I think you miss the point - isn't learning while having fun but doing something that is ultimately pointless what a good hobby should be?
I like Arduino. It is a fun hoppy - My example: I wanted to build a "big switch" interface for my special needs son.
Option one - a 3.5mm socket on a USB mouse
Option two - An Arduino with a bit bashing USB stack, emulating a USB keyboard.
Guess which works best? Option one - The mouse is always connected to the PC so I just plug the switch into the mouse and it works.
Guess which I learnt the most doing, and I had the most fun with, and maybe even feel proud of?
Ah exactly and perfectly true IF your hobby is learning to program an arduino. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with programming a MC as a hobby, I enjoyed my 68hc11 in ye olden days and modern PICs today.
But - If your hobby is the typical make magazine article of automating your fishtank feeder or monitoring your hamster cage wheel complete with a twitter interface, you're better off maximizing your efficiency, and doing it in about five lines of perl or ruby, not necessarily taking the long way around.
"big PC" stuff is like trying to interface to a USB webcam, complicated floating point calculations, exotic DSP...
Theoretically you can do that in "an 8-bit micro with 64 kB flash, a few k of on-chip RAM, a handful of I/O ports". After all that pretty well describes my home computer in the 80s and I / we did that kind of stuff. Well, maybe not well, and it was a heck of an expensive headache.
Hope it won't ruin your day to find out the Arduino IDE has a window you can open up to get text printouts from the code running on the Arduino...
Really, it's not 1985 any more:-)
Nice, instead of flashing an LED right before my interrupt routine returns, I could print it to the screen. Doesn't actually change development very much, but could occasionally be convenient...
A year or two, only if you drain and charge the battery daily.
You mean, use the device daily?
In excess of 10 hours per charge or, by your specs 10 hours per day? Really? That seems a wee bit... excessive. You really can watch multiple one hour TV shows on one charge, I've done it. And I'm talking about real hour long shows, like 55 minutes from the BBC, not "35 minutes after commercials are removed" American hour long shows.
Have you read the reviews of Flash on Android?... every review points out how it turns the entire experience to shit.
Speaking of that, installing flash is kind of like turning my basement into a septic tank for the entire municipal sewage system. Nobody really wants that, but we all have to listen to "that guy" going on and on about how real end users like my mom love the experience of finding diamond rings that accidentally get flushed, and the smell isn't really so bad once you get used to it, and its the most modern way of civil engineering so it must be the best way to do it.
OK they'll use it, and now my "zoom" screen refresh, instead of taking 10 ms, will take 5 ms. I was looking at more of a user interface perspective, will anyone notice?
I don't have much use for sports apps, so I have no experience with them. Do they stutter or freeze alot? You'd have to verify its not the network, I suppose.
After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery. Throw-away society I guess.
21 steps to battery replacement. Actually not bad. My 1st gen Mac Mini hard drive upgrade was something like 43 steps. And unlike the ipods, the ipad doesn't require soldering.
If you refuse to do it, thats OK, give me your "throw away" device with a dead battery, I'll replace the battery and either use it myself or sell it / give it away.
Apple hardware is generally superior to other consumer devices. The batteries do tend to last quite awhile. A year or two, only if you drain and charge the battery daily.
A big complaint about the first iPad was that it was uncomfortable to use as an eBook reader for long periods of time, the weight reduction and thinning while removing sharp edges out should help against that problem.
I don't think spending more engineering dollars is the solution to dollars spent for kindle astroturfers. I'd rather have it cheaper or longer battery life than thinner.
I wouldn't worry about that, it's not like the original is that slow or that many apps strain it.
Find me an app that strains it. I am not able to think of one at this time. I suppose xplane the flight simulator might come close but even that is a guess.
I mostly use mail, web browser (zoom etc is perfectly smooth), kindle reader, words w/ friends, that risk clone age of conquest. I played PvZ until it got boring.
I do have about 80 apps, its not like I never use any.
If you are thinking of TTL schematics, don't worry (too much). You'll learn soon enough what tristate I/O ports are, open collector, phrases like that.
Worry about understanding internal devices and how to use them. Pick up any 16 bit PIC reference manual and see if you can figure out the code required to use the onboard timer device, or maybe read and write from the I2C port. Doesn't matter if you're planning to use the PIC, my point is I personally know that manual is pretty decent and pretty typical of what you're going to get, and pretty typical of difficulty.
Coding for MCs isn't like high level work on PCs, its more like coding multiple simple little device drivers and gluing them together. And the only debugger you're likely to have is maybe you wired an LED to blink when certain code executes.
If you like those "black box" games where you shoot a pool ball into a black box and it is emitted out another hole of the box, and you do that many times and then deduce the location of the bumpers inside, then you'll love the mental process of working on microcontrollers.
The Arduino platform has been described in many ways, but the best I have heard so far insightfully labels it 'The 555 of the future,' referring to the ubiquitous timer chip so many simple electronic projects make use of.
I always thought of the pic 10f222 as the 555 of the future, since it has the classic 8 pin pin form factor and costs "about the same".
And the AC above is wrong, the Arduino is the Clippy of CS not the Microsoft Bob of EE.
One piece of advice for people getting "into" microcontrollers, is its a narrow field and rapidly shrinking. Rather than trying to do "big PC" stuff with a herd of 8 bit pics in raw assembly, you should be using embedded industrial single board computer PCs. PC/104, kinda like the soekris boards but tougher. Don't spend enough cash on "microcontroller stuff" to purchase a PC/104 SBC.
By narrow, I mean if you want to turn on a LED when a switch closes, use a freaking dropping resistor and some wire, not a microcontroller. Or a SSR or old fashioned physical relay, or whatever. If you want to do anything "complicated" like more than a line or two of Perl, or anything video or DSPish, use an embedded PC running linux or an embedded RTOS. If you're trying to optimize the heck out of power consumption or price, you might be stuck microcontrolling but no one whom knows anything likes to do that for fun, certainly not as a one-off or prototype. The gap in between where a microcontroller is ideal is technologically small (even if economically big). Something like a dishwasher controller or a clothes dryer controller is just about right.
"This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy."
So either the scientists are lying, or the theory is wrong. Which is it? Pons? Fleischmann? Anyone?
Its journalist BS. Doesn't mean a hell of a lot. When does journalist BS mean anything?
Way back in 1874 Abbe figured out the theoretical limit of microscope resolution. Far field resolution with positive refractive index materials, that is. Thats all we had back then. Kind of like how the romans probably could have made silicon diodes, if only they had purer silicon...
Its kind of like those theoretical thermodynamic limits. Not that its easy to even come close, but conventional physics says this is as far as you could dream of going...
For decades (centuries, really) they fooled with stranger and shorter light wavelengths, and continually optimized the material science of their lenses to get better NAs. Unfortunately they optimized themselves into quite a tight little local minimum. Recently they came up with some pretty far out material science. Also some pretty weird electromagnetics, trying to use nearfield instead of a farfield system.
They "broke all the rules", in journalist speak, much like a music band or a car body designer breaks all the rules, but that doesn't mean they can levitate or glow in the dark or something, it just means they tried something pretty far out. Unlike the car designers and musicians, the result of this foolishness is actually pretty cool and useful.
You could accurately compare near and far field work like conventional vs quantum mechanics in that a lot of what you "expect" from one, does not work in the other.
Pretty much useless theoretical foolishness for a traditional microscope, right? Well it turns out by some trickery you can apply that kind of stuff after all.
This article is not about a totally new area of science or something, just one particularly well done demonstration / experiment. Its some cool applied engineering, not new theoretical science. And I believe my little/. post is probably better and more informative than any mainstream media story will be about this topic.
I ask this as someone that has seen his wife bring up Google in the Firefox browser window to do a search when the Google search bar is right! frickin! there!
She probably used web browsers for awhile before search bars were "invented". I certainly did.
Its much more of a pain to delete your history in the search bar than just "X" a tab. Some things I search for are best forgotten, as best as possible, I guess.
It also annoys me that once I'm "done" with searching something, the search bar does not blank and I've gotta keep looking at something I'm done with. Poor UI. Its like not being allowed to kill a browser tab or not being allowed to delete an email. Boy that would be annoying. "well just don't look at it" "well just don't click it". No, I want it to go AWAY. Bye Bye. Blank.
Also windows users are used to having their toolbars hijacked by malware and psuedo-malware and otherwise F-ed with constantly, your media player changes your default search engine to bing, windows update change your default when upgrading MSIE, at least historically. If you share a PC or a browser, even temporarily, who knows how they've (mis)configured it, so you have to manually go to your favorite engine. One thing for sure, if you are stuck with windows and you want to go to google you probably can't use the google search bar. So they simply don't depend upon nor use them, they're just unusable visual noise.
By definition, Microsoft isn't a monopoly. They aren't the only operating system in town, they just happen to be the most successful with a vast majority of the market share. That's not because they are erecting large barriers to entry, it's just because the other operating systems aren't as smart as theirs.
See what I did there?
I think you may have missed this entire wikipedia article mostly about microsoft, most of which google is not guilty of. Neither are pure saints or pure sinners, but one is certainly way worse than the other, and only the astroturfers claim MS is the better one.
Google is a natural monopoly, looking at the capital costs of gathering all that data. I'm not seeing a cruddy OS, cruddy web browser, or a middle of the road office suite as being natural monopolies, given the evidence that it doesn't take too many people or too much time to do a better job. On the other hand, replicating google would be quite challenging.
Profit trumps every other concern without exception
Demand better bylaws. Non-profits and coops are not all evil. The govt already sticks their nose deeply into bylaws anyway, merely make it illegal to incorporate with the absolutely highest priority being profit. My "local" hospital is incorporated to provide the highest quality medical care they can provide. They still have crooked $1M/yr executives, its not all balloons and unicorns, but they're not as bad as some purely profit driven corporations.
I mean that isn't this the reason to incorporate, so that the person (human) is legally seperate from the company? Or is it just for tax purposes?
Usually (although it varies) small corporations spend more overall on taxes than sole proprietorship. I very specifically say "spend more overall" because the accounting and legal forms get kinda expensive, and there's a lot of tax inspired yet not directly tax payment related juggling revolving around salaries. When you add all accountant and lawyer and paperwork fees, corps probably pay more than any other form of ownership to keep the govt off their back, at least when they're small (less than 1000 employees, lets say)
Aside from the very important limited liability, it is also important for the small subset of companies that survive longer than a person, or at least if not survive long, have elderly owners. If Ford's son had to pay inheritance tax on the original model T plant... Most companies of course are not long lived.
If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
Voting merely requires living there and (in some states) not being a convicted felon. Plenty of illegals vote, no one cares. The puzzle is how to deal with non-national elections. If a corp is based in CT for tax purposes but all its real property is in WI (primary residence) then where does it vote? Even weirder, if the corporate agent lives in IL.
So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems?
Well that one is simple, the journalists whom made the whole thing up for the pageviews.
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
The aviation industry solved that by always blaming the pilot, whom coincidentally was dead. An unintended consequence would be the auto industry increasing their lethality so the driver always ends up dead, thus can take the blame.
Metalworking shops etc already carry hefty liability insurance. The social engineers in congress would have an interesting problem, as thats currently paid pre-tax but if individual worker had to buy first of all they'd be screwed to higher prices just like health insurance and secondly they'd be paying post tax money. So it would be quite a drag on the economy as a whole, although insurance companies would make more, and special interests love to donate to politicians, so I suspect its inevitable in the future...
I'm going to get flamed for this, but what the hell.
I've always thought that it is more important to get a server back up and operational as quickly as possible, then it is to keep the server down until you find the problem. Now don't get me wrong, you still need to find the ultimate problem, or at least find out if the problem is repeatable, and then find the answer to it.
So I'm in favour of any method that help me in getting the system back up and running; be it re-imaging or anything else.
Doesn't apply to anything that outputs reports to management. Any chance that you're giving them provably wrong data that dude gets shut down till fixed.
As VM's are virtualized and taking snapshots of them becomes so easy, why would you bother troubleshooting anything when you can just restore to a snap that is an hour old?
The security exploit that cracked the old image in less than a second, will crack the "identical" new image in less than a second. Or data sample #1213 which overflowed the buffer and crashed image A will simply overload and crash image B.
What it really brings up is a class distinction in sysadmins. Theres the guy whom actually fix systems, like patching security holes in system libraries to work around app bugs, redesigning firewall ACLs to avoid a new threat, do scalability assessments before the overload crashes something, and there are the guys that fix individual things like motherboards and hard drives, not administer systems, basically help desk people with the fancy sysadmin job title. Virtualization means the helpdesk board swappers with the cool job titles are outta here, but the real sysadmins have little if anything to fear.
The only problem is: enterprise application does not manage database very well, and leaves zombie processes on the database server. After a while, the database server just crashes (hard) and takes down the application server with it.
Did I mention the application... runs 24x7
So which is it, it crashes "often" enough to be a problem, or it never crashes ever?
The obvious solution is to reload it every day at the least inconvenient time.
If they will not "permit" a controlled reboot, then work around it by running health testing scripts that just happen to knock it out, sort of a euthanasia approach.
The next "solution" is a (caching?) sql proxy server in the middle, no one will notice if the reboot is fast.
Is the upgrade suggested by the admins themselves whom have tested it under load on a test server so they know it'll work, or suggested by the vendor dazzled by the vision of fat commission checks? "It'll work great, sure, it'll work great, great at paying for my sports car, yeah it'll work great"
Don't know where you're from, but when it's -20F outside it can get expensive to heat a house a few more notches.
I never really understood that. From an engineering standpoint I know the insulation / heat loss calcs only care about delta T. So raising the inside temperature 5 degrees costs about as much as lowering the outdoor temp 5 degrees.
You probably have no control over the outside air temp. Or do you?
The point I'm making is with some cheapskates, you raise the thermostat 5 degrees they act like you tried to knife them. But, if a 20 degrees colder than normal cold front passes thru, eh, who cares. Where I live 5 degrees outside air temp is about 50 miles north or south, so just move...
Crank up the heat 5 degrees, or move 50 miles south where its only -15F outside.
And here comes the problem in every study: choosing the right values/ways for assessment. I couldn't find what were the other seven choices the participants had to choose from, but this one OBVIOUSLY is a faulty one... Because the fact that you choose to get $16 tomorrow, doesn't mean that this decision is a bad one or an uncontrolled one... does it?
Its a much worse experimental design that you imply. You can come up onesie twosie examples where the intelligent decision is to avoid delayed gratification, how about asking the diabetic if they'd like a tiny bit of insulin today or a whole bunch next month. Obviously they'd die if they attempted delayed gratification so...
The horrific failure of their experimental design is heres some dude whos gotta go "now now right now I gotta go right now" then they ask him some long complicated thing (complicated for a guy whos gotta go, anyway) end in asking now or later, dude spent the entire time going "now now I gotta go now" says now and they say bzzzt thats wrong. Talk about inadvertently contaminating your results.
They also apparently skipped the whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I am no expert on it but I'm thinking "gotta go" might prioritize somewhat ahead of long term strategic planning.
Maybe he borrowed the money, so now he might owe $200k plus interest.
Those kind of amounts are discharged in bankruptcy every day, no big deal. Can anyone prove he was not planning on declaring all along? Makes you wonder if he REALLY doesn't know where the cash is. In fact sometimes the rules on chap 7 vs chap 11 mean you "save money by losing money" if you can get your net worth negative or low enough... Even better if you don't actually lose the money but its just stashed somewhere.
Now someone whom is stupid, would wire it across the country, then buy a plane ticket using their own credit card to the destination to collect it and fly back, but they would have to be really dumb to get caught like that.
Yes, I did have friends whom were cops. I have no idea if their stories are true or not, but they are certainly pretty interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you miss the point - isn't learning while having fun but doing something that is ultimately pointless what a good hobby should be?
I like Arduino. It is a fun hoppy - My example: I wanted to build a "big switch" interface for my special needs son.
Option one - a 3.5mm socket on a USB mouse
Option two - An Arduino with a bit bashing USB stack, emulating a USB keyboard.
Guess which works best? Option one - The mouse is always connected to the PC so I just plug the switch into the mouse and it works.
Guess which I learnt the most doing, and I had the most fun with, and maybe even feel proud of?
Ah exactly and perfectly true IF your hobby is learning to program an arduino. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with programming a MC as a hobby, I enjoyed my 68hc11 in ye olden days and modern PICs today.
But - If your hobby is the typical make magazine article of automating your fishtank feeder or monitoring your hamster cage wheel complete with a twitter interface, you're better off maximizing your efficiency, and doing it in about five lines of perl or ruby, not necessarily taking the long way around.
"big PC" stuff is like trying to interface to a USB webcam, complicated floating point calculations, exotic DSP...
Theoretically you can do that in "an 8-bit micro with 64 kB flash, a few k of on-chip RAM, a handful of I/O ports". After all that pretty well describes my home computer in the 80s and I / we did that kind of stuff. Well, maybe not well, and it was a heck of an expensive headache.
Hope it won't ruin your day to find out the Arduino IDE has a window you can open up to get text printouts from the code running on the Arduino...
Really, it's not 1985 any more :-)
Nice, instead of flashing an LED right before my interrupt routine returns, I could print it to the screen. Doesn't actually change development very much, but could occasionally be convenient...
A year or two, only if you drain and charge the battery daily.
You mean, use the device daily?
In excess of 10 hours per charge or, by your specs 10 hours per day? Really? That seems a wee bit ... excessive.
You really can watch multiple one hour TV shows on one charge, I've done it. And I'm talking about real hour long shows, like 55 minutes from the BBC, not "35 minutes after commercials are removed" American hour long shows.
Have you read the reviews of Flash on Android?... every review points out how it turns the entire experience to shit.
Speaking of that, installing flash is kind of like turning my basement into a septic tank for the entire municipal sewage system. Nobody really wants that, but we all have to listen to "that guy" going on and on about how real end users like my mom love the experience of finding diamond rings that accidentally get flushed, and the smell isn't really so bad once you get used to it, and its the most modern way of civil engineering so it must be the best way to do it.
OK they'll use it, and now my "zoom" screen refresh, instead of taking 10 ms, will take 5 ms. I was looking at more of a user interface perspective, will anyone notice?
I don't have much use for sports apps, so I have no experience with them. Do they stutter or freeze alot? You'd have to verify its not the network, I suppose.
After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery. Throw-away society I guess.
21 steps to battery replacement. Actually not bad. My 1st gen Mac Mini hard drive upgrade was something like 43 steps. And unlike the ipods, the ipad doesn't require soldering.
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-iPad-Wi-Fi-Battery-Replacement/2198/1
If you refuse to do it, thats OK, give me your "throw away" device with a dead battery, I'll replace the battery and either use it myself or sell it / give it away.
Apple hardware is generally superior to other consumer devices. The batteries do tend to last quite awhile. A year or two, only if you drain and charge the battery daily.
A big complaint about the first iPad was that it was uncomfortable to use as an eBook reader for long periods of time, the weight reduction and thinning while removing sharp edges out should help against that problem.
I don't think spending more engineering dollars is the solution to dollars spent for kindle astroturfers. I'd rather have it cheaper or longer battery life than thinner.
I wouldn't worry about that, it's not like the original is that slow or that many apps strain it.
Find me an app that strains it. I am not able to think of one at this time. I suppose xplane the flight simulator might come close but even that is a guess.
I mostly use mail, web browser (zoom etc is perfectly smooth), kindle reader, words w/ friends, that risk clone age of conquest. I played PvZ until it got boring.
I do have about 80 apps, its not like I never use any.
how the hardware works
If you are thinking of TTL schematics, don't worry (too much). You'll learn soon enough what tristate I/O ports are, open collector, phrases like that.
Worry about understanding internal devices and how to use them. Pick up any 16 bit PIC reference manual and see if you can figure out the code required to use the onboard timer device, or maybe read and write from the I2C port. Doesn't matter if you're planning to use the PIC, my point is I personally know that manual is pretty decent and pretty typical of what you're going to get, and pretty typical of difficulty.
Coding for MCs isn't like high level work on PCs, its more like coding multiple simple little device drivers and gluing them together. And the only debugger you're likely to have is maybe you wired an LED to blink when certain code executes.
If you like those "black box" games where you shoot a pool ball into a black box and it is emitted out another hole of the box, and you do that many times and then deduce the location of the bumpers inside, then you'll love the mental process of working on microcontrollers.
The Arduino platform has been described in many ways, but the best I have heard so far insightfully labels it 'The 555 of the future,' referring to the ubiquitous timer chip so many simple electronic projects make use of.
I always thought of the pic 10f222 as the 555 of the future, since it has the classic 8 pin pin form factor and costs "about the same".
And the AC above is wrong, the Arduino is the Clippy of CS not the Microsoft Bob of EE.
One piece of advice for people getting "into" microcontrollers, is its a narrow field and rapidly shrinking. Rather than trying to do "big PC" stuff with a herd of 8 bit pics in raw assembly, you should be using embedded industrial single board computer PCs. PC/104, kinda like the soekris boards but tougher. Don't spend enough cash on "microcontroller stuff" to purchase a PC/104 SBC.
By narrow, I mean if you want to turn on a LED when a switch closes, use a freaking dropping resistor and some wire, not a microcontroller. Or a SSR or old fashioned physical relay, or whatever. If you want to do anything "complicated" like more than a line or two of Perl, or anything video or DSPish, use an embedded PC running linux or an embedded RTOS. If you're trying to optimize the heck out of power consumption or price, you might be stuck microcontrolling but no one whom knows anything likes to do that for fun, certainly not as a one-off or prototype. The gap in between where a microcontroller is ideal is technologically small (even if economically big). Something like a dishwasher controller or a clothes dryer controller is just about right.
"This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy."
So either the scientists are lying, or the theory is wrong. Which is it? Pons? Fleischmann? Anyone?
Its journalist BS. Doesn't mean a hell of a lot. When does journalist BS mean anything?
Way back in 1874 Abbe figured out the theoretical limit of microscope resolution. Far field resolution with positive refractive index materials, that is. Thats all we had back then. Kind of like how the romans probably could have made silicon diodes, if only they had purer silicon...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Abbe
Abbe figured the resolution only depends on the wavelength of the light being viewed and the NA of the lense (numerical aperture)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Aperture
Its kind of like those theoretical thermodynamic limits. Not that its easy to even come close, but conventional physics says this is as far as you could dream of going...
For decades (centuries, really) they fooled with stranger and shorter light wavelengths, and continually optimized the material science of their lenses to get better NAs. Unfortunately they optimized themselves into quite a tight little local minimum. Recently they came up with some pretty far out material science. Also some pretty weird electromagnetics, trying to use nearfield instead of a farfield system.
They "broke all the rules", in journalist speak, much like a music band or a car body designer breaks all the rules, but that doesn't mean they can levitate or glow in the dark or something, it just means they tried something pretty far out. Unlike the car designers and musicians, the result of this foolishness is actually pretty cool and useful.
You could accurately compare near and far field work like conventional vs quantum mechanics in that a lot of what you "expect" from one, does not work in the other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanescent_wave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlens
Pretty much useless theoretical foolishness for a traditional microscope, right? Well it turns out by some trickery you can apply that kind of stuff after all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_resolution_microscopy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection_fluorescence_microscope
This article is not about a totally new area of science or something, just one particularly well done demonstration / experiment. Its some cool applied engineering, not new theoretical science. And I believe my little /. post is probably better and more informative than any mainstream media story will be about this topic.
I ask this as someone that has seen his wife bring up Google in the Firefox browser window to do a search when the Google search bar is right! frickin! there!
She probably used web browsers for awhile before search bars were "invented". I certainly did.
Its much more of a pain to delete your history in the search bar than just "X" a tab. Some things I search for are best forgotten, as best as possible, I guess.
It also annoys me that once I'm "done" with searching something, the search bar does not blank and I've gotta keep looking at something I'm done with. Poor UI. Its like not being allowed to kill a browser tab or not being allowed to delete an email. Boy that would be annoying. "well just don't look at it" "well just don't click it". No, I want it to go AWAY. Bye Bye. Blank.
Also windows users are used to having their toolbars hijacked by malware and psuedo-malware and otherwise F-ed with constantly, your media player changes your default search engine to bing, windows update change your default when upgrading MSIE, at least historically. If you share a PC or a browser, even temporarily, who knows how they've (mis)configured it, so you have to manually go to your favorite engine. One thing for sure, if you are stuck with windows and you want to go to google you probably can't use the google search bar. So they simply don't depend upon nor use them, they're just unusable visual noise.
By definition, Microsoft isn't a monopoly. They aren't the only operating system in town, they just happen to be the most successful with a vast majority of the market share. That's not because they are erecting large barriers to entry, it's just because the other operating systems aren't as smart as theirs.
See what I did there?
I think you may have missed this entire wikipedia article mostly about microsoft, most of which google is not guilty of. Neither are pure saints or pure sinners, but one is certainly way worse than the other, and only the astroturfers claim MS is the better one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices
Google is a natural monopoly, looking at the capital costs of gathering all that data. I'm not seeing a cruddy OS, cruddy web browser, or a middle of the road office suite as being natural monopolies, given the evidence that it doesn't take too many people or too much time to do a better job. On the other hand, replicating google would be quite challenging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Profit trumps every other concern without exception
Demand better bylaws. Non-profits and coops are not all evil. The govt already sticks their nose deeply into bylaws anyway, merely make it illegal to incorporate with the absolutely highest priority being profit. My "local" hospital is incorporated to provide the highest quality medical care they can provide. They still have crooked $1M/yr executives, its not all balloons and unicorns, but they're not as bad as some purely profit driven corporations.
I mean that isn't this the reason to incorporate, so that the person (human) is legally seperate from the company? Or is it just for tax purposes?
Usually (although it varies) small corporations spend more overall on taxes than sole proprietorship. I very specifically say "spend more overall" because the accounting and legal forms get kinda expensive, and there's a lot of tax inspired yet not directly tax payment related juggling revolving around salaries. When you add all accountant and lawyer and paperwork fees, corps probably pay more than any other form of ownership to keep the govt off their back, at least when they're small (less than 1000 employees, lets say)
Aside from the very important limited liability, it is also important for the small subset of companies that survive longer than a person, or at least if not survive long, have elderly owners. If Ford's son had to pay inheritance tax on the original model T plant... Most companies of course are not long lived.
If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
Voting merely requires living there and (in some states) not being a convicted felon. Plenty of illegals vote, no one cares. The puzzle is how to deal with non-national elections. If a corp is based in CT for tax purposes but all its real property is in WI (primary residence) then where does it vote? Even weirder, if the corporate agent lives in IL.
So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems?
Well that one is simple, the journalists whom made the whole thing up for the pageviews.
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
The aviation industry solved that by always blaming the pilot, whom coincidentally was dead. An unintended consequence would be the auto industry increasing their lethality so the driver always ends up dead, thus can take the blame.
Metalworking shops etc already carry hefty liability insurance. The social engineers in congress would have an interesting problem, as thats currently paid pre-tax but if individual worker had to buy first of all they'd be screwed to higher prices just like health insurance and secondly they'd be paying post tax money. So it would be quite a drag on the economy as a whole, although insurance companies would make more, and special interests love to donate to politicians, so I suspect its inevitable in the future...
I'm going to get flamed for this, but what the hell.
I've always thought that it is more important to get a server back up and operational as quickly as possible, then it is to keep the server down until you find the problem. Now don't get me wrong, you still need to find the ultimate problem, or at least find out if the problem is repeatable, and then find the answer to it.
So I'm in favour of any method that help me in getting the system back up and running; be it re-imaging or anything else.
Doesn't apply to anything that outputs reports to management. Any chance that you're giving them provably wrong data that dude gets shut down till fixed.
As VM's are virtualized and taking snapshots of them becomes so easy, why would you bother troubleshooting anything when you can just restore to a snap that is an hour old?
The security exploit that cracked the old image in less than a second, will crack the "identical" new image in less than a second. Or data sample #1213 which overflowed the buffer and crashed image A will simply overload and crash image B.
What it really brings up is a class distinction in sysadmins. Theres the guy whom actually fix systems, like patching security holes in system libraries to work around app bugs, redesigning firewall ACLs to avoid a new threat, do scalability assessments before the overload crashes something, and there are the guys that fix individual things like motherboards and hard drives, not administer systems, basically help desk people with the fancy sysadmin job title. Virtualization means the helpdesk board swappers with the cool job titles are outta here, but the real sysadmins have little if anything to fear.
The only problem is: enterprise application does not manage database very well, and leaves zombie processes on the database server. After a while, the database server just crashes (hard) and takes down the application server with it.
Did I mention the application ... runs 24x7
So which is it, it crashes "often" enough to be a problem, or it never crashes ever?
The obvious solution is to reload it every day at the least inconvenient time.
If they will not "permit" a controlled reboot, then work around it by running health testing scripts that just happen to knock it out, sort of a euthanasia approach.
The next "solution" is a (caching?) sql proxy server in the middle, no one will notice if the reboot is fast.
Is the upgrade suggested by the admins themselves whom have tested it under load on a test server so they know it'll work, or suggested by the vendor dazzled by the vision of fat commission checks? "It'll work great, sure, it'll work great, great at paying for my sports car, yeah it'll work great"
Don't know where you're from, but when it's -20F outside it can get expensive to heat a house a few more notches.
I never really understood that. From an engineering standpoint I know the insulation / heat loss calcs only care about delta T. So raising the inside temperature 5 degrees costs about as much as lowering the outdoor temp 5 degrees.
You probably have no control over the outside air temp. Or do you?
The point I'm making is with some cheapskates, you raise the thermostat 5 degrees they act like you tried to knife them. But, if a 20 degrees colder than normal cold front passes thru, eh, who cares. Where I live 5 degrees outside air temp is about 50 miles north or south, so just move...
Crank up the heat 5 degrees, or move 50 miles south where its only -15F outside.
And here comes the problem in every study: choosing the right values/ways for assessment. I couldn't find what were the other seven choices the participants had to choose from, but this one OBVIOUSLY is a faulty one... Because the fact that you choose to get $16 tomorrow, doesn't mean that this decision is a bad one or an uncontrolled one... does it?
Its a much worse experimental design that you imply. You can come up onesie twosie examples where the intelligent decision is to avoid delayed gratification, how about asking the diabetic if they'd like a tiny bit of insulin today or a whole bunch next month. Obviously they'd die if they attempted delayed gratification so...
The horrific failure of their experimental design is heres some dude whos gotta go "now now right now I gotta go right now" then they ask him some long complicated thing (complicated for a guy whos gotta go, anyway) end in asking now or later, dude spent the entire time going "now now I gotta go now" says now and they say bzzzt thats wrong. Talk about inadvertently contaminating your results.
They also apparently skipped the whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I am no expert on it but I'm thinking "gotta go" might prioritize somewhat ahead of long term strategic planning.
II stole some of my grandpa's catheters and my buddy and me, ..err installed them on our selves. .... especially the UTI that I got from it..
Next time, steal new, unused ones.
Maybe he borrowed the money, so now he might owe $200k plus interest.
Those kind of amounts are discharged in bankruptcy every day, no big deal. Can anyone prove he was not planning on declaring all along? Makes you wonder if he REALLY doesn't know where the cash is. In fact sometimes the rules on chap 7 vs chap 11 mean you "save money by losing money" if you can get your net worth negative or low enough... Even better if you don't actually lose the money but its just stashed somewhere.
Now someone whom is stupid, would wire it across the country, then buy a plane ticket using their own credit card to the destination to collect it and fly back, but they would have to be really dumb to get caught like that.
Yes, I did have friends whom were cops. I have no idea if their stories are true or not, but they are certainly pretty interesting.