All these dangling cables are the opposite of an easily portable media consumption experience. The lack of a microSD slot (literally a few pennies in connector costs - support is built into the chipset) is a stupid omission, caused by Google politics.
Until Google realizes that storage expansion is a MANDATORY feature of media consumption devices (Used on planes, road trips, and many other places where Internet access is unavailable), no Nexus device is a creditable replacement for anything.
The Asus MemoPad HD7, which is the non-bullshit OEM version of the N7 G2, while slower, is a much better device solely for the reason that it has a microSD slot.
No microSD slot = no sale.
Yeah, I know about COPPA - and its meaningless requirements could be satisfied by a simple checkbox that says "Yup, I'm over 13, let me see the boobies now please, Beavis". The reason LivingSocial wants the DOB is for demographic targeting to advertisers. 19yos have less need for discount Depends than 89yos.
Look, there are laws that guarantee limited liability on unauthorized CC transactions. And the absolute worst case, assuming the CC company disbelieves me when I tell them it's an unauthorized charge, I incur ONE fake debt that I could, if I choose, walk away from. One hit on my credit, one time.
Identity theft is the gift that keeps on giving - short of dying and being resurrected, there is no way to stop it from popping up again and again and again.
I hate the way they reassure everyone that credit card numbers weren't stolen. I DGAF who steals my credit card, because it's zero liability to me and a simple phone call will fix up any unauthorized charges. There's no identity theft possible from stealing my CC#, just some minor inconvenience.
It's a MUCH more serious matter that a name + DOB pair can be stolen, because that's sufficient to lead to serious identity theft. I've taken to using 1-1-80 as my DOB on sites that ask for it, but (a) sites shouldn't ask for it - they have no need to know, and (b) there are some sites where I enrolled before I set this policy, so they have my real DOB. I don't know if LS was one of those.
(If you want a tl;dr version of my post: Don't whine that a free service run by someone else isn't guaranteed to meet your business objectives).
Actually a couple of points. The first one is, bulk email is bulk email and it really doesn't matter how "good" an actor you are, whether you are opt-in, etc. You are not sending individual hand-calligraphed invitations to a royal wedding, or any other kind of lovingly crafted correspondence; you are sending bulk flyers which most people won't read. It is possible, maybe, to classify CONTENT algorithmically. It is impossible to classify intent (CE vs UCE).
The second one is, email is NOT a guaranteed service. Broken cable. Bad MX record. Squirrelly hard drive in a mail relay somewhere and your email is gone. Why are you complaining about one particular failure here? It seems that people who actually want to have a certain level of service guarantee (in this case, avoiding a legitimate antispam measure - regardless of how effective it is) - need to pay the piper. You resent this, and believe you should get an above-baseline level of service for free. Can you hear my boiling tears raining down on the volcanic desert of the Internet?
The third one is: you paid nothing to transport the email, you only paid to squeeze it out the urethra of your computer into the public internet - from then on all the transport is ON SOMEONE ELSE'S DIME. If they choose not to forward it, that's your bad luck. You have no recourse. Stop whining.
I have zero sympathy for any problems experienced by anyone distributing bulk email for any purpose. If you told me your correspondence with Aunt Franny was being swallowed by a demon at Gmail, or something of the kind, I'd be more sympathetic, because that's a realer problem (though my second and third points above still apply to the Aunt Franny case). It is specious, maybe arrogant, to pontificate that consumers "lose" or the "free market fails" when bulk email doesn't reach its (mostly uncaring, if not downright resentful) endpoints reliably.
In summary: Grrrr.
Well, a- increased impedance is the exact opposite of the short failure mode, and b- you might want to check your references there. Deep discharge of some chemistry variants causes metallic Cu deposition, which can lead to internal shorts.
I am willing to accept the "it's bullshit" explanation, but I also believe this failure mode could lead to a total battery replacement.
The safety device I'm talking about kicks in and permanently disables charging when it is no longer safe to assume the battery is good. Also, due to LiIon's self-discharge, even with a zero parasitic drain the battery will eventually reach this state even if there is a separate "pre-death" cutoff that doesn't actually kill the battery but just hibernates it to wait for a recharge.
Once the final deep discharge protection kicks in, the battery needs to be disassembled and every cell needs to be tested, with suspicious cells to be replaced. The longer it is left sitting, the more cells may be damaged. I can easily believe that Tesla's policy is, since they can't predict how much of the battery will be bad, to mandate total replacement.
There could even be some dumber issue, like their liability insurance specifically not covering them if they refurbish a battery that has gone into deep discharge shutdown.
All highly believable.
It's a shortcoming of LiIon technology that if the cell becomes over-discharged, the cell may fail short circuit, and a subsequent recharge may cause an "exciting" failure (think flames). That's why all LiIon packs have a protection circuit that permanently disables the pack if it's discharged to the danger zone.
Given the massive size of an automotive battery pack, it's easy to believe they have some very conservative safety devices in them. And it's also easy to believe that the cost of individually testing/replacing cells and "rebooting" the protection circuitry in a pack that has tripped its safety limits is prohibitive.
There can be reasons to spec in a specific piece of hardware - there are so many of these cheapo tablets that it's impossible to make a reasonable coverage level of "approved devices" and customers in some markets may demand either that you sell the hardware, or you tell them EXACTLY which brand and model to purchase.
But as I said and you agreed, for the love of God don't build yet another reference design tablet.
My corporation uses McAfee (horrific bloatware in itself), and also deployed SafeBoot full disk encryption to all portable machines. My laptop is a core i7 with 4GB RAM and a reasonably frisky HDD. Booting the work image is about 15 minutes between power on and a usable Windows desktop - literally. It's mostly the SafeBoot crap. Booting the same machine off a Linux USB drive is under 1 minute.
You can't get exactly what you want, but you can compress a 4-year regular bachelor program into approximately what you want.
We will assume you have the actual gen-ed SKILLS to survive in the workplace. If you do not, please stop reading now, and start studying those subjects. An engineer without, say, English skills is severely disadvantaged. No, you won't be reciting Shakespeare at a CS job, but the skills you pick up from practicing a few hundred thousand words of reading and writing make a big difference - when I pick up your API spec and try to write code that bangs it - between "Ah, this is how it works" and "WTF was this moron smoking when he wrote this document?"
FWIW, I am in exactly this position - finishing a bachelors' degree in electrical and computer engineering after having worked as an engineer for 16 years, and having written three books published in my field.
Step 0: Decide if it's really worth pursuing this career path in your country of residence. Seriously. Think about it.
Step 1: Enroll at a college in their standard program, part-time. Being a part-time student will allow you some flexibility in how you sequence your classes, and overall there will be less scrutiny of which particular courses you pick.
Step 2: Build up a minimum of 12 credits, better 20-odd credits, of straight As in courses that you think are "important" for you. Due to prereqs, you might need to do a couple of lower-level math courses to achieve this (my sequence went something like Precalc, Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Control Systems, Random Variables and Statistics, and Communication Theory, with Physics I, II and III alongside those). Getting As is critical to the next step because it establishes your bona fides as a "why the hell are you wasting my time with this baby stuff?" student. If you can't get top grades, then consider the humbling possibility that maybe you aren't quite as special as you think.
Step 3: Go to faculty with your academic record and resume and ask nicely for special treatment. This request will fan out to the other faculties and if you convinced them fully, you'll get life experience credit (free credits! no coursework) for some material, and the option to take CLEP exams to skip other courses. I was given a few courses "free", and about another 4 courses (12 credits-ish) as CLEPs.
Step 3a: ABET-accredited degree programs have strict limits on how much life experience free ride any student can receive. Deal with it and suck it up, big guy. I don't think ABET certifies pure CS degree programs (yet), though I may be wrong. But a combo EE/CS degree - forsure you need ABET. ABET is your route to PE status, should you desire it.
Step 4: There will likely be some dross left over at this point - ethics, psychology or philosophy, for instance. See if your school offers these as online courses. This way, I did Chemistry [the special-ed version for electrical majors], philosophy and a couple of other courses so unmemorable that I've even forgotten their names. It's low stress and easy to get very good grades because you set your own study schedule.
Step 5: Hopefully, profit.
Heh:) I like the way you think. Maybe also an embedded QR-code leading directly to some filthy site, so if the picture is printed in other media it will lead to lawsuits.
Unfortunately no Twitter client I use allows me to use a custom picture-hosting service. This twitpic nonsense has forced me to read the TOS for the other offered options (yfrog, plixi - or rather lockerz - etc etc). Turns out that all these services suck similarly. I just want a f'n service that acknowledges that I have the sole ownership of my photos and the sole right to extract profit from them (not that I likely ever would).
Guess I need to learn PHP so I can run my own hosting service now, and deal with the annoyances of trying to use it from Android without writing a custom app.
I'm really tired of reading these kind of stories. Databases on commercial providers ARE going to be stolen. It is irresponsible to be storing dangerous information given that hacks and theft are inevitable. For instance, why does Sony need to know my exact DOB? They actually only NEED to know whether I'm allowed to buy all games/DLC on the system, or only content that's suitable for people less than 18yo.
This problem is much bigger than "just" PSN. If anyone cares, I wrote up a proposal - really more a philosophy, with a technical proposal to counter the "it will never work" arguments - at http://larwe.com/blog/larwe.php/2011/04/27/sony-and-the-libertarianism-of-data
Grrrr.
You're lucky (or have good skip-level connections). By and large throughout my career, I've been lucky too. However for someone working in a traditional top-down authority role, it can be very difficult to get dumb directions reversed even when they are clearly (to a child of three) asinine.
Being a manager doesn't NECESSARILY involve an onerous amount of extra paperwork and politics - it just TENDS to. Heck, my job title has had "manager" in it for many years (off and on) and in some of those years I did no paperwork at all:) Where I work now, everyone at every level spends 80% of their time doing procedures anyway, so there is not much margin to add more.
That's not necessarily true. Anyway, an "individual contributor" at the bottom of the totem pole can easily get frustrated because his/her job is just to build whatever he/she's told to build, even when it's clear that the world has moved on from whatever legacy internal "truth" is driving the company. Moving up to a management level gives you the authority to make the strategic decisions about WHAT to do, not just HOW to do it.
... but I agree with the "go away" comment, if you've been in your current position for at least two years. Two years is long enough to have been given a development plan and had it successfully execute. Faced with the same problem (stuck at the same org level for ~5 years, and in fact technically pushed down the org chart due to ever-multiplying middle management layers), I changed job functions totally - engineering to marketing - which gave me an instant promotion, and allowed me to earn a second promotion six or seven months later, as a kind of "catchup".
This guy is smoking cheap crack cut with something very dangerous. The reason people (other than him) aren't clamoring for such features is that no human being wants them. People group together on the basis of common likes, common fears and common hatreds. They don't WANT to read dissenting opinions or engage in cultural diversity. Humans are tribal animals - always have been, and always will be. This is why Internet news is so much more satisfying than a printed newspaper - you only need to see the articles you care about.
The only rational reason for this hearts-flowers-and-clasped-hands-around-the-communal-bong "feature" would be to create a market for software that blocks unwanted postings from appearing in your feed/friend list/whatever term for whatever social network we're discussing.
Rely on it that Amazon has usage data for the existing Kindles out there. They have without a doubt priced the "ad-supported" Kindle such that their estimated number of impressions for the estimated lifespan of the device will pay for the $25. To lower the price further would probably require that they insert ads into the actual reading experience, and nobody in their right mind would want that device.
Make the most of the vertical space if it's against a wall. You will want to have several pieces of reasonably heavy equipment semipermanently present above the workbench - so build a couple of deep, sturdy shelves that can hold your benchtop PSUs, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, etc. The probes and wires dangle down from the front. The lowest shelf should be as low as possible while still clearing the top of the tallest PC monitor you intend to put on that bench. Support those shelves with at least 1.5x the manufacturer-recommended number of pegs.
The back of the shelf should have enough room to the wall, or cutouts, to fit - comfortably - an AC plug so that you don't have to move heaven and earth in order to add or remove an AC-powered piece of equipment from amongst the stuff on either side of it.
As well as outlets at floor level, you need an outlet strip running down the back of the bench, or on the wall behind the bench at chest level to a seated person, with a minimum of 8-10 outlets per workbench. The outlets should be spaced far enough apart that they can hold a plugpack. DO NOT think that 6-way adapters are "good enough". It is a royal pain in the ass to deal with them, and they add to cable clutter.
You will probably want a local Ethernet network for testing net-booting appliances, as well as wiring into your regular Internet connection. So make room for a small Ethernet switch.
Use some more of the wall space for component drawers of the type people use to store nails, screws, etc. You cannot have too many of these.
Since you will probably be using many SMD components (I know I do!) make a rack for the reels. A regular piece of wooden dowel with a sturdy chain attached to each end, suspended from the center of the chain, works OK. Having loose reels around the place is another pain in the ass - if you have them on a dowel then you can put R/C/L values in neat order, separate diodes from transistors, etc.
These are a few of my suggestions based on my own workspace (I do this sort of thing on a contract basis)... I personally have also ditched all my desktop PCs and use netbooks and notebooks exclusively - much of the hardware you'll be using has to be tethered to the dev system by a short USB cable, and having a desktop PC up close enough really wastes desktop real estate.
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All these dangling cables are the opposite of an easily portable media consumption experience. The lack of a microSD slot (literally a few pennies in connector costs - support is built into the chipset) is a stupid omission, caused by Google politics.
This. This x1000. And it's so stupid- it's Google arrogance that keeps SD expansion off Nexus devices.
Until Google realizes that storage expansion is a MANDATORY feature of media consumption devices (Used on planes, road trips, and many other places where Internet access is unavailable), no Nexus device is a creditable replacement for anything. The Asus MemoPad HD7, which is the non-bullshit OEM version of the N7 G2, while slower, is a much better device solely for the reason that it has a microSD slot. No microSD slot = no sale.
Yeah, I know about COPPA - and its meaningless requirements could be satisfied by a simple checkbox that says "Yup, I'm over 13, let me see the boobies now please, Beavis". The reason LivingSocial wants the DOB is for demographic targeting to advertisers. 19yos have less need for discount Depends than 89yos.
Look, there are laws that guarantee limited liability on unauthorized CC transactions. And the absolute worst case, assuming the CC company disbelieves me when I tell them it's an unauthorized charge, I incur ONE fake debt that I could, if I choose, walk away from. One hit on my credit, one time. Identity theft is the gift that keeps on giving - short of dying and being resurrected, there is no way to stop it from popping up again and again and again.
I hate the way they reassure everyone that credit card numbers weren't stolen. I DGAF who steals my credit card, because it's zero liability to me and a simple phone call will fix up any unauthorized charges. There's no identity theft possible from stealing my CC#, just some minor inconvenience. It's a MUCH more serious matter that a name + DOB pair can be stolen, because that's sufficient to lead to serious identity theft. I've taken to using 1-1-80 as my DOB on sites that ask for it, but (a) sites shouldn't ask for it - they have no need to know, and (b) there are some sites where I enrolled before I set this policy, so they have my real DOB. I don't know if LS was one of those.
I was just about to post the exact same question. I don't see a use case besides games. Gaming ecosystems are guarded by jealous dragons.
(If you want a tl;dr version of my post: Don't whine that a free service run by someone else isn't guaranteed to meet your business objectives). Actually a couple of points. The first one is, bulk email is bulk email and it really doesn't matter how "good" an actor you are, whether you are opt-in, etc. You are not sending individual hand-calligraphed invitations to a royal wedding, or any other kind of lovingly crafted correspondence; you are sending bulk flyers which most people won't read. It is possible, maybe, to classify CONTENT algorithmically. It is impossible to classify intent (CE vs UCE). The second one is, email is NOT a guaranteed service. Broken cable. Bad MX record. Squirrelly hard drive in a mail relay somewhere and your email is gone. Why are you complaining about one particular failure here? It seems that people who actually want to have a certain level of service guarantee (in this case, avoiding a legitimate antispam measure - regardless of how effective it is) - need to pay the piper. You resent this, and believe you should get an above-baseline level of service for free. Can you hear my boiling tears raining down on the volcanic desert of the Internet? The third one is: you paid nothing to transport the email, you only paid to squeeze it out the urethra of your computer into the public internet - from then on all the transport is ON SOMEONE ELSE'S DIME. If they choose not to forward it, that's your bad luck. You have no recourse. Stop whining. I have zero sympathy for any problems experienced by anyone distributing bulk email for any purpose. If you told me your correspondence with Aunt Franny was being swallowed by a demon at Gmail, or something of the kind, I'd be more sympathetic, because that's a realer problem (though my second and third points above still apply to the Aunt Franny case). It is specious, maybe arrogant, to pontificate that consumers "lose" or the "free market fails" when bulk email doesn't reach its (mostly uncaring, if not downright resentful) endpoints reliably. In summary: Grrrr.
Well, a- increased impedance is the exact opposite of the short failure mode, and b- you might want to check your references there. Deep discharge of some chemistry variants causes metallic Cu deposition, which can lead to internal shorts.
I am willing to accept the "it's bullshit" explanation, but I also believe this failure mode could lead to a total battery replacement. The safety device I'm talking about kicks in and permanently disables charging when it is no longer safe to assume the battery is good. Also, due to LiIon's self-discharge, even with a zero parasitic drain the battery will eventually reach this state even if there is a separate "pre-death" cutoff that doesn't actually kill the battery but just hibernates it to wait for a recharge. Once the final deep discharge protection kicks in, the battery needs to be disassembled and every cell needs to be tested, with suspicious cells to be replaced. The longer it is left sitting, the more cells may be damaged. I can easily believe that Tesla's policy is, since they can't predict how much of the battery will be bad, to mandate total replacement. There could even be some dumber issue, like their liability insurance specifically not covering them if they refurbish a battery that has gone into deep discharge shutdown. All highly believable.
It's a shortcoming of LiIon technology that if the cell becomes over-discharged, the cell may fail short circuit, and a subsequent recharge may cause an "exciting" failure (think flames). That's why all LiIon packs have a protection circuit that permanently disables the pack if it's discharged to the danger zone. Given the massive size of an automotive battery pack, it's easy to believe they have some very conservative safety devices in them. And it's also easy to believe that the cost of individually testing/replacing cells and "rebooting" the protection circuitry in a pack that has tripped its safety limits is prohibitive.
I was on a JetBlue flight from JFK to PHX at the time. Came through on their DirectTV service just fine :)
There can be reasons to spec in a specific piece of hardware - there are so many of these cheapo tablets that it's impossible to make a reasonable coverage level of "approved devices" and customers in some markets may demand either that you sell the hardware, or you tell them EXACTLY which brand and model to purchase. But as I said and you agreed, for the love of God don't build yet another reference design tablet.
My corporation uses McAfee (horrific bloatware in itself), and also deployed SafeBoot full disk encryption to all portable machines. My laptop is a core i7 with 4GB RAM and a reasonably frisky HDD. Booting the work image is about 15 minutes between power on and a usable Windows desktop - literally. It's mostly the SafeBoot crap. Booting the same machine off a Linux USB drive is under 1 minute.
You can't get exactly what you want, but you can compress a 4-year regular bachelor program into approximately what you want. We will assume you have the actual gen-ed SKILLS to survive in the workplace. If you do not, please stop reading now, and start studying those subjects. An engineer without, say, English skills is severely disadvantaged. No, you won't be reciting Shakespeare at a CS job, but the skills you pick up from practicing a few hundred thousand words of reading and writing make a big difference - when I pick up your API spec and try to write code that bangs it - between "Ah, this is how it works" and "WTF was this moron smoking when he wrote this document?" FWIW, I am in exactly this position - finishing a bachelors' degree in electrical and computer engineering after having worked as an engineer for 16 years, and having written three books published in my field. Step 0: Decide if it's really worth pursuing this career path in your country of residence. Seriously. Think about it. Step 1: Enroll at a college in their standard program, part-time. Being a part-time student will allow you some flexibility in how you sequence your classes, and overall there will be less scrutiny of which particular courses you pick. Step 2: Build up a minimum of 12 credits, better 20-odd credits, of straight As in courses that you think are "important" for you. Due to prereqs, you might need to do a couple of lower-level math courses to achieve this (my sequence went something like Precalc, Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Control Systems, Random Variables and Statistics, and Communication Theory, with Physics I, II and III alongside those). Getting As is critical to the next step because it establishes your bona fides as a "why the hell are you wasting my time with this baby stuff?" student. If you can't get top grades, then consider the humbling possibility that maybe you aren't quite as special as you think. Step 3: Go to faculty with your academic record and resume and ask nicely for special treatment. This request will fan out to the other faculties and if you convinced them fully, you'll get life experience credit (free credits! no coursework) for some material, and the option to take CLEP exams to skip other courses. I was given a few courses "free", and about another 4 courses (12 credits-ish) as CLEPs. Step 3a: ABET-accredited degree programs have strict limits on how much life experience free ride any student can receive. Deal with it and suck it up, big guy. I don't think ABET certifies pure CS degree programs (yet), though I may be wrong. But a combo EE/CS degree - forsure you need ABET. ABET is your route to PE status, should you desire it. Step 4: There will likely be some dross left over at this point - ethics, psychology or philosophy, for instance. See if your school offers these as online courses. This way, I did Chemistry [the special-ed version for electrical majors], philosophy and a couple of other courses so unmemorable that I've even forgotten their names. It's low stress and easy to get very good grades because you set your own study schedule. Step 5: Hopefully, profit.
Heh :) I like the way you think. Maybe also an embedded QR-code leading directly to some filthy site, so if the picture is printed in other media it will lead to lawsuits.
Unfortunately no Twitter client I use allows me to use a custom picture-hosting service. This twitpic nonsense has forced me to read the TOS for the other offered options (yfrog, plixi - or rather lockerz - etc etc). Turns out that all these services suck similarly. I just want a f'n service that acknowledges that I have the sole ownership of my photos and the sole right to extract profit from them (not that I likely ever would). Guess I need to learn PHP so I can run my own hosting service now, and deal with the annoyances of trying to use it from Android without writing a custom app.
I'm really tired of reading these kind of stories. Databases on commercial providers ARE going to be stolen. It is irresponsible to be storing dangerous information given that hacks and theft are inevitable. For instance, why does Sony need to know my exact DOB? They actually only NEED to know whether I'm allowed to buy all games/DLC on the system, or only content that's suitable for people less than 18yo. This problem is much bigger than "just" PSN. If anyone cares, I wrote up a proposal - really more a philosophy, with a technical proposal to counter the "it will never work" arguments - at http://larwe.com/blog/larwe.php/2011/04/27/sony-and-the-libertarianism-of-data Grrrr.
You're lucky (or have good skip-level connections). By and large throughout my career, I've been lucky too. However for someone working in a traditional top-down authority role, it can be very difficult to get dumb directions reversed even when they are clearly (to a child of three) asinine. Being a manager doesn't NECESSARILY involve an onerous amount of extra paperwork and politics - it just TENDS to. Heck, my job title has had "manager" in it for many years (off and on) and in some of those years I did no paperwork at all :) Where I work now, everyone at every level spends 80% of their time doing procedures anyway, so there is not much margin to add more.
That's not necessarily true. Anyway, an "individual contributor" at the bottom of the totem pole can easily get frustrated because his/her job is just to build whatever he/she's told to build, even when it's clear that the world has moved on from whatever legacy internal "truth" is driving the company. Moving up to a management level gives you the authority to make the strategic decisions about WHAT to do, not just HOW to do it.
... but I agree with the "go away" comment, if you've been in your current position for at least two years. Two years is long enough to have been given a development plan and had it successfully execute. Faced with the same problem (stuck at the same org level for ~5 years, and in fact technically pushed down the org chart due to ever-multiplying middle management layers), I changed job functions totally - engineering to marketing - which gave me an instant promotion, and allowed me to earn a second promotion six or seven months later, as a kind of "catchup".
This guy is smoking cheap crack cut with something very dangerous. The reason people (other than him) aren't clamoring for such features is that no human being wants them. People group together on the basis of common likes, common fears and common hatreds. They don't WANT to read dissenting opinions or engage in cultural diversity. Humans are tribal animals - always have been, and always will be. This is why Internet news is so much more satisfying than a printed newspaper - you only need to see the articles you care about. The only rational reason for this hearts-flowers-and-clasped-hands-around-the-communal-bong "feature" would be to create a market for software that blocks unwanted postings from appearing in your feed/friend list/whatever term for whatever social network we're discussing.
Rely on it that Amazon has usage data for the existing Kindles out there. They have without a doubt priced the "ad-supported" Kindle such that their estimated number of impressions for the estimated lifespan of the device will pay for the $25. To lower the price further would probably require that they insert ads into the actual reading experience, and nobody in their right mind would want that device.
Who says the ads will be for books? "I see you're reading Lady Chatterley's Lover - here's an ad for 10% off Horny Goat Weed".
Make the most of the vertical space if it's against a wall. You will want to have several pieces of reasonably heavy equipment semipermanently present above the workbench - so build a couple of deep, sturdy shelves that can hold your benchtop PSUs, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, etc. The probes and wires dangle down from the front. The lowest shelf should be as low as possible while still clearing the top of the tallest PC monitor you intend to put on that bench. Support those shelves with at least 1.5x the manufacturer-recommended number of pegs. The back of the shelf should have enough room to the wall, or cutouts, to fit - comfortably - an AC plug so that you don't have to move heaven and earth in order to add or remove an AC-powered piece of equipment from amongst the stuff on either side of it. As well as outlets at floor level, you need an outlet strip running down the back of the bench, or on the wall behind the bench at chest level to a seated person, with a minimum of 8-10 outlets per workbench. The outlets should be spaced far enough apart that they can hold a plugpack. DO NOT think that 6-way adapters are "good enough". It is a royal pain in the ass to deal with them, and they add to cable clutter. You will probably want a local Ethernet network for testing net-booting appliances, as well as wiring into your regular Internet connection. So make room for a small Ethernet switch. Use some more of the wall space for component drawers of the type people use to store nails, screws, etc. You cannot have too many of these. Since you will probably be using many SMD components (I know I do!) make a rack for the reels. A regular piece of wooden dowel with a sturdy chain attached to each end, suspended from the center of the chain, works OK. Having loose reels around the place is another pain in the ass - if you have them on a dowel then you can put R/C/L values in neat order, separate diodes from transistors, etc. These are a few of my suggestions based on my own workspace (I do this sort of thing on a contract basis)... I personally have also ditched all my desktop PCs and use netbooks and notebooks exclusively - much of the hardware you'll be using has to be tethered to the dev system by a short USB cable, and having a desktop PC up close enough really wastes desktop real estate.