13:05 – I just finished assembling chemical bags for another two dozen biology kits. Now I’ll start on getting together what I need for another five dozen chemistry kits. I’m down to three 30 mL bottles of 6 M hydrochloric acid in stock, and none made up. So I just made up six liters of 6 M hydrochloric acid, sufficient for 200 bottles.
And then there are all the smaller tasks that need to be done. I got a query this morning from a woman in Australia who wanted to know if she could order the international versions of both a chemistry kit and a biology kit and have them shipped in one box to reduce shipping charges. I told her we could do that. The shipping surcharge for one kit to Australia is $69. Shipping two kits in one box costs about $103, give or take, depending on actual weight. The international kits substitute chemicals that are legal to ship internationally for the regulated chemicals in the standard US versions of the kits. We’re down to only nine of the international biology chemicals bags and only two of the international chemistry chemicals bags, so I need to make up another dozen or two of each. I also need to make up another liter of Kastle-Meyer reagent for forensic kits and bottle it. And so on.
I just saw on Slashdot that the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope mount John Dobson died yesterday at age 98.
I wish I’d met him.
Do you have any idea if USPS is losing money on all its operations (first class, media class, bulk, packages, etc) or just its first class mail? I seem to remember reading that USPS needs to raise the cost of the first class stamp to 65 cents in order to fund all of their operations and employee benefits as ordered by Congress. I wonder if they need raise their package sending rates also? And if they need to drop media mail and bulk mail classes?
I do not have a problem with them raising the cost of the first class stamp at all. The current 46 cents to send a letter across the USA with a 99.9% completion rate is a bargain in my opinion. I also know that USPS has been a favorite target of Congress for unfunded mandates.
USPS by law is supposed to break even. And they actually have been breaking even if you don’t count those unfunded mandates.
Packages are a huge bright spot for USPS. IIRC, just a few years ago packages made up only something like 3% of their revenue. That’s now up in the 25% range and skyrocketing every year. USPS is taking business away from UPS and FedEx, particularly residential deliveries but also business deliveries.
As Danny, our mailman, commented yesterday, it makes no economic sense for UPS and FedEx to do residential deliveries. As he said, the USPS truck delivers every day to just about every house in the neighborhood. They’re here anyway, so why don’t UPS and FedEx use them for last-mile delivery? Instead UPS and FedEx both send trucks into our neighborhood every day to make maybe half a dozen deliveries each. So we have three trucks driving through the whole neighborhood. One of them delivers to every house every day. The other two deliver to maybe 5% of the houses each day.
I just had two people stop by my rural property wanting to put a cell phone tower on it. The tower owner would be Verizon and they would need a 100 ft by 100 ft section of land. Verizon would put a 190 ft tower, a 17 x 24 ft air conditioned building and a power generator on it.
I have nothing on my front 5 acres except grass. I would be fine with a cell phone tower on it (my total land is 14 acres, 396 ft wide by 1,427 ft long). They started offering at $400 per month for a twenty year lease and we ended up saying that $800 per month would be interesting to me. I’ve gotta check it out with the wife first. I told them that I knew of a tower getting $1100/month up by the freeway but the guy was adamant that they do not pay that out here in the sticks.
Now they are going to go talk to the neighbors to see if they can get a better deal there.
USPS does a good job on packages. If I only had customers in the USA, I would use them exclusively. But, they are so-so on international packages for places in the sticks. And I mean the sticks where someone might need a 4 wheel drive to go the last 40 miles. The problem that we had before with them (we haven’t used USPS for international packages in 10 years) was the lack of usable tracking.
How hard is it to synthesize pentobarbital?
Pretty straightforward, if you’re an organic chemist.
The Malware That Duped Target Has Been Found
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/target-malware-identified/
Yes, build your POS systems on Windows! I am sure that nobody will mess with them, especially if they are directly connected to the intertubes with no firewalls, NAT boxes or anything like that.
I noticed that Walmart’s new selfcheck POS terminals are Windows also. Seems so … vulnerable. Maybe they have a firewall though.
And the problem gets worse:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-16/atms-face-deadline-to-upgrade-from-windows-xp
42,000 ATMs in the USA and most of them run Windows XP. Nice!
What kind of moron runs any critical system on Windows?
Dunno, but I expect it’s also still the case that some ATMs connect via analog modems and transmit transaction data (including PINs) in the clear. Banks invest millions in snazzy software and executive bonuses, but security where it counts is nonexistent. Apparently, most criminals are too dumb to take advantage of it…
I just attended a presentation on companies that want to encourage “bring your own device”. The presenter was convinced that security is no problem, because you can impose policies on the devices, like the company has the right to delete all data on the device. I asked the presenter if he knew that a user with a rooted device could grant those rights, and then quietly take them away again. He either hadn’t ever thought of that, or maybe he didn’t even quite know what I meant by “rooting”. Dunno, but I’m sure he is typical of all to many people setting IT policies for companies.
As a nonsequiter: I was forced to Linux Mint on my laptop, after some Ubuntu update borked X-windows. I spent too many hours trying to fix it, but had to work and had this experimental installation of Mint, so…
I’ve been using it for about a month now, and it’s really, really nice! Some things work that Ubuntu had broken – for example, my headphone output hadn’t worked under Ubuntu for more than a year, but it does just fine under Mint. The interface is less obtrusive (I was using Xubuntu, which was already better than Unity). I’m annoyed at some of the packages that seem arbitrarily different, but that’s just a matter of getting use to the new ones.
The only worry I have is that they apparently don’t guarantee a smooth upgrade to newer versions. They suggest doing a fresh install instead. That’s one thing I definitely appreciate about Ubuntu – version upgrades generally work, with at most a few tweaks.
Does anyone have experience with carrying a Mint installation over multiple versions?
cough-cough
Yah, it’s old news. It still stands as a
pinnaclenadir of calamitously retarded design.I am new to Mint, but the afficianados say the requirement of new installations for upgrades is a protection from bad things that happen when upgrading an existing system. I do remember that the upgrades my brother did back in the Unix days were completely new installs. It was all hands on deck for those, and they usually did them over one of these long weekends, so they would have an additional day, if needed. You CAN upgrade Mint from the repositories, but the Mint folks disclaim any responsibilities for doing it that way.
I don’t spend every day with Linux. In fact, the Linux computer occasionally sits unused for days at a time, and sometimes during those days at idle, it manages to lock itself up to a hardware reboot. Wish I could like Linux like I like Windows, but there are just too many danged problems with it.
Through my tribulations, I have come across a software installation for Debian and its offspring, that makes some modifications to the Linux sound channels to stop the conflicts between OSS, ALSA, and Pulse. It is KXStudio.
http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net/
It also pre-installs and configures the Jack software patch panel and a lot of Jack plug-ins. Jack has been a stumbling block for me and even hardier Linux users than me, but the reports are that Jack just works under KXStudio. I’ll be finding out.
Now the question is: should I upgrade from Mint Olivia (release 15) to the newly released Petra (16)? or just stand pat? Last LTS release was 13, which is good for 5 years (not just 3 as in the past), so with July 2012 as the 13 release, it is going to be a long haul until the next LTS release—2017 is the projection.
If you install a new Mint from scratch is it easy to preserve existing data and/or programs?
@Miles: Personally, I keep (at least) three partitions on my disk: Current operating system, Data, and an extra. This works pretty well, because Linus distros really don’t take all that much space. 40GB is usually enough even if you have a lot of applications installed.
Upgrading while retaining your data just means putting the new install into the extra partition, playing with it until you are happy, then no longer using your old installation.
That’s the theory, anyway. You are still left with porting all of your setup. However, that isn’t too awful: you can peek at your old installation as necessary, while setting up the new one.
Thanks, I’ve got a box that is designed to learn Linux on. The current installation would be around six years old, so I’ll just wipe it. Been meaning to get on top of Linux for years, but been too lazy. I’m a bit scared by the ransomwear that’s going around, and have heard that routers are now a favourite target.
yeah, Cryptolocker is scary. I actually wound up on their webpage, somehow, telling me “all of your files are being encrypted”. Scary, but it wasn’t true, I was under Linux anyway. Hacked website, I suppose.
It took me a year or so to really get completely comfortable with Linux, but it’s worth it.