They prey on nostalgia, but the rugged aspect also speaks to me.
Casio watches, Nokia cellphones (formerly, now Huawei or Xiaomi), Thinkpad latops and Panasonic Toughbooks - if you have one, you are likely to have one of the others.
Looks like people are getting defined by their lifestyle. (I guess Rolex and Apple would be on the other end of the spectrum)
Casio's g-shock watches are pretty strong but their other watches, particularly the cheaper ones, are very much not rugged in my experience. Perhaps they were in the past relative to other inexpensive watches, but they seem capable, but not particularly rugid in my experience.
Granted that's a given for the price, but I wouldn't associate all Casio watches with rugged necessarily.
The nostalgia, I get that, I bought an old f-91w out of nostalgia recently if only because I wore it 30 years ago ;)
I have a Thinkpad and a featurephone, but I specifically dislike Casio's insistence on big, chunky, over-featured watches. I wish they'd go back to making the kind of watch they made in the 90s.
The one I had had an 8 year battery life, time/date alarms, timer, stopwatch, back/forward buttons. 30 phone number storage, heh. Nothing else. The only thing it was missing and could have used was a backlight.
Many of their newer watches also have this awful thing where if you hold own one of the buttons for a few seconds, it does a DST transition. Which is terrible, because suddenly your watch is off by an hour.
Timex Ironman might fit your needs. You can disable some features that you don't want. Indiglo backlight is excellent. They are cheap ($35) but not always durable
Good point. FWIW in 1966, when I was 18 years old and a freshman in college, my first girlfriend happened. We broke up in the spring of that first year. I was heartbroken. I thought, that's it, I'll never fall in love again or meet anyone as wonderful. I decided that since I wouldn't need money for dates and such any more, I might as well use the money I would have spent on going out and buy something nice to distract myself from my misery. I took a bus to Beverly Hills (I was at UCLA on scholarship) and went to a jewelry store that carried Rolex and bought a beautiful new stainless steel Oyster Perpetual Datejust with a Jubilee bracelet. It cost $250. I loved it for about six months, it indeed distracted me for a while as intended. Then I gradually tired of its weight and retired it to a drawer. I sold it (in excellent condition) in the spring of 1969 to help raise money for a post-graduation Europe trip with a new girlfriend. The pawn shop gave me $50 for it and I was fine with that. I just checked StockX and saw they now sell there used for about $3,500.
An entry-level Rolex costs about $5000, or 5x the price of an iPhone Xs. That iPhone will be a worthless piece of e-waste after five years or so when it stops receiving iOS updates. With regular servicing, your old Rolex will make a handsome graduation gift for your great-great-great-grandson. The Rolex might be more expensive, but I think it's something of a bargain.
The Let's Note series being very conservative with I/O, with optical drives and analog VGA output, speaks volumes both about how pragmatic they are and also how painfully slow the average Japanese business scene changes in regards to tech (what with the persistence of fax machines and all...) :/
I wear one too, one of perhaps 25 I've owned since it came out in 1989. I have 7 or 8 of them scattered around my house. I love the fact that the one you buy today is identical to the first one. Very few products go 30 years unchanged.
I have a G-Shock which syncs with the atomic clock. It is the best watch for international travel -- you will always know the correct time anywhere without any tweaking. It is a Casio -- so it does not attract the wrong kind of attention.
I saw one on eBay and I'm seriously considering it. I've found nothing online about using them in Linux, but I'm willing to give it a shot. I'd wager it shows up as a big pile of USB endpoints connected to a hub or somesuch, might be interesting to see what you can get working.
Quite a few of the keys have awkward action with excess stiction. Not great for programming (and indeed many Bloomberg programmers used other keyboards when that one was current).
In spreadsheets (excel) and notebooks (ipython/rstudio), having the data bundled with the code is a feature. It provides reproducibility.
> a destroyed formula can go undetected for a while...
That is a problem in methodology, not with the tools. There are many solutions that do not require abandoning spreadsheets.
For the destroyed formula example, you need tests. Simple example to do that with a checklist: if you are doing a SUM(), require that the employee ticks a box saying "all the number were highlighted when clicking on the SUM formula".
For the out-of-sync version, you need a central repository and another box "I retrieved the latest version from the xx repository, and this version was: ... "
Then require that to be printed and signed (accountability), and you'll see mistake disappear.
Is it any different with code? Developers don’t always stick to the procedures either.
I have ‘unit tests’ in my excel files on the last tab. Eg, the sum of all lines in the Data tab must be the same as the sum of the annual revenues in the dashboard tab.
With a bit of conditional formatting it’s easy to see if a test is failing as well.
I like programming for lots of things, but ask me to do a business case or some one-off analysis and I’d use Excel in most cases.
After they received training when they learn that this step is important and not just a formality, and why it is done, I found that people do observe procedures, especially when they have to sign the checklist they filled themselves.
Human beings observe procedures when they understand it's part of the job and they are held accountable.
There is absolutely no technical reason why it should be the case if done properly.
With SIM cards or other hardware devices, your private key is never leaked (if "done properly")
With cryptos like BTC, you can generate many keys from one source of entropy, and treat them as disposable.
I don't see why medical records couldn't be encrypted with a disposable key, given by a hardware device which stores the seed, and only linked to the matching public key.
Name + ICD diagnosis, what a wonderful leak for blackmailers wordwide! (/s)
Seriously, these two pieces of data that are innocent alone, when taken separately (HIV, chlamydia, cancer...) should NEVER have been linked together, ESPECIALLY when given to a third party, EVEN MORE stored together.
I pray it will result in many lawsuits with hefty punitive damages, and that as a consequence private data will be considered a liability to be deleted as early as possible (just like corporate email in many companies)
Good catch. Reading between the lines I took this to mean that lab information was not leaked:
> The system contained sensitive data, including credit card numbers, bank account information, medical information and Social Security numbers, Quest said. Lab results were not provided to AMCA and were not exposed in the breach. AMCA thinks 11.9 million Quest patients were affected as of May 31, 2019, Quest said.
But it only says lab results were not leaked with the extremely generic label of medical information as being leaked. I wonder if "medical information" includes lab codes or what exactly it consists of?
Medical information is likely to be ICD codes for the active diagnosis, and antecedents (history) for this patient.
This is worse than full text medical information because everything is already coded, so you can make some simple algorithms to find crunchy details with a very high specificity.
Billing amounts will correlate with tests administered, so even without lab results a ton could be inferred from a sequence of billing amounts even _without_ ICD codes.
Including the codes removes ambiguity.
If the "allowed" ICD code is linked to the public key, or in the worst case if the patient provides the disposable private key to the insurance for verification (along with PCI like rules forbidding this key to be stored, like credit card expiration date if I remember correctly) this couldn't happen.
It is gross negligence to keep these things together for longer than they need to be. Private data should be seen as a liability.
The beautiful thing with democracy is that these housing solutions that provided an actual solution to homelessness where banned, are still illegal, and thus won't be "brought back" even if they make perfect sense, were preferred by the people who used them, are a free market solution, and much cheaper than the alternatives.
See San Francisco as an example of what happens when more money is poured in the "modern" solutions - very little reduction of the problem, if any.
> VThe problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China
yet
> Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM l
ARM -> RISC, as ARM is not the only game in town. For example, at the moment I am having a lot of fun with a Unielec u7621 board (2 mini PCIe, mSata and USB3 with hardware accelerated NAT to handle 1Gbps) that costed me about $45 : https://openwrt.org/toh/unielec/u7621-06
I would love to see MIPS64 SOCs with a few GBs of RAM to replace my raspberries
This is a pretty weak rebuttal, the MT7621 based board you cite has two MIPS 24k CPUs, straight out of 2005: https://wikidevi.com/wiki/MIPS_24K
All of the MT7621"s speed is from ASICs that accelerate NAT & WPA2, without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along.
More competitive offerings like the OrangePi PC Plus ($19) and FriendlyARM boards based on Allwinner chips offer much nore performance for the dollar, but these are literally foriegn IP blocks Allwinner licensed, glued together and sent off to a 45n or 28nm fab to have manufactured. Most of the work Allwinner did for these chips was on a trashcan ready, buggy board support package.
> I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali
The Mali drivers that were just mainlined last month aren't necessarily feature complete like Intel, Via or AMD GPU drivers. Mali is licensed from ARM, which would be a showstopper for US embargoed companies.
> Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.
If MIPS64 were competitive on price, we would have a plethora of tablets & boards based on it. Currently, dated Mips 24k cores are a $0.10 afterthought that is used to boot and initialize the dedicated ASICs. We've started seeing ARM cores eat the router market though, they're likely delivering more performance for that $0.10.
I care more about freedom than performance here. Not feature complete is fine as long as it works for what I do, and that I can tweak it to do more.
Eventually, something that is not licensed from a western company (or which can't be protected by IP law) but that is fast enough for most uses will also become a $0.10 afterthought.
The mips24k is remarkable in that you can comfortably run a linux kernel with a lot of userland utilities and even text mode software -- just what we used to run on Linux computers many years ago!
We can't ever know the counterfactual. If these had degenerated into a revolution, there would have been many more casualties.
What we know for sure is that, 30 years later, the country is enjoying tremendous growth, has lifted a lot of its population from poverty, and did that even with foreign powers trying to meddle with it.
Personally, I would consider that a success - especially when compared to say Russia. Sure, things could have been handled better, but Monday quarterbacking is easy, while action is hard.
Populist revolts tend to be very ugly in China, that is true. Like tens of millions of casualties ugly. As terrible as the Communists are, and they are terrible, and have a lot of bloods on their hands, stability in China is not to be discounted, particularly now that they have nuclear weapons. A modern-day Taiping Rebellion or a return to early 20th century warlordism would be a massive catastrophe.
The ends don't justify the means, but justifying the means is socialism 101. Moreover, if they had liberalized both the economy and the social laws, economy would have grown even more.
- if they had liberalized both the economy and the social laws, economy would have grown even more.
And I pointed out (sarcastically, I admit) that the transition to freedom and market economy didn't work out very well in the other example of communist superpower. It might not have anything to do with the transition, per se; it might just be that Russia was culturally unprepared for it and it managed it very badly. But I find easy to believe that a sudden switch from a single party system and an entirely planned economy, to free market and democracy, is in itself extremely risky.
China has been doing great in the years since 1989; Russia, that has tried to follow the path of democracy and market (of course, with very mediocre results), has not.
I didn't choose Russia as an example of economic and social freedom, you did. Russia is not high on the scale of social and economic freedom. In fact Russia has never ever been a democracy in its whole history. You want a better example? Chile.
You're reading in my comment things I didn't actually say. Specifically, I didn't choose Russia as an example of economic or social freedom. I instead argued that Russia tried to go that way, and it didn't end well. And of course, if Russia were an actual example of social and economic freedom, that would go against my whole argument.
They never even tried, though. They may have claimed at some point that they'd do it, but that's a very different matter - they went the "government cronyism" way, and very explicitly so. Again, just compare what Eastern Europe has been achieving, and it's no comparison - even after you account for the fact that Russia did have to face quite a bit of enduring hostility and distrust from Western institutions.
Russia didn't really liberalize or open up socially all that much (I mean, just compare Eastern Europe!). They sold the government assets that they had around as the legacy from their socialist past for pennies on the dollar, ostensibly in order to quickly gather funds for the government and deal with the huge scale of economic disorder/crisis that had forced them away from socialism in the first place.
Their subsequent dysfunction was still the direct outcome of their former socialist system (and, to a significant extent, of overt hostility and distrust from Western institutions - which is a big part of why many people there are in turn distrusting and quite hostile towards Western values even today), not of increased freedom. What limited opening-up they did probably carried them along to where they are now.
Unrelated to the thread, but I find unmotivated disagreement (expressed with downvotes) also poisonous. I think it would be interesting to allow downvotes only in combination with a "downvote comment" expressing the reason of the disagreement.
I'd prefer to live in Switzerland. More economic and social freedom. Neither Russia nor China have too much social or economic freedom so honestly I just think the comparison doesn't make sense. Sure, someone at some point claimed Russia tried liberalism/democracy, but it was a lie, it was never tried. There's less scarcity now that in Soviet times, for sure, but it's still a crony government with no freedom of expression, which is kind of similar to China. However there's way less freedom in China probably.
Maybe not in the beta, as mentioned in the article where there may have been a risk of imminent collision.
But in the stable version? Yes it should. Your daughter is not more important than say the newborn twins that may be carried by another car that your car is about to hit.
Otherwise, you believe that her existance is worth sacrificing N people over - or hell, even a few million people, and that ain't right.
No. I decided not to have kids after realizing it came with the "risk" of making me prioritize their life over the life of many more human beings.
I do not want to alter my utility function to favor people simply based on them having some of my genes, or having been educated by me (so I'm not a teacher either!)
However, there are many wonderful parents out there - I've read some poignant stories about parents who went on with organ donation after their kid had a accident which caused irreversible brain damage. I couldn't picture myself doing that - which is why I was afraid the "risk" would be very real for me.
Casio watches, Nokia cellphones (formerly, now Huawei or Xiaomi), Thinkpad latops and Panasonic Toughbooks - if you have one, you are likely to have one of the others.
Looks like people are getting defined by their lifestyle. (I guess Rolex and Apple would be on the other end of the spectrum)