You know, we took an outage in our dev lab yesterday when a PDU blew, and took out some fiber that was running next to it. Shit happens...maybe not often, but it does. Any individual server can go, for any number of reasons, some of which are totally outside the server.
If we are talking about unimportant services, sure... leave it up to a single server. If your business depends on it though? Well then I guess if your business isn't worth keeping up in an outage...then enjoy but... I would consider that important enough to have a couple, in different places.... hopefully in an active/active config but, even a warm spare means being back up reasonably fast.
Its not about how likely it is...given enough time unlikely events happen. Its a question of how fast you can recover WHEN it happens.
Frankly, I wonder why they didn't test the one thing I do as soon as I get a new LCD, which is actually recomended by several sites out there.... turn the brightness down to under 20%, sometimes, I go all the way to "0" (interesting that 0 brightness is not a black screen).
As an N=1 test, after realising that I couldn't easily tell the difference after a minute or two, was to take one of the most observant and territorial about her PC people I know, and changed the brightness all the way down while she was away.... just as I expected, she didn't even notice. I eventually told her she had been using the display with the brightness all the way down, she had no idea.
So I agree with all the people who say turn it down.... really, your brain will adjust the white levels on its own just fine.
Then... well... I like a black google...and any other site I can get. Not because of power savings but just because I always prefered dark backgrounds with light text on screens.
Do you realise that the talk I refered to, in fact, used Newton as one of his examples of religion signaling the end of progress.
In fact he had several examples of the places where several scientists made great breakthroughs, got to the limits of their understanding, then invoked a god hypothesis and that was the end of their meaningful contribution to science, until someone else came along and picked up the problem again.
Yes thats exactly the guy who NDT was refering to, and mentioned by name. Of course, remember, you are getting my recollection of what he said, which is imperfect and since the original was an hour long video...well.... lets just say looking it up wasn't going to happen for a quick comment during the work day;)
I don't think you fully appreciate the POS system.
Actually i think IBM is smart here. They were an early pioneer and got in while the getting was good. They serviced few (compared to the number of businesses doing retail sales) but very big customers.
In any case, these card reader things are not so much part of the POS system. They connect to it, but the credit card payment infrastructure is a beast all its own. The payment processors often work similar to cell phones with the "you buy the approved equipment which is locked to our services" deals.
It may be that with these particular systems it runs through the central POS and works differently, but, even so, it will be modular and just connect. Backwards compatibility is HUGE in this industry.
Anyway... the reason, IMHO, that they are getting out is.... the game isn't what it used to be. They used to be the only game in town. Newer POS systems are cheaper, smaller, newer, and sold by smaller companies. IBM is the big fish, but a big fish in a pond more suited to small ones. it was great for them while it lasted but... shit... my wife's company sells POS systems.
In the POS busineness, its more about service contracts. Yes the big sales are nice, but, remember, stores hate to be down. You have to be able to provide onsite service, nearly 365 days a year. Not just that, but specialized service, you can't just hire anyone with an A+ cert, guys who work on registers often do it for their whole career. I can see why IBM looks at the diminishing returns on those investments and was happy to hand it off.
Those are, in fact, the strips I bought. Without the remote or power supply, figuring I could find my own, planned to use a zigbee for wireless and arduino to pwm the lights. I looked into i2c led drivers and they look promising too, but zigbee can't talk i2c directly and if I need the arduino anyway and really only 3 channels.... may as well use simple FETs to bring the signal to the next set of strips. My current plan is to use 3 sections of a quad op amp, one for each channel, to distribute the PWM signal to a bunch of NPN mosfets that will control each channel.
Even that is overkill for the prototype light but I wanted something I could scale to larger lights with more groups of strips.
I was trying to keep efficincy "as high as I reasonably can", so that was where I started. In the end... i would be happy to get to the efficincy of CFLs (from som every cursory playing around, that seems doable).
In fact, I feel, for 2 reasons, that even a bit less efficient than CFLs is STILL a win because I can dim LEDs with PWM (which should increase their life). CFLs suck at dimming, and even the so called "dimable CFLs" will flicker hoirribly when dimmed more than a small amount.
The second reason, as stated, the ability to change colors.
All in all, I have been coming to the same conclusion about SMPS but needed someone else to say it. The further I went down that rabbit whole I went the more I came around to constant voltage and limiting resistors. Remember, this is for permenant installation in my house too... so if I need to get a nice power DC power supply in to run several fixtures, I can.
The issue I started coming to was...well... like I said... CFL efficincy would be fine... but when I start adding up the CFLs I am replacing...I started to realise, I start needing a pretty hefty supply to put them all on one.... so multiple small supplies may be better. They have some switch mode wall warts now....
Can't say as I have had that problem specifically, but... its definitely an odd issue. Some of us are damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
I tend to not say (or at least dance around saying) exactly who I work for because, well, I tend to say things that they might find offensive and I figure the least I can do is try to keep my online persona from reflecting on them.
That said... if you read many of my comments, you might be surprized at who I work for... I certainly don't shill.... but there is a fine line to walk between disclosure of interests and inviting problems.
If I say "Well i work for X" then... I have to be extra careful because I am not authorized to speak for them in public. In fact, I believe I would then be required to add disclaimers and then...it all just adds to the visibility and draws more attention on me... meaning...I can't comment as freely as I would like.
Sometimes its a hard balance to strike between speaking your mind, and inviting trouble, especially since I tend to complain rather than shill, and I do feel its a bit of a violation (not just to the explicit agreements but, even without them) to wantonly air dirty laundry even when I am a less than satisfied employee.
So I prefer to err on the side of speaking in general terms and leaving the who, what, and where specifics out. Though, thats easier when the specific topic is things like "boneheaded management" than when its about the actions of specific companies. In cases like this... I can see why it gets a lot murkier and credibility requires disclosure.
Of course he did it in protest.... he should fight that all the way to the supreme court on first amendment grounds. He was making a statement through public performance.
Even if he loses, the best thing he can do is make for damned sure anyone wondering why he is a sex offender gets the real story.
and that hot dog stand doesn't even go to a cash register place, he goes and buys a register at Staples.... then takes it into a cash register place when it breaks and they tell him they don't work on those cheap store bought models and, even if they did, the labor charges would almost be the cost of a new one.... minimum.
I worked on a project involving some store upgrades in the late 90s. Just as you said... they seldom upgrade whole systems, they were running IBM servers from the 1980s in 1997, and the plan, involved removing one of them, and leaving the old secondary in service! (to run the wireless registers, not sure what the issue was, either they didn't want to buy the new wireless card, or there was no new one in that line...)
The machine we took out was a hefty full tower 386 with double height internal hard drives, providing a whopping 100 MB of storage. Reason for the upgrade: Layaway transactions were filling the hard drive and crashing the system due to data requirements.... and not having layaway was killing the business.
Of course, these new systems... new Pentiums of the time.... were running the same "Store Operating System" as the old 386s were. The entire point of this upgrade was to add disk capacity.
Though, to say they never upgrade the systems isn't exactly true. There was a pile of disused cables, maybe 6 inches deep, behind the main servers. They would upgrade something, and drop the old cable in place....in every single store.... but those clearly were the result of small changes over time.
I wont be buying any though....well maybe a few as a stop-gap but, not many.
I have been getting RGB LED strips, and looking to totally replace the house lighting. Part of the problem here is the "bulb". Yes, if you stick to a bulb form factor, and be backwards compartible, it can be hard to get enough light from LEDs, and expensive to build out etc.
However, bulbs were just the first invention....what makes that form factor so superior except for backwards compatibility?
I am looking at long strips, more like flourecent tube fixtures than bulbs. Can use many cheaper LEDs instead of a few expensive big ones... can use RBG LEDs and thus be able to change colors, or even white temp.
Of course, the stips are cheap pre-made, cheaper than I can find the LEDs on them in fact (cheapest price for 1000 in bulk was more expensive per LED than buying strips of 150 at a time) and the strips have limiting resistors, which are a major source of power loss (would be better to drop the resistor and use a constant current circuit.... but having to desolder or jumper smd resistors on each and every segment of the strip defeats the purpose of buying strips to make it easy)
Still though.... at $60/bulb.... ouch. and...its still just a bulb... with a single light color?
I was just watching a talk by NDT on "Intelligent Design". In that, he made an excellent observation about how, for a 300 year period, the Arab world was the center of intellectual progress in the world. 2/3 of all stars with names have Arabic names. They discovered 0, they gave us algebra.
Then... a new religious philosophy arose that taught that mathematics was the work of the Devil. This wasn't Mohamed.... it wasn't there in the beginings of Islam. For many years, these problems didn't exist.
The sobering thought there is... as he points out.... this period of advancement ended with the rise of this anti-scientific ideology. Just think, there are a Billion Muslims, and only a handful of Muslim/Arab nobel prize winners. If they hadn't ended their period of advancement hundreds of years before Europe became the new center of intellectual progress... where would we be today? How much raw talent just went totally unused because of these ideologies.
Honestly.... I have little doubt that there would be people posting comments from Lunar or martian colonies by now if not for this terrible ideology.
Now if they would just stop this crusade against people who don't choose alcohol as their drug of choice, it would be an even bigger step. Maybe if they stopped driving all this business underground, and stopped putting it all in the hands of major drug cartels....that would be swell too.
Maybe if they let Glaxco-smith-kline put all the major drug cartels out of business? That should take all of a few months for them.
Even dumber is...these sites tend to be pretty small. I doubt many cartels are using them, so its mostly small time dealers who are also techies. This isn't a win, this is more stupid. More lives ruined over a problem the government caused initially by creating the black markets.
Nearly every drug problem they have tried to "solve" with prohibition has only gotten worst. The ones they have driven off the streets completely tend to be the less popular drugs anyway, and just drive the users to even less safe alternatived.
Good job morons. Maybe if they keep banging their heads against the wall, the problem will just go away....clearly they just need to arrest, strip search, and lock up a few more people. That will totally solve the problem!
> putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid
Yes it is...however, I feel the same way about every other company, including the ones with the SLA who say they wont ever look at your data. Unless its encrypted on disk and they don't have the key, then I don't trust it...because it means trusting them, trusting courts that may order them to look, trusting every employee they ever hire, trusting anyone who compromises their system, thats a lot of trust.
I see no mention of linux (which is basically all I use at home or work, unless you count booting windows for the exlusive purpose of playing steam games)... but Mac users should be able to use encfs, which I have used in the past with similar services.
These services, even the free ones, are just fine, as long as you take the right precautions. The only files (at all) you will find on any cloud storage of mine are encrypted.
Actually, about a week ago I was looking at some 3d printer porn (waiting for my reprap kit to arrive)..and saw mention of how objects can be printed that couldn't really be built other ways...solid pieces with internal cavity walls etc....
the first thing I thought of was, in fact, vessels with very high internal surface areas (possibly even textured to provide even more surface area) which could be used for catalyst reactions or even for brewing (I believe there has been some experimental work in brewing using a vessel like this where yeast was in some way integrated into the internal surfaces.
Yet from the wiki page: It is covered under U.S. Patent 5,732,138, titled "Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system."
I don't believe it ever became a product... and was cumbersome to setup. Hard to justify a lava lamp display in a data center, and god forbid you need multiple sources in one DC say, on every machine)
One thing I worry about with devices like this is failure mode. if it can be made totally solid state, I would think it could be setup analogously to the way solid state relays are (with an emiter and detector in a small package).... but.... if it failed such that its numbers stopped really being random.... in what ways will it be able to detect this? (not just theoretically, but in real designs). Its great if you can get an error, but, it could be prolblematic if it just starts streaming highly repetitive numbers.
Please cite references. Or are you refering to your own personal experience? Don't forget that since the captive must know his captor doesn't have all the information, and could even have distorted info, so even the truth may get him punished if the interrogator thinks its a lie. He is still just learning to say what they want to hear.
Torture techniques, like many modern less dramatic techniques are seldom aimed at getting the whole truth so much as producing a confession. Even without torture, standard modern interrogation techniques have shown, in testing, to be able to extract a confession 90% of the time, even when the confessor isn't guilty.
Of course, many of these techniques are simple subtle applications of psychological torture.... you can get considered for bail, or spend your days in here. You can confess to this lesser crime than we say you did, or else face trial for this list of crimes.
I have seen interviews with military interrogation experts who have said that torture has generally been found to validate the subjects view of his captors and results in less cooperation.
Far more effective is subtle "befriending". There was a german interrogator who was known for getting a lot of information by taking captured pilots for walks and just....chatting them up casually. Ever seen the police question someone.... Good Cop/Bad Cop is a cliche for a reason. They don't play bad cop bad cop for a reason.
Interesting... ill have to see if I can find the story and see if they characterized it wrong or if it was my takeaway that missed that. Tis the problem with refering to information that I got while driving in the morning.
So we are splitting hairs about the definition of a cogent argument? OK... I will accept that my choice of phrase must have been wrong (I certainly wasn't quoting anyone else directly), and happily substitute your, more accurate and precise wording.
> What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a > single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made:
On NPR it was pointed out that when Einstein published his work on relativity, similar "Statement by X number of scientists" statements came out. His reply, which I think is an absolutely appropriate and correct application of "the stink test" was simply to point out that in the scientific realm, it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something. Science is not an exercise in consensus.
> As far as the 'pointed beam' you're talking about, that hasn't been improved, ever. The cone is just > as large as it's always been. If the technician stands in the room (as my co-worker often did), > they're just stupid. In fact, according to ADA recommendations, X-Ray techs are supposed to wear > dosimeters. Most dentists are too cheap to buy them, though.
Wow... agreed! My mother was an X-Ray tech for about 25 years (until she ended up on disability for unrelated reasons). When she started back in the 60s/70s she was told "by choosing this profession you are taking 7 years off your life".
Admittedly she was a hospital X-Ray dept tech, so she did them all day long, and with a machine that enforced being in a different room... unless it was a portable X-Ray but thats another story.
Even at all that, I seem to remember there were a handful of times where her dose was high enough that she was given some mandatory time off work. I can only imagine what a dentist in the room is doing to themselves.... how many times a day do they take x-rays?
Also, for anyone interested in how bad X-rays used to be... my mother was fond of pointing out how much better soft tissue xrays were back in the 50s when they could use thorium as a contrast solution:) great images..... just didn't work out so well for the patient.
I ran a poker game for about 6 years. I have seen this before. Its not probability that failed, its your use of it that did. Low probability events happen with great regularity on the long run. A poker player that is willing to bet his entire stack on anything less than the nuts, even if there is only one hand out of the enitire deck that could beat him.... if he sees that situation enough times, he will still loose that hand that one time out of 250 or so.
So.... maybe you bet your whole stack in a tournament, but....you never sit down with your whole bankroll. That is just bad bankroll management....or bad risk assessment...whatever you wanna call it.
They don't call em 100 year floods because they never happen. They call em that because they seem to be of a size you only see every 100 years or so. However... you have to remember how the odds work. Just because he had pocket aces last hand, doesn't mean he doesn't this hand. What are the odds? 1 in 250 or so times 1 and 250 or so (assuming a good shuffle etc)... pretty unlikely... but its happened to me.
Even if its not your primary means.... and believe me, I am a hardcore linux guy whose used linux on his desktop, even while working at VERY windows centric shops that didn't entirely approve. The key is to have windows available, either as a machine you can RDP or as a VM (preferable).
95% of things, you can find a fine Linux based alternative.... but every once in a while someone is gonna send you a non-xml visio or maybe you have to talk to an exchange server (I never had luck with the linux tools.... even when I got them to work).
As I type this, my work laptop is, in fact, setting up a windows VM for this purpose. At my previous job, we had both desktops and laptops, so i just did nearly everything on my laptop, which ran Ubuntu, and would just rdp control my desktop for reading email and filling out timesheets (which required IE)
Personally, I would love to ditch windows completely...but I need it for steam anyway (my only non-work use for windows), and while I don't mind spending half a day getting a new free software alternative running... few people have the patients to wait for me to do it on their time.... so, I have windows for those times, and just take everything I have to do in windows as something to add to my "upgrade to linux" punch list.
Hmmm KOTOR and Mass Effect? Loved those games...even as a heterosexual male.
Also, I might add, the comments from gay friends have pointed out that the "gay possibilities" in these games (in particular these) are kinda lame anyway (actually, the hetero possibilities are kinda lame too actually...)
Though still... Its good to see games that take the time to put in content that appeals to other audiences. I know male heterosexual gamers, like myself, are the lions share of the industry, but these games show that you can include content to appeal to different groups without detracting from the game.
The biggest sins of these games was the debacle that is only evident if you try to play KOTOR II and Mass Effect back to back (hint: its basically the same story... the central space stations even have the same name and same origin... seriously....)
I am not aware of a SINGLE application, used in business, that is "Chrome Only".
However, for years at previous jobs (where linux desktops where uncommon) I have struggled with needing to maintain a windows machine for NO OTHER PURPOSE than to run outlook for mail, and ie for a few apps that will not work with anything else.
They are all over the place. Of course, not everyone can choose, many are locked in at work, and those who are locked in tend to be locked in to IE, for the same reason... a few apps. Those who can choose, well.... even if they use firefox or chrome, probably can't fully ditch ie even if they wanted to.
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You know, we took an outage in our dev lab yesterday when a PDU blew, and took out some fiber that was running next to it. Shit happens...maybe not often, but it does. Any individual server can go, for any number of reasons, some of which are totally outside the server.
If we are talking about unimportant services, sure... leave it up to a single server. If your business depends on it though? Well then I guess if your business isn't worth keeping up in an outage...then enjoy but... I would consider that important enough to have a couple, in different places.... hopefully in an active/active config but, even a warm spare means being back up reasonably fast.
Its not about how likely it is...given enough time unlikely events happen. Its a question of how fast you can recover WHEN it happens.
Well if you already did that....
Frankly, I wonder why they didn't test the one thing I do as soon as I get a new LCD, which is actually recomended by several sites out there.... turn the brightness down to under 20%, sometimes, I go all the way to "0" (interesting that 0 brightness is not a black screen).
As an N=1 test, after realising that I couldn't easily tell the difference after a minute or two, was to take one of the most observant and territorial about her PC people I know, and changed the brightness all the way down while she was away.... just as I expected, she didn't even notice. I eventually told her she had been using the display with the brightness all the way down, she had no idea.
So I agree with all the people who say turn it down.... really, your brain will adjust the white levels on its own just fine.
Then... well... I like a black google...and any other site I can get. Not because of power savings but just because I always prefered dark backgrounds with light text on screens.
Do you realise that the talk I refered to, in fact, used Newton as one of his examples of religion signaling the end of progress.
In fact he had several examples of the places where several scientists made great breakthroughs, got to the limits of their understanding, then invoked a god hypothesis and that was the end of their meaningful contribution to science, until someone else came along and picked up the problem again.
Yes thats exactly the guy who NDT was refering to, and mentioned by name. Of course, remember, you are getting my recollection of what he said, which is imperfect and since the original was an hour long video...well.... lets just say looking it up wasn't going to happen for a quick comment during the work day ;)
I don't think you fully appreciate the POS system.
Actually i think IBM is smart here. They were an early pioneer and got in while the getting was good. They serviced few (compared to the number of businesses doing retail sales) but very big customers.
In any case, these card reader things are not so much part of the POS system. They connect to it, but the credit card payment infrastructure is a beast all its own. The payment processors often work similar to cell phones with the "you buy the approved equipment which is locked to our services" deals.
It may be that with these particular systems it runs through the central POS and works differently, but, even so, it will be modular and just connect. Backwards compatibility is HUGE in this industry.
Anyway... the reason, IMHO, that they are getting out is.... the game isn't what it used to be. They used to be the only game in town. Newer POS systems are cheaper, smaller, newer, and sold by smaller companies. IBM is the big fish, but a big fish in a pond more suited to small ones. it was great for them while it lasted but... shit... my wife's company sells POS systems.
In the POS busineness, its more about service contracts. Yes the big sales are nice, but, remember, stores hate to be down. You have to be able to provide onsite service, nearly 365 days a year. Not just that, but specialized service, you can't just hire anyone with an A+ cert, guys who work on registers often do it for their whole career. I can see why IBM looks at the diminishing returns on those investments and was happy to hand it off.
Those are, in fact, the strips I bought. Without the remote or power supply, figuring I could find my own, planned to use a zigbee for wireless and arduino to pwm the lights. I looked into i2c led drivers and they look promising too, but zigbee can't talk i2c directly and if I need the arduino anyway and really only 3 channels.... may as well use simple FETs to bring the signal to the next set of strips. My current plan is to use 3 sections of a quad op amp, one for each channel, to distribute the PWM signal to a bunch of NPN mosfets that will control each channel.
Even that is overkill for the prototype light but I wanted something I could scale to larger lights with more groups of strips.
Interesting....
I was trying to keep efficincy "as high as I reasonably can", so that was where I started. In the end... i would be happy to get to the efficincy of CFLs (from som every cursory playing around, that seems doable).
In fact, I feel, for 2 reasons, that even a bit less efficient than CFLs is STILL a win because I can dim LEDs with PWM (which should increase their life). CFLs suck at dimming, and even the so called "dimable CFLs" will flicker hoirribly when dimmed more than a small amount.
The second reason, as stated, the ability to change colors.
All in all, I have been coming to the same conclusion about SMPS but needed someone else to say it. The further I went down that rabbit whole I went the more I came around to constant voltage and limiting resistors. Remember, this is for permenant installation in my house too... so if I need to get a nice power DC power supply in to run several fixtures, I can.
The issue I started coming to was...well... like I said... CFL efficincy would be fine... but when I start adding up the CFLs I am replacing...I started to realise, I start needing a pretty hefty supply to put them all on one.... so multiple small supplies may be better. They have some switch mode wall warts now....
Can't say as I have had that problem specifically, but... its definitely an odd issue. Some of us are damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
I tend to not say (or at least dance around saying) exactly who I work for because, well, I tend to say things that they might find offensive and I figure the least I can do is try to keep my online persona from reflecting on them.
That said... if you read many of my comments, you might be surprized at who I work for... I certainly don't shill.... but there is a fine line to walk between disclosure of interests and inviting problems.
If I say "Well i work for X" then... I have to be extra careful because I am not authorized to speak for them in public. In fact, I believe I would then be required to add disclaimers and then...it all just adds to the visibility and draws more attention on me... meaning...I can't comment as freely as I would like.
Sometimes its a hard balance to strike between speaking your mind, and inviting trouble, especially since I tend to complain rather than shill, and I do feel its a bit of a violation (not just to the explicit agreements but, even without them) to wantonly air dirty laundry even when I am a less than satisfied employee.
So I prefer to err on the side of speaking in general terms and leaving the who, what, and where specifics out. Though, thats easier when the specific topic is things like "boneheaded management" than when its about the actions of specific companies. In cases like this... I can see why it gets a lot murkier and credibility requires disclosure.
Of course he did it in protest.... he should fight that all the way to the supreme court on first amendment grounds. He was making a statement through public performance.
Even if he loses, the best thing he can do is make for damned sure anyone wondering why he is a sex offender gets the real story.
and that hot dog stand doesn't even go to a cash register place, he goes and buys a register at Staples.... then takes it into a cash register place when it breaks and they tell him they don't work on those cheap store bought models and, even if they did, the labor charges would almost be the cost of a new one.... minimum.
I worked on a project involving some store upgrades in the late 90s. Just as you said... they seldom upgrade whole systems, they were running IBM servers from the 1980s in 1997, and the plan, involved removing one of them, and leaving the old secondary in service! (to run the wireless registers, not sure what the issue was, either they didn't want to buy the new wireless card, or there was no new one in that line...)
The machine we took out was a hefty full tower 386 with double height internal hard drives, providing a whopping 100 MB of storage. Reason for the upgrade: Layaway transactions were filling the hard drive and crashing the system due to data requirements.... and not having layaway was killing the business.
Of course, these new systems... new Pentiums of the time.... were running the same "Store Operating System" as the old 386s were. The entire point of this upgrade was to add disk capacity.
Though, to say they never upgrade the systems isn't exactly true. There was a pile of disused cables, maybe 6 inches deep, behind the main servers. They would upgrade something, and drop the old cable in place....in every single store.... but those clearly were the result of small changes over time.
I wont be buying any though....well maybe a few as a stop-gap but, not many.
I have been getting RGB LED strips, and looking to totally replace the house lighting. Part of the problem here is the "bulb". Yes, if you stick to a bulb form factor, and be backwards compartible, it can be hard to get enough light from LEDs, and expensive to build out etc.
However, bulbs were just the first invention....what makes that form factor so superior except for backwards compatibility?
I am looking at long strips, more like flourecent tube fixtures than bulbs. Can use many cheaper LEDs instead of a few expensive big ones... can use RBG LEDs and thus be able to change colors, or even white temp.
Of course, the stips are cheap pre-made, cheaper than I can find the LEDs on them in fact (cheapest price for 1000 in bulk was more expensive per LED than buying strips of 150 at a time) and the strips have limiting resistors, which are a major source of power loss (would be better to drop the resistor and use a constant current circuit.... but having to desolder or jumper smd resistors on each and every segment of the strip defeats the purpose of buying strips to make it easy)
Still though.... at $60/bulb.... ouch. and...its still just a bulb... with a single light color?
I was just watching a talk by NDT on "Intelligent Design". In that, he made an excellent observation about how, for a 300 year period, the Arab world was the center of intellectual progress in the world. 2/3 of all stars with names have Arabic names. They discovered 0, they gave us algebra.
Then... a new religious philosophy arose that taught that mathematics was the work of the Devil. This wasn't Mohamed.... it wasn't there in the beginings of Islam. For many years, these problems didn't exist.
The sobering thought there is... as he points out.... this period of advancement ended with the rise of this anti-scientific ideology. Just think, there are a Billion Muslims, and only a handful of Muslim/Arab nobel prize winners. If they hadn't ended their period of advancement hundreds of years before Europe became the new center of intellectual progress... where would we be today? How much raw talent just went totally unused because of these ideologies.
Honestly.... I have little doubt that there would be people posting comments from Lunar or martian colonies by now if not for this terrible ideology.
Now if they would just stop this crusade against people who don't choose alcohol as their drug of choice, it would be an even bigger step. Maybe if they stopped driving all this business underground, and stopped putting it all in the hands of major drug cartels....that would be swell too.
Maybe if they let Glaxco-smith-kline put all the major drug cartels out of business? That should take all of a few months for them.
Even dumber is...these sites tend to be pretty small. I doubt many cartels are using them, so its mostly small time dealers who are also techies. This isn't a win, this is more stupid. More lives ruined over a problem the government caused initially by creating the black markets.
Nearly every drug problem they have tried to "solve" with prohibition has only gotten worst. The ones they have driven off the streets completely tend to be the less popular drugs anyway, and just drive the users to even less safe alternatived.
Good job morons. Maybe if they keep banging their heads against the wall, the problem will just go away....clearly they just need to arrest, strip search, and lock up a few more people. That will totally solve the problem!
> putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid
Yes it is...however, I feel the same way about every other company, including the ones with the SLA who say they wont ever look at your data. Unless its encrypted on disk and they don't have the key, then I don't trust it...because it means trusting them, trusting courts that may order them to look, trusting every employee they ever hire, trusting anyone who compromises their system, thats a lot of trust.
I see no mention of linux (which is basically all I use at home or work, unless you count booting windows for the exlusive purpose of playing steam games)... but Mac users should be able to use encfs, which I have used in the past with similar services.
These services, even the free ones, are just fine, as long as you take the right precautions. The only files (at all) you will find on any cloud storage of mine are encrypted.
Actually, about a week ago I was looking at some 3d printer porn (waiting for my reprap kit to arrive)..and saw mention of how objects can be printed that couldn't really be built other ways...solid pieces with internal cavity walls etc....
the first thing I thought of was, in fact, vessels with very high internal surface areas (possibly even textured to provide even more surface area) which could be used for catalyst reactions or even for brewing (I believe there has been some experimental work in brewing using a vessel like this where yeast was in some way integrated into the internal surfaces.
This is a very neat area of research.
Yet from the wiki page:
It is covered under U.S. Patent 5,732,138, titled "Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system."
I don't believe it ever became a product... and was cumbersome to setup. Hard to justify a lava lamp display in a data center, and god forbid you need multiple sources in one DC say, on every machine)
One thing I worry about with devices like this is failure mode. if it can be made totally solid state, I would think it could be setup analogously to the way solid state relays are (with an emiter and detector in a small package).... but.... if it failed such that its numbers stopped really being random.... in what ways will it be able to detect this? (not just theoretically, but in real designs). Its great if you can get an error, but, it could be prolblematic if it just starts streaming highly repetitive numbers.
Please cite references. Or are you refering to your own personal experience? Don't forget that since the captive must know his captor doesn't have all the information, and could even have distorted info, so even the truth may get him punished if the interrogator thinks its a lie. He is still just learning to say what they want to hear.
Torture techniques, like many modern less dramatic techniques are seldom aimed at getting the whole truth so much as producing a confession. Even without torture, standard modern interrogation techniques have shown, in testing, to be able to extract a confession 90% of the time, even when the confessor isn't guilty.
Of course, many of these techniques are simple subtle applications of psychological torture.... you can get considered for bail, or spend your days in here. You can confess to this lesser crime than we say you did, or else face trial for this list of crimes.
I have seen interviews with military interrogation experts who have said that torture has generally been found to validate the subjects view of his captors and results in less cooperation.
Far more effective is subtle "befriending". There was a german interrogator who was known for getting a lot of information by taking captured pilots for walks and just....chatting them up casually. Ever seen the police question someone.... Good Cop/Bad Cop is a cliche for a reason. They don't play bad cop bad cop for a reason.
Interesting... ill have to see if I can find the story and see if they characterized it wrong or if it was my takeaway that missed that. Tis the problem with refering to information that I got while driving in the morning.
So we are splitting hairs about the definition of a cogent argument? OK... I will accept that my choice of phrase must have been wrong (I certainly wasn't quoting anyone else directly), and happily substitute your, more accurate and precise wording.
> What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a
> single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made:
On NPR it was pointed out that when Einstein published his work on relativity, similar "Statement by X number of scientists" statements came out. His reply, which I think is an absolutely appropriate and correct application of "the stink test" was simply to point out that in the scientific realm, it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something. Science is not an exercise in consensus.
> As far as the 'pointed beam' you're talking about, that hasn't been improved, ever. The cone is just
> as large as it's always been. If the technician stands in the room (as my co-worker often did),
> they're just stupid. In fact, according to ADA recommendations, X-Ray techs are supposed to wear
> dosimeters. Most dentists are too cheap to buy them, though.
Wow... agreed! My mother was an X-Ray tech for about 25 years (until she ended up on disability for unrelated reasons). When she started back in the 60s/70s she was told "by choosing this profession you are taking 7 years off your life".
Admittedly she was a hospital X-Ray dept tech, so she did them all day long, and with a machine that enforced being in a different room... unless it was a portable X-Ray but thats another story.
Even at all that, I seem to remember there were a handful of times where her dose was high enough that she was given some mandatory time off work. I can only imagine what a dentist in the room is doing to themselves.... how many times a day do they take x-rays?
Also, for anyone interested in how bad X-rays used to be... my mother was fond of pointing out how much better soft tissue xrays were back in the 50s when they could use thorium as a contrast solution :) great images..... just didn't work out so well for the patient.
I ran a poker game for about 6 years. I have seen this before. Its not probability that failed, its your use of it that did. Low probability events happen with great regularity on the long run. A poker player that is willing to bet his entire stack on anything less than the nuts, even if there is only one hand out of the enitire deck that could beat him.... if he sees that situation enough times, he will still loose that hand that one time out of 250 or so.
So.... maybe you bet your whole stack in a tournament, but....you never sit down with your whole bankroll. That is just bad bankroll management....or bad risk assessment...whatever you wanna call it.
They don't call em 100 year floods because they never happen. They call em that because they seem to be of a size you only see every 100 years or so. However... you have to remember how the odds work. Just because he had pocket aces last hand, doesn't mean he doesn't this hand. What are the odds? 1 in 250 or so times 1 and 250 or so (assuming a good shuffle etc) ... pretty unlikely... but its happened to me.
Even if its not your primary means.... and believe me, I am a hardcore linux guy whose used linux on his desktop, even while working at VERY windows centric shops that didn't entirely approve. The key is to have windows available, either as a machine you can RDP or as a VM (preferable).
95% of things, you can find a fine Linux based alternative.... but every once in a while someone is gonna send you a non-xml visio or maybe you have to talk to an exchange server (I never had luck with the linux tools.... even when I got them to work).
As I type this, my work laptop is, in fact, setting up a windows VM for this purpose. At my previous job, we had both desktops and laptops, so i just did nearly everything on my laptop, which ran Ubuntu, and would just rdp control my desktop for reading email and filling out timesheets (which required IE)
Personally, I would love to ditch windows completely...but I need it for steam anyway (my only non-work use for windows), and while I don't mind spending half a day getting a new free software alternative running... few people have the patients to wait for me to do it on their time.... so, I have windows for those times, and just take everything I have to do in windows as something to add to my "upgrade to linux" punch list.
Hmmm KOTOR and Mass Effect? Loved those games...even as a heterosexual male.
Also, I might add, the comments from gay friends have pointed out that the "gay possibilities" in these games (in particular these) are kinda lame anyway (actually, the hetero possibilities are kinda lame too actually...)
Though still... Its good to see games that take the time to put in content that appeals to other audiences. I know male heterosexual gamers, like myself, are the lions share of the industry, but these games show that you can include content to appeal to different groups without detracting from the game.
The biggest sins of these games was the debacle that is only evident if you try to play KOTOR II and Mass Effect back to back (hint: its basically the same story... the central space stations even have the same name and same origin... seriously....)
I am not aware of a SINGLE application, used in business, that is "Chrome Only".
However, for years at previous jobs (where linux desktops where uncommon) I have struggled with needing to maintain a windows machine for NO OTHER PURPOSE than to run outlook for mail, and ie for a few apps that will not work with anything else.
They are all over the place. Of course, not everyone can choose, many are locked in at work, and those who are locked in tend to be locked in to IE, for the same reason... a few apps. Those who can choose, well.... even if they use firefox or chrome, probably can't fully ditch ie even if they wanted to.