I was born in 1972, and guess what, I had to start at the bottom with a shitty paid job, and work my way up too.
Things haven't changed. Most of the highly paid and highly technical jobs are taken by those with experience, because they require people with experience. When I started in the business, sure, I thought I had the knowledge to do all that shit...but looking back from where I am now, it's amusing to think of all the pitfalls I'd have fallen into through lack of actual experience.
The story hasn't changed. Being bitter about this just proves you're spoiled.
I think that PCB is better than Eagle, the truth be known. It's likely he just autorouted the tracks as well. The Eagle autorouter doesn't have a good reputation.
It looks like his boards have solder mask on them, so the chances for briges are probably pretty low.
In all probability, it may be one of the first PCBs he's done. My first PCBs looked pretty bad too. They were also hand etched, which soon teaches you about copper fills and routing traces for easy solderability.
I'd be surprised. Sodium lights are still by far the most efficient light source we have - so far ahead of semiconductor lights in efficiency, it's not even funny. LEDs have a long way to go to match the brightness and efficiency of sodium street lighting.
But all things remaining equal, more transistors and more MHz means more power required. Batteries are only improving incrementally. With a desktop, it doesn't matter - just stick a bigger PSU in, and glue a larger heatsink on it. You can't do this with a mobile device.
Mobile processors are only going to improve incrementally until a new, disruptive technology not based on CMOS is practical due to the need to keep power consumption down and heat emission down.
No one flies light planes because it's economical. They do it because they love it.
It doesn't take an hour to get going in a light plane, even if you need to file IFR. In my situation, the typical IFR trip was: drive to the local GA airport (5 minutes) and park. Walk to the hangar, pull the club's Beech Bonanza out. Pre-flight would take around 15 minutes. If the weather looked shitty, I'd probably have already filed the IFR flight plan the evening before. The airport line man would have already fuelled it, because I'd have made a quick phone call to ask for the plane to be topped off, and it's common for fuel to be on your account at your own airfield.
Then off you go. No security lines. No one rifling through your luggage. Your luggage will actually arrive with you.
Going to the airline airport was a 45 minute drive through Houston traffic to arrive an hour early and fight the crowds. Driving meant going through Houston traffic then the dumbass drivers on the interstate on the way to Austin.
Flying privately was just far more fun, far more pleasant, and I could beat the airlines door-to-door on any trip less than 600 miles in a 160 knot Beech Bonanza: 90% of the airports in the United States have no airline service, and generally I could go to an airport that was close to my intended destination instead of one 45 minutes away through city traffic.
I have a trinitron-tubed TV, which I bought in 1993. The picture quality is still excellent, I'll keep it till it finally breaks down.
I also have a Sun-branded 21 inch Trinitron monitor for my home PC, which I bought second hand in 2000. The picture quality on that is still excellent. The minor annoyance of the aperture grille support wires is more than made up for by the great contrast, responsiveness and colour that this monitor displays. My computer desk might have a permanent bow in it from the weight, but I'm also keeping that monitor until it dies, it's superior to any LCD that I've seen so far.
But all the planes I've been on with a business class, have their own shared resources, only shared with other business class passengers, so it matters not one whit if steerage boards first. The blankets etc. aren't even a shared resource - at least on the airlines I travel on, even steerage gets blankets/pillows for each seat.
In any case, business class would still get off first if they boarded last, due to being closer to the door. Make the plane a FILO stack.
Those inexpensive "mini helicopters" will only lift two or three ounces, not pounds. Once you put a camera on them, maybe less than 1oz.
An RC helicopter that can carry a payload weighing pounds is not inexpensive. I suspect it's considerably more expensive and considerably less available than a suicide bomber.
I'm sure Apple, Sun and Linux vendors would LOVE that. Microsoft wouldn't be able to play hard ball with the EU since their shareholders would crucify them.
I hope SFU has had some improvement since I last tried it a couple of years ago. Running as an NT subsystem, and owned by MS, it should just be miles better than Cygwin. However, it feels like ISC Unix in 1991, and has poor source compatibility with other Unixes and Unixlikes such as Solaris, *BSD and Linux. Cygwin was blowing it away two years ago and probably still is.
Unless they've done some serious work on it recently, Services for Unix fell far short of Cygwin's functionality. SFU at least a couple of years ago was like using a late 80s copy of ISC or SCO UNIX, i.e. awful.
They are already doing this in the guise of FFDO (Federal Flight Deck Officers - an armed pilot). There are large numbers of flight crew going through the FFDO training and getting their badge and gun.
Assembly language is FAR from obsolete. Embedded hardware outships PCs by probably 100 to 1, and much of that is programmed using assembly language (especially if you want to get the most out of the tiny hardware). I have modern microcontrollers in my parts box with 64 *bytes* of RAM and 1kbyte of flash (Atmel ATtiny13) - while you can write a C program for this device, you can get much more out of it with asm, and it doesn't really take any longer to write (AVR asm is one of the nicer 8 bit ISAs). Portability is rarely an issue for devices like this, since even the C code won't be portable to other microcontroller architectures.
Every serious programmer should have some experience of assembly language so they can grok what's really going on. Nothing tells you why buffer overruns are so bad than watching a program written in asm run over its own stack obliterating the return address. It doesn't need to be a fancy 32 bit or 64 bit desktop chip, an 8 bit ISA or one of the classics such as the Motorola 68K is enough to understand the principles of what happens at the chip level. If you want to see what happens when programmers simply don't grok the hardware, just check out The Daily WTF....oh, and I have a rotary phone, too. It was first installed in my grandparents home in 1969 when the house was built. It's just the plain GPO phone of the time, but it's a little reminder of them each time I phone someone.
It's worse than that - many packages are in mils (such as 100 mil spacing of DIP pins) and many packages have pins spaced in mm. Many SMD packages are in mils. Many are in mm. You quite often have designs with packages spaced in mm and packages spaced in mils which plays havoc with your grid when laying out - either you have your grid spacing in mils and it makes life more awkward than it should be with the packages on your layout that are in mm, or the other way around!
Then comes the verbal confusion of mils and mm. Especially here, where people often abbreviate millimetre by calling them 'mils'!
Road sense is actually taught in this country (much more so than the vague excuse that 'drivers ed' is in the USA) so it's actually pretty obvious which line divides opposite traffic just from context. However, I do agree differentiating the colour like what's done on US roads would be better; clarity is always good. Interestingly enough, for signage, the State of Texas is adopting a font very similar to the British "Transport" font used on road signs. The "Transport" font was developed by road research. So was the new font being used in Texas and parts of Canada - since both were developed by researching what looks clear on a road, it's not entirely surprising that it lead to a font that looks extremely similar to the "Transport" font.
The main problem with street names isn't so much that they aren't there, but that they tend not to be in a consistent place, and then don't use the bloody "Transport" font which was designed to be highly readable and is used on every other road sign in the land! When giving directions, navigation by pub is a lot more effective than navigation by street name ('second left after the Fleece and Firkin' instead of 'Turn left at Foo Road').
The trouble is this device is indiscriminate. The majority of people, even teenagers, are non-criminals. It targets them. It's also a myth only teenagers hear this device, I hear this device and I've not been a teenager for 15 years - I'm hardly unique, quite a large proportion of the adult population can still hear these frequencies. (If you can hear the tv flyback, you can probably hear this too).
Someone setting up a device like this is just as antisocial as them playing death metal music at annoying volumes.
While the problem with antisocial people is genuine, this is the wrong way to tackle it.
I'm certain that someone down the next street from me has one of these devices, I can hear it and it's loud.
While hearing does degrade over time, for many people (especially those who've not abused their hearing) they can hear these frequencies well past their youth.
These devices are just as antisocial as playing, say, heavy metal loudly on the street. If I were a neighbour, I'd ask politely for the device to be turned off or turned down. If, after a couple of requests, this was not done, I'd do exactly the same as if a neighbour was playing loud unpleasant music - file a complaint.
Yes it does. Methane is an organic molecule. If you find methane, you've found an organic molecule. Organic chemistry is not necessarily produced by life forms.
That group of compounds (things like methane, ethane, propane, butane etc.) are all part of organic chemistry, and whether you find them with or without life they are still organic chemistry.
To write software you still have to buy a computer. I don't see that as much different as having to buy an FPGA development kit for implementing open hardware.
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I was born in 1972, and guess what, I had to start at the bottom with a shitty paid job, and work my way up too.
Things haven't changed. Most of the highly paid and highly technical jobs are taken by those with experience, because they require people with experience. When I started in the business, sure, I thought I had the knowledge to do all that shit...but looking back from where I am now, it's amusing to think of all the pitfalls I'd have fallen into through lack of actual experience.
The story hasn't changed. Being bitter about this just proves you're spoiled.
I think that PCB is better than Eagle, the truth be known. It's likely he just autorouted the tracks as well. The Eagle autorouter doesn't have a good reputation.
It looks like his boards have solder mask on them, so the chances for briges are probably pretty low.
In all probability, it may be one of the first PCBs he's done. My first PCBs looked pretty bad too. They were also hand etched, which soon teaches you about copper fills and routing traces for easy solderability.
I'd be surprised. Sodium lights are still by far the most efficient light source we have - so far ahead of semiconductor lights in efficiency, it's not even funny. LEDs have a long way to go to match the brightness and efficiency of sodium street lighting.
It's an observation, not a law.
But all things remaining equal, more transistors and more MHz means more power required. Batteries are only improving incrementally. With a desktop, it doesn't matter - just stick a bigger PSU in, and glue a larger heatsink on it. You can't do this with a mobile device.
Mobile processors are only going to improve incrementally until a new, disruptive technology not based on CMOS is practical due to the need to keep power consumption down and heat emission down.
Well, the Roomba might qualify for (4), but the cure for the common cold has been well known for decades: eat the hottest vindaloo curry you can find.
Plutonium reacts just fine in a power reactor designed to use it. Instead of burying the Pu, use it in a reactor.
No one flies light planes because it's economical. They do it because they love it.
It doesn't take an hour to get going in a light plane, even if you need to file IFR. In my situation, the typical IFR trip was: drive to the local GA airport (5 minutes) and park. Walk to the hangar, pull the club's Beech Bonanza out. Pre-flight would take around 15 minutes. If the weather looked shitty, I'd probably have already filed the IFR flight plan the evening before. The airport line man would have already fuelled it, because I'd have made a quick phone call to ask for the plane to be topped off, and it's common for fuel to be on your account at your own airfield.
Then off you go. No security lines. No one rifling through your luggage. Your luggage will actually arrive with you.
Going to the airline airport was a 45 minute drive through Houston traffic to arrive an hour early and fight the crowds.
Driving meant going through Houston traffic then the dumbass drivers on the interstate on the way to Austin.
Flying privately was just far more fun, far more pleasant, and I could beat the airlines door-to-door on any trip less than 600 miles in a 160 knot Beech Bonanza: 90% of the airports in the United States have no airline service, and generally I could go to an airport that was close to my intended destination instead of one 45 minutes away through city traffic.
And in any case, you don't really have cat owners -- rather, cats are human owners!
I have a trinitron-tubed TV, which I bought in 1993. The picture quality is still excellent, I'll keep it till it finally breaks down.
I also have a Sun-branded 21 inch Trinitron monitor for my home PC, which I bought second hand in 2000. The picture quality on that is still excellent. The minor annoyance of the aperture grille support wires is more than made up for by the great contrast, responsiveness and colour that this monitor displays. My computer desk might have a permanent bow in it from the weight, but I'm also keeping that monitor until it dies, it's superior to any LCD that I've seen so far.
But all the planes I've been on with a business class, have their own shared resources, only shared with other business class passengers, so it matters not one whit if steerage boards first. The blankets etc. aren't even a shared resource - at least on the airlines I travel on, even steerage gets blankets/pillows for each seat.
In any case, business class would still get off first if they boarded last, due to being closer to the door. Make the plane a FILO stack.
Why do they hate multi-stops? When I travel on SouthWest, the multi-stop is almost as good as having a direct flight. I don't mind them at all.
640k is roughly:
10 Commodore 64s
20 BBC Micros
640 ZX-81s
6 times a SDSS floppy disc
Who needs that kind of memory?
We might not need terabit ethernet *now*, but in 25 years time, it may be the basic expectation of your LAN's speed.
Those inexpensive "mini helicopters" will only lift two or three ounces, not pounds. Once you put a camera on them, maybe less than 1oz.
An RC helicopter that can carry a payload weighing pounds is not inexpensive. I suspect it's considerably more expensive and considerably less available than a suicide bomber.
I'm sure Apple, Sun and Linux vendors would LOVE that. Microsoft wouldn't be able to play hard ball with the EU since their shareholders would crucify them.
I hope SFU has had some improvement since I last tried it a couple of years ago. Running as an NT subsystem, and owned by MS, it should just be miles better than Cygwin. However, it feels like ISC Unix in 1991, and has poor source compatibility with other Unixes and Unixlikes such as Solaris, *BSD and Linux. Cygwin was blowing it away two years ago and probably still is.
Unless they've done some serious work on it recently, Services for Unix fell far short of Cygwin's functionality. SFU at least a couple of years ago was like using a late 80s copy of ISC or SCO UNIX, i.e. awful.
They are already doing this in the guise of FFDO (Federal Flight Deck Officers - an armed pilot). There are large numbers of flight crew going through the FFDO training and getting their badge and gun.
...and in any case, surely it wouldn't just fall under Fair Use anyway? You're merely format shifting the media.
Assembly language is FAR from obsolete. Embedded hardware outships PCs by probably 100 to 1, and much of that is programmed using assembly language (especially if you want to get the most out of the tiny hardware). I have modern microcontrollers in my parts box with 64 *bytes* of RAM and 1kbyte of flash (Atmel ATtiny13) - while you can write a C program for this device, you can get much more out of it with asm, and it doesn't really take any longer to write (AVR asm is one of the nicer 8 bit ISAs). Portability is rarely an issue for devices like this, since even the C code won't be portable to other microcontroller architectures.
...oh, and I have a rotary phone, too. It was first installed in my grandparents home in 1969 when the house was built. It's just the plain GPO phone of the time, but it's a little reminder of them each time I phone someone.
Every serious programmer should have some experience of assembly language so they can grok what's really going on. Nothing tells you why buffer overruns are so bad than watching a program written in asm run over its own stack obliterating the return address. It doesn't need to be a fancy 32 bit or 64 bit desktop chip, an 8 bit ISA or one of the classics such as the Motorola 68K is enough to understand the principles of what happens at the chip level. If you want to see what happens when programmers simply don't grok the hardware, just check out The Daily WTF.
By the way, get off my lawn!
It's worse than that - many packages are in mils (such as 100 mil spacing of DIP pins) and many packages have pins spaced in mm. Many SMD packages are in mils. Many are in mm. You quite often have designs with packages spaced in mm and packages spaced in mils which plays havoc with your grid when laying out - either you have your grid spacing in mils and it makes life more awkward than it should be with the packages on your layout that are in mm, or the other way around!
Then comes the verbal confusion of mils and mm. Especially here, where people often abbreviate millimetre by calling them 'mils'!
Road sense is actually taught in this country (much more so than the vague excuse that 'drivers ed' is in the USA) so it's actually pretty obvious which line divides opposite traffic just from context. However, I do agree differentiating the colour like what's done on US roads would be better; clarity is always good. Interestingly enough, for signage, the State of Texas is adopting a font very similar to the British "Transport" font used on road signs. The "Transport" font was developed by road research. So was the new font being used in Texas and parts of Canada - since both were developed by researching what looks clear on a road, it's not entirely surprising that it lead to a font that looks extremely similar to the "Transport" font.
The main problem with street names isn't so much that they aren't there, but that they tend not to be in a consistent place, and then don't use the bloody "Transport" font which was designed to be highly readable and is used on every other road sign in the land! When giving directions, navigation by pub is a lot more effective than navigation by street name ('second left after the Fleece and Firkin' instead of 'Turn left at Foo Road').
The trouble is this device is indiscriminate. The majority of people, even teenagers, are non-criminals. It targets them. It's also a myth only teenagers hear this device, I hear this device and I've not been a teenager for 15 years - I'm hardly unique, quite a large proportion of the adult population can still hear these frequencies. (If you can hear the tv flyback, you can probably hear this too).
Someone setting up a device like this is just as antisocial as them playing death metal music at annoying volumes.
While the problem with antisocial people is genuine, this is the wrong way to tackle it.
I'm 35.
I'm certain that someone down the next street from me has one of these devices, I can hear it and it's loud.
While hearing does degrade over time, for many people (especially those who've not abused their hearing) they can hear these frequencies well past their youth.
These devices are just as antisocial as playing, say, heavy metal loudly on the street. If I were a neighbour, I'd ask politely for the device to be turned off or turned down. If, after a couple of requests, this was not done, I'd do exactly the same as if a neighbour was playing loud unpleasant music - file a complaint.
Yes it does. Methane is an organic molecule. If you find methane, you've found an organic molecule. Organic chemistry is not necessarily produced by life forms.
That group of compounds (things like methane, ethane, propane, butane etc.) are all part of organic chemistry, and whether you find them with or without life they are still organic chemistry.
To write software you still have to buy a computer. I don't see that as much different as having to buy an FPGA development kit for implementing open hardware.