Slashdot Mirror


User: NixieBunny

NixieBunny's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
556
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 556

  1. Those socketed PLCCs on the controller board on Ask Derek Deville About High-Altitude Amateur Rocketry · · Score: 1

    I saw the two PLCCs, a big 84 pin and a little 32 pin flash chip, and thought to myself, "Those sockets don't look like they're rated for the sort of vibration your rocket experiences." Have you or your electronics guru considered learning the tricks of soldering QFPs and SSOPs? It's not hard.

  2. Re:for the retarded... on Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering? · · Score: 1

    It's not wasted money if you're a lawyer. It's income.

  3. Re:Aspergers / Autism on Autism Traits Prove Valuable for Software Testing · · Score: 2

    Condition? I (and a lot of leading Asperger's advocates) think it's more a type of brain than a condition. I was in the waiting room one day while my son was in an Asperger's class, and noticed that three of us dads were discussing the nature of human consciousness. Not your standard dad discussion. Point being, we're a breed apart from the 'regular' dads.

  4. I remember when Rambus made RAM on Two Rambus Patents Invalidated By USPTO · · Score: 1

    They were exotic fast things, and they didn't always behave properly, but at least they were actual products. Isn't that the ostensible reason why companies exist, to make products?

  5. Re:positive feedback increasing number of lawyers on The Dark Side of the Tech Patent Wars · · Score: 1

    There's still time to get a non-lawyer job. Some of us actually invent stuff. I have no use for patents, as they seem to exist solely to give jobs to lawyers, and to induce large corporations to employ large numbers of lawyers.

  6. It's never too late on Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages? · · Score: 1

    I work with a guy who's over 60 and is just now learning Java. He's being paid to do it, to support a scientific instrument.

  7. Re:What does "seven out of ten" mean here? on In German Trials, Airport Body Scanners Easily Confused · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the rate of actual terrorists is .000000001%, so essentially all positives are false positives.

  8. Been done already on Use Your Car To Power Your House · · Score: 1

    This guy did it years ago with his Prius. Trouble is, his electric utility is so reliable that he never gets to use the feature!

  9. Maker Faire plus airplane makes hilarity on Detroit Maker Faire Was Kinda Awesome · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was there displaying my video coat, being a human television. We had to run to catch a flight at Detroit Metro, so I didn't have time to pack my gizmo, so went to the airport wearing it.

    Now I know what Cory Doctorow was talking about in his novel "Makers" with regard to the excessive searching applied to people who create stuff. As far as they're concerned, a dad with a family in tow, wearing a coat with wires and circuit boards on it, is a human bomb. I was just laughing throughout the whole extended search.

    We got on our plane OK, because I didn't give them actual shit, but my kids got a good lesson when I said out loud, "This is the land of the free", and the nice TSA lady said, "Not any more."

  10. Re:Napkin stuff I've done on Napkins and the History of Ethernet, Compaq, Facebook · · Score: 1

    I know the feeling. I once designed a novel data-transfer circuit for a VMEbus computer board on a placemat at Applebee's. Thank goodness it was a plain white placemat, because it took a lot of drawing to get all four modes in there. Later on, I had to spend a few hours encoding the design on the placemat as logic equations.

  11. Re:The solution is easy.... on Ask Slashdot: How To Safely Saw Up Motherboards? · · Score: 1

    The tool you're thinking of is a guillotine, or shear. These are made for sheet metal, and can be had from Harbor Freight. You'd need to spend a few hundred smackeroos to get a good one that will handle a thick material, esp. since the components will have to get sheared as well, and the ceramic capacitors will dull the blade quickly.

  12. Re:Don't cut it on Ask Slashdot: How To Safely Saw Up Motherboards? · · Score: 1

    Nope, that's not feasible. The components will get in the way. They do score bare boards using special equipment, but once the board's been populated, it's no longer a simple task.

  13. If you want to keep Americans in business... on How Printed Circuit Boards Are Made · · Score: 2

    On the other hand, you can buy your boards for the expensive American price, and it still won't be the most expensive component in your project.

  14. Re:Wall clocks on The Future of Time: UTC and the Leap Second · · Score: 1

    Wall clocks don't know anything about the earth's rotation. They're typically driven by the mains frequency, which is in the process of being disconnected form 60 Hz in the USA. And GMT is no solution - it didn't handle the earth's rotation rate change very gracefully. Do you want the version that changed the definition of a second based on the last few years' observed day lengths?

  15. Re:Sad Day on Analog Designer Bob Pease Dies In Car Crash · · Score: 1

    He did put more miles on VW Beetles than perhaps a handful of people. So the odds were bound to catch up to him sooner or later.

    No doubt his crash was due way more to his mental state after having just been to Jim Williams' funeral than to anything else.

  16. No microprocessor there on The 8-Bit Computer That's Been Built By Hand · · Score: 1

    You appear to be wrong. He built a minicomputer from logic chips. Look at the schematic - why would there be an instruction decoder if he used a microprocessor?
    I wonder why he didn't wire-wrap it. This is a crazy way to build a computer - thousands of blue wires, any one of which could fail with a loose connection at any time.

  17. Re:Old school on The 8-Bit Computer That's Been Built By Hand · · Score: 1

    Yes, we were. My brother and I started with a Motorola MEK6800D1 board and took it from there. It's amazing what you can fit in 4K of RAM if you have to.

  18. Re:Obvious? on GM Patents Data Mining Method For Refining the Chevy Volt · · Score: 1

    That's just what I was thinking. This idea is obvious to me, but I'm "skilled in the art" of coming up with ideas that connect disparate things. Heck, most patents are obvious. The things worth patenting are novel, revolutionary ideas like Tesla's 3-phase power system.

  19. Re:shitty article on 'Dead Media' Never Really Die · · Score: 1

    There's a link at the bottom of the first page called "Print this", that removes all the junk.

    And why aren't you using AdBlock Plus if you don't like ads?

  20. Re:It's been awhile since astro classes, but... on China Building World's Biggest Radio Telescope · · Score: 1

    We in the spectral-line radio astronomy world make graphs, each a fuzzy horizontal line with a vertical spike in the middle, representing a spectral line of a molecule. The height of the spike relative to the fuzz on the baseline is that signal-to-noise ratio you're talking about, and it can be on the order of .01% signal/noise. But the telescope integrates that signal (signal+noise minus noise only) over a long time period, resulting in the ability to see a spike at all. As you say, the longer you look at the object, the smaller the fuzz gets. An aperture ratio of 5/3 between telescopes is not amazing, but it does give bragging rights to the Chinese, if it works and doesn't run out of funding.

  21. Re:Sad state of software on JavaScript Gameboy Color Emulator · · Score: 1

    What, emulating a 4 MHz, 8 bit CPU with bitmap graphics on a 3 GHz, 64 bit machine with a multi-core GPU isn't exciting? It runs *at full speed*!

  22. Re:Need More Information on Man Creates Open Source Flashlight · · Score: 2

    As someone who "does acquirement for aviation" (most of us call that purchasing), you should know that he'd need a Lockheed Martin behind him to create all the paperwork you just listed. And the price would go to $300 apiece.

  23. Re:Did anyone else... on Man Creates Open Source Flashlight · · Score: 1

    It's been done already. I read about it last year.

  24. Re:Needs more general relativity on Compressed Time at the Australia Telescope Compact Array · · Score: 1

    You wouldn't want to see the results! Generally speaking, radio telescopes produce graphs instead of pictures as their product. I work in submillimeter-wave spectroscopy, which produces a spectral plot labeled in Kelvins (Y axis) and km/second (X axis) with a spike in the middle indicating a detection. I've seen the results of an interferometry run (millimeter-wave VLBI), and it's enough to confuse me greatly. A bunch of graphs with axes labeled in units I've never heard of.

  25. Re:Why? on Google Files First Solar Patent, Builds R&D Team · · Score: 1

    Tracking is necessary if the heliostat isn't stiffly enough built to perform dead-reckoning pointing. In order to lower costs, the heliostat support structure must be cheap, therefore flimsy. We're not talking about building a million-dollar heliostat, but a $2,000 heliostat. This has to be as cheap as coal, right?

    I talked with an astronomer in Tucson who's designing a solar system to be cheap as coal, and he's gone through all the steps to at least figure out how to get to that price point using a movable-mirror concentrator with high-efficiency cells at the focal point. It's quite something. Although he doesn't need a tracker, since he understands optics and how to make his system achieve high efficiency, even with several degrees of pointing error.