Honestly, if somebody ever got annoyed at me for not fixing a bug on a schedule that conflicted with my priorities without even offering to compensate me, I'd tell them to shove it. That's not a threat, that's an opportunity to educate them on the value of my time and how little of a !#$% I give about their whining.
Sure, there's some nights I'm just sitting around watching TV and being useless, but those nights are much rarer than they used to be. If they'd like to re-prioritize an evening or two of my time, they can drag out the checkbook. Otherwise, I'll address their concern when I get around to it. My feelings aren't hurt if they want to switch to some other project as a result, because I understand the cost of converting and then hoping the guy over there is more agreeable than I am...
There's a line between intentional sabotage - aka telling them to delete the working filesystem - and induced incompetence.
I worked for a small company many years ago (as in about 20 years ago, during college). First there were pay cuts, then paychecks started to be late, and eventually creditors started showing up... So basically I knew I was screwed, but I figured if I quit, there was no chance at unemployment. Let's just say anything done in that last month wasn't exactly quick or robust. The firmware written in those last days pretty much skipped any error checking, met only the barest of requirements, had total crap for comments, etc. Plus, half the time I was sitting there, the programmer/debugger was hooked to one of my projects rather than theirs. As long as there was code on the screen and I was cursing at some board, nobody still there could tell if I was working on their stuff or mine.
Showed up one day to a locked door and the place cleaned out. My old boss - the owner - called me one day when he tried to sell the technology to another company. Couldn't make it work for the demo and wanted my help. Since I hadn't seen more than 25% of my pay in the last three months, I offered to help for some additional compensation up front. Went in, screwed around for two or three hours, and then declared that something must have gotten fried or jostled when they hastily packed up the place and fled in the night. Basically, unfixable, sorry, and if you want me to repair the hardware it's going to cost a lot more.
The real answer is that if you want code to run, you should probably burn it onto the EEPROMs before putting them in the product. But hey, with little financial incentives, there's virtually no end to the problems I can't solve.
Better yet - run the new guys around in circles for a while before coming to the, "Huh, well I guess I really don't remember how that works..." It only requires you to make yourself available, not to make yourself helpful. Maybe it's just because I enjoy !#@$ing with my enemies.
I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I've come to the conclusion that this is really how America ends. Wallowing in its own stupidity, locked down by the authorities because we're afraid of everything we don't understand (which is everything, due to ignorance), and decrying any interest in something other than pop culture as suspicious.
When I was a kid some forty years ago, it was still possible to learn, make, see, and do things without nine layers of security clearances and being met with "you can't do X because terrorists/drugs" at every turn. Now, the only reasonable explanation for why you're interested in something is because you do it for work. And because some company makes you do it for money, now it's suddenly okay. Building anything with wires sticking out that beeps? Terrorist.
Learning chemistry at home? Terrorist or maybe the next Walter White. Interest in trucks/trains/planes and not a truck driver/engineer/pilot? Terrorist. Interested in power generation/distribution but not a power EE? Terrorist. Interested in computer security research? Cyberterrorist! Aiieeee! I could go on and on and on here...
Hey wait a minute - you know how most of the good people in those fields got there? Because it's what interested them before they did it as a job. In the past, there were always ways to learn about these things, particularly as a kid. Folks willing to show you around, show you what they did, explain how things worked, and sometimes let you help. I can't tell you the number of things I got to try out as a kid that would now get somebody fired and probably grilled by some three letter agency. But it's because of those experiences that I'm a successful electrical engineer today who loves it as both his profession and passion. I didn't just pick a job off the list, say "that looks good and pays well", and then decide to spend my life doing it. The folks I know who did that have already washed out and gone looking for something they enjoy more.
The next generation is boned. Their curiosity about things is being actively destroyed when its met with suspicion and investigation rather than encouragement or better - "Ssh, don't tell anybody, but put this hard hat on and come with me..." This is just one example.
Yeah, there's definitely a racist problem here as well (it *IS* Texas, folks...), but I think focusing on that is missing the real point. It's not just non-white kids. The powers that be have taught us to regard everything with suspicion rather than curiosity. Yet I ask you - how many kids have you seen today who are terrorists vs. how many have you seen who need to learn about the world and figure out what they want to do with their lives?
First, I've been a model railroader and general railfan for most of my 38 years. I took a bit of a break from modeling myself during my 20s on account of wife / career / etc, but during the whole time I was working on other layouts. I dug back in with a passion about four years ago, ripped out the abortive start of a layout from a decade prior, and started construction of a new layout. I'm an N scaler myself, but most of the other layouts I work on or operate on are HO or O.
Model Railroader is good for beginners. Also be sure to check out Model Railroad Hobbyist, which is a free (er, advertiser-funded) online model railroad magazine. It's aimed a bit more at experienced modelers, but there's still lots of layout tours and the like in there that will be of interest and inspiration. Besides, the price is right to try it out.
One thing you'll start to figure out fairly quickly is what interests you and what doesn't, and that will start to steer you towards certain things. Some of us are interested in exactly replicating some prototype area and railroad down to the most minute detail, whereas some are more interested in just running trains through fantastic scenery that is purely a work of imagination. There are segments of the hobby who enjoy scenery, others that are fascinated with equipment or structure modeling, some that like to create accurate operating practices, and some that really like control systems.
My starting recommendations would be:
- Just get something running so that you can start figuring out what you like and what you don't, with the full anticipation that it'll be temporary. If you start too big of a project on your first try, you'll lose interest before you get enough of the pieces together to make it run smoothly.
- Go find a local show and see what others are doing
- Talk to your relative and learn from him, particularly if he's a relative you like. (And, well, skip this if he's equivalent to my weird uncle Gary.)
If you're interested in the controls side, there's a decent DIY electronics community within the hobby. Two Yahoo email groups I'd recommend are mrrelectronics (general MRR electronics) and Arduini (focused on Arduinos in model railroading). There's Digitrax's Loconet, CMRI, the NMRA's new LCC standard, and a couple dozen other ways to connect a layout to the computer. Then there's things like JMRI, which you've already found, which are great for linking everything together.
I'm okay with the warning/enable system in FF, but I really wish they'd add a global button of "yeah yeah, fuck off and enable it because I said so and I'll take the risk" for when I really need to get stuff done and I'm tired of having to click on the flash box on every damned site.
Honestly, as a last resort, it's not a bad idea. I have a fair amount of ESD test gear at work, including a bunch of static discharge guns and the like that can be dialed up to some crazy levels. I was once stuck in a situation much as you - they controlled the modem/router and it was crapping out every few hours, and they were the only game in town for non-dialup access (this was 15ish years ago). I'd already replaced it with a spare that did not have the issue, but since it wasn't provisioned, the only place I could go was their internal pages.
I spent probably two hours going through L1 support, L2 support, and then had them tell me that "oh, sometimes the boxes just do that". So I took the box to work, fried the shit out of it, plugged it back in to let it power up and do real damage to itself now that half the fet gates were probably cooked, and then called them back to tell them that the box had finally crapped out and started smoking. They promptly sent me a new one, and told me "must have been lightning or some sort of power surge."
Leaks and corrosion isn't "fail catastrophically", and typically happens after the battery has been dead for some time and the seals fail. Taking them to zero wasn't the problem - not removing them after they were dead was where the problems started. Many rechargable lithium chemistries, however, will generate oxygen and/or pure metal in bad places if excessively discharged (or charged), which then can translate into burning and toxic gases. Now that's catastrophic.
Yeah, the 1.35 or 1.4 number is total bull$#@!. Almost everything these days will run on the 1.1-1.2 of NiMH, as you point out. Even at that point, the remaining energy in a common alkaline (manganese dioxide) AA cell is nowhere near 80%. Alkaline goes "over the cliff" - the sharp point at the end of the discharge curve where there's no energy left and the voltage plummets - at about 0.8-0.9V. Even at 1.1V, there's only about 10% of the energy capacity left for a typical alkaline.
Look up "alkaline discharge curve" pretty much anywhere. Typically these will plot output voltage on the Y axis and amp-hours on the X axis. The energy remaining is the area under the curve to the right of where you're looking (because energy is measured in watt-hours, and voltage * amp-hours remaining is watt-hours). As you extract more energy (move right on the X), your voltage drops. When you hit a certain point... boom! straight to the floor.
Most battery powered devices these days either have a switching regulator that deals with this issue, or they use a low quiescent current, low dropout regulator and a big enough battery stack that can keep the supply rail where it needs to be until the batteries hit their dead point. While not strictly a scam, it won't do much good in most modern devices (and will actually decrease performance in well-designed ones, as I'm sure the switcher in these has a non-zero quiescent current, and an efficiency below 100%).
Carbon-zinc and alkaline (MnO2) batteries will go to complete discharge without any danger. You're thinking of various rechargeable chemistries that either suffer loss of capacity from excess discharge (Pb Acid, NiCd, NiMH, etc.) or have the potential to fail horribly (lithium chemistries).
Lithium AAs, while they exist, are fairly rare and not the same chemistry as the rechargables. As far as I know, there's no danger in taking them all the way to dead either.
I couldn't agree more. I'd so much rather deal with a company with a sense of humor and personality than some monolithic blob of an entity that's all business all the time.
Actually a friend of mine used to have just such a car. This was back in the 1990s, so I don't remember the exact make and model. We never realized that until we had to remove one of the interior door panels one day, and on the inside of the door panel was written "Last XYZ built 1988" (I may be off on the year) and then there were a whole bunch of signatures, presumably the guys who built it. Very cool.
If you're designing security critical stuff, then yes, by all means either avoid the eggs or make sure they're really as absolutely hardened and harmless as possible. However, lots of software exists outside this environment. Easter eggs are fun. They're officially against policy where I work, but more than once we've added one in. Usually with tacit management approval. Basically don't do anything stupid. The day stuff like that goes away, we're just more plug compatible programming drones rather than creative professionals with a quirky side. And that's the day I leave the industry, because the fun of it is gone.
Nuclear power but government owned and controlled and publicly audited
Yeah, because government institutions are always so much more competent and trustworthy than large corporations. Lemme see - post office, DMV, CIA/NSA... Shining examples of what can be done by government, but in wholly different ways. I'll also say corporations are no better. The US federal government is little more than an extremely large corporation with a guaranteed revenue stream and all the evils that go with that.
The correct answer - no matter who is in charge - is first and foremost proper, safety conscious engineering, and then followed up with a culture of accountability and transparency *to everyone*. That means that there aren't reports that are "secret" because of some security theater. Everybody sees it, everybody knows what's going on.
Yeah, well, we didn't call him Governor Braindead for nothing. I still would rather have him there than some of his immediate predecessors. Seems to be able to run my home state without completely screwing things up.
As someone who will lose his father in the next couple years, there aren't enough mod points in the world for the parent comment. Go do things together. The memories of doing stuff together are more valuable than any amount of messages he could leave me. I've watched his health decline steadily for the last five years, knowing that eventually it would kill him (and since it's genetic and I'm also a carrier, it'll kill me in about thirty years as well), and I've realized that I wouldn't trade the memories - vacations, fishing, hell, even building fences - for anything. I live about a thousand miles from my parents at this point, but I still make an effort to talk to them at least once a week and spend a few days with them every month or two. His breathing has now gotten bad enough that he can't travel, so I'm glad we did so much while he was able to get out and do things.
I'd spend time with her now while you're still in good condition and able to do so. The months of watching you get worse are going to be very hard for her, and the memories will be worth their weight in gold. Don't delay until you're too sick to make it happen.
If you want to leave her with a few thoughts, I'd write a letter or two. Those will be far more durable than any digital form, and will be a tangible object to tie the memories back to.
I'm like you - started with X10 stuff and went to Insteon about five years ago.
My big thing is that my house was wired by idiots, and the switches aren't ever where you'd want them. Hell, the ceiling lights and fans in the bedrooms aren't even on the same circuit as the wall switch. (The wall switch used to feed a switched outlet, as the house was built without ceiling lights in the bedrooms.) Much of the split-level house is such that you're stumbling up or down stairs in the dark before you get to the switch you need. The ability to control a bunch of stuff from a single keypad at each room entrance was the one overriding feature. It's awesome, and I couldn't be happier with it.
My ex-wife never had any issue with the system (and in fact, actually installed a good chunk of it, being a fellow engineer). My current girlfriend, who is significantly less technically inclined, figured it out in about ten seconds with no explanation. But that's because it doesn't require web browsers or smart phones or other crap - everything you need is right there, right beside the door where you need to interact with it. Oh, and it's got labels, and lights up in the dark, so...
A few thoughts: - One downside is that I had an entire generation of Keypadlincs go bad after about 3-4 years. All v5.x units, all killed in the course of a few weeks (power quality issues). Had six of them, so there's a chunk of change. Ouch. I found it interesting it only affected the 5.x units, however. Everything from earlier and later generations survived just fine. - Insteon is unmanagable without an ISY-99 or 994. It just is. Best money I ever spent - now I just fire up a java app and can reconfigure anything I need in a few minutes. - It's proprietary. If Smarthome ever goes under, I get to start over.
The rest of my automation is mostly telemetry. Temperature, leak monitoring, furnace monitoring, security cameras, etc. It's almost entirely based on embedded Linux boxes (RPis and older hacked Seagate Dockstars) scattered around, feeding data back to a central house server that then monitors things.
Don't worry, after the parent poster fires you, come work for me. I'm of the same opinion you are - it's often the easiest and cleanest way to run a block of cleanup code. Plus, it doesn't create a crapton of nested functions and conditional tests, which can be a real issue in space-constrained platforms (8 bit micros, anyone?) I like people who aren't afraid of things they've been told are "bad" without at least considering if they have a possible use, and what the real dangers are. Sure, I'd expect there to be more than "return rv" in there, otherwise you should just be throwing returns in your main code, but still...
My lighting system is all Insteon based. Even if it is proprietary (ugh), it does actually work as advertised. Everything except the Keypadlincs has been bulletproof, but some of the earlier KPLs have been less than reliable. Due to recent power spikes, I've lost the last of them, and the new 7.x models seem to be lasting without issue. Do not try to manage any Insteon network of decent size without an ISY994, however. You'll go mad. Plus, the ISY provides an easy way to script behaviours.
The rest of the house is controlled and monitored through small embedded computers tied to cameras, temp/humidity sensors, or other hardware via USB/Arduino/etc. I say "small embedded computers" because the old ones are hacked Dockstars, but as those die (and they do), they've been replaced with Raspberry Pis. The children all call back to a main control computer every 10-15 seconds, uploading an image and telemetry data via scp/ssh. That main computer then makes it accessible to the world via a mass of PHP.
I'm not a manager-manager, but I am a technical manager and - at the end of the day - basically the guy who gets the hiring decision whenever I need more people.
I don't care about what you know beyond the basics, and I also don't care where (or if) you went to college or that your degree is even slightly related to what we're doing. The things I look for are that you have some talent with system design, architecture and programming, a passion for technology (aka, it's not just a 9-5 job thing, but you eat, live, and breathe it), and the capability to go learn and figure things out on your own. Along with the third thing, a general, broad set of knowledge is good, but as long as you can use Google or books or experiments to figure things out, I'm okay. I'd much rather you be able to learn and adapt.
You'd be amazed how many people fail at least #3. I don't want to hand-hold you or have to spoon feed you answers. Don't know? Go look it up. Go try something. Just don't come over and ask for help right away. If you've gotten stuck somewhere, I'll help, but you damn well better have beaten your head against the wall for a few hours/days/weeks (depending on problem complexity) before asking.
For me, I just like wired ethernet better. Overall, simpler to configure, use, secure, and manage, and you can't beat gigabit links for bandwidth/$. I have 802.11n, but pretty much all it does is allow the laptops, tablets, and phones onto the network. The MythTV frontends, desktop machines, and home automation/telemetry bits are all hard-wired. I also keep all my data on a central fileserver in the basement, so having gigabit links from the desktop machines (and laptops when I plug them in) really makes working with large datasets significantly faster.
As for my setup, it's really rather unimpressive from any datacenter standpoint.
Upstairs closet:
- Wireless AP (802.11n) and NAT box (TP Link WDR4300 running OpenWRT)
- Cable modem
- Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves 3rd and 2nd floor ports, dual fiber links to downstairs switch)
- UPS
Basement closet:
- Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves basement, and 1st floor ports, dual fiber links to upstairs switch, dual fiber to backup fileserver in detached garage)
- House fileserver
- MythTV/home automation/voip/webserver box
- Tuners (HDHomeRun and DirecTV gear + HD-PVRs),
- ISY-99 Insteon gateway
- UPS
15 years and counting for me - not just same company, but same position. The title changes and I get promoted every couple years, but it's the same PCN doing basically the same thing.
I'm basically the technical management of a development group at a large transportation company. The technical part of my department isn't really all that bad. The challenge is knowing the business and all the weird, intricate little nuances of both our clients and how the actual business operates. I figure it takes 18 months to make a newbie a net positive in the group. I rarely hire because typically we focus on getting people who are going to stick around. It's just too costly to productivity to have short timers around. It's also how I've successfully fended off "well, can't you just outsource some of this extra work?" If I'm looking through resumes and see you only stay at similar jobs for 2-3 years, I'm not even going to read the rest of it. I assume that candidate is going to suck up all the resources to get him/her trained and then move along before they've contributed as much back. I'd much rather have someone that shows they're on the track to becoming a greybeard. You know - the guy who has been there forever to become an uberguru, and sits in the corner and says little, but when he does you should probably take it as if it were handed down on stone tablets.
Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, if somebody ever got annoyed at me for not fixing a bug on a schedule that conflicted with my priorities without even offering to compensate me, I'd tell them to shove it. That's not a threat, that's an opportunity to educate them on the value of my time and how little of a !#$% I give about their whining.
Sure, there's some nights I'm just sitting around watching TV and being useless, but those nights are much rarer than they used to be. If they'd like to re-prioritize an evening or two of my time, they can drag out the checkbook. Otherwise, I'll address their concern when I get around to it. My feelings aren't hurt if they want to switch to some other project as a result, because I understand the cost of converting and then hoping the guy over there is more agreeable than I am...
There's a line between intentional sabotage - aka telling them to delete the working filesystem - and induced incompetence.
I worked for a small company many years ago (as in about 20 years ago, during college). First there were pay cuts, then paychecks started to be late, and eventually creditors started showing up... So basically I knew I was screwed, but I figured if I quit, there was no chance at unemployment. Let's just say anything done in that last month wasn't exactly quick or robust. The firmware written in those last days pretty much skipped any error checking, met only the barest of requirements, had total crap for comments, etc. Plus, half the time I was sitting there, the programmer/debugger was hooked to one of my projects rather than theirs. As long as there was code on the screen and I was cursing at some board, nobody still there could tell if I was working on their stuff or mine.
Showed up one day to a locked door and the place cleaned out. My old boss - the owner - called me one day when he tried to sell the technology to another company. Couldn't make it work for the demo and wanted my help. Since I hadn't seen more than 25% of my pay in the last three months, I offered to help for some additional compensation up front. Went in, screwed around for two or three hours, and then declared that something must have gotten fried or jostled when they hastily packed up the place and fled in the night. Basically, unfixable, sorry, and if you want me to repair the hardware it's going to cost a lot more.
The real answer is that if you want code to run, you should probably burn it onto the EEPROMs before putting them in the product. But hey, with little financial incentives, there's virtually no end to the problems I can't solve.
Better yet - run the new guys around in circles for a while before coming to the, "Huh, well I guess I really don't remember how that works..." It only requires you to make yourself available, not to make yourself helpful. Maybe it's just because I enjoy !#@$ing with my enemies.
I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I've come to the conclusion that this is really how America ends. Wallowing in its own stupidity, locked down by the authorities because we're afraid of everything we don't understand (which is everything, due to ignorance), and decrying any interest in something other than pop culture as suspicious.
When I was a kid some forty years ago, it was still possible to learn, make, see, and do things without nine layers of security clearances and being met with "you can't do X because terrorists/drugs" at every turn. Now, the only reasonable explanation for why you're interested in something is because you do it for work. And because some company makes you do it for money, now it's suddenly okay. Building anything with wires sticking out that beeps? Terrorist.
Learning chemistry at home? Terrorist or maybe the next Walter White. Interest in trucks/trains/planes and not a truck driver/engineer/pilot? Terrorist. Interested in power generation/distribution but not a power EE? Terrorist. Interested in computer security research? Cyberterrorist! Aiieeee! I could go on and on and on here...
Hey wait a minute - you know how most of the good people in those fields got there? Because it's what interested them before they did it as a job. In the past, there were always ways to learn about these things, particularly as a kid. Folks willing to show you around, show you what they did, explain how things worked, and sometimes let you help. I can't tell you the number of things I got to try out as a kid that would now get somebody fired and probably grilled by some three letter agency. But it's because of those experiences that I'm a successful electrical engineer today who loves it as both his profession and passion. I didn't just pick a job off the list, say "that looks good and pays well", and then decide to spend my life doing it. The folks I know who did that have already washed out and gone looking for something they enjoy more.
The next generation is boned. Their curiosity about things is being actively destroyed when its met with suspicion and investigation rather than encouragement or better - "Ssh, don't tell anybody, but put this hard hat on and come with me..." This is just one example.
Yeah, there's definitely a racist problem here as well (it *IS* Texas, folks...), but I think focusing on that is missing the real point. It's not just non-white kids. The powers that be have taught us to regard everything with suspicion rather than curiosity. Yet I ask you - how many kids have you seen today who are terrorists vs. how many have you seen who need to learn about the world and figure out what they want to do with their lives?
First, I've been a model railroader and general railfan for most of my 38 years. I took a bit of a break from modeling myself during my 20s on account of wife / career / etc, but during the whole time I was working on other layouts. I dug back in with a passion about four years ago, ripped out the abortive start of a layout from a decade prior, and started construction of a new layout. I'm an N scaler myself, but most of the other layouts I work on or operate on are HO or O.
Model Railroader is good for beginners. Also be sure to check out Model Railroad Hobbyist, which is a free (er, advertiser-funded) online model railroad magazine. It's aimed a bit more at experienced modelers, but there's still lots of layout tours and the like in there that will be of interest and inspiration. Besides, the price is right to try it out.
One thing you'll start to figure out fairly quickly is what interests you and what doesn't, and that will start to steer you towards certain things. Some of us are interested in exactly replicating some prototype area and railroad down to the most minute detail, whereas some are more interested in just running trains through fantastic scenery that is purely a work of imagination. There are segments of the hobby who enjoy scenery, others that are fascinated with equipment or structure modeling, some that like to create accurate operating practices, and some that really like control systems.
My starting recommendations would be:
- Just get something running so that you can start figuring out what you like and what you don't, with the full anticipation that it'll be temporary. If you start too big of a project on your first try, you'll lose interest before you get enough of the pieces together to make it run smoothly.
- Go find a local show and see what others are doing
- Talk to your relative and learn from him, particularly if he's a relative you like. (And, well, skip this if he's equivalent to my weird uncle Gary.)
If you're interested in the controls side, there's a decent DIY electronics community within the hobby. Two Yahoo email groups I'd recommend are mrrelectronics (general MRR electronics) and Arduini (focused on Arduinos in model railroading). There's Digitrax's Loconet, CMRI, the NMRA's new LCC standard, and a couple dozen other ways to connect a layout to the computer. Then there's things like JMRI, which you've already found, which are great for linking everything together.
I'm okay with the warning/enable system in FF, but I really wish they'd add a global button of "yeah yeah, fuck off and enable it because I said so and I'll take the risk" for when I really need to get stuff done and I'm tired of having to click on the flash box on every damned site.
Honestly, as a last resort, it's not a bad idea. I have a fair amount of ESD test gear at work, including a bunch of static discharge guns and the like that can be dialed up to some crazy levels. I was once stuck in a situation much as you - they controlled the modem/router and it was crapping out every few hours, and they were the only game in town for non-dialup access (this was 15ish years ago). I'd already replaced it with a spare that did not have the issue, but since it wasn't provisioned, the only place I could go was their internal pages.
I spent probably two hours going through L1 support, L2 support, and then had them tell me that "oh, sometimes the boxes just do that". So I took the box to work, fried the shit out of it, plugged it back in to let it power up and do real damage to itself now that half the fet gates were probably cooked, and then called them back to tell them that the box had finally crapped out and started smoking. They promptly sent me a new one, and told me "must have been lightning or some sort of power surge."
Yup, a power surge indeed.
Leaks and corrosion isn't "fail catastrophically", and typically happens after the battery has been dead for some time and the seals fail. Taking them to zero wasn't the problem - not removing them after they were dead was where the problems started. Many rechargable lithium chemistries, however, will generate oxygen and/or pure metal in bad places if excessively discharged (or charged), which then can translate into burning and toxic gases. Now that's catastrophic.
Yeah, the 1.35 or 1.4 number is total bull$#@!. Almost everything these days will run on the 1.1-1.2 of NiMH, as you point out. Even at that point, the remaining energy in a common alkaline (manganese dioxide) AA cell is nowhere near 80%. Alkaline goes "over the cliff" - the sharp point at the end of the discharge curve where there's no energy left and the voltage plummets - at about 0.8-0.9V. Even at 1.1V, there's only about 10% of the energy capacity left for a typical alkaline.
Look up "alkaline discharge curve" pretty much anywhere. Typically these will plot output voltage on the Y axis and amp-hours on the X axis. The energy remaining is the area under the curve to the right of where you're looking (because energy is measured in watt-hours, and voltage * amp-hours remaining is watt-hours). As you extract more energy (move right on the X), your voltage drops. When you hit a certain point... boom! straight to the floor.
Most battery powered devices these days either have a switching regulator that deals with this issue, or they use a low quiescent current, low dropout regulator and a big enough battery stack that can keep the supply rail where it needs to be until the batteries hit their dead point. While not strictly a scam, it won't do much good in most modern devices (and will actually decrease performance in well-designed ones, as I'm sure the switcher in these has a non-zero quiescent current, and an efficiency below 100%).
Carbon-zinc and alkaline (MnO2) batteries will go to complete discharge without any danger. You're thinking of various rechargeable chemistries that either suffer loss of capacity from excess discharge (Pb Acid, NiCd, NiMH, etc.) or have the potential to fail horribly (lithium chemistries).
Lithium AAs, while they exist, are fairly rare and not the same chemistry as the rechargables. As far as I know, there's no danger in taking them all the way to dead either.
...have no sense of humor that they're aware of, anyway. I personally find them quite amusing from time to time.
I couldn't agree more. I'd so much rather deal with a company with a sense of humor and personality than some monolithic blob of an entity that's all business all the time.
Actually a friend of mine used to have just such a car. This was back in the 1990s, so I don't remember the exact make and model. We never realized that until we had to remove one of the interior door panels one day, and on the inside of the door panel was written "Last XYZ built 1988" (I may be off on the year) and then there were a whole bunch of signatures, presumably the guys who built it. Very cool.
If you're designing security critical stuff, then yes, by all means either avoid the eggs or make sure they're really as absolutely hardened and harmless as possible. However, lots of software exists outside this environment. Easter eggs are fun. They're officially against policy where I work, but more than once we've added one in. Usually with tacit management approval. Basically don't do anything stupid. The day stuff like that goes away, we're just more plug compatible programming drones rather than creative professionals with a quirky side. And that's the day I leave the industry, because the fun of it is gone.
Nuclear power but government owned and controlled and publicly audited
Yeah, because government institutions are always so much more competent and trustworthy than large corporations. Lemme see - post office, DMV, CIA/NSA... Shining examples of what can be done by government, but in wholly different ways. I'll also say corporations are no better. The US federal government is little more than an extremely large corporation with a guaranteed revenue stream and all the evils that go with that.
The correct answer - no matter who is in charge - is first and foremost proper, safety conscious engineering, and then followed up with a culture of accountability and transparency *to everyone*. That means that there aren't reports that are "secret" because of some security theater. Everybody sees it, everybody knows what's going on.
Yeah, well, we didn't call him Governor Braindead for nothing. I still would rather have him there than some of his immediate predecessors. Seems to be able to run my home state without completely screwing things up.
As someone who will lose his father in the next couple years, there aren't enough mod points in the world for the parent comment. Go do things together. The memories of doing stuff together are more valuable than any amount of messages he could leave me. I've watched his health decline steadily for the last five years, knowing that eventually it would kill him (and since it's genetic and I'm also a carrier, it'll kill me in about thirty years as well), and I've realized that I wouldn't trade the memories - vacations, fishing, hell, even building fences - for anything. I live about a thousand miles from my parents at this point, but I still make an effort to talk to them at least once a week and spend a few days with them every month or two. His breathing has now gotten bad enough that he can't travel, so I'm glad we did so much while he was able to get out and do things.
I'd spend time with her now while you're still in good condition and able to do so. The months of watching you get worse are going to be very hard for her, and the memories will be worth their weight in gold. Don't delay until you're too sick to make it happen.
If you want to leave her with a few thoughts, I'd write a letter or two. Those will be far more durable than any digital form, and will be a tangible object to tie the memories back to.
I live in the first world, you insensitive clod... *smirk*
I'm like you - started with X10 stuff and went to Insteon about five years ago.
My big thing is that my house was wired by idiots, and the switches aren't ever where you'd want them. Hell, the ceiling lights and fans in the bedrooms aren't even on the same circuit as the wall switch. (The wall switch used to feed a switched outlet, as the house was built without ceiling lights in the bedrooms.) Much of the split-level house is such that you're stumbling up or down stairs in the dark before you get to the switch you need. The ability to control a bunch of stuff from a single keypad at each room entrance was the one overriding feature. It's awesome, and I couldn't be happier with it.
My ex-wife never had any issue with the system (and in fact, actually installed a good chunk of it, being a fellow engineer). My current girlfriend, who is significantly less technically inclined, figured it out in about ten seconds with no explanation. But that's because it doesn't require web browsers or smart phones or other crap - everything you need is right there, right beside the door where you need to interact with it. Oh, and it's got labels, and lights up in the dark, so...
A few thoughts:
- One downside is that I had an entire generation of Keypadlincs go bad after about 3-4 years. All v5.x units, all killed in the course of a few weeks (power quality issues). Had six of them, so there's a chunk of change. Ouch. I found it interesting it only affected the 5.x units, however. Everything from earlier and later generations survived just fine.
- Insteon is unmanagable without an ISY-99 or 994. It just is. Best money I ever spent - now I just fire up a java app and can reconfigure anything I need in a few minutes.
- It's proprietary. If Smarthome ever goes under, I get to start over.
The rest of my automation is mostly telemetry. Temperature, leak monitoring, furnace monitoring, security cameras, etc. It's almost entirely based on embedded Linux boxes (RPis and older hacked Seagate Dockstars) scattered around, feeding data back to a central house server that then monitors things.
Don't worry, after the parent poster fires you, come work for me. I'm of the same opinion you are - it's often the easiest and cleanest way to run a block of cleanup code. Plus, it doesn't create a crapton of nested functions and conditional tests, which can be a real issue in space-constrained platforms (8 bit micros, anyone?) I like people who aren't afraid of things they've been told are "bad" without at least considering if they have a possible use, and what the real dangers are. Sure, I'd expect there to be more than "return rv" in there, otherwise you should just be throwing returns in your main code, but still...
But it's nerd girls I'm trying to impress, you insensitive clod!
My lighting system is all Insteon based. Even if it is proprietary (ugh), it does actually work as advertised. Everything except the Keypadlincs has been bulletproof, but some of the earlier KPLs have been less than reliable. Due to recent power spikes, I've lost the last of them, and the new 7.x models seem to be lasting without issue. Do not try to manage any Insteon network of decent size without an ISY994, however. You'll go mad. Plus, the ISY provides an easy way to script behaviours.
The rest of the house is controlled and monitored through small embedded computers tied to cameras, temp/humidity sensors, or other hardware via USB/Arduino/etc. I say "small embedded computers" because the old ones are hacked Dockstars, but as those die (and they do), they've been replaced with Raspberry Pis. The children all call back to a main control computer every 10-15 seconds, uploading an image and telemetry data via scp/ssh. That main computer then makes it accessible to the world via a mass of PHP.
I'm not a manager-manager, but I am a technical manager and - at the end of the day - basically the guy who gets the hiring decision whenever I need more people.
I don't care about what you know beyond the basics, and I also don't care where (or if) you went to college or that your degree is even slightly related to what we're doing. The things I look for are that you have some talent with system design, architecture and programming, a passion for technology (aka, it's not just a 9-5 job thing, but you eat, live, and breathe it), and the capability to go learn and figure things out on your own. Along with the third thing, a general, broad set of knowledge is good, but as long as you can use Google or books or experiments to figure things out, I'm okay. I'd much rather you be able to learn and adapt.
You'd be amazed how many people fail at least #3. I don't want to hand-hold you or have to spoon feed you answers. Don't know? Go look it up. Go try something. Just don't come over and ask for help right away. If you've gotten stuck somewhere, I'll help, but you damn well better have beaten your head against the wall for a few hours/days/weeks (depending on problem complexity) before asking.
For me, I just like wired ethernet better. Overall, simpler to configure, use, secure, and manage, and you can't beat gigabit links for bandwidth/$. I have 802.11n, but pretty much all it does is allow the laptops, tablets, and phones onto the network. The MythTV frontends, desktop machines, and home automation/telemetry bits are all hard-wired. I also keep all my data on a central fileserver in the basement, so having gigabit links from the desktop machines (and laptops when I plug them in) really makes working with large datasets significantly faster.
As for my setup, it's really rather unimpressive from any datacenter standpoint.
Upstairs closet:
- Wireless AP (802.11n) and NAT box (TP Link WDR4300 running OpenWRT)
- Cable modem
- Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves 3rd and 2nd floor ports, dual fiber links to downstairs switch)
- UPS
Basement closet:
- Managed 24-port gigabit switch (serves basement, and 1st floor ports, dual fiber links to upstairs switch, dual fiber to backup fileserver in detached garage)
- House fileserver
- MythTV/home automation/voip/webserver box
- Tuners (HDHomeRun and DirecTV gear + HD-PVRs),
- ISY-99 Insteon gateway
- UPS
15 years and counting for me - not just same company, but same position. The title changes and I get promoted every couple years, but it's the same PCN doing basically the same thing.
I'm basically the technical management of a development group at a large transportation company. The technical part of my department isn't really all that bad. The challenge is knowing the business and all the weird, intricate little nuances of both our clients and how the actual business operates. I figure it takes 18 months to make a newbie a net positive in the group. I rarely hire because typically we focus on getting people who are going to stick around. It's just too costly to productivity to have short timers around. It's also how I've successfully fended off "well, can't you just outsource some of this extra work?" If I'm looking through resumes and see you only stay at similar jobs for 2-3 years, I'm not even going to read the rest of it. I assume that candidate is going to suck up all the resources to get him/her trained and then move along before they've contributed as much back. I'd much rather have someone that shows they're on the track to becoming a greybeard. You know - the guy who has been there forever to become an uberguru, and sits in the corner and says little, but when he does you should probably take it as if it were handed down on stone tablets.
Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.