The main negatives are the insane complexity of the system, coupled with the vast masses of data. With an all-embracing system like this, there are so many many-to-many relationships and corner cases (which all have to be treated as a 'first class' part of the system, if it is to function at all) that it rapidly degenerates into a nightmare.
No. Blair's government uses a 'dutch auction' style of legislation to pass odious stuff.
What they do is propose something outrageously distateful, which gets parliament in uproar - while all the time they only planned something merely somewhat distateful. Parliament gets uppity, votes on it, and gets the legislation watered down to the 'somewhat distasteful' level, thinking they've won a victory. Basically, the government proposes the most draconian legislation possible and lets parliament scale it back to something they will accept, which is probably much more draconian than if they had just tried to pass what they wanted to pass in the first place.
What do you hire the gorillas with? Bribe them with bananas? I'm not sure gorillas would be all that keen to swim in the North Sea either. You might be able to train a gorilla to drive a boat eventually, perhaps. But given they are an endangered species, the RSPCA might take a dim view of you using gorillas in that manner.
I'd recommend chimpanzees. I think they are smarter than gorillas. After all, NASA managed to train chimps to fly spacecraft in the 60s.
I've been an H1B worker in the US (so all you xenophobes, kill me now. But before you do, be aware that I was significantly more expensive than the local workers - I was paid a huge international working allowance by my employer - so much so I could live *entirely* off my international service allowance and bank my entire home country salary).
Anyway - the point is this.
When working in the US, you have to go through the INS "Dehumanization Program". Not the immigration desks - no, the Houston ones at least are very good, and the immigration officers make you genuinely welcome when arriving at IAH. (Not so at Dallas Ft.Worth - I will never use that airport again). But places like the US Embassy.
The US Embassy apparently also makes up some rules of its own, too - which change all the time. Rules from the dress code if they want to interview you. They don't tell you this, and you only get to find out when they reject your application.
Two incidents spring to mind. They rejected one of my applications because the forms didn't have sufficient information. I had to travel across the country to go to the US Embassy for an interview. This is an interesting experience. The embassy has a large, square waiting room, where you first line up in single file for a delicatessen style ticket. They have a computer system which calls your number in that automated-bank-teller "Cashier number five please" voice.
So once you have the ticket, you sit down and wait. You can't really read (and the wait is long, typically 4 hours) because the numbers are called out seemingly in random order and you just KNOW if you miss your number that (a) they won't call it again and (b) if you're still there at the end because you missed your number, they will tell you to go away and re-apply (and wait 4 weeks for the next appointment). Placed around the room are these "newspapers" with a title something like "Going USA", produced by the embassy about visa issues. The first half of this newspaper is dedicated to how terrible your home country is, how superb the USA is, and how all the people who emigrated there are doing so well and making money hand over fist. The second half of the newspaper is dedicated to why we are not, under any circumstances, going to issue you with a visa!
So after an indeterminate wait, my number was called. The guy behind the desk asks, "How long have you worked at $BIG_COMPANY?". "X years," I tell them. "OK, thanks" he says, stamps my application, "Your visa will arrive in the mail in a few days".
They could have asked that question over the phone.
Our company had a department to handle international assignments (in a big IT firm, there's always quite a few people on foreign assignments). They told me that what generally happens is that you figure out how the embassy wants the paperwork and forms filled in by re-filing them until they stop rejecting them. Then you keep that format. After about six months, they suddenly start getting rejected again, so you go through the process of repeatedly refiling them until they stop bouncing - and stick to that format. Then six months after that... rinse, lather, repeat. The Embassy keeps changing its procedures and rules and refuse to tell you what you need to do, so you have to go through this time-wasting and frustrating process to get visa forms accepted.
The next run-in I had with the embassy was an extension to my H1-B visa. This was actually pre-approved by the INS in the US - so it was all approved, and I had paperwork to prove it. I went on vacation, so I needed to have a new visa put in my passport. This meant sending off the approval paperwork to the embassy, along with a form. I filled in the form, and sent it all off. It was a trivial task - the Embassy had to do nothing *except* print off a new visa and stick it into the passport.
They rejected it. Why? The form was out of date. So I downloaded the new one off their website. IT WAS IDENTICAL to the one I filed EXCEPT the date at the bottom. Absolutely ident
The trouble is that PHP is a particularly egregious example of sloppy design. I prefer to name it in the vein of PGP - if PGP means 'Pretty Good Privacy', then PHP means 'Pretty Hopeless Privacy'...
I think the wires just look thick because the insulation on them is quite thick. They fit well in the holes.
I tend to route things differently on perfboard to breadboard - I have found that the quickest way to use perfboard (usually, I use tripad board) is to use transformer wire on the bottom of the board. Melt a blob of solder onto the iron tip, and plunge the end of the xformer wire into the blob, and it neatly strips off the enamel insulation. Then heat the solder holding the component to the perfboard and sink the now tinned end of the transformer wire in.
I've gone off veroboard (stripboard) though. Too much track cutting.
I've just started this week making my own PCBs, using GNU PCB to lay out, then laser print onto glossy 'photo' paper, then iron on to copper clad board and etch.
No, you only need a handful to get started. Many learning circuits can be thrown together with a handful of transistors, resistors, capacitors and the like on breadboard. Besides, many components are dirt cheap (so I just buy ten at once). Pick an area you want to learn about, concentrate on that area, and just get the parts for the area you want to learn about.
I'm experimenting by building an 8 bit computer. The breadboard and LCD were probably the most expensive parts. The actual components - the Z80 CPU (a couple of quid brand new, or about 99p off an ebayer), 32K static RAM, flash ROM etc. really didn't cost much. A selection of the most useful logic gate ICs don't cost much, these things cost pennies. You only need tens - not hundreds, let alone thousands - to experiment. Inexpensive mail order places like Bowood Electronics means if I find I'm short of a needed part, it arrives in the post the next day.
I always tend to order at least 5 of any inexpensive part - for example, if I find I'm short of 4071 2-input OR gates, I order 5 or 10 because they always come in handy for future projects. (Bowood also have a 'special offer' page, which often has lots of ten of a given type of logic IC for pennies) That way, I've built up a reasonable stock so I have all the most commonly used parts on hand.
There are "capital F" Free electronics design tools - I use GNU PCB and gSchem on Linux. The two can be linked together to produce PCBs from schematics. It isn't tied to a particular PCB fabricator - indeed, I've just started fabricating my own PCBs at home.
...oh, an observation: I've only just started to make my own PCBs, but *don't* print a mirror image of the solder side if you want it to be on the *bottom* of the board (although this might depend on the tool you're using). When you view your printed output from above, this would be like viewing the board from above with the copper bottom most (imagine if the board was transparent). The bottom side must be printed true image, and the top side mirror image.
This caught me out with my first board because without thinking I thought "of course I need to mirror image it".
Secondly, when learning, I think starting out with breadboard is a lot more productive than jumping straight in with PCBs! However, when it comes to making a PCB (I've now used strip board, tri pad board, and finally I've started making PCBs), a PCB is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier to do than strip board, which is evil. The cheap glossy photo paper and laser printer method works *unbelivably well*. I couldn't believe just how well the toner transferred to the copper clad board, and how precise the traces were - if you covered it in a green solder resist layer it would have looked like it came from a factory.
Using IC sockets will help avoid frying ICs (and also makes the board easy to fix when one of your experiments accidentally puts a few too many volts where they shouldn't be).
Why do you need to tinker with anything that has "power"? A Z80 CPU is still as good today as it was 20 years ago (and they are still made - they are popular in embedded applications, which was after all what they were originally designed for). You can make plenty of useful devices with a 4MHz PIC or a 4MHz Z80. If you're making embedded computers, they simply don't NEED the power of a modern desktop CPU. I think people forget this and get dragged on with the marketing myth that everything needs a 1GHz+ processor when it simply doesn't. A 4MHz Z80 will still barely work up a sweat as part of say, a logging weather station. Which is a good thing because you want the battery to last.
74 series and 4000 series logic, 555 timers and the like are STILL as much fun to play with as they were 20 years ago. The existence of 3.6 GHz Xeon processors does not reduce the amount of learning or fun you can have from these parts, nor does it make simple parts any less useful than they ever were. You can still make useful gadgets with simple parts, and it's not hard to interface them with a modern desktop computer if need be.
I currently have an 8 bit computer breadboarded - Z80 CPU, 32K RAM, 128K flash ROM, PIO, LCD interface and keypad. Breadboarding is practical for any IC you can get in DIL packages. I'm still learning, and there are plenty of fairly complex circuits you can make on breadboard (even if they do look like a rats nest).
Most things are still available in DIL packages - the Z80 CPU and its peripheral chips are *still manufactured* in that form. Static RAM and flash ROM is easy to get hold of in DIL packages. Of course, there are mountains of 74-series and 4000-series logic and other things like 555 timers made in their tens of millions.
I started with electronics properly in about September time. Probably the most valuable parts I have in terms of experimentation:
1. A large breadboard (the plug in type). This means you can rapidly try things out. I now have two breadboards - one small, and one large. 2. An oscilloscope. I bought a dual trace 20MHz Gould scope off an eBayer. I would have been lost without it. The dual trace is very useful too when you need to compare signals or check that things are synchronized. 3. The Internet. Seriously - some good resources:
http://www.standardics.nxp.com/products/ Datasheets for every standard logic IC (4000 series and 74 series). Browse the site for chips you're interested in. They are cheap to buy from your local distributor (in Britain, you've got several choices - RS components, Maplin (a bit on the expensive side, but very fast delivery), Bowood Electronics (a superb small firm, fast delivery), Farnell (not used them yet, but they have an extensive catalogue).
http://www.wikipedia.org/ Lots of good articles. I used their article on buck and boost converters to get started on making high voltage switch mode power supplies for my first proper project.
The first thing I did on my breadboard was make simple circuits and understand them - using the versatile 555 timer, making logic gates out of discrete components, making an oscillator from transistors, capacitors and resistors. Then learned about how inductors work - how to use a small inductor to make a DC-DC converter. Comparing how bipolar transistors and MOSFETs work. Making small practical circuits like pulse generators etc. Then using logic ICs
I then built a Nixie tube display (with 7 tubes) out of raw 4000 series logic - essentially, I designed and built my own UART to receive data from a computer's RS232 port and display it on the tubes, and to be able to send data back to select what to display on the tubes. (Two pages of pictures here: http://www.alioth.net/pics/nixies/nixies.html). The nixie tube project was a great one to do as I had to learn lots of different things to be able to make it work: how to make a 170 volt switch mode power supply to the use of digital logic and how to debounce switches.
Now I've started designing and building an 8 bit computer based around the Z80, with flash ROM and static RAM plus an LCD interface etc. It actually works, too - I've got it running off a 4MHz crystal oscillator that I built. There's still a lot to learn - but I've gone from having very little knowledge of how to build electronic circuits to designing and building a simple 8 bit computer (with a keypad for input and LCD for output) in just a few months - if you're already experienced with software, learning about digital electronics is fairly natural. I can really recommend building something reasonably complex out of discrete 4000 or 74 series parts, because this is a great vehicle for learning about digital electronics, and how the real world tends to impinge on you a lot more than it does with software.
Pictures of the rat's nest of wiring that's the Z80 project is here (I've not updated it in a few weeks, I have more photos and assembler code to go in soon): http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/
Why the Z80? Unlike all other processors, the Z80 has registers implemented in static memory. This means when you're experimenting, you can clock the processor arbitrarily slowly - fractions of 1Hz if you really want (or even clock it by hand). This makes early circuits A LOT easier to debug. It's not hard to program, has superb documentation free to download from Zilog. It has separate I/O
Maxtor low profile drives in the Hewlett-Packard machines were decidedly unreliable - about 15% failed in less than a year in the network of 80 machines (and these are only 40GB drives). We replaced them with WD and Seagate drives - we've not had a single failure since then. Part of the problem is the design of the cooling in the ultraslim HP machines isn't very good - the drive bay gets very little cooling.
The trouble is it's a crap shoot. You don't know which drives made when are going to be reliable or unreliable until they've been in the field long enough to find out. It's not just hard drives, either. We also got hit by the capacitor plague. Machines started failing at a very high rate (we went from no failed machines in month 7 to a 50% failure rate in month 8) with some HP workstations. That batch of workstations got completely replaced under warranty - when we inspected the remaining machines we found every single one had bulging and burst capacitors. That particular batch of machines was heading for 100% failure rate. But other batches of HP machines we have just keep going on year after year without a single problem.
You can't even pin a specific manufacturer. Other Maxtor disks that we have as a group have had an extremely low failure rate - so chances are, if we now abandon Maxtor and, say, exclusively use WD, at some point we'll get a bad batch of disks from WD. With these very large disks, if you have the data to fill them, you're rolling the dice unless you have a way of doing a very good backup.
The only machines I've seen fail through bad capacitors failed due to the capacitor plague (a manufacturing defect). I have some very old computers with their original electrolytic capacitors that work just fine (the oldest, a 22 year old Sinclair Spectrum+)
I don't know the relative costs of each type in bulk - but I wonder if they just figured that it would be cheaper to manufacture the boards with SMT tantalum capacitors rather than pin-through-hole electrolytics, and are putting a spin on it?
The whole place looks pretty desperate. Even without having been burned, the place would be pretty desperate. It looks like it's starting to suffer from concrete cancer too, and there's a great deal of corrosion.
It's your problem, not the customer's problem if there is a lot of work to cancel an account. Making it hard for a customer to cancel or charging them to cancel because your cancelation processes are no good is just wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny, with all the news at the moment, I can't help thinking of that particular episode of Yes Minister.
The main negatives are the insane complexity of the system, coupled with the vast masses of data. With an all-embracing system like this, there are so many many-to-many relationships and corner cases (which all have to be treated as a 'first class' part of the system, if it is to function at all) that it rapidly degenerates into a nightmare.
No. Blair's government uses a 'dutch auction' style of legislation to pass odious stuff.
What they do is propose something outrageously distateful, which gets parliament in uproar - while all the time they only planned something merely somewhat distateful. Parliament gets uppity, votes on it, and gets the legislation watered down to the 'somewhat distasteful' level, thinking they've won a victory. Basically, the government proposes the most draconian legislation possible and lets parliament scale it back to something they will accept, which is probably much more draconian than if they had just tried to pass what they wanted to pass in the first place.
What do you hire the gorillas with? Bribe them with bananas? I'm not sure gorillas would be all that keen to swim in the North Sea either. You might be able to train a gorilla to drive a boat eventually, perhaps. But given they are an endangered species, the RSPCA might take a dim view of you using gorillas in that manner.
I'd recommend chimpanzees. I think they are smarter than gorillas. After all, NASA managed to train chimps to fly spacecraft in the 60s.
A "youngish kid" is under 15. Someone in their 20s or early 30s is an ADULT, not a kid.
I've been an H1B worker in the US (so all you xenophobes, kill me now. But before you do, be aware that I was significantly more expensive than the local workers - I was paid a huge international working allowance by my employer - so much so I could live *entirely* off my international service allowance and bank my entire home country salary).
Anyway - the point is this.
When working in the US, you have to go through the INS "Dehumanization Program". Not the immigration desks - no, the Houston ones at least are very good, and the immigration officers make you genuinely welcome when arriving at IAH. (Not so at Dallas Ft.Worth - I will never use that airport again). But places like the US Embassy.
The US Embassy apparently also makes up some rules of its own, too - which change all the time. Rules from the dress code if they want to interview you. They don't tell you this, and you only get to find out when they reject your application.
Two incidents spring to mind. They rejected one of my applications because the forms didn't have sufficient information. I had to travel across the country to go to the US Embassy for an interview. This is an interesting experience. The embassy has a large, square waiting room, where you first line up in single file for a delicatessen style ticket. They have a computer system which calls your number in that automated-bank-teller "Cashier number five please" voice.
So once you have the ticket, you sit down and wait. You can't really read (and the wait is long, typically 4 hours) because the numbers are called out seemingly in random order and you just KNOW if you miss your number that (a) they won't call it again and (b) if you're still there at the end because you missed your number, they will tell you to go away and re-apply (and wait 4 weeks for the next appointment). Placed around the room are these "newspapers" with a title something like "Going USA", produced by the embassy about visa issues. The first half of this newspaper is dedicated to how terrible your home country is, how superb the USA is, and how all the people who emigrated there are doing so well and making money hand over fist. The second half of the newspaper is dedicated to why we are not, under any circumstances, going to issue you with a visa!
So after an indeterminate wait, my number was called. The guy behind the desk asks, "How long have you worked at $BIG_COMPANY?". "X years," I tell them.
"OK, thanks" he says, stamps my application, "Your visa will arrive in the mail in a few days".
They could have asked that question over the phone.
Our company had a department to handle international assignments (in a big IT firm, there's always quite a few people on foreign assignments). They told me that what generally happens is that you figure out how the embassy wants the paperwork and forms filled in by re-filing them until they stop rejecting them. Then you keep that format. After about six months, they suddenly start getting rejected again, so you go through the process of repeatedly refiling them until they stop bouncing - and stick to that format. Then six months after that... rinse, lather, repeat. The Embassy keeps changing its procedures and rules and refuse to tell you what you need to do, so you have to go through this time-wasting and frustrating process to get visa forms accepted.
The next run-in I had with the embassy was an extension to my H1-B visa. This was actually pre-approved by the INS in the US - so it was all approved, and I had paperwork to prove it. I went on vacation, so I needed to have a new visa put in my passport. This meant sending off the approval paperwork to the embassy, along with a form. I filled in the form, and sent it all off. It was a trivial task - the Embassy had to do nothing *except* print off a new visa and stick it into the passport.
They rejected it. Why? The form was out of date. So I downloaded the new one off their website. IT WAS IDENTICAL to the one I filed EXCEPT the date at the bottom. Absolutely ident
The trouble is that PHP is a particularly egregious example of sloppy design. I prefer to name it in the vein of PGP - if PGP means 'Pretty Good Privacy', then PHP means 'Pretty Hopeless Privacy'...
No it can't. Not in any sane country, at least.
I think the wires just look thick because the insulation on them is quite thick. They fit well in the holes.
I tend to route things differently on perfboard to breadboard - I have found that the quickest way to use perfboard (usually, I use tripad board) is to use transformer wire on the bottom of the board. Melt a blob of solder onto the iron tip, and plunge the end of the xformer wire into the blob, and it neatly strips off the enamel insulation. Then heat the solder holding the component to the perfboard and sink the now tinned end of the transformer wire in.
I've gone off veroboard (stripboard) though. Too much track cutting.
I've just started this week making my own PCBs, using GNU PCB to lay out, then laser print onto glossy 'photo' paper, then iron on to copper clad board and etch.
No, you only need a handful to get started. Many learning circuits can be thrown together with a handful of transistors, resistors, capacitors and the like on breadboard. Besides, many components are dirt cheap (so I just buy ten at once). Pick an area you want to learn about, concentrate on that area, and just get the parts for the area you want to learn about.
I'm experimenting by building an 8 bit computer. The breadboard and LCD were probably the most expensive parts. The actual components - the Z80 CPU (a couple of quid brand new, or about 99p off an ebayer), 32K static RAM, flash ROM etc. really didn't cost much. A selection of the most useful logic gate ICs don't cost much, these things cost pennies. You only need tens - not hundreds, let alone thousands - to experiment. Inexpensive mail order places like Bowood Electronics means if I find I'm short of a needed part, it arrives in the post the next day.
I always tend to order at least 5 of any inexpensive part - for example, if I find I'm short of 4071 2-input OR gates, I order 5 or 10 because they always come in handy for future projects. (Bowood also have a 'special offer' page, which often has lots of ten of a given type of logic IC for pennies) That way, I've built up a reasonable stock so I have all the most commonly used parts on hand.
There are "capital F" Free electronics design tools - I use GNU PCB and gSchem on Linux. The two can be linked together to produce PCBs from schematics. It isn't tied to a particular PCB fabricator - indeed, I've just started fabricating my own PCBs at home.
...oh, an observation: I've only just started to make my own PCBs, but *don't* print a mirror image of the solder side if you want it to be on the *bottom* of the board (although this might depend on the tool you're using). When you view your printed output from above, this would be like viewing the board from above with the copper bottom most (imagine if the board was transparent). The bottom side must be printed true image, and the top side mirror image.
This caught me out with my first board because without thinking I thought "of course I need to mirror image it".
Secondly, when learning, I think starting out with breadboard is a lot more productive than jumping straight in with PCBs! However, when it comes to making a PCB (I've now used strip board, tri pad board, and finally I've started making PCBs), a PCB is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier to do than strip board, which is evil. The cheap glossy photo paper and laser printer method works *unbelivably well*. I couldn't believe just how well the toner transferred to the copper clad board, and how precise the traces were - if you covered it in a green solder resist layer it would have looked like it came from a factory.
Using IC sockets will help avoid frying ICs (and also makes the board easy to fix when one of your experiments accidentally puts a few too many volts where they shouldn't be).
Don't know about better (I've never used Eagle) but gEDA is a collection of Free (big F free) software for Unix/Linux.
Why do you need to tinker with anything that has "power"? A Z80 CPU is still as good today as it was 20 years ago (and they are still made - they are popular in embedded applications, which was after all what they were originally designed for). You can make plenty of useful devices with a 4MHz PIC or a 4MHz Z80. If you're making embedded computers, they simply don't NEED the power of a modern desktop CPU. I think people forget this and get dragged on with the marketing myth that everything needs a 1GHz+ processor when it simply doesn't. A 4MHz Z80 will still barely work up a sweat as part of say, a logging weather station. Which is a good thing because you want the battery to last.
74 series and 4000 series logic, 555 timers and the like are STILL as much fun to play with as they were 20 years ago. The existence of 3.6 GHz Xeon processors does not reduce the amount of learning or fun you can have from these parts, nor does it make simple parts any less useful than they ever were. You can still make useful gadgets with simple parts, and it's not hard to interface them with a modern desktop computer if need be.
I currently have an 8 bit computer breadboarded - Z80 CPU, 32K RAM, 128K flash ROM, PIO, LCD interface and keypad. Breadboarding is practical for any IC you can get in DIL packages. I'm still learning, and there are plenty of fairly complex circuits you can make on breadboard (even if they do look like a rats nest).
0 -Project-Pages/Image4.html
Most things are still available in DIL packages - the Z80 CPU and its peripheral chips are *still manufactured* in that form. Static RAM and flash ROM is easy to get hold of in DIL packages. Of course, there are mountains of 74-series and 4000-series logic and other things like 555 timers made in their tens of millions.
Here is my current rat's nest: http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/Z80-Project/Z8
You probably don't want to start learning and experimenting directly with 100 pin QFPs. It would be an exercise in futility.
Experiment. Really.
I started with electronics properly in about September time. Probably the most valuable parts I have in terms of experimentation:
1. A large breadboard (the plug in type). This means you can rapidly try things out. I now have two breadboards - one small, and one large.
2. An oscilloscope. I bought a dual trace 20MHz Gould scope off an eBayer. I would have been lost without it. The dual trace is very useful too when you need to compare signals or check that things are synchronized.
3. The Internet. Seriously - some good resources:
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ - Lessons in Electric Circuits, a free book - will get you started.
http://www.standardics.nxp.com/products/ Datasheets for every standard logic IC (4000 series and 74 series). Browse the site for chips you're interested in. They are cheap to buy from your local distributor (in Britain, you've got several choices - RS components, Maplin (a bit on the expensive side, but very fast delivery), Bowood Electronics (a superb small firm, fast delivery), Farnell (not used them yet, but they have an extensive catalogue).
http://www.wikipedia.org/ Lots of good articles. I used their article on buck and boost converters to get started on making high voltage switch mode power supplies for my first proper project.
The first thing I did on my breadboard was make simple circuits and understand them - using the versatile 555 timer, making logic gates out of discrete components, making an oscillator from transistors, capacitors and resistors. Then learned about how inductors work - how to use a small inductor to make a DC-DC converter. Comparing how bipolar transistors and MOSFETs work. Making small practical circuits like pulse generators etc. Then using logic ICs
I then built a Nixie tube display (with 7 tubes) out of raw 4000 series logic - essentially, I designed and built my own UART to receive data from a computer's RS232 port and display it on the tubes, and to be able to send data back to select what to display on the tubes. (Two pages of pictures here: http://www.alioth.net/pics/nixies/nixies.html). The nixie tube project was a great one to do as I had to learn lots of different things to be able to make it work: how to make a 170 volt switch mode power supply to the use of digital logic and how to debounce switches.
Now I've started designing and building an 8 bit computer based around the Z80, with flash ROM and static RAM plus an LCD interface etc. It actually works, too - I've got it running off a 4MHz crystal oscillator that I built. There's still a lot to learn - but I've gone from having very little knowledge of how to build electronic circuits to designing and building a simple 8 bit computer (with a keypad for input and LCD for output) in just a few months - if you're already experienced with software, learning about digital electronics is fairly natural. I can really recommend building something reasonably complex out of discrete 4000 or 74 series parts, because this is a great vehicle for learning about digital electronics, and how the real world tends to impinge on you a lot more than it does with software.
Pictures of the rat's nest of wiring that's the Z80 project is here (I've not updated it in a few weeks, I have more photos and assembler code to go in soon): http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/
Why the Z80? Unlike all other processors, the Z80 has registers implemented in static memory. This means when you're experimenting, you can clock the processor arbitrarily slowly - fractions of 1Hz if you really want (or even clock it by hand). This makes early circuits A LOT easier to debug. It's not hard to program, has superb documentation free to download from Zilog. It has separate I/O
Why shouldn't a builder be paid for building one house for the rest of their lives?
The rest of us have to continue working to make an income. I don't see why artists should be any different.
If we all had your attitude, we'd have never left the caves.
When you have many machines you soon find out.
Maxtor low profile drives in the Hewlett-Packard machines were decidedly unreliable - about 15% failed in less than a year in the network of 80 machines (and these are only 40GB drives). We replaced them with WD and Seagate drives - we've not had a single failure since then. Part of the problem is the design of the cooling in the ultraslim HP machines isn't very good - the drive bay gets very little cooling.
The trouble is it's a crap shoot. You don't know which drives made when are going to be reliable or unreliable until they've been in the field long enough to find out. It's not just hard drives, either. We also got hit by the capacitor plague. Machines started failing at a very high rate (we went from no failed machines in month 7 to a 50% failure rate in month 8) with some HP workstations. That batch of workstations got completely replaced under warranty - when we inspected the remaining machines we found every single one had bulging and burst capacitors. That particular batch of machines was heading for 100% failure rate. But other batches of HP machines we have just keep going on year after year without a single problem.
You can't even pin a specific manufacturer. Other Maxtor disks that we have as a group have had an extremely low failure rate - so chances are, if we now abandon Maxtor and, say, exclusively use WD, at some point we'll get a bad batch of disks from WD. With these very large disks, if you have the data to fill them, you're rolling the dice unless you have a way of doing a very good backup.
The only machines I've seen fail through bad capacitors failed due to the capacitor plague (a manufacturing defect). I have some very old computers with their original electrolytic capacitors that work just fine (the oldest, a 22 year old Sinclair Spectrum+)
I don't know the relative costs of each type in bulk - but I wonder if they just figured that it would be cheaper to manufacture the boards with SMT tantalum capacitors rather than pin-through-hole electrolytics, and are putting a spin on it?
There's some pictures here http://www.bobleroi.co.uk/ScrapBook/SealandFire_3/ SealandFire_3a.html
The whole place looks pretty desperate. Even without having been burned, the place would be pretty desperate. It looks like it's starting to suffer from concrete cancer too, and there's a great deal of corrosion.
I thought the concrete legs went down to the sea floor, rather than being a floating platform.
On a point of pedantry, you won't go 'splat'. Skydivers call dying "bouncing" for a reason.
It's your problem, not the customer's problem if there is a lot of work to cancel an account. Making it hard for a customer to cancel or charging them to cancel because your cancelation processes are no good is just wrong.