danelectro

http://dawhois.com/www/ahrens.co.uk.html

With no single known cure available for a given condition, one of the most useful parameters in case treatment is chosen might just be simple toxicity itself, depending on how the outcomes are judged by the treated, and treator if involved.

In corporations which historically benefit enormously from regulatory and media influence, it should not be unexpected for them to obfuscate or propagandize to influencers and the public on topics such as harm vs benefit to consumers, especially when the public is becoming threateningly powerful politically on that exact subject.

If you are in the toxic materials business, nature may be against you and depending on ethics, a very profitable approach has been shown to be not only playing unfairly but underhandedly tilting the playing field in your favor at the same time.

Not like there's any question.

I support the napping for productivity without having artificial stimulants (OK, natural organic drugs) involved.

The studies likely involved mostly habitual users rather than unindoctrinated subjects, but from the abstracts' documentation it is difficult to be sure. Perhaps the researchers did not recognize the distinction and just selected random participants, therefore likely to include mostly habitual users.

When I was a caffeine addict (habitual user) I could also sleep after ingestion.

In fact without a fix right before bedtime it was more difficult to get to sleep because nominal concentration level was unsatisfied, resulting more in agitation than identifiable craving. A nice hit would actually help me relax. I was not the only one who could relate to this as an indication of true addiction, where you need the substance just to be normal.

Complete withdrawal took a few weeks (of hellish tiredness, achiness, and irritability) but after this it was even easier to more alertly conduct high-stamina activities and out-perform my still-addicted colleagues without the toxic load on my system.

Sleep & nap much more productively without it after kicking the habit too.

Sure can write a lot better code when drug (addiction) free as well.

When I do feel it's necessary (never for marathon coding), a single cup of coffee (after I have already been awake 24hrs and need a little boost) naturally keeps my otherwise drug-free system awake for the next 24hrs easily which can be helpful for things like long-distance driving once or twice per year. As an addict I would have needed two or three times my nominal habitual doses to feel as alert on those same lonely roads.

To me coding does not benefit from this type of non-stop alertness, even if you are working to exhaustion, when tiredness truly comes a plain nap is better whether it is after 6hrs, 12hrs, 20hrs, whatever, then freshly go into another session, exahustion relieved.

Same with driving too, but if the schedule is too tight, a couple times a year will not make you a habitual user like everyday dosage does. I'd rather drive slow for long hours than exceed the speed limit, waste energy, and prematurely wear out my machinery.

YMMV [0] but just because everybody does caffeine won't make it good for you, especially in the long run.

[0] depending largely on body weight, metabolism, and dosage, and for driving, road speed

I posted these once before and seems like nobody noticed at the time:

Fred Nachbaur of the internet, one of his interesting projects:

announced on rec.audio.tubes:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.audio.tubes/swgQ... (his early links are long dead)

Here starts one preamp discussion:

http://www.ampage.org/homebrew.cgi?cat=sg&sb=&so=hl&page=989...

If you like, then here is the rest of that story:

http://www.dogstar.dantimax.dk

And don't forget this:

http://www.dogstarmusic.ca

With lost artists go lost arts.

This is what I am always saying in relation to funding, even though I usually don't mention it directly.

Any capitalist will profit from backing you through thick & thin.

So much so that you need to choose your capitalist as carefully as they would choose you, or even more so.

All the best.

That's what I thought when I first started innovating in the mature technical field of petro/chemical analysis.

It would require a lot of self-dedication.

Since I was already a young performance leader, I stuck with it and avoided the institutional path where they only accomplish a few hours of progress a day, take breaks, have useless meetings, etc.

Similar to a musical instrument, industrial instruments are never truly mastered, and proficiency declines once the hands are removed from regular use.

This also worked to my advantage since gifted PhD's with high aptitudes seldom can keep their hands on the gear for even one whole decade before they are needed to fill a place on the corporate ladder.

Now after 30+ years, I do not look at ordinary researchers as loafers, there are some brilliant workers and wonderful experts I can draw upon when needed. Normally you are only allowed to do a limited amount before you run the risk & woe of making co-workers look less productive.

By comparison, I now have "60years" experience compared to what would have only been about half as many accomplishments if I had been employed by an oil or chemical company over the same 3 decades. Plus I own my own technology for decades now.

Not trying to toot my own horn but it is an unfair advantage.

In my case I just used the Atari trackball to point & click (& drag) for my own purposes when programming my regular Atari in early 1982.

About 5years later when mouses started to become popular because popular PC software began mouse support, it really didn't seem that novel by then.

I like what knighthacker says too.

I have thought for a long time that a good choice for a 50/50 business arrangement is where both parties feel perfectly comfortable each doing 60% of the actual needed work indefinitely.

With the right pair, the trust, confidence, and respect for each other is there, regardless of lopsided contributions from time to time (not forever).

If each is always focused on doing more than 50%, actually each FEELING like they are always doing more than 50%, and feeling good about it, even though that would be in excess of their compensation by definition, this eliminates some of the biggest doubts you have suffered from.

Plus on those occasions where more than a nominal 100% needs to be accomplished, you will not only be capable and prepared, but it will not even be a stretch.

As others have said, this emphasizes how carefully you need to align with your partner.

I sure have found a lot more discarded PC's than I have toasters.

If you can't produce a system (hardware, software, and "support" if absolutely necessary) which can outlast a toaster by design (decade or two at least), without a need to "upgrade" these elements, then many a consumer would naturally compare your engineering unfavorably to that of the toaster.

If it's an electronic product, the customer rightly expects it to last as long as other familiar electronic products.

If it's an expensive product then the customer rightly expects it to last much longer than comparable items of lesser cost.

For a naturally expensive item like a CNC mill, where many customers will purchase their first one to replace a manual mill which has worn out after a decade or two, they often expect the modern CNC unit to fully replace the older piece with no further consideration (or cost) until the same familiar mode of mechanical wear occurs in another decade or two.

If your software or operating system does not live up to this expectation by design, then you are not giving the customer what they need to begin with.

If an industrial solution truly solves a problem, it stays solved well enough for the operator to move on to concentrate on their core competence (or different unsolved problems) from then on, and only incur insignificant costs or distractions from the previously unsolved problem.

A payroll or other office system is not that much different, but applies to many more businesses. Computerizing a formerly manual system, high up-front cost is expected to pay for itself in future efficiency. If no further features are desired, then the business should be able to rely on electro-mechanical integrity as the weakest point over the following decades. Replacing individual worn-out office machines as needed in the traditional way. Only "modernizing" company-wide on their own initiative and schedule. If you can not buy brand new machines as needed to continue your present office systems unchanged indefinitely if you want to, this does not mean there is a defect in your approach just because you need a solved problem to stay solved.

You may just be a victim of a consumer-centric (predatory) IT vendor structure even though you are paying top dollar for business solutions which are supposed to last.

Old pre-PC data systems which had COM (RS-232) ports could be directly connected to (dumb or smart) terminals by a simple RS-232 cable.

To remotely communicate, each device would need to add a modem to interface across regular ordinary phone lines. One modem would dial, the other would answer.

To use a "leased line" having no dial tone, then the dial and answer were replaced by other modem AT commands, or DIP switch settings to change default modem behavior.

Using a PC in place of a terminal was a drop-in replacement with a terminal emulator program like Hyperterminal. By the late '90's most PC's had an internal modem occupying a COM port# in addition to a regular serial connector identified by a different COM port# than the internal modem.

From Hyperterminal you could choose which COM port to communicate with, your serial port could be a local device, and modem was expected to be remote.

When the lesser laptops arrived having built-in modems but lacking serial ports any more, then you could no longer directly connect to a local RS-232 device. Serial to USB adapters, like USB itself, was not well developed, and drivers were not available for all operating systems.

A good solution for me was to use an early '90's external fax modem attached to the local serial device, even though it was going to be a local connection.

Then connect the phone connector on this modem to the laptop's phone connector locally using a simulated leased line.

IIRC the best simulated leased line I came up with had a couple 9V batteries in series to provide activity voltage, and the DC was blocked from the other end by a small capacitor which still allowed the signal frequencies to pass in both directions.

Analog lines will still support 56Kbaud, but many phone company lines are not high enough quality, so modern modems down-negotiate automatically.

Polycarbonate bottles were not in widespread consumer use back in 1970.

Even though this particular polymer was originally discovered over 100years ago, and relatively modern production techniques were patented in the '50's, widespread use to replace glass in "water cooler" type bottles did not begin until the '80's.

Later this polymer moved down the chain into smaller bottles.

The invention of polycarbonate at GE in the '50's is interesting:

"[Fox's] discovery, made within eight months of his joining GE, was a serendipitous byproduct of the wire enamel project. The byproduct would prove far more important than the original objective."

from "Unlikely Victory: How General Electric Succeeded in the Chemical Industry"

http://books.google.com/books?id=bgdvYy80AHUC&pg=PA71#v=onep...

On most PC's in BIOS (or UEFI) you can set the default boot order however you want, to prioritize USB, HDD, CDROM, Network, even floppy still.

This has been the norm for about 10years at least, so that way you get the boot order best for your usage.

Well, ya never know sometimes.

Anyone who is serious, I have built a very high quality phono preamp (well-proven prototype) especially for digitizing not only 45's & 33's (which adhere to the RIAA equalization curve), but also 78's (which need compensation, but not as extreme as the later "microgroove" recordings, and there was no standard).

If you could buy one as good I wouldn't have designed mine.

With the right partner, could even be launched as a PONO recorder to complement the upcoming PONO Player.

I'm easy to get in touch with.

Well, if you all are into old games vs PC other than just Tetris, there's always Acquire which was originally a 3M board game from the 1960's. That was when I played it as a young teenager in the Academic Games Club at our interesting high school.

It's a financial game, but better and faster than Monopoly, the highest performer (best investor/player) still wins, but at least everybody makes money, hell everybody starts with capital. Each the same amount of capital, how often do you see that :-)

Growth stocks are involved, with bonuses (which can almost be regarded as follow-on rounds adding to exits, until game-end liquidation) rather than dividends. Quite easy to learn

In the '70's, it appeared for the Apple and the Commodore PET. There was also a slightly more modern DOS version which was from Avalon-Hill, the successor to 3M for their games:

http://www.webnoir.com/bob/sid/acquire.zip

There is also another version from Bill Humphrey, the 1966 playing rules are in a DOC file within this ZIP (tailored to his PC version):

http://www.webnoir.com/bob/sid/acquire2.zip

Each player also is issued an information card you will need for proper financial planning:

http://www.webnoir.com/bob/sid/acquirecard.htm

The numbers on top in the blue header are the size of the hotel chain. The upper number (low $) in each cell is the share price for the named chains in the left-hand cell. The middle number (high $) in each cell is the bonus amount for majority holder of the named chains upon exit/liquidation. The bottom number (not-as-high $) in each cell is the bonus amount for second-majority holder of the named chains upon exit/liquidation.

Here's an alternate:

http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/44033/acquire-3m-version-c...

and another:

https://megacquire.com/zencart/images/Six-Info-Cards-+-Lg-Ca...

and another:

https://megacquire.com/zencart/images/Enlarged-Info-Card-B.j...

While I was looking for my original 3M hard copy edition to bring to my local makerspace for the young board gamers I did find a better user vs PC version from G.C.Crawshay, also DOS but have confirmed it will play in WinXP or Win7 if you have a 32-bit PC:

http://www.george.crawshay.com/cgi/products.pl?game=Acquire

Naturally it will play from a bootable DOS floppy as well. Some are surprised when you can fire up any old surplus PC having a floppy drive and it works ideally without having to have a working HDD in the system. No mouse either. USB floppy drives work too.

EDIT: I believe the floppy will also play on a 64-bit PC

The "Federal Poisoning Program" is still in force currently in 27 CFR 19 - 21 as posted by esbranson.

Industrial alcohol can contain numerous optional denaturants other than methanol, here is the latest regulation according to Cornell, showing specific denaturants and their applicable formula Nos.:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151

Among these are the SD Alcohols (SDA or Specially Denatured Alcohols) seen in shampoos and other cosmetics.

Many of these denaturants are intended to be nearly impossible to remove from the product, others not as difficult or costly to separate.

The federal government did not need to add poison to alcohol made by bootleggers, it was already present in the hijacked SDAs and CDAs the bootleggers were using as raw material.

Depending on sophistication, bootleggers (sometimes) were removing (some of) the denaturant before clandestinely distributing their material for beverage use.

EDIT: I have single-handedly tested billions of dollars worth of industrial alcohols, and methanol is one of the big ones around here. Today methanol purity (assay) is performed internationally according to the instrumental technique that I personally developed on my own decades ago and held in confidence for years before it "leaked" from the lab.

Purty good at beverage grade too, considering work for a craft distiller presently.

Also lived in two counties with borders delineated by rivers such that an island in the river was not in either county, which allowed plausible deniability for local law enforcement during prohibition. One of these islands at one time being owned by Al Capone.

Keep in mind she's answering her own question about why she can't find good programmers.

The firmware on today's USB drives is flashable from Windows (usually XP) using the manufacturer's proprietary utility for that particular flash memory controller. Sandisk remains mysterious as their utility if it exists has not been leaked.

This is likely because the firmware has not been perfected yet, so ugrades are continuing. Plus completely different characteristics can be obtained to arrive at multiple device brands or behaviors from the same hardware. "Identical" flash drives from the same manufacturer containing the same exact chips can often have different firmware revisions, and different resulting performance.

On most units an additional CDROM device, or extra partitions (hidden, private/secure or not) can be configured to be detected (or not) when plugged in to any OS. The controller provisions the available flash memory among the dictated devices and makes them available to you.

I've been adjusting the firmware for a couple years now as I do the continuous improvement on my rapid multibootable sticks.

Troubleshooting and problem-solving are specific skills that can be completely unrelated to software, even tricky software.

It's great when both problem-solving and outstanding engineering exist within the same individual, in some positions even essential.

Realistically, problem-solving is the more uncommon natural ability of the two. If it were not, there would be a lot less problems with software by now.

You mean IOW a blog?

A lot of innovation is individual as opposed to institutional.

Motivated, technically qualified individuals have always been "out there", but now they are lost in the wash with so many highly degreed average people dominating both institutional and venture efforts.

The traditional "great man" innovators are more out-of-place than ever in this landscape, where quantity of technical people is the limiting factor for shareholders requiring rapid growth.

If structures allow a return to having the quality of the innovators prevail over the quantity, more of the outstanding unrecognized individuals may be able to contribute again like what was seen 50 to 100years ago.

Some shareholders would not be able to accept the longer incubation periods and slower exponential growth necessary, but not all shareholders are the same. It could happen.

Ask yourself, if DaVinci, Newton, Edison, Einstein or somebody like that were unknowns but wanted to innovate for you, or wanted you to support their efforts (which might already be in progress), which of your exclusionary tactics would eliminate them in the first or second round?

I've said it before, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now.

That's what broadband was for.

So you could have dramatically better speeds than the vast majority of users.

That way, pages which nominally took 20 slow seconds to load over a phone modem, would appear instantly for you if you were privileged enough to have broadband.

Nowadays, "everybody" has broadband. But instead of the rapid browsing experience which everyone was looking forward to, we now have a slower user experience with broadband on most web sites than there was in 1996 with dial-up modems.

Back in 1996, most people did not yet have 56Kbaud modems, so the wise webmasters made sure their sites were optimized enough for mainstream consumers having 28.8K or at most 33.6K which would guarantee outstanding performance to the widest variety of visitors. When they were really serious about engaging users who did not have brand new computers, a site would need to perform decently at 9600 baud which was what the majority of installed modems still ran at, originally purchased for faxing.

When you occasionally went went to a slow, bloated page from a major technology company you knew right away it was "privileged idiots" on broadband without a clue as to how slow their "masterpiece" website behaved compared to what was expected from modem users.

Downloading files was expected to be slow, but web sites were not. Actually lots of MP3's were downloaded over modems, that's what MP3 was developed for. If you posted something, copyright was not a problem since you were not sharing it with the public, only those few who were online.

Almost 20years later, technology has progressed but it's clear that PEOPLE used to be more advanced than they are now.

There are probably engineers who are making sure their sites perform at 2G speeds without sinking below 1996 performance experiences, but from what I've been reading about interviewing & hiring trends it looks like they are excluded as extreme minorities within their percentiles.

Oh, well, I don't make the rules, just observing their disfunction.

I call it "herding cats".

Definitely an uncommon skill, and the top 1% are not even good enough.

Complete the invention of a new technology elemental analysis technique.

Switching power supplies were not needed for consumers until labor & material cost of linear supplies became exorbitant enough to drive all manufacturing overseas.

After that, freight was still on the increase and soon it became more economical to expensively engineer a lighter weight, smaller replacement. Regardless of orders of magnitude more complexity, switchers replaced simple transformers.

Inverters are like that too.

At 50W/inch^3 one ocean container of inverters will handle as much power as two ocean containers at 25W/inch^3.

I was not a salvage guy but in cargo measurement it turns out I had one of the first "laptops" on the Gulf Coast.

We used "regular" 16-digit hand calculators for regular calculations from ships' calibration tables, but when a vessel (especially heavy oil tankers) was far enough from even keel then the tables would not apply, and hand modeling was very tedious, so I developed a more realistic model on the "PC".

Radio Shack PC-2 (Pocket Computer) with accessories and case was about the size of a small laptop, including a 4-color printer-plotter, and RS-232 interface:

http://www.trs-80.com/images/hw-pocket2-carrying.jpg

This was way before IBM-compatible laptop PC's were developed.

You have to board the vessel for access to its dimensional drawings, and if they were inadequate then you would take hand measurements.

My application was fundamentally way more advanced than the few oil companies doing it on a TRS-80 themselves, and that was just the calculations and conversions.

I can look back without embarrassment at my UI/UX, computer-experienced marine gagers did not yet exist, home computers still very uncommon, and most offices not yet having a computer either. Gagers still have a fairly challenging job but most are not very academically oriented, even more true decades ago.

So I made it where you just hand the portable to the gager, he hits the "ON" button, it asks the questions on the one-line LED screen, then prints the questions & his answers on the little printer and the ticket advances as the calculations proceed for each compartment.

You finished hours before the company gager, and could go back over all data & results just by looking through the ticket.

The real excitement was boarding an offshore platform in the Bahamas one time with 20' waves and the crew boat was only about 30' long. They had multiple wooden landings to accomodate the tides, one was virtually submerged, the next was slightly below the waves' crest and the third was out-of-reach at the time. A knotted rope descended from the main metal platform at the top of the ladder, draping all 3 landings. Each worker waited for the pilot to sync a wave properly, then he would quickly reverse the boat to within inches of the target landing, you step off the back of the boat grabbing the wet rope, hang & swing onto the landing as the boat drops a dozen feet the next second and he powers away to a safe distance to repeat it for the next person. Climb the ladder quick before the next wave submerges the landing you are on.

Here's the rest of the page about the TRS-80 portables:

http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computer-line/pocket/

I never had to worry about recharging my portable, it ran on AA batteries.

Sorry about that.

Didn't intend to be disagreeable, but I'm not drinking the kool-aid on this one, water can not be too clean to drink, the article is a drama piece based on a false "fact".

Also must apologize for saying ultrapure is "biologically" equivalent when I meant dietarily equivalent for most people.

There can easily be germs or trace minerals even in commercial distilled water which could interfere with biological cultures causing difficulties which would not be a problem when using ultrapure.

Here's a good test sheet for the kind of ultrapure used to rate other waters for trace elements:

http://www.emdmillipore.com/US/en/product/Q-POD-Element,MM_N...

The commonly consumed solvent that I want to be careful about is alcohol.

Water, OTOH is the solvent of life. A healthy solvent no doubt.

Solvent strength and solubility calculations show complete dependence on relative concentrations of solutes, let's look at the math.

Take for example magnesium, in blood this is often the lowest in concentration of the routine electrolytes tested, and there's no doubt the right amount of magnesium is good for the health.

"Drinking" water is Ozarka's grade having highest magnesium at about 3.9mg/L max. People love this stuff. Me too when I can't get distilled. But you're SOL depending on this popular typical drinking water for magnesium completely, you need another source.

One liter of their distilled water can have 0.1mg max of Mg. (usually way less, but no need to test it any more sensitively since it's not ultrapure or anything exotic)

Ultrapure at 0.0000004mg typical per liter is what we're talking about for reference.

The cleaner the water the better the reference.

Great discrepancy here but the take away is that all these figures are inadequate sources of magnesium compared to what you need.

In typical patients urine is draining about 6 - 10 mEq/day, or 73 to 122mg/day, for an average of 97mg/day.

Now suppose you drink in 2 liters and it ends up flowing out at 97mg/day:

Ozarka Drinking water has some (palatable) magnesium in it, so you lose less, at 89mg

With their distilled you lose more, at least 97mg

with ultrapure you would lose the most, almost the whole 97mg

The RDA for magnesium is 310 to 420mg/day of which 350mg is recommended as maximum from supplements. The difference between typical drinking water magnesium content and deionized (distilled or ultrapure) is about 8mg/day when you are supposed to be consuming at least 38x that difference per day. If you're not getting that much magnesium your nutrition may not be the best, and if you are getting the RDA then the 8mg delta is not much more than rounding error. The 8mg is also a low fraction of the normal 49mg loss range from 73 to 122mg/day, and a small fraction of the full RDA.

I'm not making this up they way they are getting their facts in the article.

Distilled is a very good solvent, especially for minerals, put it in your windshield washer tank and you can see the difference.

Delicious too, try some blind testing.

No affiliation wih Ozarka on my part either.

Not a full 1000words, but hope this helps.

Wrong.

Water does not become dangerous when it is more pure.

I've been drinking distilled bottled water for decades, and I'm not the only one. I have been making ultrapure for decades too, which is biologically equivalent to distilled as far as (lack of) minerals go.

As far as I can tell, the noise about leaching beneficial minerals from the body arose with the popularity of bottled spring water and drinking water which require less expensive processing (or no processing at all for some grades from some sources) but sell for the same price as distilled water.

Discouragement was needed otherwise too many consumers would be drinking the distilled.

I could put down thousands of words about this, but Ozarka has some good waters, most consumers would be able to find one of their grades which is as good or better than what they are getting now. The test results speak for themselves:

http://www.nestle-watersna.com/asset-library/Documents/O_ENG...

There is not a significant difference in mineral nutrition between their grades, unless you were grossly deficient in your diet for a mineral which is present in one grade but not in another.

The simple answer is you need to be getting your minerals from some place other than your water.

The dirty little secret about industrial ultrapure water is that it usually tastes funny because there is something left over from the processing that is undetectable with today's limited technology, but that the olfactory & taste buds can notice.

Ultrapure is best an application-specific process, for some purposes it can be an unsolved mystery where once you purify it enough for superior performance in the application, you still don't have an exact handle on why it wasn't superior at other times. And once it works industrially, you are supposed to think it is so pure nothing could ever be detected. Handling the purification and QA steps in a superstitiously-slanted way from that point on is sometimes the best functional approach.

EDIT: here's another worthwhile citation -

http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/f/Can-You-Drink...

Turns out after you have written the floppy IMG to a blank uFD or HDD, and it boots and plays the game, then you can partition the drive (I used Linux Mint), format it as FAT32 or NTFS, and use the full drive for mass storage without a conflict.

Same drive still boots to Floppy Bird only, unless you install some other OS or something which overwrites the Floppy Bird bootloader on sector 0, and give up the bird.

Partitioning and formatting alone do not overwrite the MBR, even if it is just a custom floppy boot sector at the time.

Good to get your message.

Well, this is a time I didn't really have an opinion except maybe I like for things to take up less space for the same functionality. I was just putting up the numbers that I observed.

I didn't realize the Android version might have been more sizable due to graphics & audio, so I guess the functional code difference might not be as dramatic as the 100:1 download size ratio after all.

The Tab key function was just another observation that I had not seen in the documentation, don't even know if it is intentional.

Check my other comment on this topic, it would be good to get some feedback from the author.