Comment Re:Electrocuted a Cow (Score 1) 301
If he *had* electrocuted her, he could've provided the neighbors with replacement roasts!
If he *had* electrocuted her, he could've provided the neighbors with replacement roasts!
They already have. A good EMP might find them again.
He did that for years -- made most of his money on it. Oh, wait, that was anti-virus software. Same scheme, though: invest, promote something empty, sell like mad, & cash out.
"Engineer the fabric of reality" - Isn't that what Boot Camp's supposed to do for the inductees?
Marketing Exec: "22, and none of our competitors can touch that!"
They missed the obvious: One party's smiling, the other's frowning. They were wondering why they had to retrain the model every 4 years.
And it'll only drive to approved destinations (so as to avoid risks presented by unsafe neighborhoods) and may not take you where you want to go, but you'll look really hip while driving it.
"two weeks a month at 128kbps" -- I hear that kind of thing all the time, and it doesn't say "I need more bandwidth"; it says "I do an extremely poor job of managing my bandwidth." I understand that not everyone's a network geek, and that we shouldn't *expect* them to be, but that doesn't change the fact that their lack of management is causing them grief. Usually, when I hear this, I find that they're using more data in a month than my entire family of 15 w/ 4 online college students and a dad who works remotely for a living. If they're tolerating 2 weeks @ 128kbps, apparently their need for more isn't very serious or else they'd either ration what they have or spend more money.
I'm working w/ a family in that situation right now (has been struggling w/ data caps & horrid satellite service for 3 years) and other than putting up a pair of 700MHz Yagis and installing equipment that is giving them cellular service, the best thing I did for them was installing a router w/ a proxy and logs that show what devices are using how much data when w/ what sites. It's been a real eye opener for them -- few people have any idea of just how much data they waste -- and they're learning how to control themselves and their devices. Money-wise, the monitoring equipment can pay for itself in a couple of months.
If the general population were given "unlimited" electricity like they are Internet bandwidth, can you imagine how much our electricity usage would skyrocket? Front doors left open while an inefficient furnace runs continuously (because the heat pump broke, and why fix it when the house is warm enough?), incandescent lights, TVs & other appliances left on 24/7, Bitcoin mining galore...
Conservation isn't fun or glorious, but taking more responsibility for our own situation leads to a higher standard of living. Again, I'm not [completely] faulting the consumers; they're ignorant because they've been raised to be that way, the companies they're paying actively encourage a lack of thought, and 90% of people, if you brought this to their attention, have no idea of where to go or what to do about it -- sure, knowing where my resources are being wasted would be valuable, but how the heck do I do that, and what does this info even mean? -- so it's a real education problem, and like other forms of illiteracy I don't have a good answer for it except one-on-one attention.
I really tried not to look at the discussion for this article. I passed it by, and really tried to suppress the urge to go back on click on it. But in the end, I just couldn't resist the urge to see what % of the comments were people expressing dismay that the answer wasn't 42.
640 African elephants = 1,030 average Americans.
I'm few days late to the party, but...
A while back I came across some discarded prototypes from Sony. I eventually determined that they were multi-zone jukebox appliances for running sound systems in store. There were two types: One was a custom PCB using a low-power ARM-based microcontroller and a little bit of RAM in addition to the DAC hardware. The other was much nicer, with more zones (8 output jacks) and a bunch of heavy-duty lighted buttons plugged into sockets on it -- obviously meant to be put into a kiosk-type box. Opening it up, I found a big board & a little one. The big one was a custom daughterboard w/ hi-fi DACs for the sound output and all the connectors which lead to the GPIO pins on the little board, which was...a Raspberry Pi Zero W!
They had their customized Linux OS on a MicroSD, with most of the good stuff on an encrypted partition. I mounted the card on another system, and after messing around unsuccessfully w/ chroot and two different CPU arch's, I finally just replaced
Then I put stock Raspberry Pi OS on there, let the kids spend an evening playing games on it, and it now spends its days attached to the wall in my pump house, monitoring my fresh water supply system....
When $5-10 gets you a full-blown (but small, low-power) computer that's well-supported, your next product just got WAY easier, and you're not going to save money doing a custom board, OS, etc. unless it's really simple and you're making a LOT of devices!
> because they have to set up a vim running iTunes
Yup, that's the problem alright! Emacs is clearly a superior tool for installing ringtones.
To get a more comprehensible representation of that percentage, my son calculated (I didn't verify) that that is equivalent to just under a savings of 1 nanometer over a light year -- or 2 mm over the trip to the Andromeda galaxy.
They ran pictures of all of the political candidates through the engine, but most of them were tagged "shallow fake".
Do you know what all that MEANS? I ask because I'm pretty sure I've seen that same text in several user manuals for "made in China" gear that I have, and would love to have a translation.
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.
