Does this mean that social media will now be the blame for all the evils of society?
That's been done so much its a laughable cliche now... kind of like we laughed at them blaming DnD and video games but they just continued to babble it for years after most people laughed at them.
Check out any stereotypical "cops n robbers" night time drama where the bad guy did something bad to the victim after doing some kind of social media thing, the message being FB is dangerous but watching our TV show is both safe, entertaining, and makes you superior to being a victim and you get to blame the victim for "doing the wrong thing" (not watching TV addictively). Check out any stereotypical daytime talk show (the now retired Oprah must have done 100 shows about this, also see her buddy Dr Phil) with endless hour long explanations of how their unstable kid/husband/housepet/whatever would never have gone over the edge if it were not for FB/twitter/etc. A decade ago they would have gone over the edge due to video games, a decade before that due to DnD, a decade before that due to Elvis's hips or something.
Its such a tired cliche, and so much of the audience is already addicted, that now they aggressively support twitter / FB. It would make an interesting google ngram graph, were such a thing possible, to graph daytime talk shows with one line being "social media scare stories" and the other line being "FB and twitter product placement / social media self promotional links".
Its an interesting model for other activities. Once you get around 50% of the population to smoke weed, then suddenly, in a matter of weeks, Oprah/Dr Phil/CSI will phase shift from weed being the root of all evil to it being the greatest thing on earth and why not try our celebrity branded strain...
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a All Knowing Server Admin as we understood Him.
... all knowing proxy firewall admin...
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our spulling erroz.
That would be the almighty GOOG not "God" admittedly those two are often confused. Also thats spulling erroz and the even more pitiful "txt talk".
A set of Lovecraftian rituals to worship the mighty GOOG is kind of amusing to contemplate. Maybe I've been reading too much Stross lately.... That would probably get me an instant C+D order, but sometimes fanfic just has to be done regardless...
how do employers view degrees/advanced credentials obtained online, when compared to the more typical in-person education? Does anyone have specific experience with this situation? The eventual degree itself will have no indication that it was obtained online, but simple inference will show that it was not likely I maintained my employment on the east coast while attending school in-person on the west coast
No one cares. If you get a job, it'll be from contacts and portfolio, more or less. HR won't care as long as the checkbox is checked off and they get a transcript.
I went to a "regional" U with multiple sub-campuses (campii?). I attended only online classes, although there was a sub-campus maybe only a half hour drive away. No, I did not commute 2 hours each way every day to the main campus. Maybe they'll get the same idea about your school?
Yeah as if THAT can't be faked at a human powered interview. This is better, because no one "important" takes the blame for being conned during the interview process.
There is the "median" problem that the median skilled person gets stuck in the median job position and its management's job to make it work, so they failed in your anecdote, eh... Everyone likes to think they're the top 1% of whatever skills they have, be it programming languages or BSing (soft skills). 100% of personnel trying to find the top 1% is a waste of time for all concerned.
Welcome to the 1970s? Solar panels + some kind of high ISP, extremely low thrust engine (used to be ion engines but apparently casamir effect thrusters are much better) have been planned ever since.
The problem is really simple. It's cheap to study a potential space travel mechanism on paper. But you cannot make any real progress unless real hardware is built and tested in space.
I know for a fact the wikipedia list is only NOTEWORTHY unusual historical missions involving ion electric engines, not every boring little comsat that has yet another station keeping system.
has been at something around $500 a share for the last 6 or 7 years. Crazy.
Why? I have a treasury direct account where I can buy risk free USG bonds for a whopping 0.5% rate or so (well its complicated and depends on the length of time, etc) Pull the numbers for the mighty GOOG: an EPS around $30 and a growth rate around 6%.
How much will it cost me to get around $30+6% next year if I buy riskless US bonds, answer, a heck of a lot. It only costs me around $600 to get around $30 next year, which is frankly not all that bad. Its risky, but not that risky.
Note that we live in a centrally controlled economy not by any means a free market. What happens to equity prices if bond prices drop to a 5% rate... Hmm why risk it with the mighty GOOG when I can get 5% riskless from treasury direct... Its a rigged, corrupt market so there is little point in trying to reason out the future, but at least at present, a "sane" price for GOOG is around $500 plus or minus maybe 25%.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Are they selling enough shares to be theoretically bought out?
I'm guessing no, $5B is not enough to be purchased.
Most likely the hope is a "real" company, perhaps AT&T or some place like that, will purchase then for X*1.3 per share where X is the current price.
Now, who would want to buy FB... A major TV network trying to be relevant in society again? Merge with clearchannel to compete with the ITMS and music.google.com?
There's only a half dozen megacorps that control all you see and hear in mass media, so there really are not many possible purchasers, assuming we're about to see Disney/ABC/Facebook merging together.
The other option is going the other direction. OK FB is useless. But on the way down they could trade their worthless stock to purchase a real company with real income producing assets; perhaps a taco stand or something. Then once the original assets are worthless, they'd still own stock in something at least minimally diversified and potentially profitable. So they might go on a buying binge purchasing small semi-related companies in exchange for FB stock. What if they ended up owning most of the small PR advertising firms? Hmm... What if they bought Zynga in a share transaction (like here's 2 shares of FB for every existing share of Zynga, tada, now we own Zynga)
If you become a shareholder, will they use your name and address to spam you with adverts?;)
I know you're trying to be funny, but yes, yes they will. For/.ers who don't own stocks, every year, heck some places every quarter you'll get a postal spam explaining how they love diversity and BS like that, its all balloons and unicorns at HQ, and they'd love it if you'd boost their price by purchasing more of their stock.
Some of the most hilariously over-PR'd work I've ever seen has been certain electric company annual reports. What an amazing steaming pile.
You're assuming it'll grow. For a good laugh check out a recent zerohedge post (ZH is kind of the/. equivalent for the economic community?) showing graphs of share price as a % of IPO price for numerous recent (last year or so) tech stocks. All cratered below IPO price except for zynga which is somewhat volatile.
To have a bubble, first you have to have growth, and we're just not seeing that in recent tech IPOs.
You can get into definition battles, whats more expensive to society, a quarter million for one dude who actually needs it, or 100K unneeded $10 lorazepam prescriptions for people who don't really need it...
Its not. That's maybe a dozen un-noteworthy industrial facilities, or maybe a single really big one. One medium size heavy equipment place I worked at had dozens of CNC mills and lathes, working "most of the time" admittedly not 24x7 and not peak spindle power all the time, but it all realistically added up to a MW, especially when you add the multiple arc welding robot arm thingies (again, probably only one was working at any given time) and the plasma cutter farm which seemed to run continuously and the cranes everywhere. It was comfy in the winter without extra heating, but in the summer it got pretty uncomfortable even with ventilation. They also had a powder coating oven the size of a commercial garage (had to be, some parts in there were 30 feet long) that drew a good fraction of a megawatt just for the oven alone. At those kind of power/interference levels, you can't run copper cat-5 and wifi range is ruined by the plasma cutters (at least in those days) so it was all cheap multimode fiber thru the plant, which kept me busy.
28 MW would be something like the worlds smallest steel mill, or maybe the world smallest aluminum refinery? I'm not sure its economically possible at that small of a size. Maybe with govt subsidies? Thats only 56 five hundred HP motors, which is not much of a steel mill. 28 MW would probably be just about right for a ore refinery, those rock crushers are really hungry for power.
Lets think of just light bulbs at a VERY small building. I work in the smallest "skyscraper" in the downtown area. Its almost embarrassing to call it a skyscraper, but its not exactly a strip mall either. 40 watt fluorescent light bulbs * 2 per fixture * 20 fixtures across * 20 fixtures down (probably much higher across and down, but there's so many walls to estimate around and closets, yet the hallways are more brightly lit, so...) * 5 floors / 1e6 watts per megawatt means the wimpiest downtown office building in a fairly small city draws more than 1/8 megawatt just to light it up. It costs 16 bucks per hour just to pay for the lights, roughly. Retail space seems more brightly lit... I would guess a walmart or a strip mall might draw a pretty healthy chunk of a MW just to light it up.
This is before we get into radio and TV where admittedly 50 KW station is only 0.05 MW but, even in a small market, our radio dial is pretty full and I count 8 OTA TV stations, so it multiplies up pretty quick.
Problem w/ Linux is that no company has figured out a way to make money out of GPL software
LOL funniest thing I've read so far today. I've done nothing but make money off GPL software both my salary and $employer in general since '97. Ditto my coworkers and also practically every employed or previously employed IT person I've ever known, etc.
The concept of the wheel is similar enough to the GPL for this argument, therefore no company could ever make money using "wheels". LOL
Computer Program Reconstructs Heard Words From Brain Scans
Hard enough to parse visually, good luck using brain scans to figure that out. First 3 times I read that, I thought it was describing reconstructing computer programs using brain scans, and my first thought was, yeah, that'll work for COBOL or its modern equivalent java, now lets try something interesting like reading a Intercal programmers mind, or maybe an assembly language wizard, that'll probably crash it. What its actually discussing is not nearly as interesting.
A classic movie. The hokey pokey scene is where it starts to get really weird. OK maybe it was pretty weird before then. That movie might make a good sliding scale test to see how far along in the movie you can watch before getting completely weirded out, figure out your tolerance level.
Seriously, humans will hump damn near anything if you make it squishy enough... filthy beasts.
Who needs filthy beasts when you have tentacle monsters?
That brings up the serious question that for better or worse we expanded the human experience in the printing era, more or less, with the invention of the tentacle meme. Are there any new internet era memes that have expanded the human experience in a similar way? And no this isn't a very thiny veiled request for a goatse link, I'm looking for something a little more general in concept, not one individual incident. Maybe the general concept of Camgirls? Or the concept of an infinite array of digitally delivered pr0n, not new in any individual image but new in the concept that there's an uncountable number of images?
Its more about coming up with the most efficient way to make falsifiable predictions about the future that work often enough to be useful. this explaining stuff is a part but not the whole thing.
The summary seems to be, science sucks because its not a bunch of non-science liberal arts philosophy babble. Which is right up there with music sucks because its not a good painting.
The real discussion question, is what happened to wired? It used to be cool, well, a long time ago it used to be cool. Now?
csb: a friend of mine is trying to convince me to use an arduino mega (high density smd-only chip) where I'm currently using the skinnydip28 version of the regular 328-style arduino (which is.1" thruhole and easy to deal with). at the very least, if I was moving to a mega (25xx class), I'd insist on it being on a carrier board AND that board being built to high spec and the cpu tested on the board before being delivered to me for assembly into a larger system. I refuse to have to worry about the cpu AND the rest of the system (being a small company). I cannot find good mega-class chips already on carriers (.1-friendly carriers) AND tested AND by a company I'd trust to actually care about quality. being able to buy it pre-tested is key, to me.
I haven't worked w/ that hardware, but can't you do your software work on some dev board, even if you have to really hack the heck out of the dev board with wires laying everywhere? I've certainly done stomach turning things to poor defenseless dev boards in the past. I agree doing hardware and software dev at the same time is... overly exciting.
I donno if you like or hate seeeed studios or whatever but slapping together a simple single chip carrier PCB and having them solder just one chip to one simple board can't be all that complex for them. I've bought stuff from them that turned out OK. Maybe the killer would be lead (oh, bad pun in a SMD thread) time?
Yeah my alignment idea is to hold it in place while doing the hot air rework station thing. Agreed, don't need that alignment jig to hold in place for reflow oven, but I've never used a reflow oven, not planning to start any time soon. Supposedly you can rely on surface tension on a vibration free basically immobile horizontal within X degrees where X is pretty small. But I wanna use an alignment jig so I can just flip it onto the desk and use the rework blower (or, maybe, nudge it by hand if I've got vias to all the pads.
soapbox time: Some of the "agony" of SMD seems to come from history... Early leaded factory assembly was done by hand exactly like the dude in the basement; wave soldering and leaded pick and place came decades later so no one freaks. Early SMD factory assembly never had a "done by hand" assembly line, at least outside of aerospace and microwave RF, so people think the only way to do SMD is to own a reflow oven, stencils/paste, and a picnplace... yeah sure just like the only way to put a leaded pcb together is to own a leaded picnplace and a leaded wave soldering machine... hmmm. You wanna learn how to leaded solder, you learn how factories did it 60 years ago. In sharp contrast, don't waste time studying how factories used to do smd, if you want to do it at home... learn how the rework guys do it by hand today, if you want to learn how to do SMD at home. After the rather sharp learning curve, its pretty easy.
I don't understand why people even want a raspberry pi at all. The apps on the itunes app store are cheap. Why ruin CS and IT to make it a little easier for people who want to write their own programs? Also it would take you hours of your own time to write and compile your own software.
Come on man, its a hobby. When a dude puts together a 1000 piece puzzle you don't pee all over it by claiming you can buy a poster of the same picture and thats a better choice because you don't have to put it together... That kind of misses the point.
The fun fun fun of kit assembly isn't in working a 16 hour shift assembling it with chinese music on pandora, eating a couple rice grains and some tea while wearing a political prisoner uniform, and pretending your boss beats you for not working hard enough. Unless you like that kind of stuff. Whatever floats your boat. Anyway the fun of kit building is kit bashing weird stuff from different eras to massively customize the project to what you want. Something I've been up to on the bench recently: I started with a fairly modern microwave local oscillator kit. Then I swapped out the crystal because I need to work on a different frequency for a completely different ham radio frequency band. Then I smooshed in a completely different voltage regulator circuit; ugly as heck but I don't care; I want/need to run off 24 volts instead of 12 volts (long story there). Didn't want to buy a modern MMIC amp for the board because I had some old 80s era tech mmics laying around so I redesigned the bias ckt for the correct voltage drop and forward current (exactly as complicated as lighting a LED, just stuck a different value resistor in; didn't wanna build a constant current supply, at least not this time). So far so good. Also added a stylish power LED so I can tell my regulator hasn't shut down from overheating..... yet.
I think it would be fun to completely redo the I/O on a raspberry pi, at least to begin with that is the most obvious thing to do. Also some stuff I simply don't care about, I would not solder on. Not gonna do the composite video thing, not gonna waste time soldering it on. Probably would rip out the audio stuff figure out how to directly wire a software defined radio directly to the board. If the first thing in the TX chain on the SDR is a giant attenuator, and the last thing on the Pi audio out is a high powered headphone amp, simplicate it and toss both replacing both ckt sections with a piece of wire. etc.
BGA packages are intimidating, even to a guy who's been hand soldering other SMD packages since around/before 1990 (that being me)
Plain SMD is easy to do by hand, even the 0402 stuff.
The thing with BGA is its an alignment problem. Some entrepreneur will likely invent a magic clamp that holds the chip in perfect registration to the PCB, at which point it'll be dirt simple to solder BGAs.
I donno where the "if you're a millimeter out, your chips are fried" stuff comes from because thats/.ed. I've done analog microwave RF work where that is actually true. That is not possible on a logic level board. "oh noes,/ce has been grounded, whatever shall we do?" Well just fix the solder bridge and stop whining. Its not like you just shorted out a 20 amp 24 volt power supply thru the bias/bypass network of a microwave FET amplifier, nothings going to blow up on a digital ckt.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that social media will now be the blame for all the evils of society?
That's been done so much its a laughable cliche now... kind of like we laughed at them blaming DnD and video games but they just continued to babble it for years after most people laughed at them.
Check out any stereotypical "cops n robbers" night time drama where the bad guy did something bad to the victim after doing some kind of social media thing, the message being FB is dangerous but watching our TV show is both safe, entertaining, and makes you superior to being a victim and you get to blame the victim for "doing the wrong thing" (not watching TV addictively). Check out any stereotypical daytime talk show (the now retired Oprah must have done 100 shows about this, also see her buddy Dr Phil) with endless hour long explanations of how their unstable kid/husband/housepet/whatever would never have gone over the edge if it were not for FB/twitter/etc. A decade ago they would have gone over the edge due to video games, a decade before that due to DnD, a decade before that due to Elvis's hips or something.
Its such a tired cliche, and so much of the audience is already addicted, that now they aggressively support twitter / FB. It would make an interesting google ngram graph, were such a thing possible, to graph daytime talk shows with one line being "social media scare stories" and the other line being "FB and twitter product placement / social media self promotional links".
Its an interesting model for other activities. Once you get around 50% of the population to smoke weed, then suddenly, in a matter of weeks, Oprah/Dr Phil/CSI will phase shift from weed being the root of all evil to it being the greatest thing on earth and why not try our celebrity branded strain...
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a All Knowing Server Admin as we understood Him.
... all knowing proxy firewall admin ...
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our spulling erroz.
That would be the almighty GOOG not "God" admittedly those two are often confused. Also thats spulling erroz and the even more pitiful "txt talk".
A set of Lovecraftian rituals to worship the mighty GOOG is kind of amusing to contemplate. Maybe I've been reading too much Stross lately.... That would probably get me an instant C+D order, but sometimes fanfic just has to be done regardless...
Been there, done that.
how do employers view degrees/advanced credentials obtained online, when compared to the more typical in-person education? Does anyone have specific experience with this situation? The eventual degree itself will have no indication that it was obtained online, but simple inference will show that it was not likely I maintained my employment on the east coast while attending school in-person on the west coast
No one cares. If you get a job, it'll be from contacts and portfolio, more or less. HR won't care as long as the checkbox is checked off and they get a transcript.
I went to a "regional" U with multiple sub-campuses (campii?). I attended only online classes, although there was a sub-campus maybe only a half hour drive away. No, I did not commute 2 hours each way every day to the main campus. Maybe they'll get the same idea about your school?
Yeah as if THAT can't be faked at a human powered interview. This is better, because no one "important" takes the blame for being conned during the interview process.
There is the "median" problem that the median skilled person gets stuck in the median job position and its management's job to make it work, so they failed in your anecdote, eh... Everyone likes to think they're the top 1% of whatever skills they have, be it programming languages or BSing (soft skills). 100% of personnel trying to find the top 1% is a waste of time for all concerned.
Welcome to the 1970s? Solar panels + some kind of high ISP, extremely low thrust engine (used to be ion engines but apparently casamir effect thrusters are much better) have been planned ever since.
The problem is really simple. It's cheap to study a potential space travel mechanism on paper. But you cannot make any real progress unless real hardware is built and tested in space.
That stuff is like, old, man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Operational_missions
I know for a fact the wikipedia list is only NOTEWORTHY unusual historical missions involving ion electric engines, not every boring little comsat that has yet another station keeping system.
has been at something around $500 a share for the last 6 or 7 years. Crazy.
Why? I have a treasury direct account where I can buy risk free USG bonds for a whopping 0.5% rate or so (well its complicated and depends on the length of time, etc) Pull the numbers for the mighty GOOG: an EPS around $30 and a growth rate around 6%.
How much will it cost me to get around $30+6% next year if I buy riskless US bonds, answer, a heck of a lot. It only costs me around $600 to get around $30 next year, which is frankly not all that bad. Its risky, but not that risky.
Note that we live in a centrally controlled economy not by any means a free market. What happens to equity prices if bond prices drop to a 5% rate... Hmm why risk it with the mighty GOOG when I can get 5% riskless from treasury direct... Its a rigged, corrupt market so there is little point in trying to reason out the future, but at least at present, a "sane" price for GOOG is around $500 plus or minus maybe 25%.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Are they selling enough shares to be theoretically bought out?
I'm guessing no, $5B is not enough to be purchased.
Most likely the hope is a "real" company, perhaps AT&T or some place like that, will purchase then for X*1.3 per share where X is the current price.
Now, who would want to buy FB... A major TV network trying to be relevant in society again? Merge with clearchannel to compete with the ITMS and music.google.com?
There's only a half dozen megacorps that control all you see and hear in mass media, so there really are not many possible purchasers, assuming we're about to see Disney/ABC/Facebook merging together.
The other option is going the other direction. OK FB is useless. But on the way down they could trade their worthless stock to purchase a real company with real income producing assets; perhaps a taco stand or something. Then once the original assets are worthless, they'd still own stock in something at least minimally diversified and potentially profitable. So they might go on a buying binge purchasing small semi-related companies in exchange for FB stock. What if they ended up owning most of the small PR advertising firms? Hmm... What if they bought Zynga in a share transaction (like here's 2 shares of FB for every existing share of Zynga, tada, now we own Zynga)
If you become a shareholder, will they use your name and address to spam you with adverts? ;)
I know you're trying to be funny, but yes, yes they will. For /.ers who don't own stocks, every year, heck some places every quarter you'll get a postal spam explaining how they love diversity and BS like that, its all balloons and unicorns at HQ, and they'd love it if you'd boost their price by purchasing more of their stock.
Some of the most hilariously over-PR'd work I've ever seen has been certain electric company annual reports. What an amazing steaming pile.
You're assuming it'll grow. For a good laugh check out a recent zerohedge post (ZH is kind of the /. equivalent for the economic community?) showing graphs of share price as a % of IPO price for numerous recent (last year or so) tech stocks. All cratered below IPO price except for zynga which is somewhat volatile.
To have a bubble, first you have to have growth, and we're just not seeing that in recent tech IPOs.
Thats a good once, but I'm also worried about html parsers needing to understand half a dozen variants of the "closing slash"
My question is, what drug is more expensive?
Idursulfase for the win. Interesting from a biochemical production standpoint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idursulfase
You can get into definition battles, whats more expensive to society, a quarter million for one dude who actually needs it, or 100K unneeded $10 lorazepam prescriptions for people who don't really need it ...
Just so no one gets confused, this molecule goes by 3 common names VX-770 and Ivacaftor and Kalydeco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalydeco
There are not three separate drugs for the same problem etc.
As if http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4be/index.htm makes sense to anyone under age 30. I demand the addition of a punchcard glyph...
Take a good look at glyph 27cb aka \diagup part of the Misc Math Symbols. People are gonna try embedding that in html now. Can't wait.
You make it seem like 28MW is not a lot of power.
Its not. That's maybe a dozen un-noteworthy industrial facilities, or maybe a single really big one. One medium size heavy equipment place I worked at had dozens of CNC mills and lathes, working "most of the time" admittedly not 24x7 and not peak spindle power all the time, but it all realistically added up to a MW, especially when you add the multiple arc welding robot arm thingies (again, probably only one was working at any given time) and the plasma cutter farm which seemed to run continuously and the cranes everywhere. It was comfy in the winter without extra heating, but in the summer it got pretty uncomfortable even with ventilation. They also had a powder coating oven the size of a commercial garage (had to be, some parts in there were 30 feet long) that drew a good fraction of a megawatt just for the oven alone. At those kind of power/interference levels, you can't run copper cat-5 and wifi range is ruined by the plasma cutters (at least in those days) so it was all cheap multimode fiber thru the plant, which kept me busy.
28 MW would be something like the worlds smallest steel mill, or maybe the world smallest aluminum refinery? I'm not sure its economically possible at that small of a size. Maybe with govt subsidies? Thats only 56 five hundred HP motors, which is not much of a steel mill. 28 MW would probably be just about right for a ore refinery, those rock crushers are really hungry for power.
Lets think of just light bulbs at a VERY small building. I work in the smallest "skyscraper" in the downtown area. Its almost embarrassing to call it a skyscraper, but its not exactly a strip mall either. 40 watt fluorescent light bulbs * 2 per fixture * 20 fixtures across * 20 fixtures down (probably much higher across and down, but there's so many walls to estimate around and closets, yet the hallways are more brightly lit, so...) * 5 floors / 1e6 watts per megawatt means the wimpiest downtown office building in a fairly small city draws more than 1/8 megawatt just to light it up. It costs 16 bucks per hour just to pay for the lights, roughly. Retail space seems more brightly lit... I would guess a walmart or a strip mall might draw a pretty healthy chunk of a MW just to light it up.
This is before we get into radio and TV where admittedly 50 KW station is only 0.05 MW but, even in a small market, our radio dial is pretty full and I count 8 OTA TV stations, so it multiplies up pretty quick.
Problem w/ Linux is that no company has figured out a way to make money out of GPL software
LOL funniest thing I've read so far today. I've done nothing but make money off GPL software both my salary and $employer in general since '97. Ditto my coworkers and also practically every employed or previously employed IT person I've ever known, etc.
The concept of the wheel is similar enough to the GPL for this argument, therefore no company could ever make money using "wheels". LOL
Computer Program Reconstructs Heard Words From Brain Scans
Hard enough to parse visually, good luck using brain scans to figure that out. First 3 times I read that, I thought it was describing reconstructing computer programs using brain scans, and my first thought was, yeah, that'll work for COBOL or its modern equivalent java, now lets try something interesting like reading a Intercal programmers mind, or maybe an assembly language wizard, that'll probably crash it. What its actually discussing is not nearly as interesting.
A classic movie. The hokey pokey scene is where it starts to get really weird. OK maybe it was pretty weird before then. That movie might make a good sliding scale test to see how far along in the movie you can watch before getting completely weirded out, figure out your tolerance level.
Seriously, humans will hump damn near anything if you make it squishy enough... filthy beasts.
Who needs filthy beasts when you have tentacle monsters?
That brings up the serious question that for better or worse we expanded the human experience in the printing era, more or less, with the invention of the tentacle meme. Are there any new internet era memes that have expanded the human experience in a similar way? And no this isn't a very thiny veiled request for a goatse link, I'm looking for something a little more general in concept, not one individual incident. Maybe the general concept of Camgirls? Or the concept of an infinite array of digitally delivered pr0n, not new in any individual image but new in the concept that there's an uncountable number of images?
Its more about coming up with the most efficient way to make falsifiable predictions about the future that work often enough to be useful. this explaining stuff is a part but not the whole thing.
The summary seems to be, science sucks because its not a bunch of non-science liberal arts philosophy babble. Which is right up there with music sucks because its not a good painting.
The real discussion question, is what happened to wired? It used to be cool, well, a long time ago it used to be cool. Now?
csb: a friend of mine is trying to convince me to use an arduino mega (high density smd-only chip) where I'm currently using the skinnydip28 version of the regular 328-style arduino (which is .1" thruhole and easy to deal with). at the very least, if I was moving to a mega (25xx class), I'd insist on it being on a carrier board AND that board being built to high spec and the cpu tested on the board before being delivered to me for assembly into a larger system. I refuse to have to worry about the cpu AND the rest of the system (being a small company). I cannot find good mega-class chips already on carriers (.1-friendly carriers) AND tested AND by a company I'd trust to actually care about quality. being able to buy it pre-tested is key, to me.
I haven't worked w/ that hardware, but can't you do your software work on some dev board, even if you have to really hack the heck out of the dev board with wires laying everywhere? I've certainly done stomach turning things to poor defenseless dev boards in the past. I agree doing hardware and software dev at the same time is ... overly exciting.
I donno if you like or hate seeeed studios or whatever but slapping together a simple single chip carrier PCB and having them solder just one chip to one simple board can't be all that complex for them. I've bought stuff from them that turned out OK. Maybe the killer would be lead (oh, bad pun in a SMD thread) time?
Yeah my alignment idea is to hold it in place while doing the hot air rework station thing. Agreed, don't need that alignment jig to hold in place for reflow oven, but I've never used a reflow oven, not planning to start any time soon. Supposedly you can rely on surface tension on a vibration free basically immobile horizontal within X degrees where X is pretty small. But I wanna use an alignment jig so I can just flip it onto the desk and use the rework blower (or, maybe, nudge it by hand if I've got vias to all the pads.
soapbox time: Some of the "agony" of SMD seems to come from history... Early leaded factory assembly was done by hand exactly like the dude in the basement; wave soldering and leaded pick and place came decades later so no one freaks. Early SMD factory assembly never had a "done by hand" assembly line, at least outside of aerospace and microwave RF, so people think the only way to do SMD is to own a reflow oven, stencils/paste, and a picnplace... yeah sure just like the only way to put a leaded pcb together is to own a leaded picnplace and a leaded wave soldering machine... hmmm. You wanna learn how to leaded solder, you learn how factories did it 60 years ago. In sharp contrast, don't waste time studying how factories used to do smd, if you want to do it at home... learn how the rework guys do it by hand today, if you want to learn how to do SMD at home. After the rather sharp learning curve, its pretty easy.
I don't understand why people even want a raspberry pi at all. The apps on the itunes app store are cheap. Why ruin CS and IT to make it a little easier for people who want to write their own programs? Also it would take you hours of your own time to write and compile your own software.
Come on man, its a hobby. When a dude puts together a 1000 piece puzzle you don't pee all over it by claiming you can buy a poster of the same picture and thats a better choice because you don't have to put it together... That kind of misses the point.
The fun fun fun of kit assembly isn't in working a 16 hour shift assembling it with chinese music on pandora, eating a couple rice grains and some tea while wearing a political prisoner uniform, and pretending your boss beats you for not working hard enough. Unless you like that kind of stuff. Whatever floats your boat. Anyway the fun of kit building is kit bashing weird stuff from different eras to massively customize the project to what you want. Something I've been up to on the bench recently: I started with a fairly modern microwave local oscillator kit. Then I swapped out the crystal because I need to work on a different frequency for a completely different ham radio frequency band. Then I smooshed in a completely different voltage regulator circuit; ugly as heck but I don't care; I want/need to run off 24 volts instead of 12 volts (long story there). Didn't want to buy a modern MMIC amp for the board because I had some old 80s era tech mmics laying around so I redesigned the bias ckt for the correct voltage drop and forward current (exactly as complicated as lighting a LED, just stuck a different value resistor in; didn't wanna build a constant current supply, at least not this time). So far so good. Also added a stylish power LED so I can tell my regulator hasn't shut down from overheating..... yet.
I think it would be fun to completely redo the I/O on a raspberry pi, at least to begin with that is the most obvious thing to do. Also some stuff I simply don't care about, I would not solder on. Not gonna do the composite video thing, not gonna waste time soldering it on. Probably would rip out the audio stuff figure out how to directly wire a software defined radio directly to the board. If the first thing in the TX chain on the SDR is a giant attenuator, and the last thing on the Pi audio out is a high powered headphone amp, simplicate it and toss both replacing both ckt sections with a piece of wire. etc.
BGA packages are intimidating, even to a guy who's been hand soldering other SMD packages since around/before 1990 (that being me)
Plain SMD is easy to do by hand, even the 0402 stuff.
The thing with BGA is its an alignment problem. Some entrepreneur will likely invent a magic clamp that holds the chip in perfect registration to the PCB, at which point it'll be dirt simple to solder BGAs.
I donno where the "if you're a millimeter out, your chips are fried" stuff comes from because thats /.ed. I've done analog microwave RF work where that is actually true. That is not possible on a logic level board. "oh noes, /ce has been grounded, whatever shall we do?" Well just fix the solder bridge and stop whining. Its not like you just shorted out a 20 amp 24 volt power supply thru the bias/bypass network of a microwave FET amplifier, nothings going to blow up on a digital ckt.
"Smithers! He's standing in front of the coors beer cooler! Quick, send him SMS spam for miller!"