4) A sink. You will probably need to be able to clean PCBs, and you will need to use wet chemicals if you make your own boards.
Also, frankly, RoHS or no, you wanna be washing your hands before you leave the lab. And anyone who claims to be a real electronics guy who hasn't gotten a bad thermal burn is probably lying and the best treatment is as much cold water flowing over the burn as fast as you can possibly reach the sink (like start running for the sink while you're still yelling the F word)
If you are doing loads of SMD you might want a pick and place machine and a reflow oven.
Only for SMD production. I've done loads of SMD for 30 years now and especially for microwave RF work doing one off I think it would take a lot longer to CAD up a solder paste mask than to just hand solder it.
I think you'll find the cost of a PnP is having to buy everything in reels, and then having reels of unused stuff sit there. Yeah no headache with 0.1 uF decoupling caps, or if you focus all your work on one exact specific model of microcontroller chip, but everything else on the board is either buy a reel and throw most of it out, or do it by hand, and if you're doing 3/4 the board by hand, may as well do the whole thing and skip the PnP...
Did ya know, when you're reworking an old board and solder isn't sticking, rather than suffering or lifting the traces off the board, you can buy a little $3 pen flux applicator and suddenly its easy?
Did ya know, when washing flux off a completed board, the chemists figured out "plastic wash bottle technology" decades ago? You don't have to dump denatured alcohol on a rag, or dump most of it down the drain, or have an open bottle of solvent on your desk anymore.
Instead of icky old premade alligator clip jumpers, you can buy those fancy micro sized clamping test probe tips in bulk, and a roll of silicone superflex wire, and make your own test jumpers that are superior to crappy premade alligator clip jumpers for less money? Or at least you used to be able to do this (they last forever, more or less)
Also, get one of those tip cleaners made from what looks like a brass scourer. So much better than the wretched wet sponge.
Hakko sells a great brass turnings soldering iron cleaner. Coincidentally they sell great soldering gear, better than Metcal at about the same price. Metcal is good, don't get me wrong, in fact its very good, its just that Hakko is better. This is the soldering equivalent of the eternal vi vs emacs battle, and just like that your best bet is to try as many brands as you can and THEN select your winner (as opposed to "the" winner). Or use what your buddies use, so you can trade/share stuff. At the higher end a lot of the parts of soldering gear are swappable to different sizes sometimes different wattages.
Static issues, although that's tediously fixable with a spray. Also horrific glare if your work is properly illuminated unless you get frosted glass, in which case this is getting kinda complicated. Finally you're gonna drop stuff and a SMD component will skip across glass like a rock skipping on water, but on wood it'll still bounce but not as far. I've been doing this stuff over 30 years... you can do a lot worse than glass, so its not an awful idea, but disposable particle board wood is better.
Also if inlayed you need precision size, whereas just "drop a sheet of wood on the desk" requires no work, so when its inevitably utterly trashed (once a decade?) the replacement process is easier.
Absolute minimum of two "desk lamps on long arms". In the 80s I had a rather expensive one with a florescent ring element wrapped around a 4 or so inch magnifying glass, kind of handy when you're doing SMD work by hand. Boy was that thing heavy and RF noisy but it was perfect for soldering. Of course back then I don't think we had 0402 components. Anyway the point is if you can see a shadow, you're doin it wrong.
So you're troubleshooting the 3000 volt 2 amp power supply for an old tube amplifier while its powered up, and suddenly the lights go out while the supply is live. Not cool at all. Ideally you have lighting of some sort in the room on two separate power ckts. Extension cords are not safe, but they're a lot safer than trapped in the dark with a live power supply.
Finally everyone leaves their soldering iron plugged in and running, even the christmas tree digital ones, until they set up some kind of master power switch arrangement. You've got three power strips on my desk side (3 circuits BTW), desk lighting, test equipment, and device under test and all three strips have a $2 store bought nightlight plugged in. So if a nightlight is on, the desk is powered up. Make sure you can see the nightlights, obviously, when leaving the room and never leave the room without glancing at the nightlights as a habit.
Someone suggested a shielded room - that's easy enough to do if you expect to do RF stuff.
For gods sake man no CFLs. I had a huge battle about installing LEDs in my workroom instead of slightly cheaper CFLs. CFLs suck if you're doing low level RF work or analog work. (I suppose 1500 watt power amp wouldn't care)
I'm told that at least some florescents / CFLs put out so much noise that some microcontroller inputs will latch unless terminated. Being apocryphal this might only apply to 8031's made in 1983 but in general, I'd still say incandescent or LED, nothing else will do.
Easily replaceable wooden board. The problem is not so much using the iron as a woodburning tool as holding down two wires by laying a hammer on then, soldering the wires, then having a permanent pool of flux in/on the wood.
If it all possible make life easy on yourself.... you can get a sheet of 1/4 particle board and drop that right on the desk without even cutting. Avoid glare, do not paint, or use floor tiles, or use an old kitchen granite countertop or whatever.
In my dad's, well, grandpa's vacuum tube era a sheet of glass was a good idea other than shattering. Too much static to safely do anything post 1970 and too much glare.
Houses usually have a 2 metre earthing rod shoved in to the ground...
Does that work in very dry places?
UFER ground basically bond to the rebar in the concrete floor. Concrete, you see, covers a rather large area, like the size of the house, and fundamentally never really dries out (well, maybe in the deepest desert, but what idiot lives there). This has the charming feature of sometimes physically exploding when lightning hits... and the only way to really know if it'll blow up or not is to personally bond the rebar (arc welding rebar together is not going too far) and pour the slab yourself...
Also if you think a 2 meter rod gets pounded into the ground when no one's looking and you've got a way to chop it in half therefore much less than 1/2 the labor, I got a bridge to sell ya
Yes exactly. A "3-hole outlet" will work perfectly well at powering things if you don't hook up the ground. Its ungrounded, but you won't find out until something shorts to a chassis and you get electrocuted.
Another prime failure mode for older houses is relying on conduit for ground path and having j6p previous loanowner replace or remove a chunk of the conduit leading. No more ground anymore.
One funny failure mode of conduit grounds is not being able to source/sink 15 amps to blow the circuit breaker. Been there seen that. So hot wire shorts to chassis, resistance of the ground path is so immense from poor/corroded connections that it only drops 10 amps or so, until the fire starts or someone gets electrocuted anyway.
Finally IF you're doing analog or analog-ish stuff and you think grounding will cut down on noise, a "bad ground" might act as an antenna and make it even worse.
You can buy a little plug in doohickey from home depot or whatever that costs like $5 full of neon bulbs that will tell you if an outlet has power, if the outlet has hot-neutral reversed, and if theres a ground. You could build one in about 10 minutes using a little project box and a fat stack of 120 volt lamp/indicators/neons/whatever. The point being that you better not have 120VAC between neutral and ground, etc.
I would estimate from experience that given "normal lifestyle" with J6P fooling around with his own house wiring that about 5% of outlets will get mis-wired per decade, unless J6P had an electrician buddy or was smart enough to drop $5 on the little outlet tester lamp thingy.
So now that I've explained how having a 3-prong outlet doesn't mean you have a ground at all, we can move on to explaining exactly how, why, and when you need an isolation transformer on your test bench. The answer is short, if you can't explain, in detail, exactly whats going on WRT ground loops or floating gear to do HV work, you are not supposed to be using that stuff (TLDR is sometimes "grounded" test equipment needs to be "ungrounded", although its somewhat risky sometimes its the only way).
I immediately put you down as a "City boy". Fire restrictions exist in TONS of rural areas
Ah true in the west. Other than drought years pretty much anywhere east of Mississippi we have more water than we know what to do with. Not to make you jealous but when you schedule your burning to avoid seasonal (or year around?) fire restrictions, we schedule our recreational bonfires to avoid rain downpours. None of that stuff will burn if it rained for the last three days...
I'll give you "extreme rural" 1 person (or less) per square mile land exists. That just cuts down on the suspect list.
Just because it does not make sense to you does not make it untrue
Its more of a suspension of disbelief thing. There's no meth heads anywhere nearby? Nobody who knows you get paid for scrap metal, not pay to dispose of it? Put up a post on craigslist, "free scrap steel and stuff".
in which case they're probably not going to care about what they could sell for scrap
Owner might not care but the contractors / subs will. I don't believe there is an electrician out there who will leave copper wire laying around a jobsite, at least not on purpose. Every carpenter has a woodburning stove in his workshop... So its gotta be a homeowner doing all his own work, and probably a pretty stupid one at that.
I grew up in a semi-rural area so I know what I'm talkin bout here:
Figure out why your neighbors hate you and convince them to like you. Lets be realistic, middle of nowhere, nobody's driving 500 miles just to dump on your land... You pissed someone off who lives VERY nearby and the folks who could bust him are better friends with him than you. Fix that.
Talk to your local politicans and get fees removed from the community landfill. That's insane. Not legally permissible where I live, I believe by state reg, because the DNR doesn't want to spend $20000 cleaning up dumped motor oil as a result of "profit" they'd make from charging $5 at the landfill, not to mention it provides a profit motive for turning touristy scenery into a 3rd world wasteland. Sometimes a double taxation argument works... Govt already made 5% sales tax when I bought my motor oil, presumably they don't need another 5% to dispose of it.
Another thing I don't understand is I cannot throw out steel or metal anything without the local meth heads stealing it and getting money for it at the junkyard. Other stuff you're reporting sounds bogus. Goodwill accepts anything electronic and sometimes makes a profit reselling it. There's a veterans group who collect furniture, drive up to your house with a pickup and they unload "for free" although since they're doing "good" I slip them some cash (knowing its probably paying for their lunch instead of going in their treasury, and I don't mind a bit). The only thing I can kinda understand is the countertop, but only kinda. Like where do those come from? If its wood, burn it. If its rock, bury it. If its steel the meth heads already stole it. So...
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
Really short summary is squirting individual atoms in a superposition state thru a microwave waveguide puts the field in the waveguide into a superposition. Not surprisingly figuring out the field inside a waveguide is something we're pretty good at after a couple decades of radar work etc. Now if you take two entangled atoms and squirt them thru the detector at different times, you can do/measure all sorts of interesting quantum effects by screwing around with the field in the waveguide.
I guess a/.ification of it, is if you're familiar with the concept of knowing if an ancient computer has a 1 or 0 because a lightbulb is on or off, this is the technological element a quantum computer would use to sorta display the 1 or 0 of a result, sorta.
There's a funny ancient computing analogy where you can't read a core memory, you can only write it and see if the energy required to write is consistent with it having been a 1 or 0 before it was overwritten. The analogy is you squirt an atom thru this guys lab experiment, what comes out isn't what came in, but you can work backwards to figure out what it must have been at the start, sorta.
Its a handy basic tool/technique for quantum "stuff". Kind of like being the inventor of the "test tube" or NMR or FT-IR or whatever.
Is it just a Slashdot thing? (doesn't seem to exist elsewhere as far as I can tell)
Hardly. I was hearing it in the American South (as opposed to South America) in the early 90s.
Think of "mouth hanging open with amazement" for something not particularly amazing. Exclamation of "wow" at a demonstration of the blink tag followed by mouth breathing.
As Americans have gotten fatter it also seems to be used for "too fat to propel the walmart cart at walking speed without mouth hanging open" but this is a rare use. Also rare use in the poser community, as in eats 5 bags of cheetos per day thus fat thus has to mouth breathe, but it takes a bit more than cheeto eating to be a real web dev or real linux dev or whatever. Some "snot nosed kid" analogy thus has to mouth breathe, "kid" not necessarily meaning young, but always meaning noob.
They are not a "definitive resource" by any stretch of imagination.
which w3schools or webplatform?
Go to webplatform main page, click on html5, get "alpha" warning, a list of 9 issue/error tags, scroll down to "You can help documenting the list of HTML and related elements." and click on the link at the end "list of html and related elements" and get "This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.".
I guess the general feeling I'm getting is W3schools is proven to be operate at "somewhat less than reference quality" level, and the new shiny is currently orders of magnitude worse than w3schools but hope springs eternal and maybe someday it'll be far better... someday... maybe...
I've heard that argument before and been unimpressed. Swallow the ring? The Nazgul are not killing everything that flies... I'm sure there exists a detailed argument, I'm just saying the quick summary isn't doing it for me.
Pretty sure the winged Nazgul steed things could rip a few pathetic eagles to shreds, they sounded pretty damn nasty.
And back to the original topic of the admin having to reboot the slashdotted server, I'm going to use your excuse next time I get a call/page and don't particularly feel like fixing it. Sorry, the server's down because of a Nazgul infestation.
There's also some accounting based on historical record that 12 shuttle flights is "about" 20% chance of losing an orbiter, and at historical death rates is equivalent to about one dead astronaut.
It is definitely not a simple problem to be solved, but certainly has had a lot of work put into it. While NIF's setup fires only about once a day
I can tell you based on EE smarty stuff that capacitor charge rates depend on power supply size and unfortunately scale much worse than linear.
So if your data reduction takes "more than a day per experiment" it would be financially foolish to spend 1e3 times as much on the charging system to charge 1e2 times faster.
There are probably experimental types and runs where blasting a million targets in a day would be "nice" but there's probably too many where they're still scratching their heads the next day such that on average, dropping megabucks into the charging system would not pay off.
Also tradeoffs. Fixed budget, do you wanna do boring stuff over and over again real fast or something cool but it'll take a day to charge..
Slashdot Mirror
4) A sink. You will probably need to be able to clean PCBs, and you will need to use wet chemicals if you make your own boards.
Also, frankly, RoHS or no, you wanna be washing your hands before you leave the lab. And anyone who claims to be a real electronics guy who hasn't gotten a bad thermal burn is probably lying and the best treatment is as much cold water flowing over the burn as fast as you can possibly reach the sink (like start running for the sink while you're still yelling the F word)
If you are doing loads of SMD you might want a pick and place machine and a reflow oven.
Only for SMD production. I've done loads of SMD for 30 years now and especially for microwave RF work doing one off I think it would take a lot longer to CAD up a solder paste mask than to just hand solder it.
I think you'll find the cost of a PnP is having to buy everything in reels, and then having reels of unused stuff sit there. Yeah no headache with 0.1 uF decoupling caps, or if you focus all your work on one exact specific model of microcontroller chip, but everything else on the board is either buy a reel and throw most of it out, or do it by hand, and if you're doing 3/4 the board by hand, may as well do the whole thing and skip the PnP...
Assuming you know it exists.
Did ya know, when you're reworking an old board and solder isn't sticking, rather than suffering or lifting the traces off the board, you can buy a little $3 pen flux applicator and suddenly its easy?
Did ya know, when washing flux off a completed board, the chemists figured out "plastic wash bottle technology" decades ago? You don't have to dump denatured alcohol on a rag, or dump most of it down the drain, or have an open bottle of solvent on your desk anymore.
Instead of icky old premade alligator clip jumpers, you can buy those fancy micro sized clamping test probe tips in bulk, and a roll of silicone superflex wire, and make your own test jumpers that are superior to crappy premade alligator clip jumpers for less money? Or at least you used to be able to do this (they last forever, more or less)
As for soldering irons, Metcal is the shit...
Also, get one of those tip cleaners made from what looks like a brass scourer. So much better than the wretched wet sponge.
Hakko sells a great brass turnings soldering iron cleaner. Coincidentally they sell great soldering gear, better than Metcal at about the same price. Metcal is good, don't get me wrong, in fact its very good, its just that Hakko is better. This is the soldering equivalent of the eternal vi vs emacs battle, and just like that your best bet is to try as many brands as you can and THEN select your winner (as opposed to "the" winner). Or use what your buddies use, so you can trade/share stuff. At the higher end a lot of the parts of soldering gear are swappable to different sizes sometimes different wattages.
you might want to consider glass inlays
Static issues, although that's tediously fixable with a spray. Also horrific glare if your work is properly illuminated unless you get frosted glass, in which case this is getting kinda complicated. Finally you're gonna drop stuff and a SMD component will skip across glass like a rock skipping on water, but on wood it'll still bounce but not as far. I've been doing this stuff over 30 years... you can do a lot worse than glass, so its not an awful idea, but disposable particle board wood is better.
Also if inlayed you need precision size, whereas just "drop a sheet of wood on the desk" requires no work, so when its inevitably utterly trashed (once a decade?) the replacement process is easier.
very bright, and illuminated uniformly
Absolute minimum of two "desk lamps on long arms". In the 80s I had a rather expensive one with a florescent ring element wrapped around a 4 or so inch magnifying glass, kind of handy when you're doing SMD work by hand. Boy was that thing heavy and RF noisy but it was perfect for soldering. Of course back then I don't think we had 0402 components. Anyway the point is if you can see a shadow, you're doin it wrong.
So you're troubleshooting the 3000 volt 2 amp power supply for an old tube amplifier while its powered up, and suddenly the lights go out while the supply is live. Not cool at all. Ideally you have lighting of some sort in the room on two separate power ckts. Extension cords are not safe, but they're a lot safer than trapped in the dark with a live power supply.
Finally everyone leaves their soldering iron plugged in and running, even the christmas tree digital ones, until they set up some kind of master power switch arrangement. You've got three power strips on my desk side (3 circuits BTW), desk lighting, test equipment, and device under test and all three strips have a $2 store bought nightlight plugged in. So if a nightlight is on, the desk is powered up. Make sure you can see the nightlights, obviously, when leaving the room and never leave the room without glancing at the nightlights as a habit.
Someone suggested a shielded room - that's easy enough to do if you expect to do RF stuff.
For gods sake man no CFLs. I had a huge battle about installing LEDs in my workroom instead of slightly cheaper CFLs. CFLs suck if you're doing low level RF work or analog work. (I suppose 1500 watt power amp wouldn't care)
I'm told that at least some florescents / CFLs put out so much noise that some microcontroller inputs will latch unless terminated. Being apocryphal this might only apply to 8031's made in 1983 but in general, I'd still say incandescent or LED, nothing else will do.
For soldering, just get a wooden board
Easily replaceable wooden board. The problem is not so much using the iron as a woodburning tool as holding down two wires by laying a hammer on then, soldering the wires, then having a permanent pool of flux in/on the wood.
If it all possible make life easy on yourself.... you can get a sheet of 1/4 particle board and drop that right on the desk without even cutting. Avoid glare, do not paint, or use floor tiles, or use an old kitchen granite countertop or whatever.
In my dad's, well, grandpa's vacuum tube era a sheet of glass was a good idea other than shattering. Too much static to safely do anything post 1970 and too much glare.
Houses usually have a 2 metre earthing rod shoved in to the ground...
Does that work in very dry places?
UFER ground basically bond to the rebar in the concrete floor. Concrete, you see, covers a rather large area, like the size of the house, and fundamentally never really dries out (well, maybe in the deepest desert, but what idiot lives there). This has the charming feature of sometimes physically exploding when lightning hits... and the only way to really know if it'll blow up or not is to personally bond the rebar (arc welding rebar together is not going too far) and pour the slab yourself...
Also if you think a 2 meter rod gets pounded into the ground when no one's looking and you've got a way to chop it in half therefore much less than 1/2 the labor, I got a bridge to sell ya
A opposed to fake earth grounded mains?
Yes exactly. A "3-hole outlet" will work perfectly well at powering things if you don't hook up the ground. Its ungrounded, but you won't find out until something shorts to a chassis and you get electrocuted.
Another prime failure mode for older houses is relying on conduit for ground path and having j6p previous loanowner replace or remove a chunk of the conduit leading. No more ground anymore.
One funny failure mode of conduit grounds is not being able to source/sink 15 amps to blow the circuit breaker. Been there seen that. So hot wire shorts to chassis, resistance of the ground path is so immense from poor/corroded connections that it only drops 10 amps or so, until the fire starts or someone gets electrocuted anyway.
Finally IF you're doing analog or analog-ish stuff and you think grounding will cut down on noise, a "bad ground" might act as an antenna and make it even worse.
You can buy a little plug in doohickey from home depot or whatever that costs like $5 full of neon bulbs that will tell you if an outlet has power, if the outlet has hot-neutral reversed, and if theres a ground. You could build one in about 10 minutes using a little project box and a fat stack of 120 volt lamp/indicators/neons/whatever. The point being that you better not have 120VAC between neutral and ground, etc.
I would estimate from experience that given "normal lifestyle" with J6P fooling around with his own house wiring that about 5% of outlets will get mis-wired per decade, unless J6P had an electrician buddy or was smart enough to drop $5 on the little outlet tester lamp thingy.
So now that I've explained how having a 3-prong outlet doesn't mean you have a ground at all, we can move on to explaining exactly how, why, and when you need an isolation transformer on your test bench. The answer is short, if you can't explain, in detail, exactly whats going on WRT ground loops or floating gear to do HV work, you are not supposed to be using that stuff (TLDR is sometimes "grounded" test equipment needs to be "ungrounded", although its somewhat risky sometimes its the only way).
I immediately put you down as a "City boy". Fire restrictions exist in TONS of rural areas
Ah true in the west. Other than drought years pretty much anywhere east of Mississippi we have more water than we know what to do with. Not to make you jealous but when you schedule your burning to avoid seasonal (or year around?) fire restrictions, we schedule our recreational bonfires to avoid rain downpours. None of that stuff will burn if it rained for the last three days...
I'll give you "extreme rural" 1 person (or less) per square mile land exists. That just cuts down on the suspect list.
swap out your hard disks on a daily basis?
Daily basis? If the point is to not lose your wedding photos, that seems a bit extreme.
Am I willing to lose my digital life's work? Nah not really. How bout the delta from the previous month? Not so bad.
Just because it does not make sense to you does not make it untrue
Its more of a suspension of disbelief thing. There's no meth heads anywhere nearby? Nobody who knows you get paid for scrap metal, not pay to dispose of it? Put up a post on craigslist, "free scrap steel and stuff".
in which case they're probably not going to care about what they could sell for scrap
Owner might not care but the contractors / subs will. I don't believe there is an electrician out there who will leave copper wire laying around a jobsite, at least not on purpose. Every carpenter has a woodburning stove in his workshop... So its gotta be a homeowner doing all his own work, and probably a pretty stupid one at that.
point being that you most likely will not need cameras for this to actually work
Why not buy a broken camera from your local junk store and very visibly install it?
I grew up in a semi-rural area so I know what I'm talkin bout here:
Figure out why your neighbors hate you and convince them to like you. Lets be realistic, middle of nowhere, nobody's driving 500 miles just to dump on your land... You pissed someone off who lives VERY nearby and the folks who could bust him are better friends with him than you. Fix that.
Talk to your local politicans and get fees removed from the community landfill. That's insane. Not legally permissible where I live, I believe by state reg, because the DNR doesn't want to spend $20000 cleaning up dumped motor oil as a result of "profit" they'd make from charging $5 at the landfill, not to mention it provides a profit motive for turning touristy scenery into a 3rd world wasteland. Sometimes a double taxation argument works... Govt already made 5% sales tax when I bought my motor oil, presumably they don't need another 5% to dispose of it.
Another thing I don't understand is I cannot throw out steel or metal anything without the local meth heads stealing it and getting money for it at the junkyard. Other stuff you're reporting sounds bogus. Goodwill accepts anything electronic and sometimes makes a profit reselling it. There's a veterans group who collect furniture, drive up to your house with a pickup and they unload "for free" although since they're doing "good" I slip them some cash (knowing its probably paying for their lunch instead of going in their treasury, and I don't mind a bit). The only thing I can kinda understand is the countertop, but only kinda. Like where do those come from? If its wood, burn it. If its rock, bury it. If its steel the meth heads already stole it. So...
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Run the numbers. 50 TB a day sounds like a lot, if they've only got one customer. But they're probably got "a zillion" which would imply your very thin slice of the upload bandwidth is going to be choked to like a gig per day. The upgrade in my basement from (full) 1 TB drives to 2 TB drives took around overnight, less than 24 hours anyway, but over the net at a gig per day would be about 3 years to fully convert. Even if they're not limited I would have serious problems shoving more than 100 gigs/day thru my cablemodem, so thats at least 10 days.
Another interesting thing to analyze is $5/month is $60/yr, so subtract $5/yr for electricity to spin a drive, assume a drive lives 2 years (probably much longer) that means if you can buy a drive big enough to hold everything you want for less than $110, just stick a drive in your basement. Better bandwidth and latency too, I have gigE at home but only ten or so megs of cablemodem. $110 at tiger direct will get me 2 TB. So 2 TB is approximately the tipping point, use less and you're better off "self hosting" in the basement, use more and you're better off using their service (and they're likely losing money if you use more than 2 TB).
Also I'm curious if its "unlimited" like cellphone or internet access is "unlimited" in other words they'll cut you off if they're losing money on you.
If he sent me a piece of regular mail, I'm completely entitled to do what I want with it, including showing the content to another entity ...
... to demand price matching on an advertisement?
Maybe its an end run to destroy that kind of retail interaction.
Some details on Serge Haroche's experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence#Quantitative_measurement
Really short summary is squirting individual atoms in a superposition state thru a microwave waveguide puts the field in the waveguide into a superposition. Not surprisingly figuring out the field inside a waveguide is something we're pretty good at after a couple decades of radar work etc. Now if you take two entangled atoms and squirt them thru the detector at different times, you can do/measure all sorts of interesting quantum effects by screwing around with the field in the waveguide.
I guess a /.ification of it, is if you're familiar with the concept of knowing if an ancient computer has a 1 or 0 because a lightbulb is on or off, this is the technological element a quantum computer would use to sorta display the 1 or 0 of a result, sorta.
There's a funny ancient computing analogy where you can't read a core memory, you can only write it and see if the energy required to write is consistent with it having been a 1 or 0 before it was overwritten. The analogy is you squirt an atom thru this guys lab experiment, what comes out isn't what came in, but you can work backwards to figure out what it must have been at the start, sorta.
Its a handy basic tool/technique for quantum "stuff". Kind of like being the inventor of the "test tube" or NMR or FT-IR or whatever.
Is it just a Slashdot thing? (doesn't seem to exist elsewhere as far as I can tell)
Hardly. I was hearing it in the American South (as opposed to South America) in the early 90s.
Think of "mouth hanging open with amazement" for something not particularly amazing. Exclamation of "wow" at a demonstration of the blink tag followed by mouth breathing.
As Americans have gotten fatter it also seems to be used for "too fat to propel the walmart cart at walking speed without mouth hanging open" but this is a rare use. Also rare use in the poser community, as in eats 5 bags of cheetos per day thus fat thus has to mouth breathe, but it takes a bit more than cheeto eating to be a real web dev or real linux dev or whatever. Some "snot nosed kid" analogy thus has to mouth breathe, "kid" not necessarily meaning young, but always meaning noob.
They are not a "definitive resource" by any stretch of imagination.
which w3schools or webplatform?
Go to webplatform main page, click on html5, get "alpha" warning, a list of 9 issue/error tags, scroll down to "You can help documenting the list of HTML and related elements." and click on the link at the end "list of html and related elements" and get "This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.".
I guess the general feeling I'm getting is W3schools is proven to be operate at "somewhat less than reference quality" level, and the new shiny is currently orders of magnitude worse than w3schools but hope springs eternal and maybe someday it'll be far better... someday... maybe...
So its basically an alpha reimplementation of w3schools?
http://www.w3schools.com/
Sauron's nazguils could take out Manwë's eagles?
I've heard that argument before and been unimpressed. Swallow the ring? The Nazgul are not killing everything that flies... I'm sure there exists a detailed argument, I'm just saying the quick summary isn't doing it for me.
Pretty sure the winged Nazgul steed things could rip a few pathetic eagles to shreds, they sounded pretty damn nasty.
And back to the original topic of the admin having to reboot the slashdotted server, I'm going to use your excuse next time I get a call/page and don't particularly feel like fixing it. Sorry, the server's down because of a Nazgul infestation.
There's also some accounting based on historical record that 12 shuttle flights is "about" 20% chance of losing an orbiter, and at historical death rates is equivalent to about one dead astronaut.
It is definitely not a simple problem to be solved, but certainly has had a lot of work put into it. While NIF's setup fires only about once a day
I can tell you based on EE smarty stuff that capacitor charge rates depend on power supply size and unfortunately scale much worse than linear.
So if your data reduction takes "more than a day per experiment" it would be financially foolish to spend 1e3 times as much on the charging system to charge 1e2 times faster.
There are probably experimental types and runs where blasting a million targets in a day would be "nice" but there's probably too many where they're still scratching their heads the next day such that on average, dropping megabucks into the charging system would not pay off.
Also tradeoffs. Fixed budget, do you wanna do boring stuff over and over again real fast or something cool but it'll take a day to charge..
When will GIT get a more safe hash function?
Its not safe? What there's an unpatched buffer overflow in there?