...we haven't gotten to the point of State Run Media or Ministry of Information...
CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, and nearly everyone came awfully close for the Obama Administration.
Media bias (on some spectrum between real and perceived) is an entirely different thing than placing gag orders on in-the-public-interest government agencies and publicy-funded scientific work. But go ahead, keep treating this as a game show, because obviously this is just politics-as-usual and nothing could possibly go wrong in such an exceptional place as the US... (/sarcasm)
Just wait until hackers find way to spoof update source, and use it as a way to install their shit on your IoT gadget
(e.g.: that's a vulnerability that's been found on Philips Smart LED light bulbs).
This.
While auto-updates circumvent one problem, it introduces another attack vector. And a failure mode. (yay! none of the lights turn on because auto-update bricked them) Not to mention the "appliance" suddenly becoming unresponsive at exactly the wrong time while it decides to update itself on its schedule, not yours.
This just all get back to the fact that internet connectivity is being taken too far, and by people who's skillset (embedded devs) usually has no overlap with a security skillset. Been there, rubbed elbows with both.
If you are over 50 and you are trying to get a job by going through HR, then there is something wrong with you.
Someone with decades of experience should have a deep network, and plenty of ex-coworkers to tap for opportunities. If they don't, that is because those co-workers don't want to work with them again. So why should I hire them?
Unless they've spent a large chunk of their later career keeping their small startup venture alive and generating revenue, effectively keeping them cloistered while they apply their skill set. Yeah, I've got a small network from when things were more robust and I had to hire out some of the engineering work, but most was done by yours truly. The one thing I could have done better was keep more of those contacts alive, as a lot of them are pretty stale. But that time period coincided with kids showing up on the scene, which triaged that pretty far down the list.
So sure, the side-gigs I've gotten over the past 5-6 years have been solely through my small network, that's a good thing. But as the startup slowly winds down, my small network is not as lucrative as I'd like it to be. I haven't had to go the head-hunter route yet, but that's probably the next stop on this train.
All that said, when/if I'm to the point where I'm considering opportunities that involve an HR dept, then I'd say things would be in a pretty desperate state
Well now you know, Facebook is left/liberal biased (which was kind of obvvious before this stunning revalation) much like the overwhming majority of the tech sector. Get over it. They are doing nothing the right wing media and players like the Koch brothers haven't been doing for years.
With the acknowledgement that the above may well be completely true, recently I've been flooded with unhinged Trump posts. From FB friends I'd never expect to see it from. So much so that for the first time I've had to unfollow somebody.
For a long time prior to that I was seeing posts/shares from my left-leaning friends from high-school oh-so-long-ago. Which made sense since I came of age in the 70's in a very liberal part of the Northeast. So seeing liberal/progressive messages from my former classmates wasn't so much an indictment of the medium as much as the demographic with which I was affiliated.
Trust me, as a driver developer, this has been causing me an immense amount of headaches, and Windows 10 is only part of the story.
But the blog entry has a key detail which nobody here seems to understand. Existing Drivers signed by a certificate that was issued prior to July 2015 will still be accepted by the kernel. What this means is that the new rollout is not going to cause the entire ecosystem of Windows legacy drivers to implode. If they were signed correctly for 64-bit Windows before, they will continue to work on Windows 10. Really, truly, I've tested this myself on preview editions of the Windows 10 AE
Where you get screwed is when a vendor needs to update a driver going forward. Then things get to be hairy. Logistically, signing became much harder, everything from obtaining a certificate to performing the actual signing. Pain. In. The. Ass.
Our company just released an update of our product just under the wire of when our legacy "get's a free pass" certificate expired so that we'd have some runway to incorporate the new driver signing nightmare into our tool chain. So we're good up until the next showstopper bug comes along, which fortunately is rare. You'll be able to use our latest release just fine on AE, even though it didn't get signed by Microsoft.
Fair enough, but it seems like all that gets focused on is the cost without weighing in the (lower than for specialists, but non-zero) benefits. Even if it isn't a zero-sum outcome, I would think at this point that most near-the-brink-of-burnout doctors would seriously consider absorbing some of this load.
It's not a given mind you, as when I witnessed controversy over what should have been the no-brainer of adding a Hospitalist staff into the mix. That meant there was an inpatient-specific doctor staff to offload torturous middle-of-the-night admissions, among other things. Most of the doctors were fine with the tradeoff of losing some of the billings associated with the admissions, as it turned "on call" in being a telephone-only affair, rather than a Russian Roulette game of "am I going to get any sleep tonight this time?". There was a small but vocal contingent that balked, but in the end the Hospitalists were hired, which was a win for both doctors and patients alike.
From my view into what my spouse and the other doctors in the practice go through, this is spot on. Right down to the "I'll just go part time", which actually translates into 40 hours (in our case, 25 patient-hours easily is a 50-hour week, and more when an inevitable heavily-loaded week comes along). The only solutions I see are to either get out altogether, utilize the MD for something that's not patient care, or find one of those rare institutions that's enlightened enough to understand how bad this problem is and takes it seriously enough to keep it under control.
Sadly, the last option is probably all but impossible right now, though there are promising signs that the industry is slowly waking up to just how unsustainable the situation is.
Yes. The UI's I've seen suck to high heaven. It's not hard to be five levels deep in nested dialog boxes as they have to navigate checkboxes and codes that are spread all over the place. The visual context-switching that has to be done to enter the information for a single visit is staggering. Not only is it slow as hell, but mentally taxing. A huge waste of the physician's mental bandwidth.
Your PCP (as well as you) are lucky. My PCP spouse is a total burnout case because of the data entry problem and lack of organizational support. I see two factors here: (1) the doctors just suck it up and put in countless hours of unpaid overtime to feed the beast, and (2) the suits that run the place don't have the business acumen to realize that a scribe would easily pay for themselves in increased billings since the doctors could handle a larger panel.
It kills me because it seems like the specialists have figured this out, just not Primary Care. My eye doctor always has some sort of assistant present to help out with the mechanics of dealing with the electronic charts. Been that way for years and years. Why the hell have the highest paid guy in the room be spending time that doesn't require his skillset when that can be offloaded by someone cheaper? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Not to mention the retro attitude towards Shareware, which was novel back in the day but is now more-or-less how most commercial software is distributed. As a former Shareware author myself, which morphed into a more commercial version, the vitriol is puzzling, especially in this day and age.
People back then were used to buying software as if it were a physical good: you got a book, media such as floppies or a CD, and perhaps a box to put it all in. But by golly if that same software was something you could download alongside items that were free, then it damned well better not cost anything either! How dare an author try to recoup development costs, at the same time they give a potential customer the ability to actually try out the software before committing to buying it?! The nerve of those guys!
This seems to have evolved into folks who think that all software should be available at no cost, economics be damned, and those who appreciate that there is a FOSS option alongside a more traditional business model (with a much improved distribution system)
But I digress. It was just striking to see the old school hate posted on the site. I guess it is a blast from the past in more ways than one...
So you zoom and and they shrink all the text back to its original four point font.
This. And it's been this idiotic for quite some time now. I mean seriously, how hard is it to detect the threshold of where you're zooming in for more streets and/or detail, and when you're just trying to f'ing read the goddam names?
If their efforts end up anything like their non-peel-apart lineup, then it's truly doomed. I have an old Land camera and a 600 series camera that uses the integrated battery pack in the cartridge (and develops in open air). The film from Impossible for the 600 is dreadful. I've gone through 3-4 cartridges and got nothing but a blurry, faded-looking mess. At best.
You also can't point/shoot/eject/watch-it-develop like you could the original Polaroid. The Impossible film remains sensitive to light for at least 10-15 seconds if not longer, requiring hacks and tricks to eject it into either a box or under shade to make it develop properly at all. A real pain, all for vintage pictures that look like they're 40 years old the minute they fully develop.
A shame really, as they have been at it for quite a number of years now. I would have hoped they could have recreated a more faithful and reliable facsimile of the original film. I know some people have reported good results, but I was never able to come close
...being that my older Comcast DVR's used CableCard technology. If you looked on the back you could see the slots for them. Of course there was secret sauce in there that allowed OnDemand access and what-not that a Tivo+CC wouldn't do. But for all the pushback against CC's it seems like it probably saves them quite a bit of money as the cost of designing a carrier-locked box must be a lot lower for the OEM's if they can use CC as the starting point and lowest-common-denominator.
Of course, Comcast's new Xfinity platform (finally becoming a platform in addition to a brand) seems to be something altogether different, since they now essentially push the DVR storage back up into Comcast's private cloud. And near as I can tell there's no CC tech inside these new boxes, and for all I know use a completely different content delivery technology.
Secondly, nobody is forcing the employees to work in such condition. The stressed out employees are always free to use the door and switch employer.
People always make that sound so easy. For entire categories of workers, the ones often under the highest stress because they are being eaten up by not one but two jobs to keep themselves afloat, are the ones least likely to have the kind of job mobility that would result in any tangible improvement.
Back in the 90's when I was a young buck and had every employer convinced of my high technical prowess, combined with an employment market that was seriously in the engineer's favor, I used to think that way too. And for me, I did have that kind of freedom. Several decades later, along with many changes to my life circumstance and the job market in which I inhabit, I have a much greater appreciation for limitations of how much control one has over their career. And that's if you're lucky enough work in a field where "career" is an appropriate term
it became a nice alternative to stencils and ovens
I'm slightly curious about that. If you're already sending your board out to get fabbed, you can get a stencil done at the same time. They cost about a tenner for as many stencils as you can fit on an A4 sheet of transparent film. If you don't need very fine pitch (I did 0.5mm pitch LGA-16 packages no problem), then you can do one at home on a vinyl cutter.
It did take me a while to get the hang of using a stencil though I must say.
Agreed that these days if you have some way to reflow, then getting a stencil at the same time as the board is painless. I'm still getting the hang of applying the paste, so having the machine do it seems a good alternative as it will likely do a more precise job of it. But I won't know until I get a unit of my own.
As I said before, in light of the OtherMill and DIY reflow oven, it's no longer clear what niche the Voltera will fill in my workshop. At the very least it will be cool to have been part of early development of this type of prototyping, which seems like it has the potential to get a lot better with more R&D. Even if I end up selling it or donating to a worthy cause like a school or Maker Space, I don't think I'll have any regrets.
Full Disclosure: I'm a backer, though not early enough to get an early-bird unit.
I look forward to trying this tech when I finally get mine. I have lots of reservations, but am still happy with my decision. I'm glad they seem to have found a way to paste/reflow boards that are inked. During the Kickstarter is was going to either be able to lay down ink, or paste/reflow. I.e., you could only paste/reflow a traditionally fabbed copper board, not a prototyped ink board that was fabbed by the Voltera. That was a pretty serious limitation, making the unit somewhat bipolar: you could quickly prototype boards in ink but then had to deal with soldering yourself. Once you were more confident with the design to send out for traditional copper boards, it became a nice alternative to stencils and ovens
I can't speak to the resistance issue, but in my mind the other huge limiter is the feature resolution limit. Sure, there's a bunch of things you can prototype within the limits of the Voltera, but you don't have to move much beyond Arduino-class designs to bump against the ceiling. Things like the Intel Edison connector is way out of reach for this thing, and even a DIMM connector (think Raspberry Pi Compute Module) is too dense. They will have some breakout boards for common footprints that are too tight, but that's a half-measure in my book and only adds to the number of things that have to get redesigned on the path from a Voltera prototype to a real board.
In the meantime I went ahead and bought an OtherMill, which can handle much smaller feature sizes, and uses traditional copper-clad boards. You have to connect your own vias, but it will at least drill them for you. And getting the alignment between both sides of the board can be tricky. But I've already done some interesting prototypes with that board, including stencils, and now have a toaster-oven-based reflow box. Had I known about the OtherMill I may not have sprung for the Voltera. Hopefully they complement each other---even if the Voltera becomes mostly a solder dispenser that's a win over what I'm dealing with now.
Yeah, I got nailed in a neighboring town which couldn't be bothered to do any more than the "when children are present" hiding-in-plain-sight signage. And the school in question was not visible from the road you're on, given it's laterally a full block away, but was apparently close enough to justify the sign. I simply had no idea it was a school zone, and no idea when the school zone hours are enforceable even if I had known. Despite the hard-ass reputation of the local cops for that town, he let me off with a warning.
In the end I had to go look up in the town's by-laws (fortunately web-accessible) to determine what that town's ordinances are for a school zone and what the hours they are in effect. Even with only getting the warning I was feeling entrapped and pretty annoyed.
I'm more and more noticing that my own town seems to actually care about child safety, as the school zone signs are large, with two lights (one above, one below) that alternate in their flashing. It's pretty hard to miss. And all the ones I've seen are actually within sight of the school in question. They do occasionally post a cop at the school to crack down on the inevitable "I'll slow down but not close enough to the school zone speed limit" offenders, which I take to be a good faith effort to demonstrate that they are serious about enforcing speed in the zone.
I had another case where I wasn't let off the hook. Again, this was another "main road, not enough indication the speed zone is in effect", and in this case the zone was so small and the sight lines so short that you all but had to slam on the brakes if you didn't know it was coming, otherwise you were over the limit and they got you. Initially I passed it off as bad luck being in an unfamiliar area during a crackdown period. But I happened to be back that way the next week and saw another unfortunate driver pull over in the same spot. That tells me that particular town is more interested in revenue than child safety.
Agreed. Though I will concede that it is also true that Big Pharma pushes their drugs when they are not needed or could even be harmful. Both extremes are true. There are people who really need these drugs and really benefit from them, and there are evil drug companies that push these drugs on everyone and do harm by doing so. Neither fact negates the other.
And I will readily admit that I have not personally witnessed drug-pushing, overdiagnosis, or the mythical lazy attitude of "just give 'em drugs and it will be easier". If that's truly out there in any quantity, that indeed can do harm.
I have seen parents refuse the drug route when their child could so clearly be helped by reducing their ADHD symptoms, to the point where the social harm of leaving it untreated is heartbreaking to witness. I've also seen people not get over their stigma of antidepressants and suffer needlessly, which is equally discouraging. But, people have to find their own path.
Of course extreme cases are a minority. That changes nothing. These kids, the extreme cases, need the medicine. Need.
This is similar to the largely pointless debate on antidepressants in general. Anyone who hasn't had clinical depression has no fucking clue what it's like. I was one the most motivated, self-starter, hard-working, emotionally balanced people out there, until my life circumstances changed immensely in my 40's. It took me a long time to recognize that I had clinical depression, since the slide was so gradual and I never ever could envision myself having this problem. Fortunately the first med I tried was extremely effective, and I was just shocked at how far I had slid once I was more like myself again. Oh the time I wasted while in the fog of depression and not even really knowing it. Life's too short.
The same is true with ADHD. Unless you have kids with true ADHD, you're clueless. I never imagined having to deal with a medication regimen with my own kids. If we could get off this train, we would, but they are essentially learning disabled without them. This is not "kids will be kids". It's a real disability, and ADHD children are very fortunate to be growing up in a time where it can be treated such they can live more fulfilling lives.
Or in other words: "what he said". It's easy to be an armchair Public Health Expert when you aren't affected by the condition in question. Real life is a lot messier.
Being a wiz at C# under Visual Studio is absolutely useless except for Windows application development. That's a relatively small fraction of all programming activity in the world, yet they act like it's the entire world.
Windows is certainly the favorite target for C# apps, but it's not absolutely useless for everything else. While it's also not the panacea the GP is suggesting, it does encourage and support sound engineering practices, alongside many other languages in the same category (Java, et al).
As for a language representing a small minority of development, yet having a vocal, myopic developer base, one could argue that for many, many languages. C# most certainly does not have a monopoly on that.
BTW, I've done a number of commercial-grade applications in C#, and like a lot of what is has to offer. I also realize that it's one of many options, and would no more suggest C# on a PIC than I would suggest assembly for a web front-end. Lest I be painted as yet another narrow-minded, no-nothing Microsoft apologist (not that that ever happens on Slashdot).
An environment that's the epitomy of Rapid Application Development. Can you have any non-trivial code working by morning on that thing?
i made no such assertion, but the parent did
Uhhhh... I see no such assertion in the parent either. If by that you mean the "having something working by morning" part. No timelines whatsoever stated or implied. If by that you mean C# being a productive language for RAD environments, then yeah, that's arguably a point he's making.
But its a stretch to the point of being obtuse that you would introduce an embedded environment as required platform in a topic that clearly refers to web technologies. I guess the next time someone deploys a server farm to host a continuously evolving web application using only embedded processors, you're the guy for the job.
Choose whatever language you want. None of you are even competitive with me when I choose C# under Visual Studio with a notebook full of pseudocode.
gee, that's great. now get your code running on MSP430 and PIC32. Can you have it working by morning?
Gee, that's great. An embedded processor with 2-16K of RAM using C. An environment that's the epitomy of Rapid Application Development. Can you have any non-trivial code working by morning on that thing?
I have that kit waiting patiently in a drawer for my 12y/o to get the initiative to build it. They even have some cool ideas on wrapping dowels and routing the "defuse" wires through them to make it look like dynamite sticks. Clearly I would tell him never to bring that to school. But now, I'd have to worry about some friend coming over, seeing it and telling his parents. One can only imagine a similarly damaging misunderstanding taking place.
Slashdot Mirror
...we haven't gotten to the point of State Run Media or Ministry of Information...
CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, and nearly everyone came awfully close for the Obama Administration.
Media bias (on some spectrum between real and perceived) is an entirely different thing than placing gag orders on in-the-public-interest government agencies and publicy-funded scientific work. But go ahead, keep treating this as a game show, because obviously this is just politics-as-usual and nothing could possibly go wrong in such an exceptional place as the US... (/sarcasm)
I'm surprised Trump even allowed this to be announced. What's good for the EPA should be good for the state governors too.
But hey, we haven't gotten to the point of State Run Media or Ministry of Information... yet.
Just wait until hackers find way to spoof update source, and use it as a way to install their shit on your IoT gadget (e.g.: that's a vulnerability that's been found on Philips Smart LED light bulbs).
This.
While auto-updates circumvent one problem, it introduces another attack vector. And a failure mode. (yay! none of the lights turn on because auto-update bricked them) Not to mention the "appliance" suddenly becoming unresponsive at exactly the wrong time while it decides to update itself on its schedule, not yours.
This just all get back to the fact that internet connectivity is being taken too far, and by people who's skillset (embedded devs) usually has no overlap with a security skillset. Been there, rubbed elbows with both.
If you are over 50 and you are trying to get a job by going through HR, then there is something wrong with you.
Someone with decades of experience should have a deep network, and plenty of ex-coworkers to tap for opportunities. If they don't, that is because those co-workers don't want to work with them again. So why should I hire them?
Unless they've spent a large chunk of their later career keeping their small startup venture alive and generating revenue, effectively keeping them cloistered while they apply their skill set. Yeah, I've got a small network from when things were more robust and I had to hire out some of the engineering work, but most was done by yours truly. The one thing I could have done better was keep more of those contacts alive, as a lot of them are pretty stale. But that time period coincided with kids showing up on the scene, which triaged that pretty far down the list.
So sure, the side-gigs I've gotten over the past 5-6 years have been solely through my small network, that's a good thing. But as the startup slowly winds down, my small network is not as lucrative as I'd like it to be. I haven't had to go the head-hunter route yet, but that's probably the next stop on this train.
All that said, when/if I'm to the point where I'm considering opportunities that involve an HR dept, then I'd say things would be in a pretty desperate state
Well now you know, Facebook is left/liberal biased (which was kind of obvvious before this stunning revalation) much like the overwhming majority of the tech sector. Get over it. They are doing nothing the right wing media and players like the Koch brothers haven't been doing for years.
With the acknowledgement that the above may well be completely true, recently I've been flooded with unhinged Trump posts. From FB friends I'd never expect to see it from. So much so that for the first time I've had to unfollow somebody.
For a long time prior to that I was seeing posts/shares from my left-leaning friends from high-school oh-so-long-ago. Which made sense since I came of age in the 70's in a very liberal part of the Northeast. So seeing liberal/progressive messages from my former classmates wasn't so much an indictment of the medium as much as the demographic with which I was affiliated.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windows_hardware_certification/2016/07/26/driver-signing-changes-in-windows-10-version-1607
Trust me, as a driver developer, this has been causing me an immense amount of headaches, and Windows 10 is only part of the story.
But the blog entry has a key detail which nobody here seems to understand. Existing Drivers signed by a certificate that was issued prior to July 2015 will still be accepted by the kernel. What this means is that the new rollout is not going to cause the entire ecosystem of Windows legacy drivers to implode. If they were signed correctly for 64-bit Windows before, they will continue to work on Windows 10. Really, truly, I've tested this myself on preview editions of the Windows 10 AE
Where you get screwed is when a vendor needs to update a driver going forward. Then things get to be hairy. Logistically, signing became much harder, everything from obtaining a certificate to performing the actual signing. Pain. In. The. Ass.
Our company just released an update of our product just under the wire of when our legacy "get's a free pass" certificate expired so that we'd have some runway to incorporate the new driver signing nightmare into our tool chain. So we're good up until the next showstopper bug comes along, which fortunately is rare. You'll be able to use our latest release just fine on AE, even though it didn't get signed by Microsoft.
Fair enough, but it seems like all that gets focused on is the cost without weighing in the (lower than for specialists, but non-zero) benefits. Even if it isn't a zero-sum outcome, I would think at this point that most near-the-brink-of-burnout doctors would seriously consider absorbing some of this load.
It's not a given mind you, as when I witnessed controversy over what should have been the no-brainer of adding a Hospitalist staff into the mix. That meant there was an inpatient-specific doctor staff to offload torturous middle-of-the-night admissions, among other things. Most of the doctors were fine with the tradeoff of losing some of the billings associated with the admissions, as it turned "on call" in being a telephone-only affair, rather than a Russian Roulette game of "am I going to get any sleep tonight this time?". There was a small but vocal contingent that balked, but in the end the Hospitalists were hired, which was a win for both doctors and patients alike.
From my view into what my spouse and the other doctors in the practice go through, this is spot on. Right down to the "I'll just go part time", which actually translates into 40 hours (in our case, 25 patient-hours easily is a 50-hour week, and more when an inevitable heavily-loaded week comes along). The only solutions I see are to either get out altogether, utilize the MD for something that's not patient care, or find one of those rare institutions that's enlightened enough to understand how bad this problem is and takes it seriously enough to keep it under control.
Sadly, the last option is probably all but impossible right now, though there are promising signs that the industry is slowly waking up to just how unsustainable the situation is.
Yes. The UI's I've seen suck to high heaven. It's not hard to be five levels deep in nested dialog boxes as they have to navigate checkboxes and codes that are spread all over the place. The visual context-switching that has to be done to enter the information for a single visit is staggering. Not only is it slow as hell, but mentally taxing. A huge waste of the physician's mental bandwidth.
Your PCP (as well as you) are lucky. My PCP spouse is a total burnout case because of the data entry problem and lack of organizational support. I see two factors here: (1) the doctors just suck it up and put in countless hours of unpaid overtime to feed the beast, and (2) the suits that run the place don't have the business acumen to realize that a scribe would easily pay for themselves in increased billings since the doctors could handle a larger panel.
It kills me because it seems like the specialists have figured this out, just not Primary Care. My eye doctor always has some sort of assistant present to help out with the mechanics of dealing with the electronic charts. Been that way for years and years. Why the hell have the highest paid guy in the room be spending time that doesn't require his skillset when that can be offloaded by someone cheaper? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Not to mention the retro attitude towards Shareware, which was novel back in the day but is now more-or-less how most commercial software is distributed. As a former Shareware author myself, which morphed into a more commercial version, the vitriol is puzzling, especially in this day and age.
People back then were used to buying software as if it were a physical good: you got a book, media such as floppies or a CD, and perhaps a box to put it all in. But by golly if that same software was something you could download alongside items that were free, then it damned well better not cost anything either! How dare an author try to recoup development costs, at the same time they give a potential customer the ability to actually try out the software before committing to buying it?! The nerve of those guys!
This seems to have evolved into folks who think that all software should be available at no cost, economics be damned, and those who appreciate that there is a FOSS option alongside a more traditional business model (with a much improved distribution system)
But I digress. It was just striking to see the old school hate posted on the site. I guess it is a blast from the past in more ways than one...
Four point text on some street names.
So you zoom and and they shrink all the text back to its original four point font.
This. And it's been this idiotic for quite some time now. I mean seriously, how hard is it to detect the threshold of where you're zooming in for more streets and/or detail, and when you're just trying to f'ing read the goddam names?
If their efforts end up anything like their non-peel-apart lineup, then it's truly doomed. I have an old Land camera and a 600 series camera that uses the integrated battery pack in the cartridge (and develops in open air). The film from Impossible for the 600 is dreadful. I've gone through 3-4 cartridges and got nothing but a blurry, faded-looking mess. At best.
You also can't point/shoot/eject/watch-it-develop like you could the original Polaroid. The Impossible film remains sensitive to light for at least 10-15 seconds if not longer, requiring hacks and tricks to eject it into either a box or under shade to make it develop properly at all. A real pain, all for vintage pictures that look like they're 40 years old the minute they fully develop.
A shame really, as they have been at it for quite a number of years now. I would have hoped they could have recreated a more faithful and reliable facsimile of the original film. I know some people have reported good results, but I was never able to come close
...being that my older Comcast DVR's used CableCard technology. If you looked on the back you could see the slots for them. Of course there was secret sauce in there that allowed OnDemand access and what-not that a Tivo+CC wouldn't do. But for all the pushback against CC's it seems like it probably saves them quite a bit of money as the cost of designing a carrier-locked box must be a lot lower for the OEM's if they can use CC as the starting point and lowest-common-denominator.
Of course, Comcast's new Xfinity platform (finally becoming a platform in addition to a brand) seems to be something altogether different, since they now essentially push the DVR storage back up into Comcast's private cloud. And near as I can tell there's no CC tech inside these new boxes, and for all I know use a completely different content delivery technology.
Secondly, nobody is forcing the employees to work in such condition. The stressed out employees are always free to use the door and switch employer.
People always make that sound so easy. For entire categories of workers, the ones often under the highest stress because they are being eaten up by not one but two jobs to keep themselves afloat, are the ones least likely to have the kind of job mobility that would result in any tangible improvement.
Back in the 90's when I was a young buck and had every employer convinced of my high technical prowess, combined with an employment market that was seriously in the engineer's favor, I used to think that way too. And for me, I did have that kind of freedom. Several decades later, along with many changes to my life circumstance and the job market in which I inhabit, I have a much greater appreciation for limitations of how much control one has over their career. And that's if you're lucky enough work in a field where "career" is an appropriate term
it became a nice alternative to stencils and ovens
I'm slightly curious about that. If you're already sending your board out to get fabbed, you can get a stencil done at the same time. They cost about a tenner for as many stencils as you can fit on an A4 sheet of transparent film. If you don't need very fine pitch (I did 0.5mm pitch LGA-16 packages no problem), then you can do one at home on a vinyl cutter.
It did take me a while to get the hang of using a stencil though I must say.
Agreed that these days if you have some way to reflow, then getting a stencil at the same time as the board is painless. I'm still getting the hang of applying the paste, so having the machine do it seems a good alternative as it will likely do a more precise job of it. But I won't know until I get a unit of my own.
As I said before, in light of the OtherMill and DIY reflow oven, it's no longer clear what niche the Voltera will fill in my workshop. At the very least it will be cool to have been part of early development of this type of prototyping, which seems like it has the potential to get a lot better with more R&D. Even if I end up selling it or donating to a worthy cause like a school or Maker Space, I don't think I'll have any regrets.
Full Disclosure: I'm a backer, though not early enough to get an early-bird unit.
I look forward to trying this tech when I finally get mine. I have lots of reservations, but am still happy with my decision. I'm glad they seem to have found a way to paste/reflow boards that are inked. During the Kickstarter is was going to either be able to lay down ink, or paste/reflow. I.e., you could only paste/reflow a traditionally fabbed copper board, not a prototyped ink board that was fabbed by the Voltera. That was a pretty serious limitation, making the unit somewhat bipolar: you could quickly prototype boards in ink but then had to deal with soldering yourself. Once you were more confident with the design to send out for traditional copper boards, it became a nice alternative to stencils and ovens
I can't speak to the resistance issue, but in my mind the other huge limiter is the feature resolution limit. Sure, there's a bunch of things you can prototype within the limits of the Voltera, but you don't have to move much beyond Arduino-class designs to bump against the ceiling. Things like the Intel Edison connector is way out of reach for this thing, and even a DIMM connector (think Raspberry Pi Compute Module) is too dense. They will have some breakout boards for common footprints that are too tight, but that's a half-measure in my book and only adds to the number of things that have to get redesigned on the path from a Voltera prototype to a real board.
In the meantime I went ahead and bought an OtherMill, which can handle much smaller feature sizes, and uses traditional copper-clad boards. You have to connect your own vias, but it will at least drill them for you. And getting the alignment between both sides of the board can be tricky. But I've already done some interesting prototypes with that board, including stencils, and now have a toaster-oven-based reflow box. Had I known about the OtherMill I may not have sprung for the Voltera. Hopefully they complement each other---even if the Voltera becomes mostly a solder dispenser that's a win over what I'm dealing with now.
Yeah, I got nailed in a neighboring town which couldn't be bothered to do any more than the "when children are present" hiding-in-plain-sight signage. And the school in question was not visible from the road you're on, given it's laterally a full block away, but was apparently close enough to justify the sign. I simply had no idea it was a school zone, and no idea when the school zone hours are enforceable even if I had known. Despite the hard-ass reputation of the local cops for that town, he let me off with a warning.
In the end I had to go look up in the town's by-laws (fortunately web-accessible) to determine what that town's ordinances are for a school zone and what the hours they are in effect. Even with only getting the warning I was feeling entrapped and pretty annoyed.
I'm more and more noticing that my own town seems to actually care about child safety, as the school zone signs are large, with two lights (one above, one below) that alternate in their flashing. It's pretty hard to miss. And all the ones I've seen are actually within sight of the school in question. They do occasionally post a cop at the school to crack down on the inevitable "I'll slow down but not close enough to the school zone speed limit" offenders, which I take to be a good faith effort to demonstrate that they are serious about enforcing speed in the zone.
I had another case where I wasn't let off the hook. Again, this was another "main road, not enough indication the speed zone is in effect", and in this case the zone was so small and the sight lines so short that you all but had to slam on the brakes if you didn't know it was coming, otherwise you were over the limit and they got you. Initially I passed it off as bad luck being in an unfamiliar area during a crackdown period. But I happened to be back that way the next week and saw another unfortunate driver pull over in the same spot. That tells me that particular town is more interested in revenue than child safety.
Dammit! Beat me to it.
Agreed. Though I will concede that it is also true that Big Pharma pushes their drugs when they are not needed or could even be harmful. Both extremes are true. There are people who really need these drugs and really benefit from them, and there are evil drug companies that push these drugs on everyone and do harm by doing so. Neither fact negates the other.
And I will readily admit that I have not personally witnessed drug-pushing, overdiagnosis, or the mythical lazy attitude of "just give 'em drugs and it will be easier". If that's truly out there in any quantity, that indeed can do harm.
I have seen parents refuse the drug route when their child could so clearly be helped by reducing their ADHD symptoms, to the point where the social harm of leaving it untreated is heartbreaking to witness. I've also seen people not get over their stigma of antidepressants and suffer needlessly, which is equally discouraging. But, people have to find their own path.
Of course extreme cases are a minority. That changes nothing. These kids, the extreme cases, need the medicine. Need.
This is similar to the largely pointless debate on antidepressants in general. Anyone who hasn't had clinical depression has no fucking clue what it's like. I was one the most motivated, self-starter, hard-working, emotionally balanced people out there, until my life circumstances changed immensely in my 40's. It took me a long time to recognize that I had clinical depression, since the slide was so gradual and I never ever could envision myself having this problem. Fortunately the first med I tried was extremely effective, and I was just shocked at how far I had slid once I was more like myself again. Oh the time I wasted while in the fog of depression and not even really knowing it. Life's too short.
The same is true with ADHD. Unless you have kids with true ADHD, you're clueless. I never imagined having to deal with a medication regimen with my own kids. If we could get off this train, we would, but they are essentially learning disabled without them. This is not "kids will be kids". It's a real disability, and ADHD children are very fortunate to be growing up in a time where it can be treated such they can live more fulfilling lives.
Or in other words: "what he said". It's easy to be an armchair Public Health Expert when you aren't affected by the condition in question. Real life is a lot messier.
Being a wiz at C# under Visual Studio is absolutely useless except for Windows application development. That's a relatively small fraction of all programming activity in the world, yet they act like it's the entire world.
Windows is certainly the favorite target for C# apps, but it's not absolutely useless for everything else. While it's also not the panacea the GP is suggesting, it does encourage and support sound engineering practices, alongside many other languages in the same category (Java, et al).
As for a language representing a small minority of development, yet having a vocal, myopic developer base, one could argue that for many, many languages. C# most certainly does not have a monopoly on that.
BTW, I've done a number of commercial-grade applications in C#, and like a lot of what is has to offer. I also realize that it's one of many options, and would no more suggest C# on a PIC than I would suggest assembly for a web front-end. Lest I be painted as yet another narrow-minded, no-nothing Microsoft apologist (not that that ever happens on Slashdot).
An environment that's the epitomy of Rapid Application Development. Can you have any non-trivial code working by morning on that thing?
i made no such assertion, but the parent did
Uhhhh... I see no such assertion in the parent either. If by that you mean the "having something working by morning" part. No timelines whatsoever stated or implied. If by that you mean C# being a productive language for RAD environments, then yeah, that's arguably a point he's making.
But its a stretch to the point of being obtuse that you would introduce an embedded environment as required platform in a topic that clearly refers to web technologies. I guess the next time someone deploys a server farm to host a continuously evolving web application using only embedded processors, you're the guy for the job.
Choose whatever language you want. None of you are even competitive with me when I choose C# under Visual Studio with a notebook full of pseudocode.
gee, that's great. now get your code running on MSP430 and PIC32. Can you have it working by morning?
Gee, that's great. An embedded processor with 2-16K of RAM using C. An environment that's the epitomy of Rapid Application Development. Can you have any non-trivial code working by morning on that thing?
http://www.makershed.com/products/defusable-alarm-clock-kit
I have that kit waiting patiently in a drawer for my 12y/o to get the initiative to build it. They even have some cool ideas on wrapping dowels and routing the "defuse" wires through them to make it look like dynamite sticks. Clearly I would tell him never to bring that to school. But now, I'd have to worry about some friend coming over, seeing it and telling his parents. One can only imagine a similarly damaging misunderstanding taking place.
Seems we have already lost the war...