2,545 karma · joined September 10, 2010
I admittedly find it a little bit confusing how many people here assign complete blame to exactly one participant.
> To help me avoid more tooth decay my dad bought me one of those fancy
> rechargable electric toothbrushes that really powers away the plaque.
> It also creates a fine aerosol mist of plaque, and I started to wonder
> if 4 years of using this brush had caused me to breathe in some of this
> plaque mist and moved an infection into my lungs.
https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-en...
> This allows 40k60 on two lanes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...
And they were quite productive:
> Apple's ATG was the birthplace of Color QuickDraw, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, QuickDraw 3D, QuickRing, 3DMF the 3D metafile graphics format, ColorSync, HyperCard, Apple events, AppleScript, Apple's PlainTalk speech recognition software, Apple Data Detectors, the V-Twin software for indexing, storing, and searching text documents, Macintalk Pro Speech Synthesis, the Newton handwriting recognizer,[5] the component software technology leading to OpenDoc, MCF, HotSauce, Squeak, and the children's programming environment Cocoa (a trademark Apple later reused for its otherwise unrelated Cocoa application frameworks).
Here are some blog posts by ATG's Jim Miller giving some background on concepts such as Data Detectors.
It's interesting to see how winter is taking hold of the planet - but a little bit disappointing that I cannot compare snowy areas between different years.
Nice things:
- tiling WM with support for floating windows
- useful widgets out of the box (CPU/mem/network graphs, clipboard notification, audio volume)
- works well most of the time
- highly configurable and scriptable
- you can set the active group ("virtual desktop) for each screen individually, whereas awesome has virtual desktops that cover all screens at once. This is great for lectures/talks as I can prepare contents/applications on my laptop screen and then move this group to the to the projector screen when needed. This makes switching between slides, web browser, or a live demo easy.
- completely written in Python, so one can easily modify the source code and reload qtile
Annoying things:
- sometimes my X server crashes and I suspect qtile to be at fault. However, it happens rarely enough so that I did not bother investigating further.
- the interactive Python shell for qtile (qsh) is a strange mix of Python and filesystem metaphors with too little actual control over the WM
- documentation and examples are not always up to date
- bug: QT applications leave withdrawn "empty" windows on the screen if qtile is reloaded (which happens when displays are connected or disconnected)
- dynamic multi-window applications don't work particularly well with tiling WMs (if these don't recognize all windows that need to be floating)
- applications can only be in a single group / virtual desktop. This is an inherent limitation caused by the aforementioned ability to assign groups to individual screens (you obviously can't have the same X11 window to be rendered to two different screens at different dimensions)
However, every single professional whom I've talked to, or whose comments I read, argued that well-trained professionals are the real bottleneck. None of them said they would try out a minimalist ventilator.
I can really understand the desire to do something in order to help those who work on the frontline. However, all this effort and ingenuity would be better spent on other projects:
- personal protective equipment (masks, face shields)
- simple replacement parts
- maybe some simple devices (e.g., CPAP, air filters)
There are quite a few BVM-based ventilators being designed right now. However, there are a lot of caveats I have become aware of. In short: ventilators for use in intensive care need to be safe and adjustable. Oh, and it is not clear whether ventilators actually change the outcome.
Lungs of COVID-19 patients are often damaged, and ventilation causes additional damage. As the patients' alveoli no longer capture enough O2, you need to increase air pressure to force more O2 into them. More pressure = more damage to alveoli, so you need to be very careful. So you need to be able to adjust the pressure curve very finely. None of the BVM solutions I have seen so far has such a feature. COVID-19 already causes severe lung damage in some people - you don't want to damage them even more due to wrong ventilation.
Unlike emergency care (where BVMs are usually used), intensive care of COVID19 patients needs to play the long game. AFAIK, patients need constant care, supervision and medication over a period of 10+ days. Any damage you cause to the lungs early on will make it harder later on.
But won't it be better to keep people alive with a simple ventilator even if they will suffer lung damage? Maybe not. I am aware of the gut-wrenching situation doctors face in Italy and elsewhere - deciding whom to connect to the few available ventilators. It seems (I'm not really sure about it yet) that ventilators just delay inevitable death by a few days in most cases. A study from Wuhan notes: “32 patients required invasive mechanical ventilation, of whom 31 (97%) died.” [1]
"Not everyone is a good fit for ICU. Even outside of COVID, if you are of a certain frailty and you have certain underlying conditions, your chances of making it off a ventilator when you are deathly sick is close to 0%." [2]
So the question is indeed whether one should really extend a patient's suffering for a few days or whether one should instead focus on making their last few days as comfortable as possible, and give them the chance to stay conscious and say goodbye to family.
Even if there is a subset of patients who might benefit from a BVM-based ventilator (and I am not sure about this), I would be very hesitant to rely on them. If a motor burns out, a tube gets loose, or a microcontroller goes crazy, the patient might choke, panic, even die. None of the DIY ventilators has gone through rigorous testing yet. None of the ones I have seen has backup mechanisms (spare motor, continuous surveillance of all parameters, fail-safe power supplies, etc.) I would not want to inflict them on dying patients - or caregivers.
This leads me to the most important point: the most severe bottleneck are qualified professionals. Should we really hand these people some DIY Arduino-based ventilators that might fail any moment, that lack important features, and that need additional training? A ventilator that malfunctions at the wrong time (or does not reliably function at all) will take away time and attention from exactly those people whom we really don't want to get distracted or burnt out.
There is a UK government guidance which gives a good overview of essential requirements for ventilators [3]. It states:
"A ventilator with lower specifications than this is likely to provide no clinical benefit and might lead to increased harm, which would be unacceptable for clinicians and would, therefore, not gain regulatory approval."
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on medical tech or intensive care. I have just followed a few of those projects over the past weeks and read reports of experts. It could be that I am wrong and those projects will save many lives. There could also be use cases where DIY ventilators may help (e.g. in home care). But overall, I am rather skeptical and would rather suggest focusing on stuff that might be more useful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fnl0n6/im_a_cr...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
Do you really want to give these people a new ventilator with which they are not familiar, which may lack features they need, and which might break down or malfunction in an unfortunate moment?
Maybe there is a place for such simple ventilators outside intensive care, e.g., as support for people who are able to breathe on their own and do not necessarily require mechanical ventilation, AND who are in a place without nasal O2 supply?
- der/die Butter
- das/die Huhn
see e.g., https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/zwiebelfisch/zwiebelfisch-der-... (German) for more local linguistic peculiarities.
However, the cargo terminal has been in operation since 2013 [1].
[1] https://www.berlin-airport.de/en/business-partners/airlines-...
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/592118040179507207/63...
Typically, one just registers a word trademark for a very small number of service/goods classes (e.g., here's a registered trademark for "car" which only applies to certain medical devices and services [1]).
A large company trying to claim "book" for pretty much the whole Nice Class 9 is not normal behavior.
[1] https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/00939884...
Surely, a man can be a role model for a woman in science (and vice versa) - e.g., if you are from the same small ethnic minority as the role model. However, male/female lifestyle, upbringing, interests, challenges, etc. are quite different in general, even in otherwise very homogeneous (western) societies. Therefore, the role model having the same sex/gender is very important.
(Just my view - I don't have evidence or experience in this regard).
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/eight-reasons-why-anoto-digit...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anoto-late-2017-update-analys...
While I'm very skeptical of this initiative for a number of reasons, I appreciate that they explicitly mention the need for Open Data and seem to commit to improving accessibility of governmental data sources.