Bruce, what would you think of providing a redirect link from technocrat.net to Slashdot classic for as long as classic remains fully functional? This might give you a feel for initial interest, and give Dice a feel for the number and quality of accounts they stand to lose.
Bob was one of the most clearheaded problem solvers out there, regardless of domain. When I was designing high-voltage CRT drivers, his books and columns were invaluable. When I moved on to digital, then FPGA system architecture, then management, again his thinking was almost always mappable in some way to the problems at hand.
When he wrote a self-published book on driving, _How to Drive Into Accidents and How Not To_, I bought and read that too (472 pages on driving).
For those that say Bob was not serious about seatbelts because he apparently was not wearing one, he talked in detail about how that Beetle had rotted belts, how he had purchased nylon webbing to repair them, and his difficulties in finding a good, robust way to sew them. He made the point that a seatbelt "holds you down firmly and helps you AVOID having an accident." [Bob's emphasis]
The man was not perfect, and I'm sure his actions did not always match his intent (did you ever see pictures of his desk? or the back seat of the Beetle?), but we've lost a great thinker, and he will be greatly missed.
I know something of Jamie and Dyami, the brothers behind Dragon Stop Motion. Jamie and I were introduced by our sons on a bike ride in 2004.
Jamie has a long history of directing award-winning stop-motion animation, from music videos to Super Bowl ads. On top of his visual aesthetic skills, he has a long history of craftsmanship (builds his own camera motion systems, creates beautiful stereo-optical systems of glass, wood, and brass). I think the artistry runs in the family.
By the time he started working on "Dragon" for United Airlines, he had become fed up with the current state of stop motion support software, especially when it came to DSLR control. He took his concerns to his brother, Dyami, who began coding after hours to support Jamie's concept.
The interesting thing is that they were not in the same city. Dyami would code new features (including hardware control via poorly-documented APIs) and, if needed, debug with Jamie over the phone. I have run large teams of very good developers, but very few are so good they can do that type of work efficiently. Talking with Jamie at the time, he said little debug was required; he would conceive of a feature one day and would have code in production the next.
Dragon has since become the brothers' primary focus. When my 10-year-old expressed interest in stop motion, we purchased one of the first copies of Dragon. I expected it would take days for me to start using, and then I would have to teach my son a limited subset of the features. Nope--he picked it up on his own and had his first few seconds of animation that afternoon. (He now keeps his whole SM kit in a backpack so he can shoot at friends' houses after school.) Tools like onion-skinning and short sequence playback made a great difference in the quality of his work.
It says a lot about Jamie's vision and UI expertise that the same tool used for multi-million-dollar movies can also be effectively used by a child. Combined with the stability provided by Dyami's top-notch coding, we couldn't be happier with Dragon. I wish them the best.
...to preventing real violence.
Thank goodness the Swiss are taking care of that too. Soon shrub assault will be a thing of the past as they codify plants' rights.
As a longtime Tek user/buyer, I brought in LeCroy this summer to help our negotiating position with Tektronix. However, the team and I were blown away by the LeCroy's ease of use. Time to configure for the types of triggered events, jitter analysis, and other functions we were interested in was much shorter on the LeCroy. The results were presented better, too. Overall, I got the impression that every feature, including deep memory, was carefully thought out and truly usable.
The Tek in the same class had more triggering features, which we estimated we had a 10%-20% chance of needing. Ultimately we purchased a couple LeCroy models (SDA6020 and WAVERUNNER 104MXI) and decided we would temporarily rent a Tek if the need arose.
Obviously context matters...in this case we were doing board-level design for high-performance storage products.
Of course, now that we have ours, LeCroy's newest models allow you to unclip the controls from the front panel and place them right next to the circuit you are probing. That would be seriously handy.
California has a major share of the solar market due to strong incentives. For each rebate, the state lists the system size, seller, and cost. There were about 15K installs in the last two years. Of the over 600 sellers listed, many are "green driven" types with few installations and not much business motivation. Below is the full list of 39 sellers that have over 100 installations. They are much more likely to return calls.
PowerLight Corp. (798 installs) Renewable Energy Concepts, Inc. (712 installs) GE Energy USA, LLC (473 installs) Gaiam Energy Tech dba Real Goods (449 installs) SPG Solar, Inc. (447 installs) Carlson Solar Inc. (334 installs) Regrid Power, Inc (320 installs) Akeena Solar, Inc. (311 installs) Premier Power Renewable Energy Inc. (278 installs) Unlimited Energy (274 installs) Sun Light & Power Co. (233 installs) Sharpe Solar Energy Systems, Inc. (219 installs) GenSelf Corporation (218 installs) Mohr Power Solar, Inc. (213 installs) Southern California Solar Inc. (202 installs) Helio Power (198 installs) Advanced Solar Electric (192 installs) Cooperative Community Energy Corp. (190 installs) Altair Energy, Inc. (188 installs) Borrego Solar Systems, Inc (183 installs) Next Energy Corp (181 installs) Borrego Solar Systems Inc. (174 installs) M C Solar Engineering (171 installs) Marin Solar, Inc. (170 installs) Sierra Pacific Home and Comfort (166 installs) Sharp Electronics Corp. (160 installs) Energy Efficiency Solar, Inc. (156 installs) Clean Power Systems, Inc (150 installs) Solahart All Valley (144 installs) Power Independence Electric (thru Home Depot) (137 installs) Sun First Solar (129 installs) Plan It Solar (126 installs) Revco Solar Engineering, Inc (123 installs) New Vision Technologies, Inc. (123 installs) Solatron Technologies, Inc. (122 installs) Solar Technologies (118 installs) Solar Works (118 installs) Independent Energy Systems, Inc. (106 installs) TMAG Inc dba Stellar Solar (Home Depot) (102 installs)
The article points out that other components of our cost of living provide a much greater opportunity for saving absolute $$ than gas. The author mentions food (red peppers) as an example, with extreme price volatility.
A Caltech economist tracked this volatility in the grocery and airline businesses (ah, the benefits of cheap undergrad labor!):
The Price is Right Mysterious
The standard supermarket chains carefully tune pricing to maximize profits from those that ignore prices while also luring the bargain shoppers. The warehouse stores are in the middle; you can beat them at a standard supermarket. You can do better than cutting your grocery bill in half, which, according to the Slashdot article government stats, would save about as much the average annual budget for gas in 2004.
If determined to shop gas prices, don't bother driving around. Use the AAA website:
AAA Gas Price Finder
SpeedSkin converts your current keyboard
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
A cover for the core keys on your current (favorite) keyboard. About 10 bucks.
100 ASA film can be awfully good. For slide (chrome/positive) film, I've seen 3dB points in excess of 6000 lines (you can get 6000 pixels across the image, and still make them out).
I do film recorder (devices that print to film) design for a living. We print to film at resolutions up to 16,384 x 13,448 pixels(614MB/image). 4" x 5" film is the usual target at the top resolution. Getting one pixel off grid by 25% is discernable.
BTW, the reason film resolution is often referred to in absolute pixel count rather than dpi is because the film is rarely the final output size--an enlarged print or a projection screen (in the case of a slide) is. This makes it hard for us to choose point size, as you might imagine.
If your site is down over New Years, think seriously about hiring a new IS manager
I've got to disagree with this generalization.
At our company, the MIS reports to me. Back in May, he said he planned to down all but our external servers.
Is he an idiot? Should we fire him?
He had just spent a weekend having the *entire* company's systems do a Y2K rollover, and then did transactions with all critical business apps. He found many problems, mostly small. One issue was that several older systems would not roll over correctly, but, once set to a post Y2K date, they were fine.
Rather than have a hardware/firmware remediation party, he figured we could just manually set the RTCs on boot after the new year. Sounded good to me.
I bought an IntelliMouse Explorer about six weeks ago. After trying to get used to it for three weeks, back it went. The sides taper towards a wider base. I found this meant I had to grip it too tightly to lift while repositioning.
I now use the IntelliMouse with IntelliEye, which has the more standard MS mouse shape. It's great; sliding friction is much lower than with a standard mouse.
In the last five years I've hired two foreign nationals via the H-1B process. It was a natural outgrowth of increased internet usage. In 1993 we began usenet advertising to expand our engineer search beyond local papers and universities. We hired from around the US as a result. Soon it became obvious that the top-flight programmers that made themselves known (generally via some type of open-source work) we not always within our borders. Our most recent international hire was an Italian who did an amazing job overhauling the Mac port of a US university's compiler project (in his spare time). Our H-1B employees are paid as well as their US counterparts and see raises commensurate with their increasing value to the company. To do otherwise embitters the employee.
However, I must agree the potential for abuse is huge. I once interviewed a Chinese Ph.D. that was currently on an H-1B with another company. He was told to lie about his education and claim a BS so they could get away with paying him $35K.
Reviewing this, I thought I should also say something about the root epsilon prop delay argument. In a *uniform medium,* the signal will slow as stated.
However, with a non-uniform medium, suddenly it is the *path chosen* that matters. Like a resistor divider, the path of lowest impedance dominates; it is the epsilon along that path that matters.
BTW, I believe Dr. HJ referrs to what I call buried microstrips as "offset striplines."
"Distance between plates" is inherently 3D (2D plates x 1D distance). The physics involved are 3D and can be generalized to cover "wires in space."
The capacitance of a wire in space is not defined until you define the return path. In the case of an infinitely large cylinder or an infinitely far away plane, capacitance per unit length goes to 0. I found nothing in my intro physics book, _Electricity and Magnetism_ (Berkeley physics course, vol 2) to contradict this. Dr. HoJo's (exellent) book is at work, but I doubt you will find any contradiction there, either.
Let's apply this back to the mineral oil. The primary capacitance is due to the ground plane under the trace. We are replacing the air above (actually, first comes the solder mask) with mineral oil, which you say has a DC of about 3. If it were 4.5, what would it take to double our original capacitance caused by the ground plane? It would take a plane in the mineral oil 0.006" above the trace. We don't have that. Do we have a plane 10x that far away (60 mils)? No. 100x? No. The effect on trace capacitance per unit length will be negligible.
I recall Dr. HoJo's book has a section on buried microstrips. You could use this to calculate how near a conductive plane above would need to be for, say, a 5% change in total capacitance.
The dielectric constant is not important as a standalone figure. The capacitance is a function of the dielectric constant and the distance between plates. The air (or mineral oil) side of a PCB trace goes some distance before coupling. In fact, the only meaningful coupling increase might be to adjacent traces, creating increased crosstalk. Remember the other side of the trace is looking at about 0.06" of FR4 (dielectric constant of about 5) to the next layer, which should be ground below impedance-controlled traces. The incident-wave height should not change due to this. Changes to the FR4 material's thickness and/or dielectric constant would be much more siginficant.
BTW, this got me thinking about the system's bypass caps, so I checked. Tantalums will only drop in capacitance by about 8% at -40C(or F) and X7R ceramics will be about the same. Z5U ceramics will drop more, but not as much as if they were running at +70F. A quick search gave me no info on low-temp characteristics for electrolytics, but most are spec'd down to -40 or lower.
I wrote the author, got reply
on
Linux on CNN
·
· Score: 1
I wrote the author, commenting on three things. I took issue with the "not a revolutionary paradigm shift" statement. I also disagreed that support costs were "about the same" as NT, and described my company's cost savings and amazement at Linux quality.
However, the major focus of his article was how media coverage had a huge Hype/Info ratio. I missed this and attempted to clarify RH Linux pricing for him. (New rule for me--always read an article twice before responding).
Mr. Hayes' response was courteous and detailed. He is not Linux clue-impaired. He made the point that my success with Linux was due to accurately evaluating, then using Linux.
He noted the article on CNN was a modified version of his original on the Computerworld site. Computerworld is IT-focused. Overall, he did a good job cautioning those who woud dismiss (or blindly embrace) Linux to use common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce, what would you think of providing a redirect link from technocrat.net to Slashdot classic for as long as classic remains fully functional? This might give you a feel for initial interest, and give Dice a feel for the number and quality of accounts they stand to lose.
Bob was one of the most clearheaded problem solvers out there, regardless of domain. When I was designing high-voltage CRT drivers, his books and columns were invaluable. When I moved on to digital, then FPGA system architecture, then management, again his thinking was almost always mappable in some way to the problems at hand.
When he wrote a self-published book on driving, _How to Drive Into Accidents and How Not To_, I bought and read that too (472 pages on driving).
For those that say Bob was not serious about seatbelts because he apparently was not wearing one, he talked in detail about how that Beetle had rotted belts, how he had purchased nylon webbing to repair them, and his difficulties in finding a good, robust way to sew them. He made the point that a seatbelt "holds you down firmly and helps you AVOID having an accident." [Bob's emphasis]
The man was not perfect, and I'm sure his actions did not always match his intent (did you ever see pictures of his desk? or the back seat of the Beetle?), but we've lost a great thinker, and he will be greatly missed.
I know something of Jamie and Dyami, the brothers behind Dragon Stop Motion. Jamie and I were introduced by our sons on a bike ride in 2004.
Jamie has a long history of directing award-winning stop-motion animation, from music videos to Super Bowl ads. On top of his visual aesthetic skills, he has a long history of craftsmanship (builds his own camera motion systems, creates beautiful stereo-optical systems of glass, wood, and brass). I think the artistry runs in the family.
By the time he started working on "Dragon" for United Airlines, he had become fed up with the current state of stop motion support software, especially when it came to DSLR control. He took his concerns to his brother, Dyami, who began coding after hours to support Jamie's concept.
The interesting thing is that they were not in the same city. Dyami would code new features (including hardware control via poorly-documented APIs) and, if needed, debug with Jamie over the phone. I have run large teams of very good developers, but very few are so good they can do that type of work efficiently. Talking with Jamie at the time, he said little debug was required; he would conceive of a feature one day and would have code in production the next.
Dragon has since become the brothers' primary focus. When my 10-year-old expressed interest in stop motion, we purchased one of the first copies of Dragon. I expected it would take days for me to start using, and then I would have to teach my son a limited subset of the features. Nope--he picked it up on his own and had his first few seconds of animation that afternoon. (He now keeps his whole SM kit in a backpack so he can shoot at friends' houses after school.) Tools like onion-skinning and short sequence playback made a great difference in the quality of his work.
It says a lot about Jamie's vision and UI expertise that the same tool used for multi-million-dollar movies can also be effectively used by a child. Combined with the stability provided by Dyami's top-notch coding, we couldn't be happier with Dragon. I wish them the best.
...to preventing real violence. Thank goodness the Swiss are taking care of that too. Soon shrub assault will be a thing of the past as they codify plants' rights.
"Voice Dialer HF" resolves each of the "Can't hands-free voice dial" issues listed above.
Disclaimer: After getting a Droid and being very, very annoyed at the same thing, I was involved in the development of this app.
As a longtime Tek user/buyer, I brought in LeCroy this summer to help our negotiating position with Tektronix. However, the team and I were blown away by the LeCroy's ease of use. Time to configure for the types of triggered events, jitter analysis, and other functions we were interested in was much shorter on the LeCroy. The results were presented better, too. Overall, I got the impression that every feature, including deep memory, was carefully thought out and truly usable.
The Tek in the same class had more triggering features, which we estimated we had a 10%-20% chance of needing. Ultimately we purchased a couple LeCroy models (SDA6020 and WAVERUNNER 104MXI) and decided we would temporarily rent a Tek if the need arose.
Obviously context matters...in this case we were doing board-level design for high-performance storage products.
Of course, now that we have ours, LeCroy's newest models allow you to unclip the controls from the front panel and place them right next to the circuit you are probing. That would be seriously handy.
California has a major share of the solar market due to strong incentives. For each rebate, the state lists the system size, seller, and cost. There were about 15K installs in the last two years. Of the over 600 sellers listed, many are "green driven" types with few installations and not much business motivation. Below is the full list of 39 sellers that have over 100 installations. They are much more likely to return calls.
w ables/COMPLETED_SYSTEMS.XLS
PowerLight Corp. (798 installs)
Renewable Energy Concepts, Inc. (712 installs)
GE Energy USA, LLC (473 installs)
Gaiam Energy Tech dba Real Goods (449 installs)
SPG Solar, Inc. (447 installs)
Carlson Solar Inc. (334 installs)
Regrid Power, Inc (320 installs)
Akeena Solar, Inc. (311 installs)
Premier Power Renewable Energy Inc. (278 installs)
Unlimited Energy (274 installs)
Sun Light & Power Co. (233 installs)
Sharpe Solar Energy Systems, Inc. (219 installs)
GenSelf Corporation (218 installs)
Mohr Power Solar, Inc. (213 installs)
Southern California Solar Inc. (202 installs)
Helio Power (198 installs)
Advanced Solar Electric (192 installs)
Cooperative Community Energy Corp. (190 installs)
Altair Energy, Inc. (188 installs)
Borrego Solar Systems, Inc (183 installs)
Next Energy Corp (181 installs)
Borrego Solar Systems Inc. (174 installs)
M C Solar Engineering (171 installs)
Marin Solar, Inc. (170 installs)
Sierra Pacific Home and Comfort (166 installs)
Sharp Electronics Corp. (160 installs)
Energy Efficiency Solar, Inc. (156 installs)
Clean Power Systems, Inc (150 installs)
Solahart All Valley (144 installs)
Power Independence Electric (thru Home Depot) (137 installs)
Sun First Solar (129 installs)
Plan It Solar (126 installs)
Revco Solar Engineering, Inc (123 installs)
New Vision Technologies, Inc. (123 installs)
Solatron Technologies, Inc. (122 installs)
Solar Technologies (118 installs)
Solar Works (118 installs)
Independent Energy Systems, Inc. (106 installs)
TMAG Inc dba Stellar Solar (Home Depot) (102 installs)
Source data from http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/emerging_rene
The standard supermarket chains carefully tune pricing to maximize profits from those that ignore prices while also luring the bargain shoppers. The warehouse stores are in the middle; you can beat them at a standard supermarket. You can do better than cutting your grocery bill in half, which, according to the Slashdot article government stats, would save about as much the average annual budget for gas in 2004.
If determined to shop gas prices, don't bother driving around. Use the AAA website: AAA Gas Price Finder
A cover for the core keys on your current (favorite) keyboard. About 10 bucks.
www.speedskin.com
100 ASA film can be awfully good. For slide (chrome/positive) film, I've seen 3dB points in excess of 6000 lines (you can get 6000 pixels across the image, and still make them out).
I do film recorder (devices that print to film) design for a living. We print to film at resolutions up to 16,384 x 13,448 pixels(614MB/image). 4" x 5" film is the usual target at the top resolution. Getting one pixel off grid by 25% is discernable.
BTW, the reason film resolution is often referred to in absolute pixel count rather than dpi is because the film is rarely the final output size--an enlarged print or a projection screen (in the case of a slide) is. This makes it hard for us to choose point size, as you might imagine.
If your site is down over New Years, think seriously about hiring a new IS manager
I've got to disagree with this generalization.
At our company, the MIS reports to me. Back in May, he said he planned to down all but our external servers.
Is he an idiot? Should we fire him?
He had just spent a weekend having the *entire* company's systems do a Y2K rollover, and then did transactions with all critical business apps. He found many problems, mostly small. One issue was that several older systems would not roll over correctly, but, once set to a post Y2K date, they were fine.
Rather than have a hardware/firmware remediation party, he figured we could just manually set the RTCs on boot after the new year. Sounded good to me.
I bought an IntelliMouse Explorer about six weeks ago. After trying to get used to it for three weeks, back it went. The sides taper towards a wider base. I found this meant I had to grip it too tightly to lift while repositioning.
I now use the IntelliMouse with IntelliEye, which has the more standard MS mouse shape. It's great; sliding friction is much lower than with a standard mouse.
In the last five years I've hired two foreign nationals via the H-1B process. It was a natural outgrowth of increased internet usage. In 1993 we began usenet advertising to expand our engineer search beyond local papers and universities. We hired from around the US as a result. Soon it became obvious that the top-flight programmers that made themselves known (generally via some type of open-source work) we not always within our borders. Our most recent international hire was an Italian who did an amazing job overhauling the Mac port of a US university's compiler project (in his spare time). Our H-1B employees are paid as well as their US counterparts and see raises commensurate with their increasing value to the company. To do otherwise embitters the employee.
However, I must agree the potential for abuse is huge. I once interviewed a Chinese Ph.D. that was currently on an H-1B with another company. He was told to lie about his education and claim a BS so they could get away with paying him $35K.
You might want to review the prior post and link.
Reviewing this, I thought I should also say something about the root epsilon prop delay argument. In a *uniform medium,* the signal will slow as stated.
However, with a non-uniform medium, suddenly it is the *path chosen* that matters. Like a resistor divider, the path of lowest impedance dominates; it is the epsilon along that path that matters.
BTW, I believe Dr. HJ referrs to what I call buried microstrips as "offset striplines."
"Distance between plates" is inherently 3D (2D plates x 1D distance). The physics involved are 3D and can be generalized to cover "wires in space."
The capacitance of a wire in space is not defined until you define the return path. In the case of an infinitely large cylinder or an infinitely far away plane, capacitance per unit length goes to 0. I found nothing in my intro physics book, _Electricity and Magnetism_ (Berkeley physics course, vol 2) to contradict this. Dr. HoJo's (exellent) book is at work, but I doubt you will find any contradiction there, either.
Let's apply this back to the mineral oil. The primary capacitance is due to the ground plane under the trace. We are replacing the air above (actually, first comes the solder mask) with mineral oil, which you say has a DC of about 3. If it were 4.5, what would it take to double our original capacitance caused by the ground plane? It would take a plane in the mineral oil 0.006" above the trace. We don't have that. Do we have a plane 10x that far away (60 mils)? No. 100x? No. The effect on trace capacitance per unit length will be negligible.
I recall Dr. HoJo's book has a section on buried microstrips. You could use this to calculate how near a conductive plane above would need to be for, say, a 5% change in total capacitance.
Oops-- order of magnitude error. I meant 0.006" of FR4 (PCB material).
I've gotta disagree.
The dielectric constant is not important as a standalone figure. The capacitance is a function of the dielectric constant and the distance between plates. The air (or mineral oil) side of a PCB trace goes some distance before coupling. In fact, the only meaningful coupling increase might be to adjacent traces, creating increased crosstalk. Remember the other side of the trace is looking at about 0.06" of FR4 (dielectric constant of about 5) to the next layer, which should be ground below impedance-controlled traces. The incident-wave height should not change due to this. Changes to the FR4 material's thickness and/or dielectric constant would be much more siginficant.
BTW, this got me thinking about the system's bypass caps, so I checked. Tantalums will only drop in capacitance by about 8% at -40C(or F) and X7R ceramics will be about the same. Z5U ceramics will drop more, but not as much as if they were running at +70F. A quick search gave me no info on low-temp characteristics for electrolytics, but most are spec'd down to -40 or lower.
However, the major focus of his article was how media coverage had a huge Hype/Info ratio. I missed this and attempted to clarify RH Linux pricing for him. (New rule for me--always read an article twice before responding).
Mr. Hayes' response was courteous and detailed. He is not Linux clue-impaired. He made the point that my success with Linux was due to accurately evaluating, then using Linux.
He noted the article on CNN was a modified version of his original on the Computerworld site. Computerworld is IT-focused. Overall, he did a good job cautioning those who woud dismiss (or blindly embrace) Linux to use common sense.