The WTC was designed to withstand the impact of the largest airliner of its time, a Boeing 707. A 757/767 isn't much more massive than a 707, but obviously the real problem is the tremendous amount of fuel that a cross-country flight carries.
In fact, it probably wouldn't have mattered what fire suppression system the building used...jet fuel is basically kerosene and it is much lighter than water. You can't effectively extinguish a kerosene fire with water. That's why you see aviation firefighers using something called aqueous film-forming foam. It floats on the kerosene.
Maybe to the layman the fact that the buildings survived the impact was amazing, but in fact it was simply a matter of good, purposeful design. Unfortunately, it's asking an awful lot to expect structural steel to survive the kind of intense temperature that is generated by an aviation fuel fire, particularly when the fuel supply is effectively limitless.
Yessir, I think that after watchin' all them cool wwf-type moves on that there Blade 2, I'm a-gonna git me some backyard rasslin' action. Oh man, did you see the preview for The Rock's new movie? He's gonna git him one a them oscar things for best badass of the year. Yeah, and then maybe I'll catch one of them NASCAR races...Saint Dale would have wanted it that way. Lucky number 3!
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it. 5 seconds of my time isn't worth $1. And the 10k it took the mail server to store the message and fraction of a penny in bandwidth aren't worth a dollar either
From the article: But it's slow going. For every piece of mail that takes seconds to delete, there are always those that require hours in security investigations--which is how Lewis arrived at his estimate that each piece of junk mail costs his company $1.
Sure, you can tell if the email is spam because it's sent to you. But the sysadmin in this case has to investigate a few more emails that you do and also has to be very sure that he's deleting spam...plus I'm sure he wants to know where it came from. I don't think that the estimate is out of line.
The largest manufacturer of DRAM in the world (according to de Dios) is located in Boise, Idaho. And guess what? The pay is competitive, from operators to engineers.
Oh yeah, and nobody here speaks with a drawl or says "eh".
skipping the OS load requires less effort, less time, and less testing
it costs more to manufacture the product without the OS
I just think that's crazy talk
For a small capacity production line, I agree, it would be more efficient and cheaper to ship with a blank drive. But for a large (thousands of systems a week), a blank system is a huge deviation from the norm. Typically the OS load is not the last step...it's among the last steps, but operational tests are the last steps, and they depend on some portion of the OS to be loaded. Skip that step for a vanishingly small percentage of systems and a new process has to be implemented...and that comes at a cost. Large manufacturers simply cannot afford to implement processes like that for such a tiny number of systems. The margins just don't allow it...but that provides opportunities to smaller shops to fill the niche.
So what I'd really like to see is the ability to buy an absolutely clean system from a major vendor at a significant discount (i.e. no MS tax).
Alas, it won't be so. The so called Microsoft Tax amounts to about $100. I was a technical support supervisor for one of the major PC manufacturers, so I had some involvment in cost analysis of the PC's we sold. Our licensing costs on the OS was between $35 and $45 (depending on the version) and Office ran about $45. Why so cheap? Obviously volume plays a significant role, but also Microsoft had no involvment in the manufacturing of the media. We received a "master" set of discs that were in turn shipped to our manufacturer who then made the media that we shipped. Microsoft incurred no costs outside of development.
Another reason that you probably won't see "clean" systems is that most computer manufacturers are seeking to reduce the number of configurations available in order to reduce the cost of building the systems. Before I left my job in the PC manufacturing industry, my company had an exraordinarily broad catalog with substantial overlap between home and business systems, as well as a number of configurations that were rarely selected. That variety costs money...and also leads to mistakes, such as an overly ambitious salesperson who happily bundles a DVD drive, CD drive and CD-RW drive into a desktop system that has two 5.25" bays. But I digress...
The number of systems that customers would order blank is vanishingly small as a percentage of total sales. My company would do it, but only for their "key" customers, organizations that ordered systems by the hundreds. Otherwise, it just wasn't worth it, particularly with the razor-thin margins in the business.
I guess one way of looking at it is that because of the rapacious competition in the industry we're paying extraordinarily low prices for computers today. Sure, the extra $80-$90 that you pay for the OS and application software seems unfair, but on the other hand, the total system price is, quite frankly, a bargain, even with the inclusion of the unwanted OS.
My suggestion (and I'm sure there's no shortage of those similar to it) is that if you want a system with a clean drive, you should build it yourself.
You know, the death of television has been direly predicted each time one of these "TV enhancers" has debuted.
Don't forget that as television viewing mushroomed in the 50's and 60's, movie studios clamored that the new technology would destroy their business. It's interesting to see who owns what now...
If you're writing Tetris® games, you're either working for the Tetris Company or violating a trademark. "Tetris" is to tetramino game as "Xerox" is to photocopier. Would you say "I built a Xerox® machine for a senior project"?
Well, no, I wouldn't say that I built a Xerox® machine...I'd say that I built a xerox machine. Xerox has become one of those ubiquitous words in our lexicon. A Canon copy machine sits around the corner from my office. When I go to make a copy, I generally don't say that I'm going to go make a xerographic copy...I say that I'm going to go make a xerox. And so do most of the people I know.
Intels top-of-the-line processors costs $20 or so to make but you buy them for $500 or so. Your typical stereo or freezer or whatever costs just a fraction of what you buy them for to make.
Well...I don't think I agree with that. Intel fits about 180 Pentium 4's onto a single wafer. Your "estimated" manufacturing cost of $20 per chip comes out to $3600 per wafer. A bare 8" wafer with an epitaxially grown SI02 layer goes for about $3000. Are you seriously suggesting that by the time that the chip emerges at the end of the process that only $600 of value is added to the entire wafer? Bear in mind that in order to develop up to 12 layers of material on the chip that a ton of photolithography, deposition and etching has to take place. And following that, the die have to be cut, tested, packaged...it's a very long process. From start to finish, it will take several days to process a wafer from bare silicon to finished package.
To top it off, while 180 P4's may come off the die, they don't all work. A very mature process with substantially fewer process steps than that of a processor would cheer for a 90% yield rate. P4's aren't mature...draw your own conclusions from that.
Also, Intel is cash flow positive. And their investment in R&D for Q4 2001 was fairly typical at about $950 million, but the cost of goods sold came in at well over $3 billion.
In fact, it costs about $50 to produce the very cheapest Pentiums...the slow Celerons and PIII's that have been in production long enough to work out the kinks in the process.
Nonetheless, your point about IP is well taken. I'm an engineer in R&D for a big semiconductor company...we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on R&D. While that's a significant portion of the company's budget (in Intel's case, it was 14% of revenues last quarter), it's safe to say that it isn't the major expense of the cost of the chips that we produce. Manufacturing expenses are the brunt of the expense. It simply costs a lot of money to build the chips.
I don't know about stereos or freezers, but I do know about semiconductors.
-h-
Even though there are a few minor errors in the paper, the authors deserve a mighty pat on the back for this. Not only did they devise a rather interesting method of estimating the speed of light, but they also managed to throw in a little basic electronic theory as well.
I'm less than a semester away from graduation as an electrical engineer and I've taken more than my fair share of physics classes, in fact, more than the curriculum required. I think that an experiment like this one has a solid place in a second semester physics class, particularly one that is taken by engineers. In the second semester, the students have (hopefully) mastered classical concepts of mechanics and are moving into waves and fields. What a perfect time for a project like this.
Suffice to say that my physics experience was not nearly so fun. Oh, and eventually we did measure the speed of light, but not until I took quantum mechanics. And then we measured it directly by modulating a laser with an extremely high frequency function generator and measuring the phase shift with an equally high sampling oscilloscope. It didn't require any particular expertise in overcoming the limitations of the hardware or really any problem solving at all, other than a little bit of math to convert feet per microsecond to meters per second.
Or you can be like me, student loans office laughed me away. You want money? Hahaha, we aren't giving you a cent, your parents make way too much money.
Well, the way I see it, you didn't try very hard. Parents won't help out with college? Hey, it happens, and that's too bad. But it's not the end of the world. You can get student loans, grants and scholarships without your parents' help. It just takes a little more work. Your university's financial aid office will show you what paperwork needs to be filled out.
Guess what? Not everything in life is easy...and some things are damned hard. But if you really want to achieve your goals, it can be done. Yeah, some people don't have to work as hard as others to get what they want, and some people don't have to work at all.
My advice is to not waste so much time worrying about how good everybody else has it and concentrate on achieving your goals yourself. Like I said before, it worked for me and I definitely wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth!
Umm. I hate to point it out, but you are the exception pal!
If he's the exception, then so am I and so are dozens of my classmates who are graduating this spring with electrical engineering degrees from Boise State University.
Not everyone has your brains, spunk, and determination.
It doesn't take brains. It does take spunk and determination. Maybe you have to get to the point where I got when I decided that I wasn't going to take low paying, go nowhere jobs for the rest of my life. College is one option, trade schools are another. Financial aid is there, and not just student loans, either. I'm evidence that it CAN be done.
The issue is the state of employment. It's not a choice except for those dynamic individuals who rise above the supression of the masses.
That's pure and utter bullshit. "Suppression of the masses"? What does that mean? That it's OK to just give up because a lot of other people have? Is it society's fault? Is the "man" keeping them down? Is the problem that somehow everyone is entitled to a high paying job, that somehow they have the "right" to make a lot of money?
Nobody has that right. But look, I've managed to finish four years of college, three and a half years of it working at a job that paid $9.00 an hour and no benefits. Was it hard work? Damn right it was. Could anybody do it? YES. I'm not special. All it takes is the realization that a handful of years of very hard work is going to pay off with a better job and a better life.
At my college I'm surrounded by people who are in the same position as me...and people who are working even harder than me because they have families to support as well. My fellow students are Hispanic, Causcasion, Asian and African American. Some of them are fortunate enough to be traditional students with parents to pay for their education, but most are not. For many of them, they will be the first in their families to have a college degree...and I suspect that the average age of my college's graduating class is around 28.
So you see, I take exception to your comments because I know from personal experience that they are wrong. Anyone who says that they can't do it is really saying that it would just be too much work. And, yeah, it's a ton of work. But it pays off.
...why not just fold the motherboard in half? sure you'd probably have a 1/8 inch gap between the 2 sides...
The EMI between the two pieces of the board would make the board an absolute nightmare to route traces on. You'd have to provide some sort of shielding between the two boards...adding to the cost. In my work as a simulation engineer, I've seen several motherboards come along that canted their DDR DIMM sockets at 45 degrees to provide a 1U-sized server board, but the interference between the board and the DIMMs made the whole thing a very shaky proposition. Putting two sections of board with high frequency traces parallel to each other is just begging for trouble.
Also, I'm not sure I see where that saves any space...maybe you can save some height, but then you're stuck with a wider footprint. Remember, there still has to be room for the cards, and, just as important, room for air to flow over heat sensitive components.
I've looked at some MicroATX boards and cases. That seems like an excellent alternative, although, much like early ATX boards, adherance to the standard seems to be a little iffy.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "It turns out that the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't think Carpel Tunnel Syndrome is a real disability.
In fact, the article clearly states:
The ruling does not mean that anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome or similar partial disabilities is automatically excluded from protection by the ADA. But it probably will make such claims harder to prove, since the court makes clear that disability must affect a range of manual tasks or duties.
Well, for starters, the Court did not rule that carpal tunnel syndrom is not a disability. They ruled that the woman in question was not disabled from carpal tunnel syndrome.
The law already makes clear just what this snippet from the article says. I think that in many cases, employers and insurance companies are concerned with the political backlash that may come from a close interpretation (that is, applying the law as written) of the law.
Nonetheless, the law is clear that you aren't disabled if you can't perform your job...there is a much broader test to be satisfied to determine a disability.
Certainly there would be a big bonanza for the plaintiff if an ADA violation was proved, but I wonder if this would have been more appropriately handled as a Workman's Compensation case? After all, she claimed that her injury came from a work-related situation...that seems tailor-made for a Workman's Comp case.
Of course, the cynical side of my must point out there there is a lot more money to be had from an ADA lawsuit...
Everybody who pointed out that you can't get a version of Windows for $99 ought to reread the post. cscx clearly said, "They're charging $99 for this. How ridiculous. OEM versions of Genunie Windows cost about the same..."
OEM versions, gang! That's not what you buy off the store shelf. And he's right. In fact, the large computer manufacturer for which I worked for three long, torturous years paid about $45 for each OEM license of Windows 95/98.
I think that it's important to remember that many universities aren't as endowment-rich as Berkeley, MIT, et al. Money has to come from somewhere. Grants drive research and the federal government has seen fit to give universities and research labs the ability to sell what they invent.
Like many things, taking that ability to its extreme may be a bad idea, but there is certainly some middle ground that can satisfy the university's need for funding and the researcher's desire to publicize his or her work. The approach of licensing technnology to nonprofit entities at no cost but licensing to for-profit corporations for a fee seems like a good compromise in many instances.
Certainly there will be those breakthroughs that just beg to be free. The case of BSD (at least in retrospect) is certainly one.
It just strikes me that a well thought out intellectual property program at a university or research lab should give much more than a passing glance at the impact of the technology that their institution develops and develop a licensing plan that is appropriate. The Salon article certainly promoted a certain agenda, but remember, not all IP directors are money hungry despots and not all professors a zealous advocates of free software for everyone. There are calm heads out there!
When I was a Sonar Technician in the US Navy, we used large display consoles with dual 21" display units in them. They ran on on 120v/400Hz power and the driving units got very hot. They were cooled with distilled water that ran through a fairly complex chilling operation (after all, it's a government operation, right?).
One of the cooling loops inside a console sprung a leak and sprayed water around. Now bear in mind that the voltages inside these display units are like those in a TV set, so they're substantially greater than a computer's, but the resulting fireworks INSIDE the sealed cabinet just about sent me crawling up the nearest bulkhead. Noise, sparks and a tremendous mess that ultimately cost about $50,000 to repair. And it wasn't uncommon...about once a year a cooling loop would let go on some piece of equipment.
Incidentally, the only reason that the loops used distilled water was so that there would be little or no mineral buildup inside the cooling loops. In some cases, the stainless tubing in use was quite small, perhaps a quarter inch in diameter. Believe me, once that water hit the equipment, even a bit of accumulated dust caused it to conduct quite well, thank you!
There was a very good point that was pretty much glossed over in the article.
What happens if they outgrow their facility? I mean, what they have seems pretty well designed for anything short of a war, I guess, but how do you cope with success?
Then again, I guess the obvious answer would be to build another one, assuming that growth==success==more money (although I'm not so sure that I'd assume that!)
They claim room for 300% growth, but still...it certainly sounds like they're virtually the only game in town...er, on the continent. Is 300% enough?
If programming was all there was to the degree, you could probably challenge or CLEP many of the classes. But a BS degree is more than just a narrowly focused curriculum. You'll also have to take a number of courses outside of your discipline, including humanities, natural sciences and communications. You'll also have to take a number of math classes. The idea is that a college education should produce a graduate who is somewhat broadly focused. I think that what you are describing (graduating in a year) is more along the lines of a technical certificate.
Even with the prospect of a few years of school, I would still pursue it. I'm graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering in May. I'm 39 years old, I've worked in the industry for years and I felt the same way that you do about my future job prospects. I managed to work between 30 and 40 hours a week (I have an understanding employer), go to school full time and maintain a 3.2 GPA. No, it's not easy, but the rewards could be worth it...I have a great job waiting for me at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
The WTC was designed to withstand the impact of the largest airliner of its time, a Boeing 707. A 757/767 isn't much more massive than a 707, but obviously the real problem is the tremendous amount of fuel that a cross-country flight carries.
In fact, it probably wouldn't have mattered what fire suppression system the building used...jet fuel is basically kerosene and it is much lighter than water. You can't effectively extinguish a kerosene fire with water. That's why you see aviation firefighers using something called aqueous film-forming foam. It floats on the kerosene.
Maybe to the layman the fact that the buildings survived the impact was amazing, but in fact it was simply a matter of good, purposeful design. Unfortunately, it's asking an awful lot to expect structural steel to survive the kind of intense temperature that is generated by an aviation fuel fire, particularly when the fuel supply is effectively limitless.
-h-
Yessir, I think that after watchin' all them cool wwf-type moves on that there Blade 2, I'm a-gonna git me some backyard rasslin' action. Oh man, did you see the preview for The Rock's new movie? He's gonna git him one a them oscar things for best badass of the year. Yeah, and then maybe I'll catch one of them NASCAR races...Saint Dale would have wanted it that way. Lucky number 3!
-h-
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it. 5 seconds of my time isn't worth $1. And the 10k it took the mail server to store the message and fraction of a penny in bandwidth aren't worth a dollar either
From the article: But it's slow going. For every piece of mail that takes seconds to delete, there are always those that require hours in security investigations--which is how Lewis arrived at his estimate that each piece of junk mail costs his company $1.
Sure, you can tell if the email is spam because it's sent to you. But the sysadmin in this case has to investigate a few more emails that you do and also has to be very sure that he's deleting spam...plus I'm sure he wants to know where it came from. I don't think that the estimate is out of line.
-h-
-h-
I'm sure that Mr. Greene is probably one of the unwashed masses that assumes that everything on the Internet is the "web".
I remember when being a hacker was not only cool, but legal too!
-h-
Oh yeah, and nobody here speaks with a drawl or says "eh".
And spuds are tasty!
-h-
the last step is to load the OS onto the HDD
to sell it blank you get to skip this step
skipping the OS load requires less effort, less time, and less testing
it costs more to manufacture the product without the OS
I just think that's crazy talk
For a small capacity production line, I agree, it would be more efficient and cheaper to ship with a blank drive. But for a large (thousands of systems a week), a blank system is a huge deviation from the norm. Typically the OS load is not the last step...it's among the last steps, but operational tests are the last steps, and they depend on some portion of the OS to be loaded. Skip that step for a vanishingly small percentage of systems and a new process has to be implemented...and that comes at a cost. Large manufacturers simply cannot afford to implement processes like that for such a tiny number of systems. The margins just don't allow it...but that provides opportunities to smaller shops to fill the niche.
-h-
Alas, it won't be so. The so called Microsoft Tax amounts to about $100. I was a technical support supervisor for one of the major PC manufacturers, so I had some involvment in cost analysis of the PC's we sold. Our licensing costs on the OS was between $35 and $45 (depending on the version) and Office ran about $45. Why so cheap? Obviously volume plays a significant role, but also Microsoft had no involvment in the manufacturing of the media. We received a "master" set of discs that were in turn shipped to our manufacturer who then made the media that we shipped. Microsoft incurred no costs outside of development.
Another reason that you probably won't see "clean" systems is that most computer manufacturers are seeking to reduce the number of configurations available in order to reduce the cost of building the systems. Before I left my job in the PC manufacturing industry, my company had an exraordinarily broad catalog with substantial overlap between home and business systems, as well as a number of configurations that were rarely selected. That variety costs money...and also leads to mistakes, such as an overly ambitious salesperson who happily bundles a DVD drive, CD drive and CD-RW drive into a desktop system that has two 5.25" bays. But I digress...
The number of systems that customers would order blank is vanishingly small as a percentage of total sales. My company would do it, but only for their "key" customers, organizations that ordered systems by the hundreds. Otherwise, it just wasn't worth it, particularly with the razor-thin margins in the business.
I guess one way of looking at it is that because of the rapacious competition in the industry we're paying extraordinarily low prices for computers today. Sure, the extra $80-$90 that you pay for the OS and application software seems unfair, but on the other hand, the total system price is, quite frankly, a bargain, even with the inclusion of the unwanted OS.
My suggestion (and I'm sure there's no shortage of those similar to it) is that if you want a system with a clean drive, you should build it yourself.
-h-
Don't forget that as television viewing mushroomed in the 50's and 60's, movie studios clamored that the new technology would destroy their business. It's interesting to see who owns what now...
-h-
Well, no, I wouldn't say that I built a Xerox® machine...I'd say that I built a xerox machine. Xerox has become one of those ubiquitous words in our lexicon. A Canon copy machine sits around the corner from my office. When I go to make a copy, I generally don't say that I'm going to go make a xerographic copy...I say that I'm going to go make a xerox. And so do most of the people I know.
-h-
Well...I don't think I agree with that. Intel fits about 180 Pentium 4's onto a single wafer. Your "estimated" manufacturing cost of $20 per chip comes out to $3600 per wafer. A bare 8" wafer with an epitaxially grown SI02 layer goes for about $3000. Are you seriously suggesting that by the time that the chip emerges at the end of the process that only $600 of value is added to the entire wafer? Bear in mind that in order to develop up to 12 layers of material on the chip that a ton of photolithography, deposition and etching has to take place. And following that, the die have to be cut, tested, packaged...it's a very long process. From start to finish, it will take several days to process a wafer from bare silicon to finished package.
To top it off, while 180 P4's may come off the die, they don't all work. A very mature process with substantially fewer process steps than that of a processor would cheer for a 90% yield rate. P4's aren't mature...draw your own conclusions from that.
Also, Intel is cash flow positive. And their investment in R&D for Q4 2001 was fairly typical at about $950 million, but the cost of goods sold came in at well over $3 billion.
In fact, it costs about $50 to produce the very cheapest Pentiums...the slow Celerons and PIII's that have been in production long enough to work out the kinks in the process.
Nonetheless, your point about IP is well taken. I'm an engineer in R&D for a big semiconductor company...we spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on R&D. While that's a significant portion of the company's budget (in Intel's case, it was 14% of revenues last quarter), it's safe to say that it isn't the major expense of the cost of the chips that we produce. Manufacturing expenses are the brunt of the expense. It simply costs a lot of money to build the chips.
I don't know about stereos or freezers, but I do know about semiconductors.
-h-
-h-
I'm less than a semester away from graduation as an electrical engineer and I've taken more than my fair share of physics classes, in fact, more than the curriculum required. I think that an experiment like this one has a solid place in a second semester physics class, particularly one that is taken by engineers. In the second semester, the students have (hopefully) mastered classical concepts of mechanics and are moving into waves and fields. What a perfect time for a project like this.
Suffice to say that my physics experience was not nearly so fun. Oh, and eventually we did measure the speed of light, but not until I took quantum mechanics. And then we measured it directly by modulating a laser with an extremely high frequency function generator and measuring the phase shift with an equally high sampling oscilloscope. It didn't require any particular expertise in overcoming the limitations of the hardware or really any problem solving at all, other than a little bit of math to convert feet per microsecond to meters per second.
All in all, a very good job.
-h-
Oh, and how about in August?
Well, the way I see it, you didn't try very hard. Parents won't help out with college? Hey, it happens, and that's too bad. But it's not the end of the world. You can get student loans, grants and scholarships without your parents' help. It just takes a little more work. Your university's financial aid office will show you what paperwork needs to be filled out.
Guess what? Not everything in life is easy...and some things are damned hard. But if you really want to achieve your goals, it can be done. Yeah, some people don't have to work as hard as others to get what they want, and some people don't have to work at all.
My advice is to not waste so much time worrying about how good everybody else has it and concentrate on achieving your goals yourself. Like I said before, it worked for me and I definitely wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth!
-h-
If he's the exception, then so am I and so are dozens of my classmates who are graduating this spring with electrical engineering degrees from Boise State University.
Not everyone has your brains, spunk, and determination.
It doesn't take brains. It does take spunk and determination. Maybe you have to get to the point where I got when I decided that I wasn't going to take low paying, go nowhere jobs for the rest of my life. College is one option, trade schools are another. Financial aid is there, and not just student loans, either. I'm evidence that it CAN be done.
The issue is the state of employment. It's not a choice except for those dynamic individuals who rise above the supression of the masses.
That's pure and utter bullshit. "Suppression of the masses"? What does that mean? That it's OK to just give up because a lot of other people have? Is it society's fault? Is the "man" keeping them down? Is the problem that somehow everyone is entitled to a high paying job, that somehow they have the "right" to make a lot of money?
Nobody has that right. But look, I've managed to finish four years of college, three and a half years of it working at a job that paid $9.00 an hour and no benefits. Was it hard work? Damn right it was. Could anybody do it? YES. I'm not special. All it takes is the realization that a handful of years of very hard work is going to pay off with a better job and a better life.
At my college I'm surrounded by people who are in the same position as me...and people who are working even harder than me because they have families to support as well. My fellow students are Hispanic, Causcasion, Asian and African American. Some of them are fortunate enough to be traditional students with parents to pay for their education, but most are not. For many of them, they will be the first in their families to have a college degree...and I suspect that the average age of my college's graduating class is around 28.
So you see, I take exception to your comments because I know from personal experience that they are wrong. Anyone who says that they can't do it is really saying that it would just be too much work. And, yeah, it's a ton of work. But it pays off.
-h-
I know, I know, what a troll...but sometimes I get so fed up...
-h-
The EMI between the two pieces of the board would make the board an absolute nightmare to route traces on. You'd have to provide some sort of shielding between the two boards...adding to the cost. In my work as a simulation engineer, I've seen several motherboards come along that canted their DDR DIMM sockets at 45 degrees to provide a 1U-sized server board, but the interference between the board and the DIMMs made the whole thing a very shaky proposition. Putting two sections of board with high frequency traces parallel to each other is just begging for trouble.
Also, I'm not sure I see where that saves any space...maybe you can save some height, but then you're stuck with a wider footprint. Remember, there still has to be room for the cards, and, just as important, room for air to flow over heat sensitive components.
I've looked at some MicroATX boards and cases. That seems like an excellent alternative, although, much like early ATX boards, adherance to the standard seems to be a little iffy.
-h-
In fact, the article clearly states:
The ruling does not mean that anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome or similar partial disabilities is automatically excluded from protection by the ADA. But it probably will make such claims harder to prove, since the court makes clear that disability must affect a range of manual tasks or duties.
Well, for starters, the Court did not rule that carpal tunnel syndrom is not a disability. They ruled that the woman in question was not disabled from carpal tunnel syndrome.
The law already makes clear just what this snippet from the article says. I think that in many cases, employers and insurance companies are concerned with the political backlash that may come from a close interpretation (that is, applying the law as written) of the law.
Nonetheless, the law is clear that you aren't disabled if you can't perform your job...there is a much broader test to be satisfied to determine a disability.
Certainly there would be a big bonanza for the plaintiff if an ADA violation was proved, but I wonder if this would have been more appropriately handled as a Workman's Compensation case? After all, she claimed that her injury came from a work-related situation...that seems tailor-made for a Workman's Comp case.
Of course, the cynical side of my must point out there there is a lot more money to be had from an ADA lawsuit...
-h-
OEM versions, gang! That's not what you buy off the store shelf. And he's right. In fact, the large computer manufacturer for which I worked for three long, torturous years paid about $45 for each OEM license of Windows 95/98.
-h-
Like many things, taking that ability to its extreme may be a bad idea, but there is certainly some middle ground that can satisfy the university's need for funding and the researcher's desire to publicize his or her work. The approach of licensing technnology to nonprofit entities at no cost but licensing to for-profit corporations for a fee seems like a good compromise in many instances.
Certainly there will be those breakthroughs that just beg to be free. The case of BSD (at least in retrospect) is certainly one.
It just strikes me that a well thought out intellectual property program at a university or research lab should give much more than a passing glance at the impact of the technology that their institution develops and develop a licensing plan that is appropriate. The Salon article certainly promoted a certain agenda, but remember, not all IP directors are money hungry despots and not all professors a zealous advocates of free software for everyone. There are calm heads out there!
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[2] http://www.jj-johnson.com/copiers.htm
[3] http://www.c-prompt-dev.com/bulletin.0119.htm
[4] http://www.naqp.org/staging1/press/copier_fraud.h
[5] http://www.parascope.com/articles/0197/xerox.htm
Sheesh. Do you believe everything you read? You forgot this site.
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When I was a Sonar Technician in the US Navy, we used large display consoles with dual 21" display units in them. They ran on on 120v/400Hz power and the driving units got very hot. They were cooled with distilled water that ran through a fairly complex chilling operation (after all, it's a government operation, right?).
One of the cooling loops inside a console sprung a leak and sprayed water around. Now bear in mind that the voltages inside these display units are like those in a TV set, so they're substantially greater than a computer's, but the resulting fireworks INSIDE the sealed cabinet just about sent me crawling up the nearest bulkhead. Noise, sparks and a tremendous mess that ultimately cost about $50,000 to repair. And it wasn't uncommon...about once a year a cooling loop would let go on some piece of equipment.
Incidentally, the only reason that the loops used distilled water was so that there would be little or no mineral buildup inside the cooling loops. In some cases, the stainless tubing in use was quite small, perhaps a quarter inch in diameter. Believe me, once that water hit the equipment, even a bit of accumulated dust caused it to conduct quite well, thank you!
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What happens if they outgrow their facility? I mean, what they have seems pretty well designed for anything short of a war, I guess, but how do you cope with success?
Then again, I guess the obvious answer would be to build another one, assuming that growth==success==more money (although I'm not so sure that I'd assume that!)
They claim room for 300% growth, but still...it certainly sounds like they're virtually the only game in town...er, on the continent. Is 300% enough?
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Even with the prospect of a few years of school, I would still pursue it. I'm graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering in May. I'm 39 years old, I've worked in the industry for years and I felt the same way that you do about my future job prospects. I managed to work between 30 and 40 hours a week (I have an understanding employer), go to school full time and maintain a 3.2 GPA. No, it's not easy, but the rewards could be worth it...I have a great job waiting for me at the end.