It has always been thus (at least since Intel Macs came around), and well known in the Apple aftermarket community, too. Buy your RAM in the aftermarket - but please get the good stuff (it's still much cheaper than from Apple.)
The remarkable thing is the bargain they give on the base MacPro system - last time I priced equivalent 8 core Linux boxes, you'd have to pay 25% more to get equivalent hardware with no OS installed.
Caveat emptor - shop wisely and save some money. And, if you're worried about your AppleCare warranty, just reconfigure yourself back to 100% factory parts before making the service call.
Personally, I agree - wrap-around gutters are just making work for the homeowner. However, free-falling water can excavate the soil around the foundation, splash up on wood siding, and cause other mischief. My solutions for this would include placing gravel or brick along the drip=line, not putting wood siding that low to the ground, etc. But, when dealing with a home as-built.......
Most of my gutters are only accessible by ladder from one or two points, the rest of the ground is too uneven, soft, covered in fragile landscaping, or blocked by larger plants/trees.
Yeah, I would have designed the houses differently too - but economic reality is such that I didn't have the time (or desire) to custom build my homes, so I'm stuck with what's available on the market - and gutter design elegance is pretty far down the priority queue.
I disagree about trusting ordinary dvd-r, unless you think a 5% loss / 30 years rate is acceptable.
I agree with a post above that referred to keeping.ISO images on a server. If you have the data on 2 or 3 separate hard drives at any given time, it's quite unlikely that all will die simultaneously, and it's easy to make a new copy when one does have a problem. The present storage requirement was stated as 100GB - that's roughly 25 DVDs, or a single external hard drive that retails for roughly $100. I'd much rather back up a single hard drive than 25 separate DVDs.
You can always transcribe the video and image files into the format duJour when you want to. Personally, I keep my files on an NAS drive and access them through DLNA, Samba, and by mounting the drive in Linux. I've been happy with the QNAP NAS boxes like the TS-109.
I found the zero tolerance aspects of RoHS particularly amusing in light of these kinds of glaring exceptions..... You there, with 0.2 micrograms of lead in your alloy, that's got to go! Oh, sir, yes, there's no other way but to put 50lbs of lead in this battery, we understand.
All in all, RoHS is a noble sentiment, and will eventually do a lot of good - it's just going to be an interesting ride while some of the unknowns get worked out... tin whiskers is probably the biggest technical challenge that I've come across in the RoHS fallout, and again, I can see the economic interests at work creating a bigger market via replacement of defective electronics - at least the landfills and incinerators won't be dealing with as much hazardous substance while they process the stream of junk.
Whiskers are projections of tin, basically little wires, they are particularly nasty at high frequencies, but are conductive like any other metal trace.
I have seen evidence of a periodic fault where a whisker grew, shorted, blasted itself apart (due to the high current density in the little conductor), and regrew to short again every couple of weeks for several months.
The stereo amplifier would likely survive several such shorts without serious problem, but eventually something in a low voltage signal path would get crossed up and that would kill it. With any luck, you could bang it with your fist and break the short, but that would only work so many times....
It's not just the solder that changed, it is also the "tinning" on all of the components, this is a huge change in the industry and we're basically throwing out decades of experience just to start learning all over again.
Rumors floating out of NASA/JSC a few years back were that they were pretty seriously concerned about the sea-change in industry since they get so much of their current componentry off the shelf, and they have documented cases of whisker induced failures. It's one thing when your iPod craps out, quite another when a GPS satellite goes off-line.
In the world of implantable medical devices (actually quite similar to space, since after a device is "launched" you really don't want to replace it for a stupid failure), there is also a lot of concern. Both of these fields can still use lead based solder, but they can no longer buy basic capacitors, and other components with the traditional lead alloy end-caps, and just the absence of lead in the caps can lead to whisker formation.
What the parent posted is a very macho statement from an industry that wants you to believe that they have a handle on the problem. Stop for a minute and think about all the mom & pop immigrant employing electronic sweatshops in the US - now think how most of those assembly plants are run in Costa Rica, Taiwan, and mainland China... how many of them are going to be educated enough to even begin to approach the kind of expertise required to avoid tin whiskers in lead free assemblies?
My take is that the electronics industry is laughing all the way to the bank, because they've taken another step on the road to manufacturing a disposable commodity. Nothing helps sales more than replacement business, and if everybody makes crap that dies within 5-10 years, you aren't going to be able to buy anything that lasts anymore.
My stereo amplifier from 1985 still works almost like the day I bought it, but with lead free connections inside, it would likely have a half-life on the order of just a few years, you never know when it's going to die, but die someday it will.
It doesn't really matter that Java was built using C, early C was built using Macro-assembly (later C was built using early C), and Macro-assemblers were written in machine code. There are still people who understand the machine code - very few, but at the moment, that's all we need.
There are places where this kind of layering has led to real nasty black boxes (such as hard drive controllers) - but for the most part, it's a good thing - allowing people to move away from the technical details on to the things they're really interested in.
If you really want to get back to basics, you should be growing your own food, while defending your territory from raiding parties, and then start attempting to refine semi-conductors and silicone into microchips.
This is classic small claims harassment, make the demand so small that it's not efficient to fight it and hope the mark just pays up.
He should be able to effectively stop them by placing counterclaim against them for his expense in fighting them, but that will likely cost him more than they are asking for.
It's a slimy game, and I haven't seen a legal system in the world that's attempting to stop this kind of petty harassment.
If this GRB is as rare as it appears to be, it will likely serve as a reference magnitude for other GRBs observed in the future (i.e., today's burst was the largest ever - 1.3x the magnitude of the Clarke Event observed in 2008, etc.)
As an aside, I'm surprised no comments (that I've read) follow this line of logic:
Of course Clarke's death didn't cause the burst, but wouldn't it be remarkable if somehow, even if by seeming coincidence, the burst caused his death?
What part of mercury vapor florescent was unclear from the start?
I'm an anti-mercury Nazi, and yet I use compact florescent bulbs in maybe 60% of the sockets in my home (mostly the non-dimmer sockets... also in a multi-bulb fixture I usually include one incandescent that actually lights when the switch is thrown instead of flickering to life later...)
On balance, I think the mercury in the bulbs is offset by the reduction in mercury laden coal burning at our local power plant - and as lame as the current waste handling stream is, I also believe that most of the mercury found in florescent bulbs in our home (compact and not - those 4' tubes in the garage likely contain more Hg than all the CFs put together) will find its way to the local landfill about 10 miles west of home, sure, about 1/2 of the bulbs will break in transit, but hopefully not too much will find its way back into our home and lungs. Mercury vapor should settle into the soil fairly quickly.
On the other hand, the power plant 4 miles north of home spews superheated coal byproducts high in the sky. I'm pretty sure I breathe a fair number of ppms of whatever the latest load of coal had in it all the time, at least when the wind is out of the North. Sure, they run scrubbers, except when they don't - and I've seen plenty of times where the scrubbers are off-line, but the power is still flowing.
The fear that I have is that Google will attain a level of acceptance such that if something is not on Google, it is effectively invisible to the world. This would give them outrageous control beyond that wielded by any oppressive government of the past.
Hopefully there will be a competitive search engine or two around to keep them honest.
Cheap shot at the parent's PhD: if all your research can be done on Google in a few minutes, what value are you adding?
If you calculate the bureaucrats salaries for the time it took them to write up and propose this expedition, along with the "burdened cost" of the buildings, utilities, auditors, HR personnel, finance personnel, oversight, management, retirement and other benefits, etc. involved, the actual operational costs of the Gulfstream jet are trivial.... now consider that the "ground mission" would still carry most of the other costs, as well as a month's preparation on-site for the instrument crew, etc. etc. the differences are really not much at all.
A small company with the necessary capabilities could carry off either mission for less than 10% of the cost, but think of all the people who would be out of work if these government agencies just left this work to the private sector.
I suppose the odds are low that they will be struck while in flight.... still, I wonder how many meteors are still producing visible trails when they reach 47,000 feet and below?
Even when new - carbeuretors weren't known for being 99.999% there for you the way electronic fuel injection is, and mechanical fuel injection had its problems too.
I had a 1980 Honda Civic with no engine management electronics - it ran well, but there were times it wouldn't start right off, especially in unusual (wet, dry, hot or cold) weather.
That's the obvious conclusion... people tend to forget that those cars were rather unreliable (thus the "keep it running" so often heard by getaway drivers in the movies)...
Russian fighter jets were said to be EMP impervious due to using tubes instead of transistors... not sure I'd want my avionics to be tube based today, either.
Say, here's a thought: tube controlled EFI - analog computing - but, wait, remember how well those tube based TVs used to work?
If the engine control computers were built to higher EMI resistance standards, these things would have a hard time knocking them down. Those engine control computers from 1973 are simple enough that you could make a very "hardened" version today.
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It has always been thus (at least since Intel Macs came around), and well known in the Apple aftermarket community, too. Buy your RAM in the aftermarket - but please get the good stuff (it's still much cheaper than from Apple.)
The remarkable thing is the bargain they give on the base MacPro system - last time I priced equivalent 8 core Linux boxes, you'd have to pay 25% more to get equivalent hardware with no OS installed.
Caveat emptor - shop wisely and save some money. And, if you're worried about your AppleCare warranty, just reconfigure yourself back to 100% factory parts before making the service call.
Personally, I agree - wrap-around gutters are just making work for the homeowner. However, free-falling water can excavate the soil around the foundation, splash up on wood siding, and cause other mischief. My solutions for this would include placing gravel or brick along the drip=line, not putting wood siding that low to the ground, etc. But, when dealing with a home as-built.......
Spoken like someone who's never tried it....
Most of my gutters are only accessible by ladder from one or two points, the rest of the ground is too uneven, soft, covered in fragile landscaping, or blocked by larger plants/trees.
Yeah, I would have designed the houses differently too - but economic reality is such that I didn't have the time (or desire) to custom build my homes, so I'm stuck with what's available on the market - and gutter design elegance is pretty far down the priority queue.
I disagree about trusting ordinary dvd-r, unless you think a 5% loss / 30 years rate is acceptable.
I agree with a post above that referred to keeping .ISO images on a server. If you have the data on 2 or 3 separate hard drives at any given time, it's quite unlikely that all will die simultaneously, and it's easy to make a new copy when one does have a problem. The present storage requirement was stated as 100GB - that's roughly 25 DVDs, or a single external hard drive that retails for roughly $100. I'd much rather back up a single hard drive than 25 separate DVDs.
You can always transcribe the video and image files into the format duJour when you want to. Personally, I keep my files on an NAS drive and access them through DLNA, Samba, and by mounting the drive in Linux. I've been happy with the QNAP NAS boxes like the TS-109.
Perhaps WEP is analogous to locking a car door, with the window down, keys in the ignition and running.
The ocean cruise to drop the torpedo would cost more than $2K in fuel alone....
Economic and political reality strikes again.
I found the zero tolerance aspects of RoHS particularly amusing in light of these kinds of glaring exceptions..... You there, with 0.2 micrograms of lead in your alloy, that's got to go! Oh, sir, yes, there's no other way but to put 50lbs of lead in this battery, we understand.
All in all, RoHS is a noble sentiment, and will eventually do a lot of good - it's just going to be an interesting ride while some of the unknowns get worked out... tin whiskers is probably the biggest technical challenge that I've come across in the RoHS fallout, and again, I can see the economic interests at work creating a bigger market via replacement of defective electronics - at least the landfills and incinerators won't be dealing with as much hazardous substance while they process the stream of junk.
Whiskers are projections of tin, basically little wires, they are particularly nasty at high frequencies, but are conductive like any other metal trace.
I have seen evidence of a periodic fault where a whisker grew, shorted, blasted itself apart (due to the high current density in the little conductor), and regrew to short again every couple of weeks for several months.
The stereo amplifier would likely survive several such shorts without serious problem, but eventually something in a low voltage signal path would get crossed up and that would kill it. With any luck, you could bang it with your fist and break the short, but that would only work so many times....Yeah - the battery doesn't exactly have RoHS written all over it, either.
They're not running short enough on capacity anywhere to give a damn about efficiency. They do, however, have to score the occasional political point.
It's not just the solder that changed, it is also the "tinning" on all of the components, this is a huge change in the industry and we're basically throwing out decades of experience just to start learning all over again.
Rumors floating out of NASA/JSC a few years back were that they were pretty seriously concerned about the sea-change in industry since they get so much of their current componentry off the shelf, and they have documented cases of whisker induced failures. It's one thing when your iPod craps out, quite another when a GPS satellite goes off-line.
In the world of implantable medical devices (actually quite similar to space, since after a device is "launched" you really don't want to replace it for a stupid failure), there is also a lot of concern. Both of these fields can still use lead based solder, but they can no longer buy basic capacitors, and other components with the traditional lead alloy end-caps, and just the absence of lead in the caps can lead to whisker formation.
What the parent posted is a very macho statement from an industry that wants you to believe that they have a handle on the problem. Stop for a minute and think about all the mom & pop immigrant employing electronic sweatshops in the US - now think how most of those assembly plants are run in Costa Rica, Taiwan, and mainland China... how many of them are going to be educated enough to even begin to approach the kind of expertise required to avoid tin whiskers in lead free assemblies?
My take is that the electronics industry is laughing all the way to the bank, because they've taken another step on the road to manufacturing a disposable commodity. Nothing helps sales more than replacement business, and if everybody makes crap that dies within 5-10 years, you aren't going to be able to buy anything that lasts anymore.
My stereo amplifier from 1985 still works almost like the day I bought it, but with lead free connections inside, it would likely have a half-life on the order of just a few years, you never know when it's going to die, but die someday it will.It doesn't really matter that Java was built using C, early C was built using Macro-assembly (later C was built using early C), and Macro-assemblers were written in machine code. There are still people who understand the machine code - very few, but at the moment, that's all we need.
There are places where this kind of layering has led to real nasty black boxes (such as hard drive controllers) - but for the most part, it's a good thing - allowing people to move away from the technical details on to the things they're really interested in.
If you really want to get back to basics, you should be growing your own food, while defending your territory from raiding parties, and then start attempting to refine semi-conductors and silicone into microchips.
This is classic small claims harassment, make the demand so small that it's not efficient to fight it and hope the mark just pays up.
He should be able to effectively stop them by placing counterclaim against them for his expense in fighting them, but that will likely cost him more than they are asking for.
It's a slimy game, and I haven't seen a legal system in the world that's attempting to stop this kind of petty harassment.
As an aside, I'm surprised no comments (that I've read) follow this line of logic:
Of course Clarke's death didn't cause the burst, but wouldn't it be remarkable if somehow, even if by seeming coincidence, the burst caused his death?
Look up "Mad Hatter's Disease".
I'm an anti-mercury Nazi, and yet I use compact florescent bulbs in maybe 60% of the sockets in my home (mostly the non-dimmer sockets... also in a multi-bulb fixture I usually include one incandescent that actually lights when the switch is thrown instead of flickering to life later...)
On balance, I think the mercury in the bulbs is offset by the reduction in mercury laden coal burning at our local power plant - and as lame as the current waste handling stream is, I also believe that most of the mercury found in florescent bulbs in our home (compact and not - those 4' tubes in the garage likely contain more Hg than all the CFs put together) will find its way to the local landfill about 10 miles west of home, sure, about 1/2 of the bulbs will break in transit, but hopefully not too much will find its way back into our home and lungs. Mercury vapor should settle into the soil fairly quickly.
On the other hand, the power plant 4 miles north of home spews superheated coal byproducts high in the sky. I'm pretty sure I breathe a fair number of ppms of whatever the latest load of coal had in it all the time, at least when the wind is out of the North. Sure, they run scrubbers, except when they don't - and I've seen plenty of times where the scrubbers are off-line, but the power is still flowing.
The fear that I have is that Google will attain a level of acceptance such that if something is not on Google, it is effectively invisible to the world. This would give them outrageous control beyond that wielded by any oppressive government of the past.
Hopefully there will be a competitive search engine or two around to keep them honest.
Cheap shot at the parent's PhD: if all your research can be done on Google in a few minutes, what value are you adding?
by 2017, everyone including geezers, will be required to have the new uber-ID (which, actually, looks pretty tame from the sketchy details in TFA).
There's absolutely no reason to consider something like this in Brownville Texas, but some places on Earth make sense.
Still a very customer un-friendly thing to do.
But, bureaucratic overhead (especially at the federal level) seems such a high price to pay for anything.
If you calculate the bureaucrats salaries for the time it took them to write up and propose this expedition, along with the "burdened cost" of the buildings, utilities, auditors, HR personnel, finance personnel, oversight, management, retirement and other benefits, etc. involved, the actual operational costs of the Gulfstream jet are trivial.... now consider that the "ground mission" would still carry most of the other costs, as well as a month's preparation on-site for the instrument crew, etc. etc. the differences are really not much at all.
A small company with the necessary capabilities could carry off either mission for less than 10% of the cost, but think of all the people who would be out of work if these government agencies just left this work to the private sector.
I suppose the odds are low that they will be struck while in flight.... still, I wonder how many meteors are still producing visible trails when they reach 47,000 feet and below?
Even when new - carbeuretors weren't known for being 99.999% there for you the way electronic fuel injection is, and mechanical fuel injection had its problems too. I had a 1980 Honda Civic with no engine management electronics - it ran well, but there were times it wouldn't start right off, especially in unusual (wet, dry, hot or cold) weather.
Russian fighter jets were said to be EMP impervious due to using tubes instead of transistors... not sure I'd want my avionics to be tube based today, either.
Say, here's a thought: tube controlled EFI - analog computing - but, wait, remember how well those tube based TVs used to work?
If the engine control computers were built to higher EMI resistance standards, these things would have a hard time knocking them down. Those engine control computers from 1973 are simple enough that you could make a very "hardened" version today.