why deal with an unfamiliar environment instead of running applications on a standard OS? The only reason I can think of is if you have very strict and low power consumption limits (milliwatts instead of one or two watts). Once you throw Ethernet in there, there really is no point in going with a microcontroller anymore.
This isn't unusual. For example, just about any device that needs to be battery powered. An 8bit ARM or PIC can run a a few milliwatts, less if it can drop into sleep mode for a percentage of its operation.
Sure a couple of watts is not much, but if a device is running from batteries, it's still 500 times the power budget of a "limited microcontroller design"
This is often quoted by manufacturers as an advantage of these poisons, but it turns out not to be true. The level of vitamin D contained in a typical application of these poisons is more than enough to be fatal to small mammals, e.g. cats and dogs, or even unpleasant for humans.
Damn, and I was just about to eat that dead rat I found.
It's probably still there, minus a few superficial parts which would have been sold on to the next generation of kids at vastly inflated prices. Where did you break it? Kinross Forest? Cargo Rd?
Unfortunately "union" has become such a dirty word that it's hard for them to gain traction, even though credit unions have nothing in common with trade unions.
Closing your eyes and pretending things are the way you want them to be rather than how they are isn't a sound business strategy.
I dunno, that seems to be what most telecommunications companies, music producers, even the banks seem to be doing. Screw the business strategy, when you can run a company into the ground and still walk away with millions of dollars worth of golden parachute.
I agree. I tend to buy hardware online for this very reason. However my point still stands that this behaviour by the retailers is greedy, and very short-sighted, because in the long run it drives customers and their money overseas.
That's very clever to have done that upside down thing with plain text.
There are many products that are overly expensive in Australia compared with other countries. A few example based on the US market, which I'm most familiar with. I can buy a Leatherman at Walmart for about $60, or from a retailer in Australia for more like $200. A $25 cheap rifle scope from Walmart retails for about $60 in.au. Similar markups apply for other consumer optics - binoculars, small telescopes etc. Software, books, music, all these cost more in AUD than the equivalent in USD on the US market, even though the AUD is worth more.
I support a general inquiry into price gouging like this, but limiting the inquiry specifically to Apple products seems like publicity whoring, or a ploy to make the problem sound more isolated than it really is.
I'm pretty sure DEET is still legal. It's used as a mosquito repellent, and can be bought in camping stores in various concentrations.
Are you thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT ? DDT was used as an insecticide and is now pretty much banned worldwide. And if I remember correctly, The issue was not necessarily immediately toxicity to humans (although it IS known to be an endocrine disruptor, and has other documented negative effects on humans) but that it had the nasty property of being slow to break down, and accumulating in the food chain. This had different effects on different animals occupying different niches in the food chain, but the higher in the food chain, the greater the bio-accumulation. So as well as accumulating in humans, it also affected other predators, such as birds of prey, directly affecting their ability to breed.
So, just because it hasn't directly killed many humans, doesn't mean that it's safe to spray the stuff around with reckless abandon. Also note that it HASN'T been banned as a disease vector control, but has been restricted so it's not sprayed around like crazy as it was in the 1950s. Also note that there is a plethora of other insecticides out there, so equating malaria deaths with a reduction in DDT use is over-simplistic.
I guess that makes sense for dehumidifying labs, archives, and server rooms. I hope that such a scheme wouldn't be implemented by default in other buildings though - it seems pretty wasteful.
Unfortunately, you can make all the laws you want, but Stupid will find a way. Here in.au we banned cell phone use years ago - first it caused people to text more (because it's easier to hide the phone in your lap) but what I see now is more idiots who pull over anywhere to answer the phone. In the breakdown lanes of the freeway, around blind corners, you name it. The new laws have done _nothing_ to make the roads safer, the selfish assholes have just found new ways to be selfish assholes.
I hear you on the "reading the paper" theme though. The cell phone laws always pissed me off because they do nothing to address the idiots who are tuning their radio, lighting a cigarette, eating a hamburger and turning around to talk to someone in the back seat all at the same time while going around a corner! To me, this seems a lot more dangerous than checking a text when you're stopped at a red light.
Unfortunately, you can't ban Stupid, because Stupid always finds a way. We already have plenty of laws about dangerous driving, they just need to be enforced, rather than banning specific behaviours, which does nothing to address to underlying problem.
Isn't this a free-as-in-beer vs. free-as-in-speech argument? I may be way off-beam here but I think Android is open source and IE isn't. So no, this would be nothing like the MS antitrust case.
Prostitution is legal in some states of Australia. It's a very regulated industry, only licenced brothels are permitted, all their workers have to get regular STD checks, and there are limits on the number of workers each brothel can employ. Freelance streetwalking is still illegal.
I can assure you that there is a lot less human trafficking, slavery and general abuse than in many of our neighbouring countries. Is it perfect? No.
But the workers have healthcare and the protection of the law. If things get violent or abusive, they can go to the police without fear of prosecution. This works in everyone's favour - a john is less likely to beat up a prostitute, because the police will get called for assault. The employer is a registered business, so they can't abuse the prostitutes for fear of losing their licence and right to operate their business. The john is more confident of receiving a hygienic service from a healthy woman. The brothel doesn't have to coerce people into prostitution - they can just advertise the job and let the free market sort it out!
I dunno, the Amiga had its HAM graphics modes which could do 4096 simultaneous colours. The fact that the graphics output had the same refresh rate as TV was pretty awesome too, and sold quite a few Amigas to TV studios.
NES had superior animation? Maybe there is some spec buried in the NES datasheets that's superior. In the real world however, I propose that th only way the Amiga could fail against a NES is if it wasn't switched on;-)
Tha Atari had better music _software_ but MIDI itself is pretty much just serial with a different pinout (so that musicians were forced to buy overpriced cables) but even the Amiga's serial port could handle the 19200bps that was MIDI.
And one area where the Amiga was definitely #1 was the OS. Unfortunately this was before the operating system was seen as anything important, so the consumers (and Commodore's own retarded marketing department) didn't appreciate how awesome it really was. Diferent screen resolutions displaying _at the same time_, true multitasking, in 256k of memory... I could go on, but it's a long time ago, and I have some kids I need to chase off my lawn.
Plenty of good videos on YouTube though. The BBC's "Compute" program was pretty damn impressed in the 1980s. Windowed GUIs were so novel at the time (Xerox and Apple's work notwithstanding) that the presenters didn't even have the words to describe what they were doing.... "Now we drag this little box over here..."
This sounds like a similar concept to the Terrafugia Transition, which is also advertised as a "roadable aircraft." The Transition has made a few appearances on Slashdot in the past. Apparently the Transition uses a CVT to transmit internal combustion engine power to the wheels, so it's not a hybrid like Rutan's one in TFA.
+1 here. I used to work the graveyard shift on a helpdesk for tax software, and it was the sweetest entry-level gig I ever had. Midnight until 8am. We got about 10% more money per hour for doing it, and it was way more relaxed than the day shift. Hardly anyone is doing their taxes at 4am. Management isn't there to make sure I'm wearing a tie, or that my feet aren't on the desk, or whatever bee is in their bonnet that day. Starting at midnight means that you can go out in the evening, have dinner with friends, see a movie, whatever. I used to ride my bike to work, because there's no traffic on the road at midnight, so it's easy.
Diet, exercise, and socialising were easy. My girlfriend did get grumpy about it though, so yes, the "undersexed" aspect seems accurate!
I can assure you there are plenty of night shifts in all sorts of laboratories. I wish you luck in your new career, but if you're doing it to get away from night shifts, you may want to investigate something else.
Does anybody have stats on how many more hijackings occur on flights that don't require security theater? Surely if these stupid measures worked, we'd see a higher rate of aircraft being used as terrorist weapons in countries outside the US, you know, uncivilised places that still allow bottled water, don't require groping, etc...
How many aircraft have been blown out of the sky in countries that DON'T have stupid shoe-removal and liquid regulations? Most of the world doesn't do this, and last time I checked there isn't a problem with shoe bombers and liquid explosives outside the USA.
A lot of the life expectancy is lowered because of death at child birth (both children and women) and also in the fragile toddler years. There were people who regularly lived to 40s/50s/60s.
Thank you. Really, thank you. That statistic gets thrown around all the time, and as you point out, it's bullshit. Life expectancy was lower because lots of babies and children died. Polio, Measles, smallpox, malnutrition....childbirth [as you stated], whatever.
Just because life expectancy was in the order of 30 years, absolutely does not mean that there was ever a time in human history that healthy 30 year olds were just spontaneously dropping dead.
Amen. I worked in healthcare in.au and we had the same problem. Different logins for at least 5 different systems. All of these required the usual mix of cases and numbers. Some of these changed monthly, some of them changed quarterly. The previous few passwords were stored so you couldn't alternate between just two passwords.
So it was policy (like, written in the orientation documents for new hires) to use the same password for each system-mandated change, but append the month that the password was created, to trick the filter.
Slashdot Mirror
why deal with an unfamiliar environment instead of running applications on a standard OS? The only reason I can think of is if you have very strict and low power consumption limits (milliwatts instead of one or two watts). Once you throw Ethernet in there, there really is no point in going with a microcontroller anymore.
This isn't unusual. For example, just about any device that needs to be battery powered. An 8bit ARM or PIC can run a a few milliwatts, less if it can drop into sleep mode for a percentage of its operation.
Sure a couple of watts is not much, but if a device is running from batteries, it's still 500 times the power budget of a "limited microcontroller design"
This is often quoted by manufacturers as an advantage of these poisons, but it turns out not to be true. The level of vitamin D contained in a typical application of these poisons is more than enough to be fatal to small mammals, e.g. cats and dogs, or even unpleasant for humans.
Damn, and I was just about to eat that dead rat I found.
It's probably still there, minus a few superficial parts which would have been sold on to the next generation of kids at vastly inflated prices. Where did you break it? Kinross Forest? Cargo Rd?
That's a hell of a story. What a badass.
Unfortunately "union" has become such a dirty word that it's hard for them to gain traction, even though credit unions have nothing in common with trade unions.
the radiation from what antarctica plant?
Closing your eyes and pretending things are the way you want them to be rather than how they are isn't a sound business strategy.
I dunno, that seems to be what most telecommunications companies, music producers, even the banks seem to be doing. Screw the business strategy, when you can run a company into the ground and still walk away with millions of dollars worth of golden parachute.
I agree. I tend to buy hardware online for this very reason. However my point still stands that this behaviour by the retailers is greedy, and very short-sighted, because in the long run it drives customers and their money overseas.
That's very clever to have done that upside down thing with plain text.
There are many products that are overly expensive in Australia compared with other countries. A few example based on the US market, which I'm most familiar with. I can buy a Leatherman at Walmart for about $60, or from a retailer in Australia for more like $200. A $25 cheap rifle scope from Walmart retails for about $60 in .au. Similar markups apply for other consumer optics - binoculars, small telescopes etc. Software, books, music, all these cost more in AUD than the equivalent in USD on the US market, even though the AUD is worth more.
I support a general inquiry into price gouging like this, but limiting the inquiry specifically to Apple products seems like publicity whoring, or a ploy to make the problem sound more isolated than it really is.
So you just threw everything away? Because otherwise you still have quite a lot to show for that $1500.
I'm pretty sure DEET is still legal. It's used as a mosquito repellent, and can be bought in camping stores in various concentrations.
Are you thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT ? DDT was used as an insecticide and is now pretty much banned worldwide. And if I remember correctly, The issue was not necessarily immediately toxicity to humans (although it IS known to be an endocrine disruptor, and has other documented negative effects on humans) but that it had the nasty property of being slow to break down, and accumulating in the food chain. This had different effects on different animals occupying different niches in the food chain, but the higher in the food chain, the greater the bio-accumulation. So as well as accumulating in humans, it also affected other predators, such as birds of prey, directly affecting their ability to breed.
So, just because it hasn't directly killed many humans, doesn't mean that it's safe to spray the stuff around with reckless abandon. Also note that it HASN'T been banned as a disease vector control, but has been restricted so it's not sprayed around like crazy as it was in the 1950s. Also note that there is a plethora of other insecticides out there, so equating malaria deaths with a reduction in DDT use is over-simplistic.
The wiki link above is very informative.
I guess that makes sense for dehumidifying labs, archives, and server rooms. I hope that such a scheme wouldn't be implemented by default in other buildings though - it seems pretty wasteful.
Unfortunately, you can make all the laws you want, but Stupid will find a way. Here in .au we banned cell phone use years ago - first it caused people to text more (because it's easier to hide the phone in your lap) but what I see now is more idiots who pull over anywhere to answer the phone. In the breakdown lanes of the freeway, around blind corners, you name it. The new laws have done _nothing_ to make the roads safer, the selfish assholes have just found new ways to be selfish assholes.
I hear you on the "reading the paper" theme though. The cell phone laws always pissed me off because they do nothing to address the idiots who are tuning their radio, lighting a cigarette, eating a hamburger and turning around to talk to someone in the back seat all at the same time while going around a corner! To me, this seems a lot more dangerous than checking a text when you're stopped at a red light.
Unfortunately, you can't ban Stupid, because Stupid always finds a way. We already have plenty of laws about dangerous driving, they just need to be enforced, rather than banning specific behaviours, which does nothing to address to underlying problem.
Isn't this a free-as-in-beer vs. free-as-in-speech argument? I may be way off-beam here but I think Android is open source and IE isn't. So no, this would be nothing like the MS antitrust case.
Prostitution is legal in some states of Australia. It's a very regulated industry, only licenced brothels are permitted, all their workers have to get regular STD checks, and there are limits on the number of workers each brothel can employ. Freelance streetwalking is still illegal.
I can assure you that there is a lot less human trafficking, slavery and general abuse than in many of our neighbouring countries. Is it perfect? No.
But the workers have healthcare and the protection of the law. If things get violent or abusive, they can go to the police without fear of prosecution. This works in everyone's favour - a john is less likely to beat up a prostitute, because the police will get called for assault. The employer is a registered business, so they can't abuse the prostitutes for fear of losing their licence and right to operate their business. The john is more confident of receiving a hygienic service from a healthy woman. The brothel doesn't have to coerce people into prostitution - they can just advertise the job and let the free market sort it out!
I dunno, the Amiga had its HAM graphics modes which could do 4096 simultaneous colours. The fact that the graphics output had the same refresh rate as TV was pretty awesome too, and sold quite a few Amigas to TV studios.
NES had superior animation? Maybe there is some spec buried in the NES datasheets that's superior. In the real world however, I propose that th only way the Amiga could fail against a NES is if it wasn't switched on ;-)
Tha Atari had better music _software_ but MIDI itself is pretty much just serial with a different pinout (so that musicians were forced to buy overpriced cables) but even the Amiga's serial port could handle the 19200bps that was MIDI.
And one area where the Amiga was definitely #1 was the OS. Unfortunately this was before the operating system was seen as anything important, so the consumers (and Commodore's own retarded marketing department) didn't appreciate how awesome it really was. Diferent screen resolutions displaying _at the same time_, true multitasking, in 256k of memory... I could go on, but it's a long time ago, and I have some kids I need to chase off my lawn.
Plenty of good videos on YouTube though. The BBC's "Compute" program was pretty damn impressed in the 1980s. Windowed GUIs were so novel at the time (Xerox and Apple's work notwithstanding) that the presenters didn't even have the words to describe what they were doing.... "Now we drag this little box over here..."
This sounds like a similar concept to the Terrafugia Transition, which is also advertised as a "roadable aircraft." The Transition has made a few appearances on Slashdot in the past. Apparently the Transition uses a CVT to transmit internal combustion engine power to the wheels, so it's not a hybrid like Rutan's one in TFA.
Terrafugia's homepage at www.terrafugia.com
+1 here. I used to work the graveyard shift on a helpdesk for tax software, and it was the sweetest entry-level gig I ever had. Midnight until 8am. We got about 10% more money per hour for doing it, and it was way more relaxed than the day shift. Hardly anyone is doing their taxes at 4am. Management isn't there to make sure I'm wearing a tie, or that my feet aren't on the desk, or whatever bee is in their bonnet that day. Starting at midnight means that you can go out in the evening, have dinner with friends, see a movie, whatever. I used to ride my bike to work, because there's no traffic on the road at midnight, so it's easy.
Diet, exercise, and socialising were easy. My girlfriend did get grumpy about it though, so yes, the "undersexed" aspect seems accurate!
I can assure you there are plenty of night shifts in all sorts of laboratories. I wish you luck in your new career, but if you're doing it to get away from night shifts, you may want to investigate something else.
Does anybody have stats on how many more hijackings occur on flights that don't require security theater? Surely if these stupid measures worked, we'd see a higher rate of aircraft being used as terrorist weapons in countries outside the US, you know, uncivilised places that still allow bottled water, don't require groping, etc...
How many aircraft have been blown out of the sky in countries that DON'T have stupid shoe-removal and liquid regulations? Most of the world doesn't do this, and last time I checked there isn't a problem with shoe bombers and liquid explosives outside the USA.
I bet there are a few people on this site who would love to hang out and do drugs with some 17 year olds.
A lot of the life expectancy is lowered because of death at child birth (both children and women) and also in the fragile toddler years. There were people who regularly lived to 40s/50s/60s.
Thank you. Really, thank you. That statistic gets thrown around all the time, and as you point out, it's bullshit. Life expectancy was lower because lots of babies and children died. Polio, Measles, smallpox, malnutrition....childbirth [as you stated], whatever.
Just because life expectancy was in the order of 30 years, absolutely does not mean that there was ever a time in human history that healthy 30 year olds were just spontaneously dropping dead.
Bah. My beenz account will keep me comfortable in retirement.
Amen. I worked in healthcare in .au and we had the same problem. Different logins for at least 5 different systems. All of these required the usual mix of cases and numbers. Some of these changed monthly, some of them changed quarterly. The previous few passwords were stored so you couldn't alternate between just two passwords.
So it was policy (like, written in the orientation documents for new hires) to use the same password for each system-mandated change, but append the month that the password was created, to trick the filter.