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Tin Whiskers — Fact Or Fiction?
bLanark writes "Some time ago, most electronics were soldered with old-fashioned lead solder, which has been tried and tested for decades. In 2006, the EU banned lead in solder, and so most manufacturers switched to a lead-free solder. Most made the switch in advance, I guess due to shelf-life of products and ironing out problems working with the new material. Lead is added to solder as it melts at low temperature, but also, it prevents the solder from growing 'whiskers' — crystalline limbs of metal. The effect of whiskers on soldered equipment would include random short-circuits and strange RF-effects. Whiskers can grow fairly quickly and become quite long. Robert Cringley wrote this up this some time ago, but it seems that the world has not been taking notice. I guess cars (probably around 30 processors in a modern car) and almost every appliance would be liable to fail sooner than expected due to tin whiskers. Note that accelerated life-expectancy tests can't simulate the passing of time for whiskers to grow. I've googled, and there is plenty of research into the effects of tin whiskers. I should point out that the Wikipedia page linked to above states that tin whisker problems 'are negligible in modern alloys,' but can we trust Wikipedia? So: was the tin whisker problem overhyped, was it an initial problem that has been solved in the few years since lead-free solder came into use, or is it affecting anyone already?"
If you don't trust wikipedia, then change it! That's the whole idea behind wikipedia.
/. ID #644805
This insightful comment brought to you by Forest Grump -
Tip: Do not change it using your home/work computer. It is best to change it from a public library in a city far far away.
Tip #2: Don't buy a plane ticket to travel to this far far away city. It is best to hitchhike so you can save on travel $$$ and not leave a paper trail.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
A few years ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, a big beautiful all-American football hero type, about twenty five, came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was "straight" and married -- and in any case I was sure I wouldn't have a chance with him.
As soon as he left, I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy young ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as a man's wrist. I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a heavy rimmer and had lapped up more than one little clump of shit, but that had been just an inevitable part of eating ass and not an end in itself.
Of course I'd had jerkoff fantasies of devouring great loads of it (what rimmer hasn't?), but I had never done it. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of the world's handsomest young stud.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking.
I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract? I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled. I've found since then that shit nearly almost does. I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big brown cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was the donor of this feast wasn't there to wash it down with his piss. I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my hankercheif, and stashed them in my briefcase.
In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole -- not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone.
The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process. I often think of that lovely young guy dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did,bring to a grateful shiteater.
In South Kore, only old people solder tin whiskers!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Well, trust is not a binary thing. You can trust someone for one thing and not another. And even if you do trust, you can have trust at a wide variety of different levels.
I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia in some ways either, not so much because it lies, but because it doesn't want the truth. If I know something true, and I'm the only person in the world, it doesn't want it. But if I know something false, and I write it up, then it's referenceable, and it becomes closer to something Wikipedia does want. I can understand both of those at some level, but I think Wikipedia should care a lot more than it does about creating new mechanisms to let in real truth (perhaps creating a mechanism by which individual knowledge can be vetted) and keep out falsehoods (perhaps creating mechanisms for peer review of referenced documents). The fact that it doesn't is, of course, why other competitors have come up. I guess on that point, you have to score one for the marketplace for at least creating the idea and allowing competition to crank out alternatives.
But as to what to trust in Wikipedia, their strength is that the things they say are supposed to be things that can be backed up by reference. Where you see a strong claim and no reference, find a way to flag that fact and maybe the person who put it in will add a reference. Where you see a reference, follow the chain back to the original source. That source may ultimately be believable or not, of course. In some sense, by its choice of paradigm, Wikipedia is just a complicated, statically-enumerated set of search engine results. It gets you started, but it isn't the whole of the thing you want.
If I knew more about phenomenology, I'd probably say that's just the nature of the Universe, and that Wikipedia can no more escape it than anyone can escape the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. That is, no one ever really knows anything about the Universe other than what they're told, and what they can work out in terms of internal consistency checks on what they're told. But all I know of that is what I've seen mentioned in Dark Star. So I'll let you do your own research there. Whether to direct you to Wikipedia or the movie though, to study more of phenomenology... I dunno, that's a hard choice. Probably I'd say just see the movie. It's worth more than the 6.5 stars IMDB gives it. One could just imagine what Bomb #20 might have to say on the matter of Wikipedia...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer