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.
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
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.
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"
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.:
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.
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.
