I work at a place that has pick-and-place machines to manufacture our stuff. But we don't do BGA yet because we don't have the X-ray equipment to confirm that the BGA was soldered properly. Sure, you can do this in a toaster oven (it's somewhere on sparkfun.com), but it's not even for experts, it's for completely crazy people.
I have a lot of experience soldering small packages and would not even bother attempting a BGA.
This isn't just about "soldering small packages", this is about stuff where you can't even get physical access to the places that need to be soldered. I've soldered some 0.5mm QFP stuff (with an 0.4mm tip and a flux pen), but it's not fun.
tl;dr for TFA: This ain't Heathkit, and Heathkit never put surface-mount stuff in their kits.
A lunar colony could pay for itself by producing solar power satellites for use in LEO.
And where would it get the raw materials? In case you haven't heard, the moon doesn't have any metals. Unless you're making those satellites out of rock, with solar panels made out of rock, and rock wires, you've still got to ship all your raw materials up from LEO. Then you've got to land them in a gravity well (it may be 1/6th gravity but it's still there), and then ship them back up again. If you're not going to build them on Earth, then you might as well build them in LEO.
I'm not a Twitting Twat, so I can't care about this. Nor am I a Farcebooker.
In fact, I detest the trend of every website to have these obnoxious pop-up "friend" and "share" buttons that go to there and a few other lame hipster sites, such as Redduuhh. When/. added that a few weeks ago, I promptly added the icons image to my AdBlock, though the cursor still changes over that area. (Of course all of sharethis.com was already in my AdBlock.)
This means that we will need to find resources on the moon, develop them, and aim for a self-sustaining colony.
Exactly. At this point I can't see many even mediocre reasons to go back to the moon. Radio-telescope observatory on the dark side? Helium-3 for fusion technology we won't likely have for at least 50 more years? A shallower gravity well than Earth? A bunch of rock and dust? (nasty, un-eroded dust, too) Certainly not for the water on the poles that's only useful if you have some other reason to be up there. Maybe for prospecting to see if there might be any metals hidden below the surface, but that's it.
Really, the moon is a boring place. Getting there the first time is pretty cool, but after that there isn't much to do other than build stuff so you can stay around long enough to build some more stuff. At least whatever you leave up there will stay put, unlike LEO.
Asteroids, Mars, even the moons of other planets (when not made nasty by radiation belts), that's where the action is.
There's probably more, but I only went looking in his recent history. So this isn't his only post dropped at the moment an article goes live. Sure smells like astroturf to me. And you can't use the "subscriber preview" argument, either, since there's no "*" after his username.
Based on the headline "augmented reality," I assumed it would be used for things like highlighting on the windshield pedestrians with a bright outline, given that pedestrians are invisible to drivers since they are thin and vertical in a visual field cluttered with thin and vertical poles.
And it could also display the number of points each one is worth.
Then I hope you never have to use a language that doesn't coddle you by providing you with it. Using a calculator doesn't mean nobody ever has to understand how long multiplication or division works, nor does it mean you never have to show your work. The point of a Computer Science degree is to understand how that shit works, not how to be a PHP webmonkey (in 24 days!).
Pretty much everyone wants to know what's going on in North Korea and Iran, and apparently you can photograph both from the orbit that Tiandong is in.
In other words, it's entirely possible that this is a coincidence, based on both being positioned to look at the same something else, rather than at each other. And the X-37 going into that orbit before Tiandong was launched somewhat supports this.
A few weeks ago in a tech iv (phone) with a "vice president of software engineering" I was asked "How would you find the middle of a linked list, using the most efficient method." It was for a web development position
Yeah, that was kind of stupid. Not much use for linked lists in a web dev position, unless they're somehow using C for a back-end, in which case you probably don't want to work there anyhow. That plus his attitude meant THEY failed the test, wasting a day of your time, but at least not wasting months of having to work with said asshole. Then again, your response was a bit overboard, too, by whining about it. Asking something like "Will I really need to know how to use linked lists for this position?" would have been much better.
I have heard about linked list in university, many years ago, and did some stuff with them in a class once, but never in industry.
Then I hope your degree doesn't say "Computer Science" on it, because that's something a CS grad should know, whether or not you end up using it. You shouldn't have just heard about them, you should have had a whole class focused on them, singly-linked, doubly-linked, circular, trees, etc.
If you're using brain teasers as pass-fail criteria, then you're stupid. And if you're using them in an interview process that lasts less than an hour or two, you're even more stupid. They can be good for understanding a person's thought process during problem solving, but that's it. It's not the answer, but how they come up with it. That being said, the "how many gas stations in such-and-such city" where you have to pull estimates out of your ass are not good for choosing programmers, so don't even go there.
I used to work for a big company that you've probably heard of. When we interviewed people, our group had a brain teaser that we liked to use, probably because the answer (and there was a fixed, definite answer) was not the obvious one. And we got to draw pictures of it on the white board while asking it. But it was the programming test that really mattered to our group.
First of all, we had them do it on a white board in front of the group. (This was after all the individual interviews were done, and we had warmed up the group part of the interview with a brain teaser or two.) We weren't looking for getting API parameters in the right order, just that you could do the algorithm on the fly, and in a less than quiet environment. (typical cubicle farm level noise from us chatting to each other during this) We didn't even care what language they wanted to write in, the point was getting the algorithm right. And if they got something wrong, we would tell them how the output would be wrong, and let them fix it. Again, the goal was to see how they write code, and show us how, not that they could spit out the right thing from memory.
First was to implement strcpy. Any C programmer (our stuff was mostly C++) should at least understand how strings and pointers work to build something around *p++ = *s++ with a loop. So you probably got an off-by-one error, so what, we point it out, you fix it, but you at least got the basic idea right if you got even that far. Second was to write code to copy a file, since you should also be able to understand how to get data in and out of files. Then we would ask how to make the file copy faster, since most people would try the one-byte-at-a-time approach, and you ought to know about buffering, too. Finally, reverse a singly-linked list. This is something that any CS student should learn in their second year Data Structures class. Not to memorize it (because it's kind of pointless to memorize such a function), but to figure out how to do it from scratch. If your degree says "Computer Science" on it, you should be familiar enough with how to walk down linked lists to at least make a decent start on this one.
Well, guess what. The fresh out of college CS grads generally failed horribly, especially the ones that had been weaned on Java, where you don't have to deal with pointers like you do with C and C++. It was really stunning and even sad to see people fail at this. (The EE grads did much better, FWIW.)
I've been expecting something like this for years. The only thing I can see that DSLR technology really gets you is this: what you see through the viewfinder is what you're going to see on the film. But we're not using film anymore, and those sensors can give you some sort of picture (even if it's not quite as good as it will be when the shutter does its thing for the right amount of time*) that shows you what you're taking a picture of.
I wear glasses, and I don't like having to bring the camera right up to my face just to see what I'm taking a picture of, so I use the display screen. Which (suprirse!) also shows you what you're going to take a picture of, framing-wise. (And as your link says, the display screen technology will get better.) This is probably my main reason (other than cost) for not wanting a DSLR: The main advantage of a DSLR would be wasted on me.
The fact that DSLRs take interchangeable lenses has nothing to do with the DSLR technology itself. It's just that DSLR was the only professional option just before digital cameras, so it's been carried over to film-less professional cameras, and the change has been relatively fast, less than two decades.
In the meantime, I'm sticking with my decent $500-range fixed-lens Lumix that I got a few years ago. I don't take too many pictures, so I can't justify the cost of a DSLR, nor the time to learn how to use one properly. But I don't want a baby camera, either.
*I suppose something really bright where you need a really fast shutter speed might have bad contrast in preview. And you don't want to point it at the sun, but then you wouldn't want to do that with an optical viewfinder anyhow. Or will they even need shutters? The idea of buffering up 1/4 sec of frames from before you press the button... never miss that perfect moment again!
Just how valuable is a gimmick letter template for a seasonal holiday with some cheap clipart background images which you have to print out yourself?
FTFY. The least he could do is figure out how to expand to more themes than just Christmas, then set them up under other domains.
Not only that, but I can't see why a site like that couldn't use a few tasteful ads. You're writing a "letter from Santa" (WTF is up with that? I thought people only wrote letters TO Santa!), and Target might be interested in showing you some ads for wrapping paper (gets you in the store) or toys. The guy just has no imagination.
In the US they want people with credit cards to become like drug junkies with their credit. In fact, until it was abolished recently, they intentionally set the minimum payments so that you would make effectively no progress with your balance. That way they can collect just the interest payments (and sometimes nice fat late fees), while keeping you in hock for the larger amount. And most people are stupid, so they would dutifully pay the minimum, while just assuming that it would reduce their balance.
It's almost like he doesn't want people to know what he did during that time...
Hey, it worked for that guy sitting in the Oval Office right now. Or sitting in the Oval Office last week anyhow, I think he's in Hawaii playing golf right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I work at a place that has pick-and-place machines to manufacture our stuff. But we don't do BGA yet because we don't have the X-ray equipment to confirm that the BGA was soldered properly. Sure, you can do this in a toaster oven (it's somewhere on sparkfun.com), but it's not even for experts, it's for completely crazy people.
I have a lot of experience soldering small packages and would not even bother attempting a BGA.
This isn't just about "soldering small packages", this is about stuff where you can't even get physical access to the places that need to be soldered. I've soldered some 0.5mm QFP stuff (with an 0.4mm tip and a flux pen), but it's not fun.
tl;dr for TFA: This ain't Heathkit, and Heathkit never put surface-mount stuff in their kits.
A lunar colony could pay for itself by producing solar power satellites for use in LEO.
And where would it get the raw materials? In case you haven't heard, the moon doesn't have any metals. Unless you're making those satellites out of rock, with solar panels made out of rock, and rock wires, you've still got to ship all your raw materials up from LEO. Then you've got to land them in a gravity well (it may be 1/6th gravity but it's still there), and then ship them back up again. If you're not going to build them on Earth, then you might as well build them in LEO.
I'm not a Twitting Twat, so I can't care about this. Nor am I a Farcebooker.
In fact, I detest the trend of every website to have these obnoxious pop-up "friend" and "share" buttons that go to there and a few other lame hipster sites, such as Redduuhh. When /. added that a few weeks ago, I promptly added the icons image to my AdBlock, though the cursor still changes over that area. (Of course all of sharethis.com was already in my AdBlock.)
This means that we will need to find resources on the moon, develop them, and aim for a self-sustaining colony.
Exactly. At this point I can't see many even mediocre reasons to go back to the moon. Radio-telescope observatory on the dark side? Helium-3 for fusion technology we won't likely have for at least 50 more years? A shallower gravity well than Earth? A bunch of rock and dust? (nasty, un-eroded dust, too) Certainly not for the water on the poles that's only useful if you have some other reason to be up there. Maybe for prospecting to see if there might be any metals hidden below the surface, but that's it.
Really, the moon is a boring place. Getting there the first time is pretty cool, but after that there isn't much to do other than build stuff so you can stay around long enough to build some more stuff. At least whatever you leave up there will stay put, unlike LEO.
Asteroids, Mars, even the moons of other planets (when not made nasty by radiation belts), that's where the action is.
Absolutely. We need more pat-downs and strip-searches of old ladies and grade schoolers to put a stop to this.
Wouldn't it be much simpler to name it Kalocin instead?
ISAGN for Badge Perfume.
If they listened to programmers, they would have C99 support.
They've got a picture of it up on Wikipedia, but not for much longer!
And the result will be a merger of SOPA and a slightly amended PIPA.
We'll get... the SOPAPILLA bill! (Mmmmm... pass the honey please?)
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/01/13/1953230/microsoft-trustworthy-computing-turns-10
There's probably more, but I only went looking in his recent history. So this isn't his only post dropped at the moment an article goes live. Sure smells like astroturf to me. And you can't use the "subscriber preview" argument, either, since there's no "*" after his username.
Right there next to COBOL?
Based on the headline "augmented reality," I assumed it would be used for things like highlighting on the windshield pedestrians with a bright outline, given that pedestrians are invisible to drivers since they are thin and vertical in a visual field cluttered with thin and vertical poles.
And it could also display the number of points each one is worth.
Then I hope you never have to use a language that doesn't coddle you by providing you with it. Using a calculator doesn't mean nobody ever has to understand how long multiplication or division works, nor does it mean you never have to show your work. The point of a Computer Science degree is to understand how that shit works, not how to be a PHP webmonkey (in 24 days!).
Pretty much everyone wants to know what's going on in North Korea and Iran, and apparently you can photograph both from the orbit that Tiandong is in.
In other words, it's entirely possible that this is a coincidence, based on both being positioned to look at the same something else, rather than at each other. And the X-37 going into that orbit before Tiandong was launched somewhat supports this.
A few weeks ago in a tech iv (phone) with a "vice president of software engineering" I was asked "How would you find the middle of a linked list, using the most efficient method." It was for a web development position
Yeah, that was kind of stupid. Not much use for linked lists in a web dev position, unless they're somehow using C for a back-end, in which case you probably don't want to work there anyhow. That plus his attitude meant THEY failed the test, wasting a day of your time, but at least not wasting months of having to work with said asshole. Then again, your response was a bit overboard, too, by whining about it. Asking something like "Will I really need to know how to use linked lists for this position?" would have been much better.
I have heard about linked list in university, many years ago, and did some stuff with them in a class once, but never in industry.
Then I hope your degree doesn't say "Computer Science" on it, because that's something a CS grad should know, whether or not you end up using it. You shouldn't have just heard about them, you should have had a whole class focused on them, singly-linked, doubly-linked, circular, trees, etc.
"GLUG GLUG That's racist! GLUG GLUG"
If you're using brain teasers as pass-fail criteria, then you're stupid. And if you're using them in an interview process that lasts less than an hour or two, you're even more stupid. They can be good for understanding a person's thought process during problem solving, but that's it. It's not the answer, but how they come up with it. That being said, the "how many gas stations in such-and-such city" where you have to pull estimates out of your ass are not good for choosing programmers, so don't even go there.
I used to work for a big company that you've probably heard of. When we interviewed people, our group had a brain teaser that we liked to use, probably because the answer (and there was a fixed, definite answer) was not the obvious one. And we got to draw pictures of it on the white board while asking it. But it was the programming test that really mattered to our group.
First of all, we had them do it on a white board in front of the group. (This was after all the individual interviews were done, and we had warmed up the group part of the interview with a brain teaser or two.) We weren't looking for getting API parameters in the right order, just that you could do the algorithm on the fly, and in a less than quiet environment. (typical cubicle farm level noise from us chatting to each other during this) We didn't even care what language they wanted to write in, the point was getting the algorithm right. And if they got something wrong, we would tell them how the output would be wrong, and let them fix it. Again, the goal was to see how they write code, and show us how, not that they could spit out the right thing from memory.
First was to implement strcpy. Any C programmer (our stuff was mostly C++) should at least understand how strings and pointers work to build something around *p++ = *s++ with a loop. So you probably got an off-by-one error, so what, we point it out, you fix it, but you at least got the basic idea right if you got even that far. Second was to write code to copy a file, since you should also be able to understand how to get data in and out of files. Then we would ask how to make the file copy faster, since most people would try the one-byte-at-a-time approach, and you ought to know about buffering, too. Finally, reverse a singly-linked list. This is something that any CS student should learn in their second year Data Structures class. Not to memorize it (because it's kind of pointless to memorize such a function), but to figure out how to do it from scratch. If your degree says "Computer Science" on it, you should be familiar enough with how to walk down linked lists to at least make a decent start on this one.
Well, guess what. The fresh out of college CS grads generally failed horribly, especially the ones that had been weaned on Java, where you don't have to deal with pointers like you do with C and C++. It was really stunning and even sad to see people fail at this. (The EE grads did much better, FWIW.)
I've been expecting something like this for years. The only thing I can see that DSLR technology really gets you is this: what you see through the viewfinder is what you're going to see on the film. But we're not using film anymore, and those sensors can give you some sort of picture (even if it's not quite as good as it will be when the shutter does its thing for the right amount of time*) that shows you what you're taking a picture of.
I wear glasses, and I don't like having to bring the camera right up to my face just to see what I'm taking a picture of, so I use the display screen. Which (suprirse!) also shows you what you're going to take a picture of, framing-wise. (And as your link says, the display screen technology will get better.) This is probably my main reason (other than cost) for not wanting a DSLR: The main advantage of a DSLR would be wasted on me.
The fact that DSLRs take interchangeable lenses has nothing to do with the DSLR technology itself. It's just that DSLR was the only professional option just before digital cameras, so it's been carried over to film-less professional cameras, and the change has been relatively fast, less than two decades.
In the meantime, I'm sticking with my decent $500-range fixed-lens Lumix that I got a few years ago. I don't take too many pictures, so I can't justify the cost of a DSLR, nor the time to learn how to use one properly. But I don't want a baby camera, either.
*I suppose something really bright where you need a really fast shutter speed might have bad contrast in preview. And you don't want to point it at the sun, but then you wouldn't want to do that with an optical viewfinder anyhow. Or will they even need shutters? The idea of buffering up 1/4 sec of frames from before you press the button... never miss that perfect moment again!
Just how valuable is a gimmick letter template for a seasonal holiday with some cheap clipart background images which you have to print out yourself?
FTFY. The least he could do is figure out how to expand to more themes than just Christmas, then set them up under other domains.
Not only that, but I can't see why a site like that couldn't use a few tasteful ads. You're writing a "letter from Santa" (WTF is up with that? I thought people only wrote letters TO Santa!), and Target might be interested in showing you some ads for wrapping paper (gets you in the store) or toys. The guy just has no imagination.
The reason iOS devices don't need anti-malware solutions is because Android is a much easier target.
FTFY.
Steve Jobs is laughing from beyond the grave.
And if it gets as far as the A-10s, they're really screwed.
In the US they want people with credit cards to become like drug junkies with their credit. In fact, until it was abolished recently, they intentionally set the minimum payments so that you would make effectively no progress with your balance. That way they can collect just the interest payments (and sometimes nice fat late fees), while keeping you in hock for the larger amount. And most people are stupid, so they would dutifully pay the minimum, while just assuming that it would reduce their balance.
If the wanted to skip a Monday, they could have just shot the whole day down.
It's almost like he doesn't want people to know what he did during that time...
Hey, it worked for that guy sitting in the Oval Office right now. Or sitting in the Oval Office last week anyhow, I think he's in Hawaii playing golf right now.