I've got upwards of twenty devices with mini-USB ports, with an average age of ownership and frequency of connection similar to the micro-USB devices. None have failed. I've got even more mini-USB cables than devices. None have failed.
And that's exactly what mechanics tells us should happen.
Agreed. The larger connector will always win, for nature cannot be fooled. In spite of connector size, the insertion/removal forces will be similar, after all it has to deal with same kind of mechanical environment -- phones dropped, phones hitting things in the car, mating/unmating of the connector, stiffness of the cable, etc. If you have less material to carry similar stresses, and substantially similar outline but scaled down, it can't but develop fatigue fractures earlier. There's absolutely no way around this. The smaller (micro) connector's mechanical structure has to fail earlier, because it's essentially the larger connector (mini) scaled down -- the materials, the overall shape, and the environment are still the same. Whoever imagined longer overall life (not contact life) for that smaller connector must have slept through their mechanics of materials courses.
The problem is typically their incorrect budgeting of mounting area on the PCB. Those miniature surface mount connectors demand large mounting pads for the frame -- really much larger than the minimum dimensions shown in the datasheet. The pads should also have plugged vias in them for mechanical strength against delamination -- this isn't a problem as I'm sure there's plenty of plugged vias in any modern motherboard, whether for a PC, laptop or a smartphone. It's just silly design, that's all.
Uh-huh. And deal with an impedance matched transmission line between the connector and the PCB. And do it such that it doesn't occupy half the volume available for the phone.
Look at any high-frequency instrument assembled such that connectors are on the front panel, say any "vintage" spectrum analyzer. Take out the input connector assembly. Look at its volume and weight. Then put your phone next to it. Hopefully you'll understand then.
Oscillococcinum and similar "remedies" are simply yummy, to my taste at least. I treat them as seasonal candies, nothing more. I love the echinacea pills, sour and smooth. Cheap if you know where to buy them at a discount, too.
Whoever put out the $0.5billion figure was lying through their teeth, with full knowledge of what was going on. That's known as getting your foot in. I still think it's going to be a wonderful instrument and wish them success with the mission.
In Poland, it's the border protection people. Their mission is to police, not to kill. They are present at internal borders -- that would be at the airports. Someone else in this thread mentioned that the security in polish airports is a mix of military, civilian and contractor personnel. I'm talking specifically about people who man the security checkpoints. I've never saw anyone but a uniformed border guard manning the x-ray and the metal detector.
In the U.S., border protection is sepearate from the military, but methinks in many European countries, it's traditionally either a branch of the military in its own right, or a sub-branch of the army.
It's not like it in the entire E.U. In Poland at least, it's all run by the military, and they seem like quite competent people, with plenty of experience. I'd take military any day over a contractor, at least in Poland.
Forgot to add: the concept of a "trophy wife" is vastly different between U.S. and most places in Europe. I find the U.S. version to be a sad perversion.
But if you were an educated woman, would you really feel secure in losing your only advantage in the gender equation (your relative education and intelligence) and marrying a male geek? Hell no, you'd want a burly, dumb man.
Why does a relationship between two people always need someone to be on the top? Why would I want to marry an educated woman who is so insecure that she needs to keep an "advantage in the gender equation"? Perhaps she is "well" educated in a lot of things, but lacks critical insight into herself. In my marriage, we don't play mind games for reasons other than mutual amusement/entertainment. We're probably well into the game area, as most jokes we tell each other are inside to the extent that would require at least a minute worth of explaining to a random third party.
I would never marry someone who feels like needing to have an advantage in the relationship. Never forget that advantages can turn into disadvantages real quick. The pharmacist should think what will become of her kids if she suddenly passed away. Would she want her piano-playing, ballet-dancing, grade-skipping (choose/modify as needed) overachievers to be raised into adulthood by said burly guy and his possible future second wife? To me, she has no advantage -- I'd never call short-sightedness to be an advantage when it comes to marriage.
Alas, I was tutored in my native language by a lady who had an accomplished physicist for a husband. I can't imagine her wanting someone dumb instead. And I'm pretty sure at least in Europe you'll find plenty of normal, educated women, who have equally well educated husbands.
Even if the surface gravity would be twice Earth's, I'm sure it'd be manageable. In a few weeks you'd get used to it. Of course you'd have joint problems not unlike those fat people have, but hey, all in the name of science:)
I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm taking offense at being considered some lowlife (or no-life) simply because Walmart is within walking distance...
OK-dokey, so presume we're trying to put solar panels on Cassini.
Solar flux @ 1 A.U. (Earth's orbit) -- round to 1kW/m^2 Solar flux @ 10 A.U. (Saturn's aphelion) -- 10W/m^2
Power needed: 700W (to be generated by solar panels instead of RTGs) Space-rated solar panel efficiency: ~10% (conservative figure takes into account degradation due to age and radiation)
Needed area: (700W)/(0.1)/(10W/m^2) = 700m^2
That's a freaking huge panel, almost as big as a pair of U.S. wing arrays on ISS. For a sense of scale, here's how big the darn things are.
Besides, you need extra fuel or energy to keep the damn things oriented towards the sun. This would likely add more weight since Cassini had to, first and foremost, take lots of pictures. Good luck with taking pics *and* pointing the solar panels. Of course you can have batteries like ISS does. All of this hassle adds significant risk to the mission.
Whatever changes you do to a piece of software, even long after the creation date, are subject to copyright that extends from the date of update onwards. So even if parts of your code may not be subject to copyright protection, it wouldn't be the entire product -- so your "current" product would never fall into public domain, as long as you maintained it. Of course, people could run the very old versions freely under emulators and whatnot. That's fine: that makes you keep innovating, like the U.S. founders wanted. Progress and all that.
Remember that military technology is usually at least a decade behind what you'd have on your desktop, computing wise. Usually way more behind than that. A Sidewinder misslie is a design from the late 50s. It predates the Apollo program. To reverse engineer that, you need to know analog circuit design and feedback/control theory, and some dynamics. You don't need to know what a CPU is because there isn't one, and whatever ICs are there, if any, have maybe a couple dozen transistors on them. I'm pretty sure even most modern Sidewinders aren't very complex, circuit-wise. There's no gigahertz or even hundred-megahertz clocks anywhere in that missile. You could debug them with a 250MHz scope, and could probably put most of the control and signal processing into a CPU like Propeller, where you can easily directly interface to analog I/O lines by implementing a sigma-delta ADC/DAC in software.
Heck, those are sometimes sold in major stores. Walmart used to sell the Victoria's Secret bras, for example, but with different labeling. I compared them side-by-side and they were the same things that must have come from the same factory, put together by the same group of people.
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I've got upwards of twenty devices with mini-USB ports, with an average age of ownership and frequency of connection similar to the micro-USB devices. None have failed.
I've got even more mini-USB cables than devices. None have failed.
And that's exactly what mechanics tells us should happen.
Agreed. The larger connector will always win, for nature cannot be fooled. In spite of connector size, the insertion/removal forces will be similar, after all it has to deal with same kind of mechanical environment -- phones dropped, phones hitting things in the car, mating/unmating of the connector, stiffness of the cable, etc. If you have less material to carry similar stresses, and substantially similar outline but scaled down, it can't but develop fatigue fractures earlier. There's absolutely no way around this. The smaller (micro) connector's mechanical structure has to fail earlier, because it's essentially the larger connector (mini) scaled down -- the materials, the overall shape, and the environment are still the same. Whoever imagined longer overall life (not contact life) for that smaller connector must have slept through their mechanics of materials courses.
The problem is typically their incorrect budgeting of mounting area on the PCB. Those miniature surface mount connectors demand large mounting pads for the frame -- really much larger than the minimum dimensions shown in the datasheet. The pads should also have plugged vias in them for mechanical strength against delamination -- this isn't a problem as I'm sure there's plenty of plugged vias in any modern motherboard, whether for a PC, laptop or a smartphone. It's just silly design, that's all.
Uh-huh. And deal with an impedance matched transmission line between the connector and the PCB. And do it such that it doesn't occupy half the volume available for the phone.
Look at any high-frequency instrument assembled such that connectors are on the front panel, say any "vintage" spectrum analyzer. Take out the input connector assembly. Look at its volume and weight. Then put your phone next to it. Hopefully you'll understand then.
Because multiplications by a constant that's but an entry in a list having a couple of powers of two are all the rage these days.
Now be careful. Their marketing drones may be reading /. too, you know.
Oscillococcinum and similar "remedies" are simply yummy, to my taste at least. I treat them as seasonal candies, nothing more. I love the echinacea pills, sour and smooth. Cheap if you know where to buy them at a discount, too.
Imagine if all the money spent on sending handfuls of people into space was spent on health care education here on Earth?
Ummm, we wouldn't have trolls like you? So on that sentence, and only on that single one, we sorta-kinda agree.
Whoever put out the $0.5billion figure was lying through their teeth, with full knowledge of what was going on. That's known as getting your foot in. I still think it's going to be a wonderful instrument and wish them success with the mission.
In Poland, it's the border protection people. Their mission is to police, not to kill. They are present at internal borders -- that would be at the airports. Someone else in this thread mentioned that the security in polish airports is a mix of military, civilian and contractor personnel. I'm talking specifically about people who man the security checkpoints. I've never saw anyone but a uniformed border guard manning the x-ray and the metal detector.
In the U.S., border protection is sepearate from the military, but methinks in many European countries, it's traditionally either a branch of the military in its own right, or a sub-branch of the army.
It's not like it in the entire E.U. In Poland at least, it's all run by the military, and they seem like quite competent people, with plenty of experience. I'd take military any day over a contractor, at least in Poland.
But we do, silly.
At least you'll be able to sue them. TSA has a certain amount of immunity IIRC.
;) I'll let you get away with mostly anything. Special biologist exception. Call it reverse discrimination if you will.
It's on the way to an ice cream store ;)
Forgot to add: the concept of a "trophy wife" is vastly different between U.S. and most places in Europe. I find the U.S. version to be a sad perversion.
But if you were an educated woman, would you really feel secure in losing your only advantage in the gender equation (your relative education and intelligence) and marrying a male geek? Hell no, you'd want a burly, dumb man.
Why does a relationship between two people always need someone to be on the top? Why would I want to marry an educated woman who is so insecure that she needs to keep an "advantage in the gender equation"? Perhaps she is "well" educated in a lot of things, but lacks critical insight into herself. In my marriage, we don't play mind games for reasons other than mutual amusement/entertainment. We're probably well into the game area, as most jokes we tell each other are inside to the extent that would require at least a minute worth of explaining to a random third party.
I would never marry someone who feels like needing to have an advantage in the relationship. Never forget that advantages can turn into disadvantages real quick. The pharmacist should think what will become of her kids if she suddenly passed away. Would she want her piano-playing, ballet-dancing, grade-skipping (choose/modify as needed) overachievers to be raised into adulthood by said burly guy and his possible future second wife? To me, she has no advantage -- I'd never call short-sightedness to be an advantage when it comes to marriage.
Alas, I was tutored in my native language by a lady who had an accomplished physicist for a husband. I can't imagine her wanting someone dumb instead. And I'm pretty sure at least in Europe you'll find plenty of normal, educated women, who have equally well educated husbands.
Even if the surface gravity would be twice Earth's, I'm sure it'd be manageable. In a few weeks you'd get used to it. Of course you'd have joint problems not unlike those fat people have, but hey, all in the name of science :)
I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm taking offense at being considered some lowlife (or no-life) simply because Walmart is within walking distance...
OK-dokey, so presume we're trying to put solar panels on Cassini.
Solar flux @ 1 A.U. (Earth's orbit) -- round to 1kW/m^2
Solar flux @ 10 A.U. (Saturn's aphelion) -- 10W/m^2
Power needed: 700W (to be generated by solar panels instead of RTGs)
Space-rated solar panel efficiency: ~10% (conservative figure takes into account degradation due to age and radiation)
Needed area: (700W)/(0.1)/(10W/m^2) = 700m^2
That's a freaking huge panel, almost as big as a pair of U.S. wing arrays on ISS. For a sense of scale, here's how big the darn things are.
Besides, you need extra fuel or energy to keep the damn things oriented towards the sun. This would likely add more weight since Cassini had to, first and foremost, take lots of pictures. Good luck with taking pics *and* pointing the solar panels. Of course you can have batteries like ISS does. All of this hassle adds significant risk to the mission.
Whatever changes you do to a piece of software, even long after the creation date, are subject to copyright that extends from the date of update onwards. So even if parts of your code may not be subject to copyright protection, it wouldn't be the entire product -- so your "current" product would never fall into public domain, as long as you maintained it. Of course, people could run the very old versions freely under emulators and whatnot. That's fine: that makes you keep innovating, like the U.S. founders wanted. Progress and all that.
spectateswamp, is that you? :)
It's lingerie. It wears out anyway :)
Remember that military technology is usually at least a decade behind what you'd have on your desktop, computing wise. Usually way more behind than that. A Sidewinder misslie is a design from the late 50s. It predates the Apollo program. To reverse engineer that, you need to know analog circuit design and feedback/control theory, and some dynamics. You don't need to know what a CPU is because there isn't one, and whatever ICs are there, if any, have maybe a couple dozen transistors on them. I'm pretty sure even most modern Sidewinders aren't very complex, circuit-wise. There's no gigahertz or even hundred-megahertz clocks anywhere in that missile. You could debug them with a 250MHz scope, and could probably put most of the control and signal processing into a CPU like Propeller, where you can easily directly interface to analog I/O lines by implementing a sigma-delta ADC/DAC in software.
Heck, those are sometimes sold in major stores. Walmart used to sell the Victoria's Secret bras, for example, but with different labeling. I compared them side-by-side and they were the same things that must have come from the same factory, put together by the same group of people.