Slashdot Mirror

American lost to the Japanese in the 1970s because before the oil crisis, there was no incentive to make efficient cars in the US, but there was in Japan (mostly because big cars didn't fit on Japanese roads, but also because America was already a car culture and we were OK shelling out a sizeable chunk of our earnings to drive). When the oil crisis hit, the Japanese were in a better position to take advantage of it than the Americans were. Painting it as American engineers being inferior is untrue.

It's not a myth. When you recycle steel, it gets harder. You can put carbon back into it to make it softer, but that costs money. American cars of the 1950s were made out of mild steel. That steel eventually got recycled and shipped to Japan. Then the Japanese didn't add more carbon to it — instead, they designed vehicles around the materials.

You can look at any of a hundred sources, but here's one. Mild steel has little carbon, adding carbon makes it harder (up to 0.77%, but no one uses hypereutectic steel for cars).

Actually, many membrane keyswitches (and electronics components in general) are designed - and encouraged by the manufacturer - to be washed in water after assembly. Together with water-soluble fluxes, this is a standard manufacturing step to remove flux residue and other contaminants. (Enclaimer: IAAEE)

(One caveat; this is distilled/DI water based cleaning; a dip in the ocean is an entirely different story!)

Stainless steel, as another person pointed out would also work.

No it wouldn't, not with all alloys.

Any anything with welds (think any large-bore steel pipe system) is automatically going to be a corrosion target, because the welding process can evaporate key corrosion-resistant elements from the alloy.

About the only easy solution to salt water is PVC, but that has crap thermal characteristics.

Stainless steel, as another person pointed out would also work.

No it wouldn't, not with all alloys.

Any anything with welds (think any large-bore steel pipe system) is automatically going to be a corrosion target, because the welding process can evaporate key corrosion-resistant elements from the alloy.

About the only easy solution to salt water is PVC, but that has crap thermal characteristics.

Switching power supplies can be surprisingly fragile. I've killed a couple working on TVs (that's basically what a flyback circuit is) and you can do it in one or two cycles (of your AC, not CPU cycles). And no, you don't want to know how much those power transistors cost. And I've killed computer PS by shorting across IC pins. There's not a lot of current going through these, and a 50-200 ohm short will definitely do the job. Remember, it only has to conduct long enough to nuke the chip.

Or maybe you'd prefer to ask the Cisco power engineer about it. Naah, he probably doesn't know what he's talking about.

and therein lies the problem: you just asserted that this is an item of faith for you, not reason; facts be damned, you cannot be convinced.

Never mind that there are several companies who do raised subfloors who've been addressing this problem for some time. They're all peddling snake oil, and NASA is helping them do it.

Never mind that Zn whiskers grow slowly, Zn-electroplated subfloor panels in data centers aren't that old, and PC board density has been increasing. Or that they only occur on electroplated zinc, and only grow long enough to be problematic in very low traffic areas. Nope, must be bogus.

Never mind that hospitals are affected as well and take this seriously. Or that the condition is well known among electroplaters and materials engineers, and was discussed at least ten years ago in the literature. Or that it's been involved in at least one product liability case. Or that Bell Labs has known about it for over fifty years (since 1948).

And never mind you could have found everything I mentioned above within the first 30 google results for "Zinc Whiskers". Nope. It must all be a myth, because there's no such thing as newly discovered age-related problems.

(Oh, and I hear that automobile corrosion is a myth too ... I went to the new car lot and looked around and didn't see any, so it must not exist)

Funny, I didnt' have any trouble coming up with stuff on google. Anyway, as requested, link.