imagine you're a multinational oil company with 300 billion dollars worth of oil and gas reserves, and want to know the exact amount of oil and gas coming out of each well every day or even hour by hour...
and you're doing this without the internet because you like rolling out your own private wide area network? much easier to make a WAN that sits on top of the internet.
remote administration is a lot cheaper than flying admins to every site too. so the question really is, why wouldn't these systems be hooked to the internet.
those of us who remember the old days, when slashdot was really nerdy, are kind of disheartened by people who recommend for instance, Dell, HP, or Microsoft products, who really don't know what coding in ASM is like or what it's like fixing compiler options when trying to get an open source app to compile on an unsupported os... (btw: i hate coding)
slashdrones for instance modded an anti vista joke i made recently down to +2, because they couldn't see the humor in vista being called 'slow'
Vista is Slow! it makes gnome look like it were actually compiled with optimizations. gnome runs fine on a single core 3ghz with 768 MB or ram or more, which is a lot higher than XP's decent performance on 256 MB ram with a single core 2 ghz or better (more ram, maybe a little faster cpu for heavy firefox usage) but vista is slow on a 7200 rpm drive with 2 GB of ram and a dual core 2.2 ghz cpu!
give me a break, one slashdrone says vista has great support for slower hard drives (a feature which isn't even enabled by default and takes a removable flash drive, and about 7 reboots to enable, BTW) and i get modded down to +2, on a frigging joke!
I'm gonna cite that thing about the memory http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3009 bottom of page 1 and start of page 2 explain why they couldn't get turbo memory to work (on their first review of it) because they literally had to reboot vista 7 times to enable a built-in feature of vista. nice.
this is a wonderful find, oh and BTW the area where the coal was mined was actually a peat bog, that turned into a forest in the carboniferous period, then turned into sea several times and then back into a forest, and was also a ferny weedy place. most likely earthquakes from changes in plate tectonics played a huge role in how the land mass changed, from being above land, below land, and the erosion of nearby mountains provided the silt to cover the land when it was above ground.
so no the coal was not the result of the forest, although it may have added slightly to the coal, when it was submersed, most coal is formed from wetlands where vastly more biomass concentrates and is preserved from decaying due to water covering it thus preventing microbes from getting the oxygen to decay the plant matter. if you want coal you look for places where the water was stagnant like prehistoric wetlands, or former continental shelf areas.
well, i've gotten 2 ask slashdot articles on slow news days. in comparison to me, you get a lot of submissions that get front page.
i used to try to find interesting geek news and link summaries and have good links about the information, but after my 20th rejection i just kinda quit. the new automatic journal submission model makes it a bit easier than in the past, but i still don't get stuff about tech that i journal about to make main page.
"Why is it wrong for a Slashdot post to express an opinion?"
Because of the borg, you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. opinion must be shared by all, or not exist. there can be no bias, except that of the slashdrone. there must be no argument on what is right, for the slashdrones can not argue.
actually it has to do with lazy editors who rely on quality story submissions from a handful of 'power' submitters who rarely get their summaries wrong and often stimulate topics of discussion, while being in general related to the main page.
NYCL has submitted tons of YRO type content including front page material, so the editor probably only checked the subject and submitter before approving this for front page.
if i had submitted this it would have gotten rejected, easily. but it was NYCL. so, yeah. also, this subject has been covered on front page in the past, and this sort of adds a conclusion. I'm actually surprised that a publisher was actually willing to publish a non-official lexicon in the first place, they're generally poorly selling books that only die hard fans buy, and as this case demonstrates, significant added value has to be added to avoid lawsuits, which usually means getting access to authors notes to flesh out details that they just couldn't put in a 'interesting' fun to read book.
"If someone could explain in non-layman's terms what exactly the problem was I would much appreciate it."
nobody else caught your request for 'non-layman's terms' so here goes:
Chip Scale Packaging (CSP) Technology The information presented in this chapter has been collected from a number of sources describing CSP activities, both nationally at IVF and reported elsewhere in the literature. The most important of the former being the Chip Scale Packaging Task Force, an international multi-client programme carried out between 1996 and 1997 and a project work carried out by two students at Chalmers University of Technology.. D1. Introduction to CSP Technology D1.1 Definition of CSP Originally, CSP was the acronym for Chip Size Packaging but very few packages are of true chip size. Therefore, the acronym is today usually used for Chip Scale Packaging. According to IPC's standard J-STD- 012, "Implementation of Flip Chip and Chip Scale Technology", a CSP shall have an area of no more than 1.2X the area of the original die size and is direct surface mountable [D1]. D1.2 Description of various types of CSPs In contrast to most other package types, the name of the package type, "Chip Scale Packaging", contains no information about how the package is constructed, except for that it shall have approximately the same size as the chip. Therefore, CSPs include component types with probably more dissimilar characteristics than any two other IC package types clearly manifesting the inaccuracy to look at CSPs as a homogenous group. Some packages look like miniaturised BGAs which names like miniBGA and BGA indicate. Others have leads which give them properties similar to conventional leaded packages such as PLCCs. For this reason, CSPs are often classified based on their structure. At least four major categories have been proposed [D2]. These are: flex circuit interposer, rigid substrate interposer, custom lead frame, and wafer-level assembly. Examples of packages of these categories are given in Figure D1. Chip Sealing Resin Lead Frame Wire Bond Tape Protective Layer Custom Lead Frame Package by Fujitsu Rigid Substrate Interposer Package by Matsushita Chip Sealing Resin Land pad Ceramic Substrate Via Stud Bump Flex Circuit Interposer Package by Tessera Chip Ring Lead Flex Tape Bump Array Elastomer Wafer-Level Assembly Package by ChipScale Metal Cap Epoxy Metal Lead Metal Plated Silicon Post Silicon Circuit Figure D1. Main CSP Categories D1.3 Driving Forces for using CSPs The main driving forces for using CSPs are:
Improvement in performance
Size and weight reduction
Easier assembly process (compared to bare die attach)
Lower overall production costs. Of these, reduction of size and weight are probably the most important factors for initial adoption of CSP technology. Consequently, consumer products like camcorders, mobile phones, and laptops are among the products that have been first to utilise CSPs. D1.4 Advantages and disadvantages using CSPs Chip Scale Packaging combines the best of flip chip assembly and surface mount technology. It gives almost the size and performance benefits as bare die chip assembly, at the same time as it offer the advantages of a encapsulated package. CSPs can be standardised, tested, surface mounted, and reworked. So far most CSPs have been produced for applications with rather low number of I/Os but many types of CSPs can be produced with large number of interconnections. However, before CSPs with large number of I/Os will find widespread use, techniques for producing reliable low-cost high-density printed boards must be developed. The advantages and disadvantages of CSPs depend on what one compare with, standard surface mount or bare die assembly. Due to the large spread of characteristics for various CSPs, it also depend on the type of
high density algae 'factories' that uses sealed growth environments use less water per acre than soy beans.
the problem is it takes money to build those kinds of places, and in the past oil has always been cheaper.
open air ponds lose water to evaporation, but also can overtop from rain, but again, the initial filling of the tanks uses the most water, and algae also grow nicely in salt water, meaning you can pump in water from the ocean.
ask anyone who has a home garden and a swimming pool, which uses more water in the summer, the garden, or the swimming pool, and they'll tell you it's the garden, because the pool gets topped off by rain and stays cold enough that it doesn't evaporate water the way plants do.
Right from your article "and be cheaper to manage"
sounds like the LSE fired expensive. knowledgeable admins and went for 'cheaper' ones, there is your problem right there. windows server isn't perfect, but clearly they had good hardware, were running mission critical apps, but went with cheaper less experienced admins.
also, your fine article specified there were 'no production outages', they don't claim the system ran 24/7/365 with no reboots or glitches, but that there was no production outages for six years. there is quite a bit of difference. the former states that admins and hardware were able to offer the specific services needed at the time it was needed for 6 years, but not on the amount of redundant hardware, etc required to accomplish everything.
so given everything i've read here, under experienced windows admin approves an under tested system upgrade that epic fails, and takes down the production server for the first time in 6 years. no shock here, they wanted to cut corners on admin costs, they brought the epic fail on themselves.
uranium 238 is radioactive, specifically it gives off alpha radiation, which is stopped by a very thin coating of metal, which makes the rounds safe to handle, but the sheathing melts or tears off on contact with an enemy tank, allowing exposure to toxic, alpha radiation emitting uranium 238, in the form of shrapnel, and particulates. when a human strikes 2 pieces of metal together sparks can be made, so just imagine when an armor piercing shell hits a tank.
oh yeah, did i mention, Depleted uranium is the ideal source for creating plutonium? all you need is a nice breeder reactor to create steady neutron flows. it's estimated that there would be enough u238 around the world to offer 5 billion years of electricity consumption if we used breeder reactors to convert it into fissile plutonium.
oh and just to be fair, india is using thorium to create uranium 233, in thermal reactors, because thorium is even more common than uranium 238. (also, thorium, and radium are byproducts of burning coal for electric generation)
okay, so the top 20 are all copyrighted content, did you bother to check if they're in google's search database too? spore the dark night
i'd keep going but wow the top 20 all show up on google, with the 'filetype:torrent' prefix, so why isn't google in court for having a 'filetype:torrent' feature which clearly makes searching for torrents with google so much easier? after all your argument is that torrents are primarily for illegal downloaders, shouldn't every search engine that finds torrents be affected?
iso hunt is a search engine, their problem? they only do torrents.
why are people going after the search engines, and not the torrent trackers or the torrent seeders? oh wait, they tried going after the 'seeders' and failed miserably in every appearance in court.
I normally write about robots in Japan on this blog but today I am going to write about a robot that is being developed in the U.S. This is because I had the chance to interview Brian P. Gerkey, Research Scientist at Willow Garage, for the Japanese GetRobo Blog, and I felt it important for me to report this in English too at this time of era.
Willow Garage is a privately-funded research lab in California which is developing a hardware and software platform for Personal Robots - robots that do tasks for humans in everyday lives. The company is unique in that it has enough resources to "indefinitely" maintain a lab of 60 researchers without making any profit. The goal of the company is to make a positive and big impact in the robotics community by fully utilizing the open source development process.
The hardware platform is called PR2 and the software team at Willow Garage is developing the Robot Operating System (ROS) for PR2, a modular software system designed to facilitate code reuse throughout the robotics community. Brian is on the team developing ROS (led by Morgan Quigley at Stanford University) and is also the lead in developing all the applications that sit on top of ROS. Brian is well-known as the founder of The Player Project which he will explain about during the interview.
The following is an edited version of the interview with Brian (photographed below).
Gerkey_2 GetRobo: How did you get to join Willow Garage?
Brian: I was at SRI doing various kinds of robotics research. I had been there for 2 and a half years and was perfectly happy and wasn't particularly looking for another opportunity. But Eric Berger at Willow Garage whom I knew from Stanford contacted me and asked whether I was interested in joining. I was a bit wary at first since it is an unusual place. And I took a little bit of convincing to be sure.
GetRobo: What were you wary about?
Brian: One aspect of it is that I wanted to understand what the motivations were in particular of Scott and Steve, meaning that they're running the organization so I wanted to understand what their motivations were in what they were doing. Because I'm used to places like universities where the motivation is to do science, and to do research you have to go out and get contracts to support it. Then there are places like SRI where you do science but the goal there is to get clients. And in a fully industrial setting the goal is to get clients by selling products or services. Willow Garage doesn't fit into any of those categories, so I just wanted to understand why it was that they were doing what they were doing. And eventually they came to convince me that the idea is to take this long runway approach in developing technologies by putting significant resources into a focused topic in a way that allows you to spend years working on it to get to a point where business opportunities present themselves. So we are neither living off day-to-day contract income as like a place like SRI would nor are we trying desperately to get a marketable product out the door in order to satisfy our venture capital investors like a normal startup would operate.
GetRobo: What is your role at Willow Garage?
Brian: My role is software lead for the PR2. Morgan at Stanford is the lead on ROS which is the underlying infrastructure that we are building on, and I'm the lead here in developing all the applications that sit on the top of ROS. And that involves everything from designing the architecture of the software that we are building to the determination of the development policy since we have a lot of people writing the software. We have things like testing infrastructure and coding guidelines - not all of it are my favorite things to do, but important things for a professional softw
sadly, $250 off the retail price with 2 year commitment is standard for all the wireless carriers. and i mean all of them. ironically, for 1 year commitment you get about $200 off, so most phones are priced just over $200 or more, so that the 'basic' phone is free, the slightly better model free with 2 years, and the premium phones cost $$.
and a phone designed for the blind is a 'premium' although the phone probably runs linux, just like most of the other cell phones out there, blind users need something like orca, and making it screen less compensates for having to run text to speech software.
so it's a premium phone at a premium price. it's too bad my phone is discontinued, because it has a nice set of A-Z keys around the 'number keys' the alphabet keys stick out, making it possible to 'feel' your way around the phone, ah well, my phone would require counting bumps to figure out which key is which. ah well, i guess the blind are getting ripped off, because there aren't as many of them as there are sighted people.
you don't need to go all the way back to WWII we've been using a kind of atomic weapon since the iraq war. http://www.rense.com/general56/dep.htm 315-330 tons to so far 1575 tons of depleted uranium is enough to kill a lot of people.
we used them in the gulf war as well, and in Afghanistan too, mostly they're used as tank piercing rounds, but on impact they release quite a bit of DU which is why it's a favorite tank piercer not only do you pierce the armor, you kill the crew in a matter of minutes, plus America has over 100 million tons of the stuff, and it's not good for anything except tank piercing rounds, so they have to store it like any radioactive contaminated metals. the more they fire off as weapons, the less they have to store.
"Build irrigation canals from Alaska and quadruple the levies on the Mississippi? "
actually, what we want to do is the opposite of build massive levies on the Mississippi. we want to dredge a flood canal that leads the floodwaters to swampland on both sides of the Mississippi, by encouraging natural flooding in the swampland every spring, we can help rebuild the wetlands by depositing silt in the swamps every year, and help counteract saltwater invasion that kills off the swamp and turns it into a gradually eroding shoreline.
it's not impossible to create a man directed flood, and ideally the flood won't affect normal human populations centers, since much of Louisiana is wetlands and it's hard to build on wetlands.
problem is nobody wants to pay for the project, even though dredging canals and maybe even having them real deep and have a big floodgate in the design that can be closed if flooding is too high would save tons of hurricane damage (specifically the storm surges) which are getting worse and worse each year. during Katrina it took a level 3 hurricane to storm surge up over the tops of the canals this year a category 2 was almost topping the same, rebuilt walls. all because we built levy systems to protect cities from flooding and denied the wetlands their annual silt deposits that helped them grow, to replace what hurricanes had torn down the last year.
actually, rather than reverse engineering the whole HDD the easiest thing to do, would be to remove the read/write heads and put an interface up to an read/write head emulator, and give the data back based on the pattern that you believe is the 'original, pre dd' state.
and of course, be ready to tweak that data, repeatedly, preferably automatically until all the file checksums match for all the known files and then play around with the remaining data until you achieve the goal of finding out the name of the file or folder.
but again, the price for doing this is a lot more than the cost of a HDD ($60, although new 80 gig HDDs are now only $25) plus $40 in pocket cash doesn't even come close to the real world cost of trying to recover data from a hdd that has been dded. it's pretty clear the software/hardware on the drive itself is unable to read such data, or else some one would have done it.
also, fully dissecting the contents of a formatted HDD might require peeling off the magnetic material in layers, to get the full pattern, the rules of the contest clearly make that against the rules. because the hd must be working afterwards... peeling the magnetic layers to get the most accurate precise reading of how the metal has been magnetized in the past might be required to get data off a dded hdd.
if someone wants to have a serious contest, offer half a million as a reward for reading the dded data. then someone will try to claim it. $40 is not worth it.
"They'll probably kick it down to something the family is actually able to pay"
and AT&T will still profit. the sad thing is that unlimited data even over wireless doesn't really cost that much. especially if you're just posting digital pictures to some online site so everyone in your family can download them.
it's already been said but there was nothing worth charging $20,000 for, sending a couple dozen photos each around a couple MB max is worth $20,000? that's the cost of putting up like 20 cellular towers...
the scam is that most people just hit 1 bad tower, and pay the crazy $150 for 1 MB of data, because the rest of the time they were in a normal service plan range.
the thing is, while Microsoft does make games, it's the 3rd party licenses that get the lions share of the market. yeah i know there are usually some form of a fee for being officially licensed. but who knew rockstar games was going to be game when GTA 1 came out and sold hugely?
because of anti dumping laws very few consoles have ever been sold below cost, although there is some question as to if those companies didn't play the 'shell' game, of using VC as a front to create one time part supplier 'shell' corporations to avoid having books that show them selling parts below cost even though they did...
oh and if you're wondering, in the USA a USA company cannot be convicted of dumping. so microsoft can't be prosecuted for dumping, while sony and nintendo as foreign corporations can be sued.
I'll explain the difference, Dumping is when a company sells a product below cost to bankrupt their competitors.
Loss leaders are when a store sells a product below what they pay to draw in consumers and get sales.
Clearly the video game industry is rife with corruption and 'Dumping' primarily because hardware makers can subsidize the price of a console with license fees from game developers.
depend on 'dumpers' like Microsoft to have some very complex bookwork, and possibly some Chinese shell corporations to sell high priced parts significantly below cost, but only to Microsoft.
there are lots of ways electronics can be sold below price, specifically cell phones and satellite TV boxes, which come with service agreements. but in the cell phone market, you're not locked into a single phone, although each cell provider has their own line of phones... most big players have models for each provider, except in cases where they get more money to be 'exclusive' to AT&T (like the iphone) etc.
some of this stuff is illegal in many places, but as i said shell corporations are shady and hard to stop. because billionaires often engage in venture capitalism, it's not hard to 'invest' in a shell corporation that's going to go into an exclusive contract to say, sell 40 million $40 dollar parts at $1 a part, and have the initial VC funding of say 40 million dollars, while 'your buddy' makes a cool million cash etc... then let the company go belly up, or keep using the same shell corporation with additional rounds of VC funding...
dude, windows 95 was the version that drove me to using free open source software in the first place (i went with BSD because at the time, it had the more straight forward install) windows 98 fixed a few bugs, but it wasn't until NT/XP that windows had a solid winner of an OS on their hands.
but then, the whole not having 'security' by default bit me in the ass and i'll never quite trust windows again. keep in mind i was running a very minimal configuration of XP and behind a basic wireless router, but i got bit with a nasty polymorphic rootkit in 06' and now use a foss firewall standard. plus there are a few applications i don't trust anymore with internet, and have a non-internet windows XP machine.
Linux is finally getting to the point where it can realistically take the place of windows, but you need to teach people to no longer go out and 'buy' programs but instead to search their repositories, and when that fails search sourceforge.. otherwise they'll just complain about limited functionality.
the one downside though is games compatibility, but many people i know who play video games play consoles exclusively. windows itself can be a huge headache trying to play games. ah well.
Slashdot Mirror
imagine you're a multinational oil company with 300 billion dollars worth of oil and gas reserves, and want to know the exact amount of oil and gas coming out of each well every day or even hour by hour...
and you're doing this without the internet because you like rolling out your own private wide area network? much easier to make a WAN that sits on top of the internet.
remote administration is a lot cheaper than flying admins to every site too. so the question really is, why wouldn't these systems be hooked to the internet.
those of us who remember the old days, when slashdot was really nerdy, are kind of disheartened by people who recommend for instance, Dell, HP, or Microsoft products, who really don't know what coding in ASM is like or what it's like fixing compiler options when trying to get an open source app to compile on an unsupported os... (btw: i hate coding)
slashdrones for instance modded an anti vista joke i made recently down to +2, because they couldn't see the humor in vista being called 'slow'
Vista is Slow! it makes gnome look like it were actually compiled with optimizations. gnome runs fine on a single core 3ghz with 768 MB or ram or more, which is a lot higher than XP's decent performance on 256 MB ram with a single core 2 ghz or better (more ram, maybe a little faster cpu for heavy firefox usage) but vista is slow on a 7200 rpm drive with 2 GB of ram and a dual core 2.2 ghz cpu!
give me a break, one slashdrone says vista has great support for slower hard drives (a feature which isn't even enabled by default and takes a removable flash drive, and about 7 reboots to enable, BTW) and i get modded down to +2, on a frigging joke!
I'm gonna cite that thing about the memory http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3009 bottom of page 1 and start of page 2 explain why they couldn't get turbo memory to work (on their first review of it) because they literally had to reboot vista 7 times to enable a built-in feature of vista. nice.
"from being above land, below land, "
from being above sea level and below sea level
is what i meant, whoops. i reread it and still didn't catch it ugh.
well, finding that in a very short period of time, of natural global warming, that rainforests are replaced with giant ferns is a little disheartening. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
this is a wonderful find, oh and BTW the area where the coal was mined was actually a peat bog, that turned into a forest in the carboniferous period, then turned into sea several times and then back into a forest, and was also a ferny weedy place. most likely earthquakes from changes in plate tectonics played a huge role in how the land mass changed, from being above land, below land, and the erosion of nearby mountains provided the silt to cover the land when it was above ground.
so no the coal was not the result of the forest, although it may have added slightly to the coal, when it was submersed, most coal is formed from wetlands where vastly more biomass concentrates and is preserved from decaying due to water covering it thus preventing microbes from getting the oxygen to decay the plant matter. if you want coal you look for places where the water was stagnant like prehistoric wetlands, or former continental shelf areas.
well, i've gotten 2 ask slashdot articles on slow news days. in comparison to me, you get a lot of submissions that get front page.
i used to try to find interesting geek news and link summaries and have good links about the information, but after my 20th rejection i just kinda quit. the new automatic journal submission model makes it a bit easier than in the past, but i still don't get stuff about tech that i journal about to make main page.
"Why is it wrong for a Slashdot post to express an opinion?"
Because of the borg, you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. opinion must be shared by all, or not exist. there can be no bias, except that of the slashdrone. there must be no argument on what is right, for the slashdrones can not argue.
actually it has to do with lazy editors who rely on quality story submissions from a handful of 'power' submitters who rarely get their summaries wrong and often stimulate topics of discussion, while being in general related to the main page.
NYCL has submitted tons of YRO type content including front page material, so the editor probably only checked the subject and submitter before approving this for front page.
if i had submitted this it would have gotten rejected, easily. but it was NYCL. so, yeah. also, this subject has been covered on front page in the past, and this sort of adds a conclusion. I'm actually surprised that a publisher was actually willing to publish a non-official lexicon in the first place, they're generally poorly selling books that only die hard fans buy, and as this case demonstrates, significant added value has to be added to avoid lawsuits, which usually means getting access to authors notes to flesh out details that they just couldn't put in a 'interesting' fun to read book.
"If someone could explain in non-layman's terms what exactly the problem was I would much appreciate it."
nobody else caught your request for 'non-layman's terms' so here goes:
Chip Scale Packaging (CSP) Technology
The information presented in this chapter has been collected from a number of sources describing CSP
activities, both nationally at IVF and reported elsewhere in the literature. The most important of the former
being the Chip Scale Packaging Task Force, an international multi-client programme carried out between
1996 and 1997 and a project work carried out by two students at Chalmers University of Technology..
D1. Introduction to CSP Technology
D1.1
Definition of CSP
Originally, CSP was the acronym for Chip Size Packaging but very few packages are of true chip size.
Therefore, the acronym is today usually used for Chip Scale Packaging. According to IPC's standard J-STD-
012, "Implementation of Flip Chip and Chip Scale Technology", a CSP shall have an area of
no more than 1.2X the area of the original die size and is direct surface mountable [D1].
D1.2
Description of various types of CSPs
In contrast to most other package types, the name of the package type, "Chip Scale Packaging", contains no
information about how the package is constructed, except for that it shall have approximately the same size
as the chip. Therefore, CSPs include component types with probably more dissimilar characteristics than
any two other IC package types clearly manifesting the inaccuracy to look at CSPs as a homogenous group.
Some packages look like miniaturised BGAs which names like miniBGA and BGA indicate. Others have
leads which give them properties similar to conventional leaded packages such as PLCCs. For this reason,
CSPs are often classified based on their structure. At least four major categories have been proposed [D2].
These are: flex circuit interposer, rigid substrate interposer, custom lead frame, and wafer-level assembly.
Examples of packages of these categories are given in Figure D1.
Chip
Sealing Resin
Lead Frame
Wire Bond
Tape
Protective
Layer
Custom Lead Frame
Package by Fujitsu
Rigid Substrate Interposer
Package by Matsushita
Chip
Sealing Resin
Land pad
Ceramic Substrate
Via
Stud Bump
Flex Circuit Interposer
Package by Tessera
Chip
Ring
Lead
Flex Tape
Bump Array
Elastomer
Wafer-Level Assembly
Package by ChipScale
Metal Cap
Epoxy
Metal Lead
Metal Plated Silicon Post
Silicon Circuit
Figure D1. Main CSP Categories
D1.3
Driving Forces for using CSPs
The main driving forces for using CSPs are:
Improvement in performance
Size and weight reduction
Easier assembly process (compared to bare die attach)
Lower overall production costs.
Of these, reduction of size and weight are probably the most important factors for initial adoption of CSP
technology. Consequently, consumer products like camcorders, mobile phones, and laptops are among the
products that have been first to utilise CSPs.
D1.4
Advantages and disadvantages using CSPs
Chip Scale Packaging combines the best of flip chip assembly and surface mount technology. It gives
almost the size and performance benefits as bare die chip assembly, at the same time as it offer the
advantages of a encapsulated package. CSPs can be standardised, tested, surface mounted, and reworked.
So far most CSPs have been produced for applications with rather low number of I/Os but many types of
CSPs can be produced with large number of interconnections. However, before CSPs with large number of
I/Os will find widespread use, techniques for producing reliable low-cost high-density printed boards must be
developed.
The advantages and disadvantages of CSPs depend on what one compare with, standard surface mount or
bare die assembly. Due to the large spread of characteristics for various CSPs, it also depend on the type of
high density algae 'factories' that uses sealed growth environments use less water per acre than soy beans.
the problem is it takes money to build those kinds of places, and in the past oil has always been cheaper.
open air ponds lose water to evaporation, but also can overtop from rain, but again, the initial filling of the tanks uses the most water, and algae also grow nicely in salt water, meaning you can pump in water from the ocean.
ask anyone who has a home garden and a swimming pool, which uses more water in the summer, the garden, or the swimming pool, and they'll tell you it's the garden, because the pool gets topped off by rain and stays cold enough that it doesn't evaporate water the way plants do.
Right from your article "and be cheaper to manage"
sounds like the LSE fired expensive. knowledgeable admins and went for 'cheaper' ones, there is your problem right there. windows server isn't perfect, but clearly they had good hardware, were running mission critical apps, but went with cheaper less experienced admins.
also, your fine article specified there were 'no production outages', they don't claim the system ran 24/7/365 with no reboots or glitches, but that there was no production outages for six years. there is quite a bit of difference. the former states that admins and hardware were able to offer the specific services needed at the time it was needed for 6 years, but not on the amount of redundant hardware, etc required to accomplish everything.
so given everything i've read here, under experienced windows admin approves an under tested system upgrade that epic fails, and takes down the production server for the first time in 6 years. no shock here, they wanted to cut corners on admin costs, they brought the epic fail on themselves.
to run vista, or do you need a RAID array of these drives.
uranium 238 is radioactive, specifically it gives off alpha radiation, which is stopped by a very thin coating of metal, which makes the rounds safe to handle, but the sheathing melts or tears off on contact with an enemy tank, allowing exposure to toxic, alpha radiation emitting uranium 238, in the form of shrapnel, and particulates. when a human strikes 2 pieces of metal together sparks can be made, so just imagine when an armor piercing shell hits a tank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-238
oh yeah, did i mention, Depleted uranium is the ideal source for creating plutonium? all you need is a nice breeder reactor to create steady neutron flows. it's estimated that there would be enough u238 around the world to offer 5 billion years of electricity consumption if we used breeder reactors to convert it into fissile plutonium.
there are several ways to create neutrons, #1 build a fusor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor #2 mix radium with beryllium.
oh and just to be fair, india is using thorium to create uranium 233, in thermal reactors, because thorium is even more common than uranium 238. (also, thorium, and radium are byproducts of burning coal for electric generation)
okay, so the top 20 are all copyrighted content, did you bother to check if they're in google's search database too? spore
the dark night
i'd keep going but wow the top 20 all show up on google, with the 'filetype:torrent' prefix, so why isn't google in court for having a 'filetype:torrent' feature which clearly makes searching for torrents with google so much easier? after all your argument is that torrents are primarily for illegal downloaders, shouldn't every search engine that finds torrents be affected?
iso hunt is a search engine, their problem? they only do torrents.
why are people going after the search engines, and not the torrent trackers or the torrent seeders? oh wait, they tried going after the 'seeders' and failed miserably in every appearance in court.
http://getrobo.typepad.com/getrobo/2008/08/interviewing-br.html
in case it gets /.ed full text below.
"Interviewing Brian Gerkey at Willow Garage
I normally write about robots in Japan on this blog but today I am going to write about a robot that is being developed in the U.S. This is because I had the chance to interview Brian P. Gerkey, Research Scientist at Willow Garage, for the Japanese GetRobo Blog, and I felt it important for me to report this in English too at this time of era.
Willow Garage is a privately-funded research lab in California which is developing a hardware and software platform for Personal Robots - robots that do tasks for humans in everyday lives. The company is unique in that it has enough resources to "indefinitely" maintain a lab of 60 researchers without making any profit. The goal of the company is to make a positive and big impact in the robotics community by fully utilizing the open source development process.
The hardware platform is called PR2 and the software team at Willow Garage is developing the Robot Operating System (ROS) for PR2, a modular software system designed to facilitate code reuse throughout the robotics community. Brian is on the team developing ROS (led by Morgan Quigley at Stanford University) and is also the lead in developing all the applications that sit on top of ROS. Brian is well-known as the founder of The Player Project which he will explain about during the interview.
The following is an edited version of the interview with Brian (photographed below).
Gerkey_2 GetRobo: How did you get to join Willow Garage?
Brian: I was at SRI doing various kinds of robotics research. I had been there for 2 and a half years and was perfectly happy and wasn't particularly looking for another opportunity. But Eric Berger at Willow Garage whom I knew from Stanford contacted me and asked whether I was interested in joining. I was a bit wary at first since it is an unusual place. And I took a little bit of convincing to be sure.
GetRobo: What were you wary about?
Brian: One aspect of it is that I wanted to understand what the motivations were in particular of Scott and Steve, meaning that they're running the organization so I wanted to understand what their motivations were in what they were doing. Because I'm used to places like universities where the motivation is to do science, and to do research you have to go out and get contracts to support it. Then there are places like SRI where you do science but the goal there is to get clients. And in a fully industrial setting the goal is to get clients by selling products or services. Willow Garage doesn't fit into any of those categories, so I just wanted to understand why it was that they were doing what they were doing. And eventually they came to convince me that the idea is to take this long runway approach in developing technologies by putting significant resources into a focused topic in a way that allows you to spend years working on it to get to a point where business opportunities present themselves. So we are neither living off day-to-day contract income as like a place like SRI would nor are we trying desperately to get a marketable product out the door in order to satisfy our venture capital investors like a normal startup would operate.
GetRobo: What is your role at Willow Garage?
Brian: My role is software lead for the PR2. Morgan at Stanford is the lead on ROS which is the underlying infrastructure that we are building on, and I'm the lead here in developing all the applications that sit on the top of ROS. And that involves everything from designing the architecture of the software that we are building to the determination of the development policy since we have a lot of people writing the software. We have things like testing infrastructure and coding guidelines - not all of it are my favorite things to do, but important things for a professional softw
since when does isohunt brag about providing illegal, copyrighted works on it?
try "linux" http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=linux wow i didn't know a version of linux had had over 10,000 seeders (parsix, linux by name)
okay not a fan of formatting and installing, how about a vmware appliance http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=vmware+appliance
yeah, isohunt suggests that you get full iso images, but what full iso images? of copyrighted contet? or of gnu linux isos?
sadly, $250 off the retail price with 2 year commitment is standard for all the wireless carriers. and i mean all of them. ironically, for 1 year commitment you get about $200 off, so most phones are priced just over $200 or more, so that the 'basic' phone is free, the slightly better model free with 2 years, and the premium phones cost $$.
and a phone designed for the blind is a 'premium' although the phone probably runs linux, just like most of the other cell phones out there, blind users need something like orca, and making it screen less compensates for having to run text to speech software.
so it's a premium phone at a premium price. it's too bad my phone is discontinued, because it has a nice set of A-Z keys around the 'number keys' the alphabet keys stick out, making it possible to 'feel' your way around the phone, ah well, my phone would require counting bumps to figure out which key is which. ah well, i guess the blind are getting ripped off, because there aren't as many of them as there are sighted people.
you don't need to go all the way back to WWII we've been using a kind of atomic weapon since the iraq war. http://www.rense.com/general56/dep.htm 315-330 tons to so far 1575 tons of depleted uranium is enough to kill a lot of people.
we used them in the gulf war as well, and in Afghanistan too, mostly they're used as tank piercing rounds, but on impact they release quite a bit of DU which is why it's a favorite tank piercer not only do you pierce the armor, you kill the crew in a matter of minutes, plus America has over 100 million tons of the stuff, and it's not good for anything except tank piercing rounds, so they have to store it like any radioactive contaminated metals. the more they fire off as weapons, the less they have to store.
So do I, just wait until some hackers figure out how to make them spit out money by directing the network traffic to a comprised server.
there is a real good reason why banks are paranoid about the security of their systems, especially ATMs.
"Build irrigation canals from Alaska and quadruple the levies on the Mississippi? "
actually, what we want to do is the opposite of build massive levies on the Mississippi. we want to dredge a flood canal that leads the floodwaters to swampland on both sides of the Mississippi, by encouraging natural flooding in the swampland every spring, we can help rebuild the wetlands by depositing silt in the swamps every year, and help counteract saltwater invasion that kills off the swamp and turns it into a gradually eroding shoreline.
it's not impossible to create a man directed flood, and ideally the flood won't affect normal human populations centers, since much of Louisiana is wetlands and it's hard to build on wetlands.
problem is nobody wants to pay for the project, even though dredging canals and maybe even having them real deep and have a big floodgate in the design that can be closed if flooding is too high would save tons of hurricane damage (specifically the storm surges) which are getting worse and worse each year. during Katrina it took a level 3 hurricane to storm surge up over the tops of the canals this year a category 2 was almost topping the same, rebuilt walls. all because we built levy systems to protect cities from flooding and denied the wetlands their annual silt deposits that helped them grow, to replace what hurricanes had torn down the last year.
actually, rather than reverse engineering the whole HDD the easiest thing to do, would be to remove the read/write heads and put an interface up to an read/write head emulator, and give the data back based on the pattern that you believe is the 'original, pre dd' state.
and of course, be ready to tweak that data, repeatedly, preferably automatically until all the file checksums match for all the known files and then play around with the remaining data until you achieve the goal of finding out the name of the file or folder.
but again, the price for doing this is a lot more than the cost of a HDD ($60, although new 80 gig HDDs are now only $25) plus $40 in pocket cash doesn't even come close to the real world cost of trying to recover data from a hdd that has been dded. it's pretty clear the software/hardware on the drive itself is unable to read such data, or else some one would have done it.
also, fully dissecting the contents of a formatted HDD might require peeling off the magnetic material in layers, to get the full pattern, the rules of the contest clearly make that against the rules. because the hd must be working afterwards... peeling the magnetic layers to get the most accurate precise reading of how the metal has been magnetized in the past might be required to get data off a dded hdd.
if someone wants to have a serious contest, offer half a million as a reward for reading the dded data. then someone will try to claim it. $40 is not worth it.
"They'll probably kick it down to something the family is actually able to pay"
and AT&T will still profit. the sad thing is that unlimited data even over wireless doesn't really cost that much. especially if you're just posting digital pictures to some online site so everyone in your family can download them.
it's already been said but there was nothing worth charging $20,000 for, sending a couple dozen photos each around a couple MB max is worth $20,000? that's the cost of putting up like 20 cellular towers...
the scam is that most people just hit 1 bad tower, and pay the crazy $150 for 1 MB of data, because the rest of the time they were in a normal service plan range.
the thing is, while Microsoft does make games, it's the 3rd party licenses that get the lions share of the market. yeah i know there are usually some form of a fee for being officially licensed. but who knew rockstar games was going to be game when GTA 1 came out and sold hugely?
because of anti dumping laws very few consoles have ever been sold below cost, although there is some question as to if those companies didn't play the 'shell' game, of using VC as a front to create one time part supplier 'shell' corporations to avoid having books that show them selling parts below cost even though they did...
oh and if you're wondering, in the USA a USA company cannot be convicted of dumping. so microsoft can't be prosecuted for dumping, while sony and nintendo as foreign corporations can be sued.
doh the math gods kill me again, 40 million $40 parts is more like 1.6 billion dollars. ah well, the general concept is still there.
I'll explain the difference, Dumping is when a company sells a product below cost to bankrupt their competitors.
Loss leaders are when a store sells a product below what they pay to draw in consumers and get sales.
Clearly the video game industry is rife with corruption and 'Dumping' primarily because hardware makers can subsidize the price of a console with license fees from game developers.
depend on 'dumpers' like Microsoft to have some very complex bookwork, and possibly some Chinese shell corporations to sell high priced parts significantly below cost, but only to Microsoft.
there are lots of ways electronics can be sold below price, specifically cell phones and satellite TV boxes, which come with service agreements. but in the cell phone market, you're not locked into a single phone, although each cell provider has their own line of phones... most big players have models for each provider, except in cases where they get more money to be 'exclusive' to AT&T (like the iphone) etc.
some of this stuff is illegal in many places, but as i said shell corporations are shady and hard to stop. because billionaires often engage in venture capitalism, it's not hard to 'invest' in a shell corporation that's going to go into an exclusive contract to say, sell 40 million $40 dollar parts at $1 a part, and have the initial VC funding of say 40 million dollars, while 'your buddy' makes a cool million cash etc... then let the company go belly up, or keep using the same shell corporation with additional rounds of VC funding...
dude, windows 95 was the version that drove me to using free open source software in the first place (i went with BSD because at the time, it had the more straight forward install) windows 98 fixed a few bugs, but it wasn't until NT/XP that windows had a solid winner of an OS on their hands.
but then, the whole not having 'security' by default bit me in the ass and i'll never quite trust windows again. keep in mind i was running a very minimal configuration of XP and behind a basic wireless router, but i got bit with a nasty polymorphic rootkit in 06' and now use a foss firewall standard. plus there are a few applications i don't trust anymore with internet, and have a non-internet windows XP machine.
Linux is finally getting to the point where it can realistically take the place of windows, but you need to teach people to no longer go out and 'buy' programs but instead to search their repositories, and when that fails search sourceforge.. otherwise they'll just complain about limited functionality.
the one downside though is games compatibility, but many people i know who play video games play consoles exclusively. windows itself can be a huge headache trying to play games. ah well.