I swear this was a thread like 2 months ago, not sure why these keep getting submitted.
I joined netflix in early 1999, Blockbuster had a miniscule DVD section at the time and the rule of VHS was just losing it's crown. Netflix had a huge selection compared to them. I was on a 4 disk at a time plan until a couple years back (dropped to 2+Stream).
The thing is because of licensing and streaming rights, there's still a lot more content available on physical media vs streaming. The biggest issue now is that they don't seem to be replacing media for older things (or media is unavailable) so you get into situations with older shows where disk 1 of season 1 is no longer available and then some of the older media that shows up looks like it's been through the wringer. New release though they're still keeping stock coming in as it becomes available due to the OMG EXCLUSIVE OWN IT 10 WEEKS SOONER ON WHATEVER STEAMING LIBRARY IS FUNCTIONAL UNTIL IT SHUTS DOWN!!(Yeah we lost the DRM war peeps)
For streaming media I have Netflix, Prime and I cut to Hulu for Live a couple months ago. It's ok, it's not a 100% functional replacement for something like cable, but it's good enough for me and I figure it'll get better.
I picked them over GoogleTV because Hulu has History Channel and YoutubeTV doesn't, DirectTV's streaming DVR thing is barely functional from what I hear (seriously people still watch TV not timeshifted?) and sling, I'm not sure how they're still a thing after the old slingbox fiasco... I thought they got sued into oblivion.
Net result for me was a $200 reduction in my cable bill and the primary driver for actually getting rid of cable at the end was signal quality. Cox cable here where I am does a pretty harsh re-compresses on everything (way to high on the reduction factor guys and high motion high color? ugh someone preview the output at least) and they downmix the audio. I understand that it's an issue with the bandwidth available how they do catv signal delivery and they wont be able to to move into 2160p delivery without major changes to that infrastructure but hey, that's not my problem. That industry has known their limitations for more than a decade and haven't really decided to do anything about it.
My only technical complaint about hulu from a quality perspective is their audio delivery sample rate is close to borderline, but I'm not sure if that's how they get it from the upstream producers or if they mess with it. I have a fairly robust audio system in my main tv room and on that one I can hear the difference between a 192khz sample rate and lower and hulu is right at the edge on multichannel audio where I'll start to notice a tinny-ness like quality to it.
I still have the physical media Netflix sent me for the first cut of their streaming app for the ps3 somewhere.
First version you had to put the disk in there and boot it like a game.
I can't stand the ui. I also find the system user hostile. I can understand simplifying the os for the masses but not at the power users expense.
Your post sum's up my feelings pretty well...
Generally it goes like this.... On most Nix's/Nix like platforms, I fire it up, and the amount of crap that I have to remove/disable/discard is really pretty minimal. It's more like after baseline config/tuning slam in some apps for it's function and it's ready to rock....
On a windows box, drop in the os, then FIGHT'S ON to not have it try to do stupid things all the time. On windows 10, I pretty much cant get it to the kind of minimalist place where I want it (I've only been at it on win10 for a couple of weeks though...).
Just about a month ago I got a emv chipped card from my bank. The grocery stores and a few other shops near me have that same type slot reader under the keypad you mentioned. I've been sticking my card in all of them when it prompts for an insert/swipe but I don't know if they're just not enabled around here or what because it never works and I always have to fall back to the mag strip.
The thing I don't like about it, is on the signature block on the back of the card I just write check id, then I put clear tape over the sig block and the cvv so it doesn't wear off (I've worn off the cvv #'s before...). Anyway, so my old card had a picture of me on the front of it. The new one doesn't. So now if someone actually does bother to read where it says check ID, instead of just me saying look at the picture, I have to pull id as well (which is either an RFID Drivers license, or an RFID enabled passport card). So for now, I kind of miss my old photoid card, vs my emv chipped card that doesn't work. I already had to buy a faraday cage wallet because of my drivers license & passport card (I'm paranoid about the rfid stuff), and then another rf blocking pouch for my regular full size passport.
Yeah, it's everyone elses fault. You don't buy anything right? Something like 85% of all cargo moved around the US is done by truck because the rail system is shit and inefficient compared to the roadway system. So pretty much everything everyone buys, moves by truck.
When I look at fuel costs, the consumer at the pump is probably the bottom rung of ladder. Lower fuel brings construction costs down (what you think a loader, grader, excavator or a crane run on batteries?), and makes it cheaper to move bulk goods. Anyone saying this is all bad because the gas tax is not high enough already has problems. The gas tax has not changed, so right now it's generating more revenue because more fuel is being sold.
You want more cash into state and federal highway transportation taxes? Then stop wasting money with on bloated government and pork barrel spending. Any additional taxation is just going to either be mismanaged and diverted into non-essential service projects or to go into programs for people who are not putting anything back into the flow, latest one this month? Let's use blanket amnesty for illegals.
So build more Rail you say? Can't do that because even if you try to re-open an old rail spur that's already got track everyone freaks out because then there's going to be a train near them. So they'll bitch about the trains, they'll bitch about the traffic and meanwhile nothing changes.
You know how great the average person's perspective on taxes is? A town near me has a small auto mall. 3 dealerships. One of them (Nissan) went out of business 7 years ago. The building is zoned Auto-Dealer only. So for the last 7 years, no dealer has wanted to move into that space & the building has generated nothing but property taxes. There was a plan to change it to general commercial, it had to go to a general town vote. There were already new businesses lined up to use the space, (3-4 restaurants, office space etc). The town decided in the mid-term elections that they would rather leave 50k+ sq ft of Class-A office/retail space unused and hope that 'sometime' in the future a car dealer would move into it vs. actually having the space used and generating sales taxes etc. Except if that happens now there will probably be protests against it because since nothing else is in the parking lot for that space the building owner has turned the parking lot into boat and rv storage. So if anyone does try to move into it, the people in town are all going to be up in arms about how they have to find a new place to store their rv/boats whatever and how this is such a great travisty...
spf, dkim, dmarc, so many ways to try and accomplish the same thing and none of them work well because nobody trusts any of them fully and few people have them fully implemented... Obligatory xkcd
The only thing it's hurting is the other people looking for sapphire display covers like was mentioned a couple months back.
Personally, I'm on the Gorilla Glass bandwagon. It's:
Stronger
Stronger
Cheaper & faster to produce
apple can pretty much do what it wants and they have plenty of money so it's not like it's a gamble at this point. $1bn is not going to dent their bank.
I own a couple of their devices, but I've personally relegated them down to be things I don't even carry around, and the interface always makes me feel like I'm using one of those kid's toy computers that has like 6 buttons with pictures on them (the cow says Mooooo).
You know this article has been posted on multiple news sites, and it continues to amaze me that it gets the amount of negative reaction that it does.
Breaking down this instance, and throwing out wrongful prosecution & 'they got the wrong guy' (in the case they had DNA evidence as well as admission), this is a person that raped a woman, then slit her throat and left her in the street. She was also pregnant at the time. I have zero sympathy for him. I would rather we shot him up with a sedative & od'd him on painkillers than the other options which are essentially (2):
Let him sit in prison sponging off taxpayers for the rest of his natural life
or
Let him out because `can't you all understand that he just had a lapse in judgement and made a mistake? surely he needs another chance!`
honestly, to all the people crying about the barbarism of this situation, suppose the woman was someone that you knew, spouse, sister, mother etc. How would you feel about the situation then? How would you react to someone killing your wife and unborn child? What would you want to happen to that person?
Maybe we should offer all of the vocal proponents of this situation an option: Adopt a death row inmate.
You can take a guy on death row home, we'll put a tag bracelet on his foot. You can care for him out of your own pocket, with no reimbursed expenses (no dependant tax write off either) and be responsible for him. If he leaves your house, you pay a fine, if he manages to damage anyone else's property, you're responsible. Any futher crime he commits, you're the liable party.
How about that, keeps the anti-death penalty people happy, keeps scumbags from sponging tax money...
I could really care less about the interactions with other races. I mean, how may different noises can they possibly make when I've got my boot on their throat (or throats, aliens ya know) and they're trying to get me to stop genociding their species.
I kinda liked fleet combat in MoO, but I'd rather see a full modernized redo of that vs. something that's going to focus more on diplomacy, which is what I'd have to say this is going to be since they want to spend so much time on how the aliens communicate.
Err... nearly no one does contact rework anymore professionally, and even half-serious hobbyists nowadays at least have a AOYUE and a high temp vac pickup. Then just clean the site, apply mini stencil, squeegee paste, remove stencil, place new part, reflow.
Yeah, personally I haven't done SMT rework in about 15 years, Aoyue sure has brought the price down on rework stations, that's less than I paid for my Metcal, and that's just a basic iron. I don't want to remember how much we paid for some of the larger Metcal & Pace hand rework systems back in the day.
trying to desolder 100 pins spaced 0.01" apart then resoldering them, unless you have a 0.1 mill precision soldering robot it is impossible, you can't even buy wire thin enough to do it by hand.
SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.
Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.
Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.
Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.
Seriously? Nobody takes a crack at marketing calling the new one blue? If you thought windows 8 was bad, the new version is guaranteed to leave you blue... or something?
Having played Planetside 1 from beta (sill have cd's!) and for a few years after launch, a lot of the people I used to play that with were pretty excited about planetside 2, until we actually got to play it. The summary about it was pretty much this: Everything you hated about planetside 1? We took it out. Everything you liked about planetside 1? We dropped most of that too! Things you thought were missing from Planetside 1? We put some of those in.
This one feels like pretty much a large map rip-off of all the other fps's out on the scene now, and I've taken to calling it Planetfieldfall2: modern agenda.
Graphics are pretty good, maps are still huge, but all the things that would make us get 20-30 people together to storm around and kick some butt together are gone. Thanks for nothing and you won't be getting any cash from me.
This comment is meant to be read on a future display. It is only 1 line high. If this text takes more than one line of text on your display you need to upgrade. I have no doubt that this will be modded up in the future when users realize my forward thinking capacity. Let's hear it for product teams that believe that displays are only useful for watching movies and we don't need vertical resolution.
Bump for bookcat. A few years back I started using it, I was getting into a situation where I had purchased a couple of books I already owned and wanted to start keeping track of them all. Started with a spreadsheet for simple search. Got tired of maintaining it, then transitioned to this.
Process for physical books is now:
Buy book
When it arrives, scan the barcode with an android phone, put the book away.
Import the isbn into Bookcat, then bookcat downloads the cover/metadata etc for it
Update location field, any other metrics you want to keep, price paid, condition for used etc.
Then you've got a nice searchable index. It's made for small libraries so it does have the loan & check in/check out functionality as well, and I think it's like $40?
Yeah that's what I use, it's dirt cheap and you can just buy a roll and cut the lengths you need. My home office desk I screwed some longer strips to the back underside of the desk so everything stays up high, out of the way and out of sight, then it's easy enough to redo since you're working with velcro. Being able to get behind the desk I highly recommend as well.
Also dont be afraid of physical separation, I have my cable modem, firewall, and a switch on one side of the room on a cabinet where printer, mfd etc are, along with a small nas, then gig isl's over to the other side of the room where workstations on the desk are plugged in.
I'm also a big fan of synergy ( http://synergy-foss.org/ ) as a software keyboard/mouse for machines vs having use physical keyboards or physical kvm's for multiples, and you still get the separated video output for each which is nice.
Every once and a while you need to go through the stuff you've got cabled up, getting rid of things you don't use all the time, or can consolidate (that's probably an annual or bi-annual job though lol). I did that earlier this year and it actually helped quite a bit.
AOL's 3 remaining customers are going to use a new application to aggregate their mail from services that already provide more functionality than AOL does in an attempt to show relevant value and usefulness. One of the 3 customers, known simply as "granma" was quoted as saying "Now I don't have to remember all those complicated things like gee mails and yahooie for when I need to tell my grandson that the guv'ment is going to start charging for email, or if I forward this message bill gates is going to give me a dollar!".
Cool story, would read again, +1, +like & stuff. Need's more bitcoin.
Agreed. Last title I picked up from them I think I paid like $50 for it, messed around with it for like a week. Then removed it and their stupid drm launcher/rootkit.
Publishers can quote piracy all they want but I think crap content is a bigger detriment to their financial base and word about that gets around just as quick as draconian drm.
Honestly, if there was a mechanism in place to get a refund on some of the garbage software I've bought over the years I think there's only a hand full of stuff I would actually keep.
I didn't read all the responses but from my dealing with the FBI cyber crimes division they won't even look at it unless there's $10k USD or more in loss/damages.
What I do (when I'm bored:P ) is just take the logs, pull the source address, punch it through arin and see who owns the netblock, then file a abuse/fraud ticket through whoever owns the netblock (including providing the logs). That seems to work pretty well for us based companies. I was really impressed with the amazon cloud guys and how fast they shut down a compromised vm after I sent them the info. Regional/smaller ISP's are usually pretty good, larger ones it can be hit or miss.
Dealing with offshore addresses is more problematic, due to inconsistent controls, communications barriers etc. For addresses like that if it's not a country I'm going to be travelling to or do business with I'll just acl the whole block (sometimes the whole country) at my perimeter.
Aside from that, nonstandard ports, knocking, vpn are all good ways to deal with this kind of thing. I'm guessing you're at least not leaving all your personally critical data there, and that you do at least have some isolation.
This pretty much sums it up. Earlier this year I broke my slide out keyboard smartphone. I went to the shop to see what they had, and it was either get the same one I bought a year ago or buy the new model. New model had a faster processor, better radio, more memory etc. Yeah it's bigger and it doesn't have a slide out keyboard, but I bought it anyway because I didn't want to buy the slower one even though the faster phone didn't have some of the features I wanted and I didn't like that it's larger.
It seems like you get 3 options when you go with a carrier and narrow it down to a specific manufacturer. The budget model that has pretty much nothing, the older version that's ok, but you know there's something better or the shiny new one that's not really what you want but it's the only option left.
The display annoyances trend is getting worse though I'm dreading when I have to replace my desktop displays again because the industry seems to think that the only thing people do with computers is watch movies on them so all the displays have to be widescreen and 1080p is fine, so you don't need a lot of vertical resolution. I'm tired of the arguments there too, no I don't want to turn it sideways because then it's to narrow and too tall.
I want a phone, not a tablet.
I want my vertical pixels back.
I'll add a gripe #3 just because... Blue LED's, enough said. Shuji Nakamura, it's your fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I swear this was a thread like 2 months ago, not sure why these keep getting submitted.
I joined netflix in early 1999, Blockbuster had a miniscule DVD section at the time and the rule of VHS was just losing it's crown.
Netflix had a huge selection compared to them. I was on a 4 disk at a time plan until a couple years back (dropped to 2+Stream).
The thing is because of licensing and streaming rights, there's still a lot more content available on physical media vs streaming. The biggest issue now is that they don't seem to be replacing media for older things (or media is unavailable) so you get into situations with older shows where disk 1 of season 1 is no longer available and then some of the older media that shows up looks like it's been through the wringer. New release though they're still keeping stock coming in as it becomes available due to the OMG EXCLUSIVE OWN IT 10 WEEKS SOONER ON WHATEVER STEAMING LIBRARY IS FUNCTIONAL UNTIL IT SHUTS DOWN!!(Yeah we lost the DRM war peeps)
For streaming media I have Netflix, Prime and I cut to Hulu for Live a couple months ago.
It's ok, it's not a 100% functional replacement for something like cable, but it's good enough for me and I figure it'll get better.
I picked them over GoogleTV because Hulu has History Channel and YoutubeTV doesn't, DirectTV's streaming DVR thing is barely functional from what I hear (seriously people still watch TV not timeshifted?) and sling, I'm not sure how they're still a thing after the old slingbox fiasco... I thought they got sued into oblivion.
Net result for me was a $200 reduction in my cable bill and the primary driver for actually getting rid of cable at the end was signal quality.
Cox cable here where I am does a pretty harsh re-compresses on everything (way to high on the reduction factor guys and high motion high color? ugh someone preview the output at least) and they downmix the audio. I understand that it's an issue with the bandwidth available how they do catv signal delivery and they wont be able to to move into 2160p delivery without major changes to that infrastructure but hey, that's not my problem. That industry has known their limitations for more than a decade and haven't really decided to do anything about it.
My only technical complaint about hulu from a quality perspective is their audio delivery sample rate is close to borderline, but I'm not sure if that's how they get it from the upstream producers or if they mess with it. I have a fairly robust audio system in my main tv room and on that one I can hear the difference between a 192khz sample rate and lower and hulu is right at the edge on multichannel audio where I'll start to notice a tinny-ness like quality to it.
I still have the physical media Netflix sent me for the first cut of their streaming app for the ps3 somewhere.
First version you had to put the disk in there and boot it like a game.
I can't stand the ui. I also find the system user hostile. I can understand simplifying the os for the masses but not at the power users expense.
Your post sum's up my feelings pretty well... Generally it goes like this.... On most Nix's/Nix like platforms, I fire it up, and the amount of crap that I have to remove/disable/discard is really pretty minimal. It's more like after baseline config/tuning slam in some apps for it's function and it's ready to rock.... On a windows box, drop in the os, then FIGHT'S ON to not have it try to do stupid things all the time. On windows 10, I pretty much cant get it to the kind of minimalist place where I want it (I've only been at it on win10 for a couple of weeks though...).
Because most of them understand Sturgeon's Revelation even if they don't know what it is.
Just about a month ago I got a emv chipped card from my bank. The grocery stores and a few other shops near me have that same type slot reader under the keypad you mentioned. I've been sticking my card in all of them when it prompts for an insert/swipe but I don't know if they're just not enabled around here or what because it never works and I always have to fall back to the mag strip.
The thing I don't like about it, is on the signature block on the back of the card I just write check id, then I put clear tape over the sig block and the cvv so it doesn't wear off (I've worn off the cvv #'s before...). Anyway, so my old card had a picture of me on the front of it. The new one doesn't. So now if someone actually does bother to read where it says check ID, instead of just me saying look at the picture, I have to pull id as well (which is either an RFID Drivers license, or an RFID enabled passport card). So for now, I kind of miss my old photoid card, vs my emv chipped card that doesn't work. I already had to buy a faraday cage wallet because of my drivers license & passport card (I'm paranoid about the rfid stuff), and then another rf blocking pouch for my regular full size passport.
Yeah, it's everyone elses fault. You don't buy anything right? Something like 85% of all cargo moved around the US is done by truck because the rail system is shit and inefficient compared to the roadway system. So pretty much everything everyone buys, moves by truck.
When I look at fuel costs, the consumer at the pump is probably the bottom rung of ladder. Lower fuel brings construction costs down (what you think a loader, grader, excavator or a crane run on batteries?), and makes it cheaper to move bulk goods. Anyone saying this is all bad because the gas tax is not high enough already has problems. The gas tax has not changed, so right now it's generating more revenue because more fuel is being sold.
You want more cash into state and federal highway transportation taxes? Then stop wasting money with on bloated government and pork barrel spending. Any additional taxation is just going to either be mismanaged and diverted into non-essential service projects or to go into programs for people who are not putting anything back into the flow, latest one this month? Let's use blanket amnesty for illegals.
So build more Rail you say? Can't do that because even if you try to re-open an old rail spur that's already got track everyone freaks out because then there's going to be a train near them. So they'll bitch about the trains, they'll bitch about the traffic and meanwhile nothing changes.
You know how great the average person's perspective on taxes is? A town near me has a small auto mall. 3 dealerships. One of them (Nissan) went out of business 7 years ago. The building is zoned Auto-Dealer only. So for the last 7 years, no dealer has wanted to move into that space & the building has generated nothing but property taxes. There was a plan to change it to general commercial, it had to go to a general town vote. There were already new businesses lined up to use the space, (3-4 restaurants, office space etc). The town decided in the mid-term elections that they would rather leave 50k+ sq ft of Class-A office/retail space unused and hope that 'sometime' in the future a car dealer would move into it vs. actually having the space used and generating sales taxes etc. Except if that happens now there will probably be protests against it because since nothing else is in the parking lot for that space the building owner has turned the parking lot into boat and rv storage. So if anyone does try to move into it, the people in town are all going to be up in arms about how they have to find a new place to store their rv/boats whatever and how this is such a great travisty...
spf, dkim, dmarc, so many ways to try and accomplish the same thing and none of them work well because nobody trusts any of them fully and few people have them fully implemented... Obligatory xkcd
Stronger
Stronger
Should have been
Stronger
Lighter
Guess I'm tired.
The only thing it's hurting is the other people looking for sapphire display covers like was mentioned a couple months back.
Personally, I'm on the Gorilla Glass bandwagon.
It's:
Stronger
Stronger
Cheaper & faster to produce
apple can pretty much do what it wants and they have plenty of money so it's not like it's a gamble at this point. $1bn is not going to dent their bank.
I own a couple of their devices, but I've personally relegated them down to be things I don't even carry around, and the interface always makes me feel like I'm using one of those kid's toy computers that has like 6 buttons with pictures on them (the cow says Mooooo).
You know this article has been posted on multiple news sites, and it continues to amaze me that it gets the amount of negative reaction that it does.
Breaking down this instance, and throwing out wrongful prosecution & 'they got the wrong guy' (in the case they had DNA evidence as well as admission), this is a person that raped a woman, then slit her throat and left her in the street. She was also pregnant at the time. I have zero sympathy for him. I would rather we shot him up with a sedative & od'd him on painkillers than the other options which are essentially (2):
Let him sit in prison sponging off taxpayers for the rest of his natural life
or
Let him out because `can't you all understand that he just had a lapse in judgement and made a mistake? surely he needs another chance!`
honestly, to all the people crying about the barbarism of this situation, suppose the woman was someone that you knew, spouse, sister, mother etc. How would you feel about the situation then? How would you react to someone killing your wife and unborn child? What would you want to happen to that person?
Maybe we should offer all of the vocal proponents of this situation an option:
Adopt a death row inmate.
You can take a guy on death row home, we'll put a tag bracelet on his foot. You can care for him out of your own pocket, with no reimbursed expenses (no dependant tax write off either) and be responsible for him. If he leaves your house, you pay a fine, if he manages to damage anyone else's property, you're responsible. Any futher crime he commits, you're the liable party.
How about that, keeps the anti-death penalty people happy, keeps scumbags from sponging tax money...
Maybe we can use them to beta test the new obamacare website...
I could really care less about the interactions with other races. I mean, how may different noises can they possibly make when I've got my boot on their throat (or throats, aliens ya know) and they're trying to get me to stop genociding their species.
I kinda liked fleet combat in MoO, but I'd rather see a full modernized redo of that vs. something that's going to focus more on diplomacy, which is what I'd have to say this is going to be since they want to spend so much time on how the aliens communicate.
Err... nearly no one does contact rework anymore professionally, and even half-serious hobbyists nowadays at least have a AOYUE and a high temp vac pickup.
Then just clean the site, apply mini stencil, squeegee paste, remove stencil, place new part, reflow.
Yeah, personally I haven't done SMT rework in about 15 years, Aoyue sure has brought the price down on rework stations, that's less than I paid for my Metcal, and that's just a basic iron. I don't want to remember how much we paid for some of the larger Metcal & Pace hand rework systems back in the day.
trying to desolder 100 pins spaced 0.01" apart then resoldering them, unless you have a 0.1 mill precision soldering robot it is impossible, you can't even buy wire thin enough to do it by hand.
SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.
Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.
Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.
Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.
Windows 8: We Blue it...
Seriously? Nobody takes a crack at marketing calling the new one blue? If you thought windows 8 was bad, the new version is guaranteed to leave you blue... or something?
You and me both brother... When I saw that article that's the first thing I said... 20 years? F*** I feel old :(
Sorry bro, my GPU doesn't support text acceleration. No sale here...
Having played Planetside 1 from beta (sill have cd's!) and for a few years after launch, a lot of the people I used to play that with were pretty excited about planetside 2, until we actually got to play it. The summary about it was pretty much this:
Everything you hated about planetside 1? We took it out.
Everything you liked about planetside 1? We dropped most of that too!
Things you thought were missing from Planetside 1? We put some of those in.
This one feels like pretty much a large map rip-off of all the other fps's out on the scene now, and I've taken to calling it Planetfieldfall2: modern agenda.
Graphics are pretty good, maps are still huge, but all the things that would make us get 20-30 people together to storm around and kick some butt together are gone. Thanks for nothing and you won't be getting any cash from me.
This comment is meant to be read on a future display. It is only 1 line high. If this text takes more than one line of text on your display you need to upgrade. I have no doubt that this will be modded up in the future when users realize my forward thinking capacity. Let's hear it for product teams that believe that displays are only useful for watching movies and we don't need vertical resolution.
Bump for bookcat. A few years back I started using it, I was getting into a situation where I had purchased a couple of books I already owned and wanted to start keeping track of them all. Started with a spreadsheet for simple search. Got tired of maintaining it, then transitioned to this.
Process for physical books is now:
Buy book
When it arrives, scan the barcode with an android phone, put the book away.
Import the isbn into Bookcat, then bookcat downloads the cover/metadata etc for it
Update location field, any other metrics you want to keep, price paid, condition for used etc.
Then you've got a nice searchable index. It's made for small libraries so it does have the loan & check in/check out functionality as well, and I think it's like $40?
Yeah that's what I use, it's dirt cheap and you can just buy a roll and cut the lengths you need. My home office desk I screwed some longer strips to the back underside of the desk so everything stays up high, out of the way and out of sight, then it's easy enough to redo since you're working with velcro. Being able to get behind the desk I highly recommend as well.
For Wall warts, I use these guys ( http://www.cablestogo.com/product_list.asp?cat_id=1020 ), power squid type power strips, you can attach them high underneath your desk then coil up the excess cable length near them so you don't have hanging wires. Additionally then you dont have to worry about them blocking recepticles on your good power strips (I'm still an isobar fan for those http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/product-series.cfm?txtSeriesID=825 )
Also dont be afraid of physical separation, I have my cable modem, firewall, and a switch on one side of the room on a cabinet where printer, mfd etc are, along with a small nas, then gig isl's over to the other side of the room where workstations on the desk are plugged in.
I'm also a big fan of synergy ( http://synergy-foss.org/ ) as a software keyboard/mouse for machines vs having use physical keyboards or physical kvm's for multiples, and you still get the separated video output for each which is nice.
Every once and a while you need to go through the stuff you've got cabled up, getting rid of things you don't use all the time, or can consolidate (that's probably an annual or bi-annual job though lol). I did that earlier this year and it actually helped quite a bit.
AOL's 3 remaining customers are going to use a new application to aggregate their mail from services that already provide more functionality than AOL does in an attempt to show relevant value and usefulness. One of the 3 customers, known simply as "granma" was quoted as saying "Now I don't have to remember all those complicated things like gee mails and yahooie for when I need to tell my grandson that the guv'ment is going to start charging for email, or if I forward this message bill gates is going to give me a dollar!".
Cool story, would read again, +1, +like & stuff. Need's more bitcoin.
Agreed. Last title I picked up from them I think I paid like $50 for it, messed around with it for like a week. Then removed it and their stupid drm launcher/rootkit.
Publishers can quote piracy all they want but I think crap content is a bigger detriment to their financial base and word about that gets around just as quick as draconian drm.
Honestly, if there was a mechanism in place to get a refund on some of the garbage software I've bought over the years I think there's only a hand full of stuff I would actually keep.
I didn't read all the responses but from my dealing with the FBI cyber crimes division they won't even look at it unless there's $10k USD or more in loss/damages.
What I do (when I'm bored :P ) is just take the logs, pull the source address, punch it through arin and see who owns the netblock, then file a abuse/fraud ticket through whoever owns the netblock (including providing the logs). That seems to work pretty well for us based companies. I was really impressed with the amazon cloud guys and how fast they shut down a compromised vm after I sent them the info. Regional/smaller ISP's are usually pretty good, larger ones it can be hit or miss.
Dealing with offshore addresses is more problematic, due to inconsistent controls, communications barriers etc. For addresses like that if it's not a country I'm going to be travelling to or do business with I'll just acl the whole block (sometimes the whole country) at my perimeter.
Aside from that, nonstandard ports, knocking, vpn are all good ways to deal with this kind of thing. I'm guessing you're at least not leaving all your personally critical data there, and that you do at least have some isolation.
This pretty much sums it up. Earlier this year I broke my slide out keyboard smartphone. I went to the shop to see what they had, and it was either get the same one I bought a year ago or buy the new model. New model had a faster processor, better radio, more memory etc. Yeah it's bigger and it doesn't have a slide out keyboard, but I bought it anyway because I didn't want to buy the slower one even though the faster phone didn't have some of the features I wanted and I didn't like that it's larger.
It seems like you get 3 options when you go with a carrier and narrow it down to a specific manufacturer. The budget model that has pretty much nothing, the older version that's ok, but you know there's something better or the shiny new one that's not really what you want but it's the only option left.
The display annoyances trend is getting worse though I'm dreading when I have to replace my desktop displays again because the industry seems to think that the only thing people do with computers is watch movies on them so all the displays have to be widescreen and 1080p is fine, so you don't need a lot of vertical resolution. I'm tired of the arguments there too, no I don't want to turn it sideways because then it's to narrow and too tall.
I want a phone, not a tablet.
I want my vertical pixels back.
I'll add a gripe #3 just because... Blue LED's, enough said. Shuji Nakamura, it's your fault.