Wait -- that was ABC, who kept screaming at the top of their lungs about how the anthrax was linked to Iraq, had bentonite traced to Iraq, and how three or four highly credible sources had confirmed that it was produced in Iraq labs. And, to the best of my knowledge, they have never changed or recanted those allegations, even now that they're (along with everyone else) claiming that a single US-based scientist was actually the person who managed to produce, on his own, without access to the necessary equipment, weaponized anthrax that several FBI labs couldn't replicate given several years of effort.
I recently read a book about the service-level class in large Indian cities. One of the sections that really stuck in my head was a stripper's description of the difference between the way rich men tipped and the way rich men who were there with friends tipped: the first group literally threw money at them, while the second group would *turn their backs* on the strippers and just throw money over their shoulders, while talking to their friends. Now *that* is conspicuous consumption.
That's one reason, by the way, that I think preaching to people about the necessity for conservation is useless -- because many people don't really care about living a good life. What they care about is living a better life than the people they're around. So no matter what you tell them, they'll just keep trying to get *more* than everyone else.
Interesting article in New Scientist about this last week, concerning Colorado River sucker fish. They had two species that couldn't/didn't interbreed, had lived like that for centuries. Someone introduced another species of suckerfish. Turns out it *can* breed with both existing species, and now they're finding suckerfish that have genetic material from all three species, so, for any reasonable definition, those suckerfish are interbred from two species that were not previously capable of breeding.
So are the original two suckerfish distinct species, because they couldn't interbreed, or are they actually one, because now they can?
>We've lost our sense of adventure, the acceptance of risk and, well, we've become a society that's so bent on being safe that we're afraid to take any warranted risks: we've become a society of pansies.
It's not that we've lost our sense of adventure, it's that our sense of risk has become disproportionate, as has our sense of compensatory entitlement. We're terrified to get hurt and furiously looking for someone to blame when we do. So, people risk less out of fear of death, and companies risk less out of fear of getting sued to oblivion.
I sometimes wonder if this echoes a transition from a basically religious society to a basically secular one. When you believe in Heaven you are less likely to be fanatically death-averse than when you are convinced that this life is all you get.
Tell that to my last job. They didn't require overtime. They merely said that our regularly scheduled working hours were 3pm to 1am, Monday through Friday. If we chose not to show up for our 50 working hours per week, we were, indeed, fired, for "not meeting our job requirements".
You may argue that it wasn't legal for them to fire people, but that doesn't change the fact that they did indeed fire people for not working overtime.
>Moreover, individuals with increased rates of endogenous formation of carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds are likely to be susceptible to the development of cancers in the digestive system.
My memory of organic chemistry is that consumption of nitrites, not nitrates, results in formation of endogenous N-nitroso compounds, but I may be wrong.
I'd say getting my driver's license was about 300 times easier than getting my pilot certificate, yeah.
But the thing is: the driver's license requirement at the airport has *nothing* to do with security. All it does is prevent you reselling your ticket to someone else -- because, as you say, it's comparatively easy to get fake ID, and all the people we've so far managed to track down after they'd committed their special Big Crime, had in fact gotten fake ID's. That's precisely why companies like this Clear group can charge extra money to try and actually verify your identity and trustworthiness, because they're going above and beyond the cheap state-issued picture ID and doing some nominal background checking. That's the very basis of their whole business model: that they vouch for the people they put on the trusted list. (But as I said earlier, all that means is that any potential nogoodnik would just figure out how to game *them*: all it does is move the point of failure to another location, while extracting money from people, and as a business model, that's usually pretty successful, until it breaks, by which time the people who came up with it are rich and gone.)
You've hit upon the actual problem with this whole scheme: if you build a two-tier security system (whether you call it Clear or racial profiling or whatever) you annoy the people in the lower tier because they're being 'profiled' for extra checking -- they're false positives and they resent it and tell you that you're a racist or something. But the reason it's a Very Bad Idea isn't because of them, it's because of the false negatives, the people who figure out how to get into the less-checked, higher tier. If you're a nogoodnik and you have nogoodnik associates, you just keep trying, using different associates, until you get some people into the higher-tier group, and once they've managed to get through the system once or twice, you now have enhanced access. It's like the social equivalent of a software backdoor, and it's why two-tier systems are not only irritating but can make a system less secure.
Similar: riding my bike across Denmark when I was 16. Chain got squeaky, so I walked into a bike store to see if I could fix it and used what I thought was the Danish word for 'oil', which I'm going to represent as "ool". Only the Danish word for oil is actually more like "eul", whereas "ool" means beer. So I'm standing there, 16 years old, in a bike store, asking them for beer for my bike.
They stared at me, probably muttered something about stupid Americans, and then studiously ignored me.
(I might have my words reversed: that was 20-some years ago. But I remember the embarrassment when we DID figure it out...)
A friend of mine got a tattoo of some Japanese characters. I asked "why do you have 'grandmother' tattooed on your arm?" She said, "What? This says 'mother'!" No, no it doesn't... Boy was she irritated.
Authoritarianism is just what happens when some people think that they know what's best for everyone. Censorship and spying are parts of this.
But for many people, it's less about the authority than about the 'standing up' part. People who lack self-confidence aren't going to stand up to a pushy government, or anyone, because they're scared. As a result, when someone *does* stand up, it shames those who didn't, and they resent that person. This has been called crab mentality: the idea that a crab trying to escape from a bucket is pulled back by its fellow crabs.
At its base, authoritarianism is strongly related to insecurity. My point is just that many people encourage this (actively or passively) through fear and cognitive dissonance, not malice.
I, also, never had a clue about the flonk.flonk.flonk thing.
But hey, this is slashdot: there's a non-zero chance that the person who proposed that newsgroup is reading this.
Anyone out there know the significance of flonk? Or why three times the flonk is even better? (I assume that the repetition is just because that was/is a Usenet tradition, but maybe there's a reason.)
For the record, the secret military shuttle, if it's not just put in there to be hip, is probably a reference to the purported project blackstar which got some press coverage about two years ago. Aviation Week claimed that further developments of the old B-70 Valkryie were carrying small winged rocketships that could make LEO, much the way that Rutan's SpaceShipOne works. I submitted it as a slashdot story in 2006 but it was rejected, and within two months a lot of other informed sources tore the story apart.
Still, it's pretty cool to consider that there might've been an alternate military space program.
For the record, I got my private pilot license for about $4500. Granted, that was a few years ago before gas went through the roof, but I also didn't do a very good job of it and could've saved a lot more money if I'd done it right.
If anyone reading this is thinking about it, here are some hints.
1. Figure out how much you think it's going to cost, based on what the FBO you're working with says it's going to cost, then add 30%, and don't start until you have this sum saved up and know you won't need it. (Reason: running low on money means you don't fly as often, means you don't learn/retain as well, means you take a lot more lessons.)
2. Once you start, schedule for 4 lessons a week. Weather means you'll probably only fly 3 of those. That's optimal: fly, take a day off, repeat. More than that is somewhat overwhelming, and much less than that, less than 2 times a week, and you won't be learning so much as relearning what you did last time and then learning a little bit of new stuff.
3. Find a flight instructor who is a middle-aged airplane junkie, not a kid just out of school, because the middle-aged or older instructor will stick around, while the kid is just making time until an airline comes looking for employees. It really slows down your training if you have to go through several instructors because they keep getting Real Jobs and disappearing.
4. Shop around before you start. Sign up for discovery flights at several local FBO's, find a place you like, you feel like you can trust to field good planes. It's worth paying somewhat more per hour to not have to deal with planes that have mechanical problems that mean you don't get your lessons because they're grounded.
5. Get your medical done first. You'll waste a LOT of money if you start lessons and then get your medical before you solo... and find out that you have some weird blood disease you didn't know about and can't actually get a medical certificate.
6. Buy a flight log book from Sporty's or Aviation Spruce before you do any of this, because every "discovery flight" you take when you're shopping around, checking out different FBO's, is loggable time, and it's usually cheap loggable time. If you're a quick learner, you can save maybe a couple hundred dollars by getting cheap time cut off that 40 hours you need before your final test.
I'm assuming you'll be doing ground school on your own. Ask if the FBO's are okay with that: some won't let you. I did my own studying, learned what I needed from books I checked out from the library, and passed the FAA written test with flying colors.
The question is: what's a jet? If you have a propeller that's in a duct, and it's accellerating air that's shooting out of the back, providing propulsion, is that a jet? coz that's what powers 747's. There are two different parts of propulsion systems: how you burn fuel, and how you couple the mechanical energy you got from the fuel burning, to accellerating air. Piston engines burn fuel with a positive-displacement system. Jet engines use a non-positive-displacement system, relying on pressure differentials and forced induction. But it's not exactly a hard boundary between them. The Napier Nomad engine used pistons and an axial-flow turbine, coupled together, to extract work from burnt fuel, to drive a propeller. It was half-piston half-jet. Likewise, people have taken a piston engine with a big turbocharger, and put the propeller on the turbo -- so it's a jet, that's using a piston engine to produce hot air to drive the turbine. The engines we generally think of as jets, the things that drive 747's and the like, have a small jet engine driving a big propeller, which actually provides 80% of the engine thrust. There is actually a continuum between a traditional small plane with its piston engine and a military turbojet. It's just that we don't see a lot of the points along the continuum because they weren't financially viable.
Ebola has, what, a 40% mortality rate, and it's over one way or the other in less than two weeks. Alzheimer's, in contrast, has (until now) a 100% mortality rate and takes *years* of horribleness.
Another really nice thing about inline and horizontally opposed 4-cylinder engines is that they have a flat crankshaft, so it can be formed by forging, giving a very strong, light crankshaft. I believe V4's require a cast crankshaft, because it has 90 degree segments (unless you want it to run/sound like a Harley.) Castings aren't as strong as pure forged.
At least that's what I've read when I was rebuilding my Subaru engine.
Harbor Freight sells OBD-II readers for $40 and have several other more expensive models as well. They read and clear diag messages. You can build your own based on a pic microcontroller; this will interface to a laptop and give you real-time access to all the OBD-II information. There are opensource software packages for Windows and Linux that allow you to build virtual instrumentation if you want to see what your oil pressure or water temperature are, rather than just relying on the dashboard disaster lights, or see what your oxygen sensor or mass air flow sensor are reading, if you're really curious.
I have exactly the opposite experience, which I attribute to Japanese designers trying to keep us from running out of gas. My Subaru shows "E" when it still has roughly 10 liters in the tank, out of a total of 66 liters. The 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 indications are directly linearly proportional to the distance I've driven.
Back in the dark ages this issue even came up in an old episode of the Dick Van Dyke show. He bought a cute little European sports car and was really irritated that it ran out of gas the moment it hit 'E', rather than (like American cars at the time) going on another thirty km or so till he got to a convenient gas station.
While I entirely agree with your message, I feel that I should mention the accepted value for insolation is closer to 1400 watts per square meter, not 400 -- which only goes to reinforce your point. Just thought you might like to know.
I just pulled some capXor capacitors out of a viewsonic monitor that had died horribly. I don't know what they'd put in those caps but it sure wasn't electrolyte. Maybe fish oil. So I see your point.
MY point is that even a crap computer full of dodgy hardware, beats 30 year old hardware that nobody knows how to repair or even run correctly, that's being run by operators who are barely literate, if the controller are even still operational. I've seen more than my share of NC mills that have been back-converted to hand operation because the NC stuff didn't work anymore. In fact, I have an industrial-grade solar panel alignment controller that I can't make heads or tails of, so I've replaced it with something like what I was talking about elsewhere in this thread: owfs running a serial-port-based solar irradiance detector, and the parallel port running a big stepper motor, all packed into an ancient text-only 386 laptop. It's worked for a long time now.
If you have a manufacturing business that makes less than $10k a year, which describes many, many small businesses across southeast asia and africa, $180 is a lot of money to shell out for a new piece of equipment. Training and a technician to troubleshoot an old Allen-Bradley PLC that could keep running even if you lit it on fire? is going to cost more than your gross profit for the whole year. So when a sensor dies on the A-B, which one keeps the business running?
It also beats having nothing at all, which is what people trying to get manufacturing running across 90% of the world currently have. Good idea? maybe not. But, like eating the people who died in the plane crash to keep from starving, some people don't have a choice.
As I said in another response in this thread, I have lost count of how many people from India have written me, asking for implementation details and help on getting oven controllers they've built working, which are based on a plan I drew up 10 years ago that uses qbasic, parallel port interface, and an AD0805 A/D converter reading a thermocouple. Some of them had turned it into a commercial product: they were selling the worst-coded, most crap thermal control unit the world has ever seen. Because it beat their other options.
As I've written elsewhere in this thread, across the Third World, those mission-critical applications often don't have *any* sort of controller other than a human one. Getting statistical process control, data acquisition, logging, and trend analysis equipment working, no matter how delicate the equipment, is going to be an enormous change for people who have been working with handheld calculators and handwritten logbooks. And in that case, the cheaper the non-robust hardware, the better, because they can buy multiple machines and swap them out.
You're arguing the same thing as all the people who are saying "this thing can't run Duke Nukem 4000" and missing the point entirely. These cheap little crappy machines aren't going to be replacing anything in the First World -- not anything, not anywhere. What they *are* going to do is give small manufacturers in India and China, and many other places besides, the ability to add process control to facilities that don't have anything at all right now. I've designed and built small kiln controllers for hobby usage, using a crappy 8 bit A/D converter hooked into a parallel port and some truly awful qbasic routines to do the interfacing, and I've gotten *dozens* of emails from people in India who were trying to get my circuit/software working for their pottery factories and heat treatment facilities in small machine shops. They currently have either nothing, or ancient stuff they can't fix and can hardly program. That's where these will have an effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait -- that was ABC, who kept screaming at the top of their lungs about how the anthrax was linked to Iraq, had bentonite traced to Iraq, and how three or four highly credible sources had confirmed that it was produced in Iraq labs.
And, to the best of my knowledge, they have never changed or recanted those allegations, even now that they're (along with everyone else) claiming that a single US-based scientist was actually the person who managed to produce, on his own, without access to the necessary equipment, weaponized anthrax that several FBI labs couldn't replicate given several years of effort.
I recently read a book about the service-level class in large Indian cities. One of the sections that really stuck in my head was a stripper's description of the difference between the way rich men tipped and the way rich men who were there with friends tipped: the first group literally threw money at them, while the second group would *turn their backs* on the strippers and just throw money over their shoulders, while talking to their friends.
Now *that* is conspicuous consumption.
That's one reason, by the way, that I think preaching to people about the necessity for conservation is useless -- because many people don't really care about living a good life. What they care about is living a better life than the people they're around. So no matter what you tell them, they'll just keep trying to get *more* than everyone else.
Interesting article in New Scientist about this last week, concerning Colorado River sucker fish. They had two species that couldn't/didn't interbreed, had lived like that for centuries. Someone introduced another species of suckerfish. Turns out it *can* breed with both existing species, and now they're finding suckerfish that have genetic material from all three species, so, for any reasonable definition, those suckerfish are interbred from two species that were not previously capable of breeding.
So are the original two suckerfish distinct species, because they couldn't interbreed, or are they actually one, because now they can?
>We've lost our sense of adventure, the acceptance of risk and, well, we've become a society that's so bent on being safe that we're afraid to take any warranted risks: we've become a society of pansies.
It's not that we've lost our sense of adventure, it's that our sense of risk has become disproportionate, as has our sense of compensatory entitlement. We're terrified to get hurt and furiously looking for someone to blame when we do. So, people risk less out of fear of death, and companies risk less out of fear of getting sued to oblivion.
I sometimes wonder if this echoes a transition from a basically religious society to a basically secular one. When you believe in Heaven you are less likely to be fanatically death-averse than when you are convinced that this life is all you get.
>They can't fire you for not working overtime.
Tell that to my last job.
They didn't require overtime. They merely said that our regularly scheduled working hours were 3pm to 1am, Monday through Friday. If we chose not to show up for our 50 working hours per week, we were, indeed, fired, for "not meeting our job requirements".
You may argue that it wasn't legal for them to fire people, but that doesn't change the fact that they did indeed fire people for not working overtime.
>Moreover, individuals with increased rates of endogenous formation of carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds are likely to be susceptible to the development of cancers in the digestive system.
My memory of organic chemistry is that consumption of nitrites, not nitrates, results in formation of endogenous N-nitroso compounds, but I may be wrong.
I'd say getting my driver's license was about 300 times easier than getting my pilot certificate, yeah.
But the thing is: the driver's license requirement at the airport has *nothing* to do with security. All it does is prevent you reselling your ticket to someone else -- because, as you say, it's comparatively easy to get fake ID, and all the people we've so far managed to track down after they'd committed their special Big Crime, had in fact gotten fake ID's.
That's precisely why companies like this Clear group can charge extra money to try and actually verify your identity and trustworthiness, because they're going above and beyond the cheap state-issued picture ID and doing some nominal background checking. That's the very basis of their whole business model: that they vouch for the people they put on the trusted list. (But as I said earlier, all that means is that any potential nogoodnik would just figure out how to game *them*: all it does is move the point of failure to another location, while extracting money from people, and as a business model, that's usually pretty successful, until it breaks, by which time the people who came up with it are rich and gone.)
You've hit upon the actual problem with this whole scheme: if you build a two-tier security system (whether you call it Clear or racial profiling or whatever) you annoy the people in the lower tier because they're being 'profiled' for extra checking -- they're false positives and they resent it and tell you that you're a racist or something.
But the reason it's a Very Bad Idea isn't because of them, it's because of the false negatives, the people who figure out how to get into the less-checked, higher tier. If you're a nogoodnik and you have nogoodnik associates, you just keep trying, using different associates, until you get some people into the higher-tier group, and once they've managed to get through the system once or twice, you now have enhanced access. It's like the social equivalent of a software backdoor, and it's why two-tier systems are not only irritating but can make a system less secure.
Similar: riding my bike across Denmark when I was 16. Chain got squeaky, so I walked into a bike store to see if I could fix it and used what I thought was the Danish word for 'oil', which I'm going to represent as "ool". Only the Danish word for oil is actually more like "eul", whereas "ool" means beer. So I'm standing there, 16 years old, in a bike store, asking them for beer for my bike.
They stared at me, probably muttered something about stupid Americans, and then studiously ignored me.
(I might have my words reversed: that was 20-some years ago. But I remember the embarrassment when we DID figure it out...)
A friend of mine got a tattoo of some Japanese characters.
I asked "why do you have 'grandmother' tattooed on your arm?"
She said, "What? This says 'mother'!"
No, no it doesn't...
Boy was she irritated.
Authoritarianism is just what happens when some people think that they know what's best for everyone. Censorship and spying are parts of this.
But for many people, it's less about the authority than about the 'standing up' part. People who lack self-confidence aren't going to stand up to a pushy government, or anyone, because they're scared. As a result, when someone *does* stand up, it shames those who didn't, and they resent that person. This has been called crab mentality: the idea that a crab trying to escape from a bucket is pulled back by its fellow crabs.
At its base, authoritarianism is strongly related to insecurity. My point is just that many people encourage this (actively or passively) through fear and cognitive dissonance, not malice.
I, also, never had a clue about the flonk.flonk.flonk thing.
But hey, this is slashdot: there's a non-zero chance that the person who proposed that newsgroup is reading this.
Anyone out there know the significance of flonk? Or why three times the flonk is even better? (I assume that the repetition is just because that was/is a Usenet tradition, but maybe there's a reason.)
Coz your post is dead accurate about the whole usenet sense of humor.
I loved:
alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack
alt.sex.bestiality.barney.die.die.die
and all the many alt.*.whilst.wearing.rubber.knickers groups.
Not that I ever *read* any of them, but it made my heart warm knowing they existed.
For the record, the secret military shuttle, if it's not just put in there to be hip, is probably a reference to the purported project blackstar which got some press coverage about two years ago. Aviation Week claimed that further developments of the old B-70 Valkryie were carrying small winged rocketships that could make LEO, much the way that Rutan's SpaceShipOne works. I submitted it as a slashdot story in 2006 but it was rejected, and within two months a lot of other informed sources tore the story apart.
Still, it's pretty cool to consider that there might've been an alternate military space program.
For the record, I got my private pilot license for about $4500. Granted, that was a few years ago before gas went through the roof, but I also didn't do a very good job of it and could've saved a lot more money if I'd done it right.
If anyone reading this is thinking about it, here are some hints.
1. Figure out how much you think it's going to cost, based on what the FBO you're working with says it's going to cost, then add 30%, and don't start until you have this sum saved up and know you won't need it. (Reason: running low on money means you don't fly as often, means you don't learn/retain as well, means you take a lot more lessons.)
2. Once you start, schedule for 4 lessons a week. Weather means you'll probably only fly 3 of those. That's optimal: fly, take a day off, repeat. More than that is somewhat overwhelming, and much less than that, less than 2 times a week, and you won't be learning so much as relearning what you did last time and then learning a little bit of new stuff.
3. Find a flight instructor who is a middle-aged airplane junkie, not a kid just out of school, because the middle-aged or older instructor will stick around, while the kid is just making time until an airline comes looking for employees. It really slows down your training if you have to go through several instructors because they keep getting Real Jobs and disappearing.
4. Shop around before you start. Sign up for discovery flights at several local FBO's, find a place you like, you feel like you can trust to field good planes. It's worth paying somewhat more per hour to not have to deal with planes that have mechanical problems that mean you don't get your lessons because they're grounded.
5. Get your medical done first. You'll waste a LOT of money if you start lessons and then get your medical before you solo... and find out that you have some weird blood disease you didn't know about and can't actually get a medical certificate.
6. Buy a flight log book from Sporty's or Aviation Spruce before you do any of this, because every "discovery flight" you take when you're shopping around, checking out different FBO's, is loggable time, and it's usually cheap loggable time. If you're a quick learner, you can save maybe a couple hundred dollars by getting cheap time cut off that 40 hours you need before your final test.
I'm assuming you'll be doing ground school on your own. Ask if the FBO's are okay with that: some won't let you. I did my own studying, learned what I needed from books I checked out from the library, and passed the FAA written test with flying colors.
The question is: what's a jet?
If you have a propeller that's in a duct, and it's accellerating air that's shooting out of the back, providing propulsion, is that a jet? coz that's what powers 747's.
There are two different parts of propulsion systems: how you burn fuel, and how you couple the mechanical energy you got from the fuel burning, to accellerating air.
Piston engines burn fuel with a positive-displacement system. Jet engines use a non-positive-displacement system, relying on pressure differentials and forced induction.
But it's not exactly a hard boundary between them. The Napier Nomad engine used pistons and an axial-flow turbine, coupled together, to extract work from burnt fuel, to drive a propeller. It was half-piston half-jet. Likewise, people have taken a piston engine with a big turbocharger, and put the propeller on the turbo -- so it's a jet, that's using a piston engine to produce hot air to drive the turbine.
The engines we generally think of as jets, the things that drive 747's and the like, have a small jet engine driving a big propeller, which actually provides 80% of the engine thrust.
There is actually a continuum between a traditional small plane with its piston engine and a military turbojet. It's just that we don't see a lot of the points along the continuum because they weren't financially viable.
Ebola has, what, a 40% mortality rate, and it's over one way or the other in less than two weeks.
Alzheimer's, in contrast, has (until now) a 100% mortality rate and takes *years* of horribleness.
I'll take Ebola, thanks.
Another really nice thing about inline and horizontally opposed 4-cylinder engines is that they have a flat crankshaft, so it can be formed by forging, giving a very strong, light crankshaft. I believe V4's require a cast crankshaft, because it has 90 degree segments (unless you want it to run/sound like a Harley.) Castings aren't as strong as pure forged.
At least that's what I've read when I was rebuilding my Subaru engine.
Harbor Freight sells OBD-II readers for $40 and have several other more expensive models as well. They read and clear diag messages.
You can build your own based on a pic microcontroller; this will interface to a laptop and give you real-time access to all the OBD-II information. There are opensource software packages for Windows and Linux that allow you to build virtual instrumentation if you want to see what your oil pressure or water temperature are, rather than just relying on the dashboard disaster lights, or see what your oxygen sensor or mass air flow sensor are reading, if you're really curious.
I have exactly the opposite experience, which I attribute to Japanese designers trying to keep us from running out of gas. My Subaru shows "E" when it still has roughly 10 liters in the tank, out of a total of 66 liters. The 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 indications are directly linearly proportional to the distance I've driven.
Back in the dark ages this issue even came up in an old episode of the Dick Van Dyke show. He bought a cute little European sports car and was really irritated that it ran out of gas the moment it hit 'E', rather than (like American cars at the time) going on another thirty km or so till he got to a convenient gas station.
While I entirely agree with your message, I feel that I should mention the accepted value for insolation is closer to 1400 watts per square meter, not 400 -- which only goes to reinforce your point. Just thought you might like to know.
I just pulled some capXor capacitors out of a viewsonic monitor that had died horribly. I don't know what they'd put in those caps but it sure wasn't electrolyte. Maybe fish oil. So I see your point.
MY point is that even a crap computer full of dodgy hardware, beats 30 year old hardware that nobody knows how to repair or even run correctly, that's being run by operators who are barely literate, if the controller are even still operational. I've seen more than my share of NC mills that have been back-converted to hand operation because the NC stuff didn't work anymore. In fact, I have an industrial-grade solar panel alignment controller that I can't make heads or tails of, so I've replaced it with something like what I was talking about elsewhere in this thread: owfs running a serial-port-based solar irradiance detector, and the parallel port running a big stepper motor, all packed into an ancient text-only 386 laptop. It's worked for a long time now.
If you have a manufacturing business that makes less than $10k a year, which describes many, many small businesses across southeast asia and africa, $180 is a lot of money to shell out for a new piece of equipment. Training and a technician to troubleshoot an old Allen-Bradley PLC that could keep running even if you lit it on fire? is going to cost more than your gross profit for the whole year. So when a sensor dies on the A-B, which one keeps the business running?
It also beats having nothing at all, which is what people trying to get manufacturing running across 90% of the world currently have. Good idea? maybe not. But, like eating the people who died in the plane crash to keep from starving, some people don't have a choice.
As I said in another response in this thread, I have lost count of how many people from India have written me, asking for implementation details and help on getting oven controllers they've built working, which are based on a plan I drew up 10 years ago that uses qbasic, parallel port interface, and an AD0805 A/D converter reading a thermocouple. Some of them had turned it into a commercial product: they were selling the worst-coded, most crap thermal control unit the world has ever seen.
Because it beat their other options.
As I've written elsewhere in this thread, across the Third World, those mission-critical applications often don't have *any* sort of controller other than a human one. Getting statistical process control, data acquisition, logging, and trend analysis equipment working, no matter how delicate the equipment, is going to be an enormous change for people who have been working with handheld calculators and handwritten logbooks. And in that case, the cheaper the non-robust hardware, the better, because they can buy multiple machines and swap them out.
You're arguing the same thing as all the people who are saying "this thing can't run Duke Nukem 4000" and missing the point entirely. These cheap little crappy machines aren't going to be replacing anything in the First World -- not anything, not anywhere. What they *are* going to do is give small manufacturers in India and China, and many other places besides, the ability to add process control to facilities that don't have anything at all right now.
I've designed and built small kiln controllers for hobby usage, using a crappy 8 bit A/D converter hooked into a parallel port and some truly awful qbasic routines to do the interfacing, and I've gotten *dozens* of emails from people in India who were trying to get my circuit/software working for their pottery factories and heat treatment facilities in small machine shops.
They currently have either nothing, or ancient stuff they can't fix and can hardly program. That's where these will have an effect.