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User: NixieBunny

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Comments · 556

  1. Re:Impossible! on A Tiny Screw Shows Why iPhones Won't Be 'Assembled in USA' (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    You must not know much about what goes into a modern electronics product. The phones and tablets and laptops being sold today are too small for off-the-shelf fasteners to be used. I make Nixie tube wristwatches in the USA, and I use the smallest American screw I can get to hold them together. That screw is about twice as big as the average screw in a modern phone.

  2. The South Pole Station has a hydroponic greenhouse on Scientists Harvest First Vegetables in Antarctic Greenhouse (apnews.com) · · Score: 1

    The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has a nice greenhouse in which fresh food has been grown for ten years or so. I was there a few months back, and ate some of their greens. Yummy! This experiment must be a bit more exotic, otherwise it wouldn't be newsworthy.

  3. Re:no surprise here on At Burning Man While Your Startup Burns (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1, Informative

    Your stereotype of Burning Man people is true for perhaps 2% of the people at Burning Man. The rest of us are people who work for a living and go there to enjoy each other's company amidst the fun stuff we create.

  4. Re:Experience Counts on China Built the World's Largest Telescope, But Has No One To Run It (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Managing a large facility like this is not a job in which the person at the top makes the decisions about details. They have to be on top of the big picture. I am an engineer who works on radio telescopes, so I am familiar with the sort of issues that come up. The biggest issue by far is making sure that your facility has funding to carry out its mission. Next is finding people who can handle all the details. Then making sure that useful science is being carried out, so that the funding will stay in place and the people won't leave.

  5. Re:Just a question... on Math Journal Editors Resign To Start Rival Journal That Will Be Free To Read (insidehighered.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Journals are traditionally published by a couple Dutch companies, and cost a lot in order to make these publishers wealthy. The academics go along with it because they want to be published. These mutinies are trying to wrest control of the journals away from the for-profit Dutch publishers and back into academia where it ought to be. More power to them!

  6. Re:Like the AMD-64 instruction set? on Intel: Steer Clear Of Our Patents (axios.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Intel and AMD have had some cross licensing arrangement from the late seventies, which I'm sure we are not able to view. But patents on a 40 year old architecture might be a wee bit expired by now.

  7. Re:Need more info - on Microsoft Targets Chrome Users With Windows 10 Pop-up Ad (pcmag.com) · · Score: 2

    Of course the entire point of Windows 10 was to make them able to generate income from something other than OS installs. Why else would it automatically replace your Windows 7 with itself?

    One more demonstration that I appear to have done the right thing by installing 7 on my shiny new HP laptop four months ago.

  8. Re:This: on Ask Slashdot: What's The Most Useful 'Nerd Watch' Today? · · Score: 1

    With all due respect, Woz wears the one that I make.

  9. Re: NOT the same "insurmountable problems" at all. on World's First 'Solar Panel Road' Opens In France (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    The point is, you can put them above the traffic for a small fraction of the cost of putting them below the traffic. More efficient, too. Cover every rooftop with solar shingles before laying the first solar road. It's just common engineering sense.

  10. Insurmountable problems, indeed on World's First 'Solar Panel Road' Opens In France (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There must be people in high places who can't add, for these projects to be getting built.

  11. Re:And this is a surprise? Why? on Here We Go Again: Microsoft's Popping Up Ads From the Windows 10 Toolbar (pcworld.com) · · Score: 1

    This justifies why I went to such great lengths to prevent them from upgrading my computers to 10.

  12. I gave up before the launch on MacBook Pro (2016) Disappointment Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux (betanews.com) · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I recently switched from my aging MacBook Pro to a 17" HP Envy running Windows 7, because HP at least hasn't removed all the useful ports, and the older OS will run happily without a cloud. Oh, and it can run all that engineering software I need to do my work.

  13. It is a rather badly worded description of how an accurate clock keeps time. It makes much more sense to say that it has a timekeeping error of less than 1 billionth of a second per year. Such a clock will only run for 10 to 20 years, so saying what it will do in a billion years is meaningless.

  14. Re:But what would the adapter connect to? on Apple Explores the Idea Of Killing Headphone Jack On the MacBook Pro (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 1

    I was expecting this. Just ordered a Lenovo P70 laptop yesterday, since Apple seems to be headed down the path of removing any reason whatsoever for an engineer to use their products. I switched to a Nexus phone a few months ago.

    I just wish the P70 had a COM port.

  15. Re:Compiling toothbrush code with GCC on TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly (tiobe.com) · · Score: 1

    Finally, a thread about vibrator design!

  16. I just started working on a job in Vivado, which is Xilinx's new development environment for their latest multi-thousand dollar FPGAs. The supplied editor does not know what VHDL is. I use Emacs to edit my source code, because it has a VHDL template processor. If only the people developing the latest IDEs had any idea what their customers actually did or a living...

  17. Re:I wish that was accurate on TIOBE's Language-Popularity Index Sees A New Top 10 Language: Assembly (tiobe.com) · · Score: 1

    I program little tiny things that run on PIC16Fxxx processors, clocked at 32.768 kHz. C is not feasible for this environment. If you think no one uses this shit, ask the Woz what wristwatch he wears. http://www.nixiewatch.com/firm...

  18. My brother used that same piece of fine old music The Blue Danube) in our Typewriter Repairmen underwater robot video. YouTube saw fit to mute the sound due to some copyright claim. Bastards.
    http://selectric.org/nurc/introfinal.wmv

  19. Some people care about money, others... on Open and Rich Co-exist But Don't Mingle So Much (scripting.com) · · Score: 1

    Some of us don't care about money, but rather about making the world a more fun place to live in. We enjoy hanging out with the accidentally rich way more than the intentionally rich.

  20. Still useless for advertising on Facebook Could Be Eavesdropping On Your Phone Calls (news10.com) · · Score: 1

    Displaying an ad based on a word I say is the biggest waste of advertising money I can think of.

  21. Re:Tips for a pirate radio operator... on In Internet Age, Pirate Radio Arises As Surprising Challenge (ap.org) · · Score: 2

    I actually built and ran a pirate radio station in Tucson 15-20 years ago, Radio Limbo 103.3. I agree with your tip, but I took it a step further. The transmitter was a 1 watt unit that we hiked way up into the mountains north of town, giving it a 3000 foot elevation advantage. We transmitted through a Yagi made from a modified FM receiving antenna. The uplink was on UHF, and the rig was solar powered. It covered most of the city (about a 10 mile radius in the preferred direction) reasonably well.

    The other thing we did, which really made the station great, was to get about a hundred DJs to volunteer for 1 or 2 hour slots, to make the programming interesting.

  22. They want interesting newsfeed stuff on Facebook Is Building A Standalone Camera App To Encourage Its 1.6 Billion Users To Share More (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    I will take screenshots of all those stupid FB memes and post them as original photos, just to piss them off.

  23. Re:People say "custom-made" like it's a bad thing on Why BART Is Falling Apart · · Score: 2

    It's difficult to even define standard interfaces that make sense 50 years in the future. But you have a good point - modular hardware is a lot easier to upgrade than complete systems. I work on a telescope that was originally built in 1965, so I get to replace bits and pieces of it with new stuff now and then. However, sometimes all I have to do is correct a little design mistake from way back when to get it running in tip-top form.

  24. Re:Probably using a CHAMP-WB on US Army Developing Encrypted Radar Waveform (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, we considered the ROACH boards. Got an NSF grant to build a 4 GHz wide spectrometer. No CASPER hardware can do that. We had to wait for someone to put Tektronix's 12 GSPS ADC chip on an FPGA board we could buy.

  25. Re:Probably using a CHAMP-WB on US Army Developing Encrypted Radar Waveform (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    It's only $90k. Cheap!