMPS chip?
Or Tektronix suing over someone photocopying an old 545 O'scope manual?
I can't even begin to list all the products I have been introduced to by copies of manufacturer's data sheets hosted on arduino forums. People would put a pdf on their local server because a lot of companies keep changing their link address, making links subject to failure should the corporate entity re-organize their site.
Legally, I have to agree that Toshiba does have claim to their documentation, but I do think they are lacking a lot of horse sense. I wonder who was lucky enough to find a boss who would actually pay to have him make his company look like a horse ass....
I note some countries attract lots of financial business because they set themselves up as "tax havens", shielding cash flows from the heavy taxation levied by some governments.
Other countries will set themselves up as manufacturing havens, allowing production without being forced to obey some other sovereign's rules.
There will be constant law enforcement activity trying to keep people from running this countries surplus of goods into countries controlled by politicians who passed law making production of those goods illegal in their country. This will result in an outflow of wealth from countries crippled by counterproductive law.
Yet more countries will print money to pay for importing what they no longer can make themselves. Eventually economics will do them in. Their leaders will sell off their country's resources one by one to keep themselves in power, while enacting law after law to keep their tenacious hold on monopolistic power; monopolies based not on economics, but politics.
Call me jaded.... but I know I learned everything I know from my teachers and disassembling things I found. Using that, I was able to reassemble things in different ways to do different things. I remember building my first phonograph, radio, telephone, etc. Will our next generation be limited to assembling fast food? I am finding the only decent "toys for nerds" are now originating outside the US, As far as I can see, the US has already crumbled to the greed of the few enforced by a Congress voted in power by obedient sheep who vote for who they are told to vote for.
These Class D amplifiers claim to be 90% efficient.
I have a few of these I got from China. Its amazing how much sound I can get driving these with a single 18650 lithium cell. Sure not as loud as my bigger class T amps, but about as loud as that vacuum-tube radio I had as a kid ( 50L6 output... remember 'em?).
I have been tracking low-power stuff as I intend one day to go off-grid, but I do not want to give up my creature comforts to do so.
I think Tri-Path was on the right path with their "Class-T" design. Its a lot like a bipolar switching power supply with a fast output voltage setpoint ( the speaker is the load ).
You can buy these right now at Amazon and others.
I have a couple of these and they work great for running remote PA systems on gel-cells.
If someone else is paying for it, who cares? Just about anything "covered by insurance" has skyrocketed pricewise.
You hit on one of my curiousities. The article mentions the accretion disk rotating in the same direction as the spin of a black hole.
The incoming mass has inertia, which will spin up the black hole as its pulled in.
There appear to be two huge forces at work... gravitational, electric forces, and centrifugal force. One is trying to hold everything together, the other is trying to blow it apart.
Its a pet theory of mine that what we know as the "big bang" is actually the result of a massive black hole, overspun as it consumed the universe before it. A severe case of indigestion, if you will.
My evidence is that the observed universe appears full of rotational inertia, and if everything blew out from a point, where did the rotational inertia come from?
Comments invited!
I think your parent was pointing out that this technology can also be "weaponized", so as to be used to cause an innocent target to have incriminating evidence logged against them.
With the technological advances we have today, "Reddy Kilowatt" is being pressed into service as a very inexpensive 24/7 security watchman serving the interests of whoever instantiated him. If I am going to willingly have one of these watchmen instantiated in my vehicle, I also want it to summon armed enforcement in the event my vehicle is being violated or summon help in the event of a road emergency, from flat tire to hijacking..
Done right, this technology will make car theft a thing of the past. Being I am getting older myself ( and saw my neighbor succumb to a heart attack away from home ), it would be comforting to me to have a "emergency" button in my car that would hail law enforcement for me in the event I needed them.
I guess if you consider the problems you would have calibrating an analog version, along with the display interface, the digital stuff has become more practical than the old analog stuff we grew up with. Did you forget all those trimpots we always had to design in because we never knew the exact parameters of our parts?
Those old analog panel meters are now quite expensive. As well as being fragile, and never were much better than 2% accurate. The cheapest 3 1/2 digit display you get today blows them out of the water.
Personally, I enjoyed this article - as I build a lot of heat transfer controllers - and I find it very interesting what others are doing.... Not to say I would do it the same way, but others often find some way around a situation that has stymied me in the past.
I am very interested in when people start controlling compressor speed via variable-speed three-phase drives. Some washing machines already use these pancake-like motors to completely eliminate the transmission, controlling the motor speed and direction directly from a microcontroller so as to seamlessly shift the motor function between agitate and spin. I have been waiting with baited breath for a refrigeration compressor made in that manner so I can optimize the refrigeration process for whatever heat transfer I can get into the evaporator coil and out of the condenser coil. The only control point I now have is either flat all-or-nothing from the compressor and limited control of the thermal expansion valve. With finer control of heat exchanger temperatures, I can control not only air temp but also the humidity.
Articles like this constitute a design snippet to show a usable part of a larger system.
Well, isn't it kind of natural to feel "left out" when you see someone else get something and you didn't?
Geez, I would not even do that to my cats. If I feed one and don't feed the other one, I am guaranteed a fullbore catfight, and I will probably lose one cat.
It is really insulting to see bonuses distributed among management for their skill of getting me to work for peanuts.
It really makes me feel really stupid and taken advantage of to put in long hours, only to see someone else reap the benefit.
And to add insult to injury, the other guy got the benefit for the skill of talking me into the long hours. At that point I am finally so disgusted I can not keep my mind on my work - I just feel like a stupid patsy. I figure I am in the wrong place, unappreciated and unneeded, and ready to leave at the first opportunity, and let the suited and tied shakers of the hand make the damm thing work.
They seem to have gobs of money and authority - maybe they can go to the machine, wave their pens and threaten a bad review if the machine won't fix itself.