This has been posted for 6 hours and nobody has mentioned a static strap yet? WTF. In the telco space, it's SOP for operators to need to put on a static strap prior to extracting or servicing blades or shelves. Shelves and servers even have built-in ESD grounding points so that you don't need to hunt around for a piece of bare grounded metal to clip to. Even if it's only ever used once a year when the CIO is taking the CEO and other executives on a tour through the server room and you want to look super professional while replacing some RAM in a server, they have their purpose.
Don't worry, they'll all be re-trained as robot technicians, I'm sure. That's what happened to all of the workers displaced by robots in the automotive industry, right? Right??
Actually, unions were created to protect the common worker from the abuses of their employer. In that way, unions have failed for pretty much for the same reasons that communism has: it's impossible to put into practice such pie-in-the-sky theory when you're dealing with a bunch of selfish human assholes that are willing to game the system for their own profit or advantage (or to protect their own laziness and incompetence).
That being said, maybe there's a place for something (a union) to protect your common tech worker from the abuses of their employer. While it might be true that your average high-tech employer isn't visibly out to abuse their employees as it might have been back during the industrial revolution, there are probably still cases where this does happen. Take the case of my wife's employer, for instance. For the third or fourth year running, this employer has instituted a forced time off policy in order to make their bottom line look better. At first it was just a week after xmas, but this year everyone is required to take 2 weeks in Q4 and 2 weeks in Q1. What's the big deal? It's not like she lost any vacation, right? 4 weeks of vacation is pretty generous (for north america), right? Well when the company hires you and gives you a "benefit package" that includes 3 weeks of vacation, what is it, other than abuse, when they tell you that you need to take those three weeks, plus a fourth week on top of that, at a time of their choosing? How is "vacation" a benefit when you can't take it when you want, and if you want to take vacation at any other time, you have to take it un-paid? Anyone starting work at that company now is screwed in terms of vacation for the next year, and that assumes that they don't pull this stunt (or something worse) next year. As it is, anyone who doesn't already have 4 weeks of vacation available to them (or have already used up their vacation for the year) will have negative vacation going into 2013; that is, they are in debt to the company for that time, and will actually owe the company money if they leave before 2014. Assuming they do this again next year, they are setting themselves up so that their employees are perpetually in vacation debt, which I'm sure looks great in their accounting books, but how again isn't that abusive? The worst thing is, it's not like any of my wife's deadlines have been adjusted for this; product releases are still scheduled for the same dates that they were before. It's almost like the company expects their employees to work during their so-called "vacation"... Sorry to belabour the vacation point, or to bring my personal problems into this, but it's currently very much on my mind as it's severely messing up our plans for family vacation next year...
Anyway, I'm sure the knee-jerk reaction will be "well why doesn't she quit and work for another company". Sure, that's certainly an option, and one that my wife and I have talked about, but why does it have to be this way? What does my wife quitting do to help those left behind that wouldn't (or couldn't, for whatever reason) quit? What if, instead, everyone put their foot down and said, "no way, you're not taking my vacation away from me". How's that going to happen unless everyone gets together as a group (a union) and organizes it? Maybe in a case like that a union is a good thing. The whole "power in numbers" concept...
Despite the shitty situation, I don't actually hope that my wife's work will unionise in order to protect themselves from this kind of abuse, for the same reasons that many other posters have pointed out. I think that's a slippery slope and that once one "tech" company unionises, like the plague it will spread to many of the others in the region to the detriment of everyone. I like the idea of a union that protects workers from the abuse that some companies seem too willing to inflict, so that people don't have to make a stand individually. However I'm too much of a cynic (or a realist) to ever believe that it could work or could be sustainable, at least not in the long run. Greedy, selfish, self-serving humans would all but guarantee that it would fail.
Yeah, I guess I wasn't very clear in my original question. When I stated the question, I was actually thinking of the situation my wife and I are in (we have a shared mortgage, bank account, etc and we both work and pay our debts off together). If I now die, she's on the line to pay off all of the debt, so in my mind, she's effectively "inherited" that debt (or at least my half of it). Although my original question sure does read that way, I wasn't trying to imply that debt could be passed down through different generations (i.e. parents to children)... I was just wondering if some people taking advantage of "death with dignity" will unknowingly screw their spouse out of insurance money because their insurer considers the death to be suicide.
I wonder what life insurance companies have to say about this. Specifically, does exercising your right to "die with dignity" automatically cause you to forfeit any life insurance that you might have? If so, that's going to doubly suck for the family you leave behind, especially if you have unpaid debts that'll be passed down to them...
> and a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope to see what I'm doing. I wish we had a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope, but even our cheap Chinese-made one is indispensable. With adjustable zoom and focus, rework on 0201 components is trivial and rework on stupidly small 01005 components is actually possible. Our microscope even has a built-in USB CCD camera. The quality isn't fantastic, but I've used it on several occasions to document rework steps, capture evidence of botched board assembly, etc. I'd say the camera is definitely optional, but the microscope is a must.
> A good old fashioned Tek 100-250MHz analogue scope. No DSO. No fancy stuff - just an analogue scope. That's fine for debugging power supplies and low frequency designs, but is useless to "test and debug modern electronic device prototypes" as he specified. For that, you'll need something with a much higher bandwidth. Our HW lab isn't terribly decked out, but we do have a couple of fast-ish digital scopes (6GHz), but more importantly we have a couple of sets of good active differential probes (3-7GHz) in addition to our crappy (in comparison) 500MHz passive probes. These definitely don't come cheap (> $3K per probe, and they were used when we bought them), but doing measurements or signal integrity on DDR3 or PCIe gen 1 isn't a problem. Unfortunately, we'd need even faster equipment to comfortably measure PCIe gen2 or XAUI, but what we have is good for 90% of our designs. Good active probe sets will allow you to swap different probe heads in and out; some probe heads are good for hand probing (i.e. browser heads) while others are made to be plugged in or soldered into your board. You'll never get a better measurement than you can with a good active differential probe soldered directly to your board.
Another benefit of using a modern digital scope is that you can network them (can access network shares, open a vnc session to the scope for remote operation, etc) and run measurement applications on them, which definitively isn't possible with an old scope. Getting a fully loaded scope with all of the measurement applications you ever intend to use already installed would be stupidly expensive. It isn't very expensive, however, to get a basic scope with the fundamental applications you know you'll always use, and when the need comes up for some other measurement software, simply "rent" it for a month or two until you are done. We did this for several months this year while characterizing our DDR2 and DDR3 interfaces.
BTW, our scopes and probes are from Agilent and we rented SW for our scopes (as well as additional probes and other things) from either TRS Rentelco or Electrorent. We also used one or both of these services to buy a lot of used equipment (including the scopes and some of the probes) at a big discount compared to getting them new.
> Get some decent goggles/safety glasses for the smoke test when you power up something you've made Good idea; I need to get some for our lab... I'd also like to add that having one or more eye-wash stations as well as a ventilation (exhaust or filtering) system are (or should be) necessities. If you've ever gotten flux remover in the eye, you'll know why the eye-wash station is a must-have, and when soldering, you really should have something in place to carry away the smoke. It's not like the old days with rosin core solder where soldering actually smelled good (even if the fumes were terrible for your health). Today's no-clean/no-wash/water-soluble/RoHS fluxes and solder are still bad for you, plus they smell like shit.
Listen, people can get a smart phone anywhere, okay? They come to Apple for the style and the attitude. Okay? That's what the purple flair's about. It's about fun.
Slashdot used to link directly to xkcd (it was in the QuickLinks frame). They stopped that a couple of years ago for some reason. Maybe because the slashdot time waster + xkcd time waster equalled, well, too much wasted time...
A true man of reason [...] about as down to earth and realistic of a man in person as any average tech savvy geek [...]
Exactly why his opinion won't make a lick of difference in what's going on. Executives running companies appear to be locked in a constant battle with one another that seems destined to end in mutual destruction, and the lawyers are standing there behind them egging them on and counting their money. There's no room for reason in a battle like that. Woz is lucky they even let him out of the HW lab long enough for him to express his opinion to the outside world. In fact, they're probably upgrading the lock on the lab door as we speak, just to prevent this from ever happening again...
In their defence, both 1.6 and 0.1 are likely numbers that are rounded from some more precise measurements. The term "nearly" probably applied to the original measurements as opposed to the nicely rounded numbers presented in TFA. Just sayin'...
How can it be that none of the companies targeted by Apple have found a reason to sue Apple for infringing their own products? If I'm not mistaken, Samsung, Motorola, etc, have all been making phones and cell phones far longer than Apple has, and have had far longer to lay down a patent minefield to protect themselves from this shit. Why haven't they found a reason to sue? Is it really possible for Apple's designs to be so squeaky clean that there is nothing for others to go after? Really? Or is it that they're too afraid and are either sitting there quietly, hoping to fly under Apple's radar, or too busy trying to defend themselves from current attacks to launch their own? I'm incredulous that other than a couple of Chinese companies suing Apple for one reason or another, I haven't heard of anybody really being on the offensive against apple. Or, maybe that side of things just doesn't make the headlines...
Or maybe they won't assume that each person that mentions kids is automatically a pedophile, and might instead infer that I was simply one parent amongst many at a school picnic, who just happened to notice the fascinating and efficient way in which popsicles somehow managed to get distributed to all kids, all without the need for fancy announcements or for them to be hand-delivered.
What's I find more troublesome is that at the time I had no idea that I had made some grand discovery that I could have likened to TCP and written an article about. Imagine, if I had only known, I too could have had an article on the front page of Slashdot about how something mundane is remarkable because it works just like some fancy internet protocol! Ah well, that's why I won't be quitting my day job...
Agreed. It's the same with kids and popsicles. If one kid enters a room with a popsicle, one or a few kids will notice and will go searching around for where the popsicle came from. If those kids then all come back with popsicles, even more will start noticing and will then start hunting around for them too, just like the ants in the article. I saw just this occur at a school picnic a couple of months ago.
Now replace "popsicle" with "ice cream sandwhich" and "kid" with "grown up man" and you see exactly the same thing at my work on thursdays, when someone places a box of icecream sandwiches on the counter in the cafeteria. See TCP come alive as larger and larger deluge of grown men detect the presence of icecream sandwhiches and make their way to the cafeteria to get one, all without a single email notification going out.
Not to dismiss out of hand this person's research, but it does seem like it's just another case of some researcher trying to piggy-back their work onto some trendy acronym or concept in order to get their work noticed (and funded). Saying that forager ants mirror kid "popsiclenet" doesn't sound as cool or worthy of funding as saying it mirrors TCP, I guess.
What the? Brembo? Tranny? Methinks you've come to the wrong place, my friend.
I doubt those words have ever been spoken aloud on Slashdot before, and I'm pretty sure that they are near the bottom of the list of things your typical slashdotter will think of when they think of "tech". If you'd at least said your Brembo brakes ran Linux or something, then maybe we'd be impressed. Maybe.
There was an old man sitting on his porch watching the rain fall. Pretty soon the water was coming over the porch and into the house. The old man was still sitting there when a rescue boat came and the people on board said, "You can't stay here you have to come with us." The old man replied, "No, God will save me." So the boat left. A little while later the water was up to the second floor, and another rescue boat came, and again told the old man he had to come with them. The old man again replied, "God will save me." So the boat left him again. An hour later the water was up to the roof and a third rescue boat approached the old man, and tried to get him to come with them. Again the old man refused to leave stating that, "God will save him." So the boat left him again. Soon after, the man drowns and goes to heaven, and when he sees God he asks him, "Why didn't you save me?" God replied, "You idiot! Who do you think sent you those three boats!"
An old joke that seems oddly relevant... Why would god give us intelligence, logic and reasoning if he didn't want us to use them? Let me guess... "it's a test of our faith".
USB 2 is half duplex and from what I'm told has quite a bit of overhead, not to mention the fact that depending on how things are connected together (i.e one controller vs many), the available BW might actually be shared amongst multiple devices. Ethernet can in some cases suffer from some of these problems as well, but it is at least full duplex, and in this day and age, who doesn't run Gigabit Ethernet?
Slashdot Mirror
This has been posted for 6 hours and nobody has mentioned a static strap yet? WTF. In the telco space, it's SOP for operators to need to put on a static strap prior to extracting or servicing blades or shelves. Shelves and servers even have built-in ESD grounding points so that you don't need to hunt around for a piece of bare grounded metal to clip to. Even if it's only ever used once a year when the CIO is taking the CEO and other executives on a tour through the server room and you want to look super professional while replacing some RAM in a server, they have their purpose.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are scientists hand-picked by the king now?
Don't worry, they'll all be re-trained as robot technicians, I'm sure. That's what happened to all of the workers displaced by robots in the automotive industry, right? Right??
Actually, unions were created to protect the common worker from the abuses of their employer. In that way, unions have failed for pretty much for the same reasons that communism has: it's impossible to put into practice such pie-in-the-sky theory when you're dealing with a bunch of selfish human assholes that are willing to game the system for their own profit or advantage (or to protect their own laziness and incompetence).
That being said, maybe there's a place for something (a union) to protect your common tech worker from the abuses of their employer. While it might be true that your average high-tech employer isn't visibly out to abuse their employees as it might have been back during the industrial revolution, there are probably still cases where this does happen. Take the case of my wife's employer, for instance. For the third or fourth year running, this employer has instituted a forced time off policy in order to make their bottom line look better. At first it was just a week after xmas, but this year everyone is required to take 2 weeks in Q4 and 2 weeks in Q1. What's the big deal? It's not like she lost any vacation, right? 4 weeks of vacation is pretty generous (for north america), right? Well when the company hires you and gives you a "benefit package" that includes 3 weeks of vacation, what is it, other than abuse, when they tell you that you need to take those three weeks, plus a fourth week on top of that, at a time of their choosing? How is "vacation" a benefit when you can't take it when you want, and if you want to take vacation at any other time, you have to take it un-paid? Anyone starting work at that company now is screwed in terms of vacation for the next year, and that assumes that they don't pull this stunt (or something worse) next year. As it is, anyone who doesn't already have 4 weeks of vacation available to them (or have already used up their vacation for the year) will have negative vacation going into 2013; that is, they are in debt to the company for that time, and will actually owe the company money if they leave before 2014. Assuming they do this again next year, they are setting themselves up so that their employees are perpetually in vacation debt, which I'm sure looks great in their accounting books, but how again isn't that abusive? The worst thing is, it's not like any of my wife's deadlines have been adjusted for this; product releases are still scheduled for the same dates that they were before. It's almost like the company expects their employees to work during their so-called "vacation"... Sorry to belabour the vacation point, or to bring my personal problems into this, but it's currently very much on my mind as it's severely messing up our plans for family vacation next year...
Anyway, I'm sure the knee-jerk reaction will be "well why doesn't she quit and work for another company". Sure, that's certainly an option, and one that my wife and I have talked about, but why does it have to be this way? What does my wife quitting do to help those left behind that wouldn't (or couldn't, for whatever reason) quit? What if, instead, everyone put their foot down and said, "no way, you're not taking my vacation away from me". How's that going to happen unless everyone gets together as a group (a union) and organizes it? Maybe in a case like that a union is a good thing. The whole "power in numbers" concept...
Despite the shitty situation, I don't actually hope that my wife's work will unionise in order to protect themselves from this kind of abuse, for the same reasons that many other posters have pointed out. I think that's a slippery slope and that once one "tech" company unionises, like the plague it will spread to many of the others in the region to the detriment of everyone. I like the idea of a union that protects workers from the abuse that some companies seem too willing to inflict, so that people don't have to make a stand individually. However I'm too much of a cynic (or a realist) to ever believe that it could work or could be sustainable, at least not in the long run. Greedy, selfish, self-serving humans would all but guarantee that it would fail.
Yeah, I guess I wasn't very clear in my original question. When I stated the question, I was actually thinking of the situation my wife and I are in (we have a shared mortgage, bank account, etc and we both work and pay our debts off together). If I now die, she's on the line to pay off all of the debt, so in my mind, she's effectively "inherited" that debt (or at least my half of it). Although my original question sure does read that way, I wasn't trying to imply that debt could be passed down through different generations (i.e. parents to children)... I was just wondering if some people taking advantage of "death with dignity" will unknowingly screw their spouse out of insurance money because their insurer considers the death to be suicide.
I wonder what life insurance companies have to say about this. Specifically, does exercising your right to "die with dignity" automatically cause you to forfeit any life insurance that you might have? If so, that's going to doubly suck for the family you leave behind, especially if you have unpaid debts that'll be passed down to them...
Oh wait, you said 'geek'. Nevermind...
> and a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope to see what I'm doing.
I wish we had a Bauch & Lomb stereo microscope, but even our cheap Chinese-made one is indispensable. With adjustable zoom and focus, rework on 0201 components is trivial and rework on stupidly small 01005 components is actually possible. Our microscope even has a built-in USB CCD camera. The quality isn't fantastic, but I've used it on several occasions to document rework steps, capture evidence of botched board assembly, etc. I'd say the camera is definitely optional, but the microscope is a must.
> A good old fashioned Tek 100-250MHz analogue scope. No DSO. No fancy stuff - just an analogue scope.
That's fine for debugging power supplies and low frequency designs, but is useless to "test and debug modern electronic device prototypes" as he specified. For that, you'll need something with a much higher bandwidth. Our HW lab isn't terribly decked out, but we do have a couple of fast-ish digital scopes (6GHz), but more importantly we have a couple of sets of good active differential probes (3-7GHz) in addition to our crappy (in comparison) 500MHz passive probes. These definitely don't come cheap (> $3K per probe, and they were used when we bought them), but doing measurements or signal integrity on DDR3 or PCIe gen 1 isn't a problem. Unfortunately, we'd need even faster equipment to comfortably measure PCIe gen2 or XAUI, but what we have is good for 90% of our designs. Good active probe sets will allow you to swap different probe heads in and out; some probe heads are good for hand probing (i.e. browser heads) while others are made to be plugged in or soldered into your board. You'll never get a better measurement than you can with a good active differential probe soldered directly to your board.
Another benefit of using a modern digital scope is that you can network them (can access network shares, open a vnc session to the scope for remote operation, etc) and run measurement applications on them, which definitively isn't possible with an old scope. Getting a fully loaded scope with all of the measurement applications you ever intend to use already installed would be stupidly expensive. It isn't very expensive, however, to get a basic scope with the fundamental applications you know you'll always use, and when the need comes up for some other measurement software, simply "rent" it for a month or two until you are done. We did this for several months this year while characterizing our DDR2 and DDR3 interfaces.
BTW, our scopes and probes are from Agilent and we rented SW for our scopes (as well as additional probes and other things) from either TRS Rentelco or Electrorent. We also used one or both of these services to buy a lot of used equipment (including the scopes and some of the probes) at a big discount compared to getting them new.
> Get some decent goggles/safety glasses for the smoke test when you power up something you've made
Good idea; I need to get some for our lab... I'd also like to add that having one or more eye-wash stations as well as a ventilation (exhaust or filtering) system are (or should be) necessities. If you've ever gotten flux remover in the eye, you'll know why the eye-wash station is a must-have, and when soldering, you really should have something in place to carry away the smoke. It's not like the old days with rosin core solder where soldering actually smelled good (even if the fumes were terrible for your health). Today's no-clean/no-wash/water-soluble/RoHS fluxes and solder are still bad for you, plus they smell like shit.
Listen, people can get a smart phone anywhere, okay? They come to Apple for the style and the attitude. Okay? That's what the purple flair's about. It's about fun.
They have nice hardware designs. If only all electronics were that well made.
Too bad they're such assholes though... it means I won't be buying one.
What, were you hoping for pictures? Have you ever seen Neil Young???
*shudders*
Slashdot used to link directly to xkcd (it was in the QuickLinks frame). They stopped that a couple of years ago for some reason. Maybe because the slashdot time waster + xkcd time waster equalled, well, too much wasted time...
A true man of reason [...] about as down to earth and realistic of a man in person as any average tech savvy geek [...]
Exactly why his opinion won't make a lick of difference in what's going on. Executives running companies appear to be locked in a constant battle with one another that seems destined to end in mutual destruction, and the lawyers are standing there behind them egging them on and counting their money. There's no room for reason in a battle like that. Woz is lucky they even let him out of the HW lab long enough for him to express his opinion to the outside world. In fact, they're probably upgrading the lock on the lab door as we speak, just to prevent this from ever happening again...
whatchu talkin bout Spilsbury?
sudo apt-get install kde-standard
A few minutes later, problem solved. Longer than one Ubuntu cycle... what a joke...
In their defence, both 1.6 and 0.1 are likely numbers that are rounded from some more precise measurements. The term "nearly" probably applied to the original measurements as opposed to the nicely rounded numbers presented in TFA. Just sayin'...
The sad fact is that its not speed that kills, its differential speed.
Which amounts to the same thing, if you're comparing the velocity of a vehicle to that of a guardrail, stopped car, etc. Just sayin'
How can it be that none of the companies targeted by Apple have found a reason to sue Apple for infringing their own products? If I'm not mistaken, Samsung, Motorola, etc, have all been making phones and cell phones far longer than Apple has, and have had far longer to lay down a patent minefield to protect themselves from this shit. Why haven't they found a reason to sue? Is it really possible for Apple's designs to be so squeaky clean that there is nothing for others to go after? Really? Or is it that they're too afraid and are either sitting there quietly, hoping to fly under Apple's radar, or too busy trying to defend themselves from current attacks to launch their own? I'm incredulous that other than a couple of Chinese companies suing Apple for one reason or another, I haven't heard of anybody really being on the offensive against apple. Or, maybe that side of things just doesn't make the headlines...
Or maybe they won't assume that each person that mentions kids is automatically a pedophile, and might instead infer that I was simply one parent amongst many at a school picnic, who just happened to notice the fascinating and efficient way in which popsicles somehow managed to get distributed to all kids, all without the need for fancy announcements or for them to be hand-delivered.
What's I find more troublesome is that at the time I had no idea that I had made some grand discovery that I could have likened to TCP and written an article about. Imagine, if I had only known, I too could have had an article on the front page of Slashdot about how something mundane is remarkable because it works just like some fancy internet protocol! Ah well, that's why I won't be quitting my day job...
Agreed. It's the same with kids and popsicles. If one kid enters a room with a popsicle, one or a few kids will notice and will go searching around for where the popsicle came from. If those kids then all come back with popsicles, even more will start noticing and will then start hunting around for them too, just like the ants in the article. I saw just this occur at a school picnic a couple of months ago.
Now replace "popsicle" with "ice cream sandwhich" and "kid" with "grown up man" and you see exactly the same thing at my work on thursdays, when someone places a box of icecream sandwiches on the counter in the cafeteria. See TCP come alive as larger and larger deluge of grown men detect the presence of icecream sandwhiches and make their way to the cafeteria to get one, all without a single email notification going out.
Not to dismiss out of hand this person's research, but it does seem like it's just another case of some researcher trying to piggy-back their work onto some trendy acronym or concept in order to get their work noticed (and funded). Saying that forager ants mirror kid "popsiclenet" doesn't sound as cool or worthy of funding as saying it mirrors TCP, I guess.
Actually I want two of them. One at 27MHz and one at 54MHz so that I can drive them at the same time!
What the? Brembo? Tranny? Methinks you've come to the wrong place, my friend.
I doubt those words have ever been spoken aloud on Slashdot before, and I'm pretty sure that they are near the bottom of the list of things your typical slashdotter will think of when they think of "tech". If you'd at least said your Brembo brakes ran Linux or something, then maybe we'd be impressed. Maybe.
There was an old man sitting on his porch watching the rain fall. Pretty soon the water was coming over the porch and into the house.
The old man was still sitting there when a rescue boat came and the people on board said, "You can't stay here you have to come with us."
The old man replied, "No, God will save me." So the boat left. A little while later the water was up to the second floor, and another rescue boat came, and again told the old man he had to come with them.
The old man again replied, "God will save me." So the boat left him again.
An hour later the water was up to the roof and a third rescue boat approached the old man, and tried to get him to come with them.
Again the old man refused to leave stating that, "God will save him." So the boat left him again.
Soon after, the man drowns and goes to heaven, and when he sees God he asks him, "Why didn't you save me?"
God replied, "You idiot! Who do you think sent you those three boats!"
An old joke that seems oddly relevant... Why would god give us intelligence, logic and reasoning if he didn't want us to use them? Let me guess... "it's a test of our faith".
USB 2 is half duplex and from what I'm told has quite a bit of overhead, not to mention the fact that depending on how things are connected together (i.e one controller vs many), the available BW might actually be shared amongst multiple devices. Ethernet can in some cases suffer from some of these problems as well, but it is at least full duplex, and in this day and age, who doesn't run Gigabit Ethernet?
They are! I have it on good authority that Stanly Kubrick himself photoshoped the flag onto those pictures...