[ot] life of bright LED

[Vu Pham]

On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 19:06 +0800, Man-wai Chang wrote:
> > There is a book with all the pills in color plates.
> 
> Out of curiosity, is there a rule among pill manufacturers to guarantee 
> each pill have a unique appearance (like public IPs)?
> 

Public IPs is not a good comparison, I think. MAC address is more
appropriate.

And for that comparison, theoretically you can develop rules like: 

- for the left half of the pills, the color is unique among
manufacturers, e.g. manufacturer A using color 0x0a0a0a, manufacturer B
using color 0x0b0b0b. With this first rule, you know which pills are of
which manufacturers.

- for the right half of the pills, each manufacturer can assign
different colors for different products.

Then we have to invent the glasses that can help the nurses to read the
colors correctly, and they will look up some drug-color database
( perhaps on some Linux servers ) to find out the name of the drugs.

Or for the sake of simplicity, doctors just give you prescriptions like
"use 0A14FCFE123B for three days"

Vu