jeroen94704

As an addition to this, if the bad news will have a big impact on whoever you are delivering it to, just tell them the bad news and then sit back and wait for them to start talking.

Reason: If you tell someone they are being let go, whatever you say immediately after that won't get processed. Give them time to let it sink in and get over the first shock. They'll start talking/asking questions when they're able to.

Check http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/ for a treasure trove of similar helpdesk oddities.

It may be worth adding that EMC compatibility is only one step in getting your product ready for market introduction. Depending on the category of the product (consumer, medical, automotive, industrial, high-power, wireless etc etc) there may be many more tests you need to pass and many more standards you need to adhere to before you are allowed to sell your product.

Yes, you do need to take it into account, but even so, there are no guarantees you _are_ going to pass the first time around. EMC is as much dark art as it is engineering, and some things you simply cannot predict up front. We always tell our customers we do the best we can up front, but to expect EMC issues nonetheless.

It's interesting then what makes Gilstrap so energetic in his efforts to keep those patent-cases coming. Assuming there are no direct monetary payments from patent trolls coming his way, what is is incentive? Does he get "favors" from patent trolls, or does he have a relatives or friends who benefit from his practices? Always follow the money, is what I heard :).

Yes, there are some (there are 4 in the Netherlands, for example: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_slavernijmonumenten_...), but I think people in Europe are generally less aware of their countries' role in slavery compared to people in the US.

This is part of the standard FDA procedure. It starts with a formal warning letter (they send out many of those each year, for varying degrees of severity), and give the company a chance to address the non-conformities and violations. If a company fails to address the issues found, further action is taken, as evidenced by this bit from the end of the letter:

"Correct the violations cited in this letter promptly. Failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice including, without limitation, seizure and injunction. Unresolved violations in this warning letter may also prevent other Federal agencies from awarding contracts."

I've recently browsed through these warning letters for educational purposes (they're all publicly published on the FDA website), and this is by far the sternest letter I've seen.

> Watching two radios frequency hop, and negotiate to avoid a > congested wifi channel was unreal.

Exactly. As I said in another comment, we did a test in a very busy office space and didn't loose a single bit of data @ several 100kbit/s over a week transmitting continously. We could see it hopping on the sniffer.

I am currently in the process of developing a BT based embedded system, and in my experience Bluetooth is extremely resilient to the crowded 2.4 GHz space. It has very good and fast frequency hopping, so it maintains a connection even in the presence of several WiFi access points covering all but a small portion of the 2.4 GHz band. We ran a test in our office which has many access points and laptops/phones, and even an alarm system that uses 2.4 GHz. At a distance of 10m between central and peripheral (with several dry-walls in between) we didn't lose a single bit over a full week of continuous data transmission at several 100 kbit/s.

There are limits of course. At some point the 2.4 GHz band is so saturated nothing low power gets through. But so far, I am pleasantly surprised by the reliability.

All this was done using BT 4.2 though, so maybe that helps.

How big a job is customizing all this to work on a different board? At work we use iMX6-based SoM's on custom baseboards, and so far have stuck to Linux. But we'd like to experiment with Android, just to see if that is a viable/interesting option for embedded systems.

There is a fairly well known Dutch pilot whose last name literally translates to "brick".

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether that is an example of nominative determinism or not.

The locale and language are system settings. My point is that applications and websites have no business second guessing those system settings based on location.

For the system-level settings, those are always part of the OS install process. So either an end-user building their own system, a commercial system builder or downstream provider like a phone company will have to set it to some value during installation. Location doesn't enter into it.

Apart from travellers, there's people who don't want to deal with the often atrocious and incomplete translations provided by sites and applications.

"it's irritating when apps don't use my location to pick sane defaults"

No, no, a thousand times NO. Location should NOT EVER be used as a basis for things like units, currency, date format etc.

_every_ computer these days has perfectly serviceable language and locale settings. These settings should be the definitive source for any application to decide how to present language/locale-dependent information to you. If an application shows you distances in miles, either:

1) The application ignores the language and locale settings altogether and always uses english/miles. 2) The application does look at the language setting but ignores the locale setting and decides that "english language" implies "distance in miles" 3) The application does the right thing, and your computer is actually set to a locale that uses miles for distance.

Note that none of these scenario's are fixed by looking at the physical location of your computer.

Fascinating: 71% say they trust climate scientists regarding climate change, yet only 49% say they think "most scientists think global warming is happening". This would imply it is not necessary to convince people anthropogenic climate change is real, only that most climate scientists think it is real. Very different message.

This article seems to assume you're single and not in a hurry to start a family. I'd be interested to read an article "Does it make sense for a programmer with a wife and kids to move to the bay area". I secretly suspect the answer will be "no", since no matter how you slice it, a 4-bedroom house in the Bay Area won't be reachable until you are well on your way to, say, 40 or so.

Excellent point. Getting rid of timezones would mean most people would have to switch to a different _date_ at some random point (determined by their longitude) during the day. Very impractical.

It's not that bad. ASML ships several tens of units (costing $millions to $tens of millions each) each quarter, but they also have an order backlog of several thousand units. This includes not just the super-high-end EUV machines they are in the process of developing, but also the less-than-super-high-end ("low-end" doesn't really apply to any of their machines).

Indeed, the difficulty getting a reliable EUV source with enough power is arguably the reason why this technology has been delayed so much. Cymer, the company who was in the process of developing this source, was having so much trouble getting it to work ASML ended up simply buying them so they could focus all their resources on that one problem.

A fall-back scenario, should the tin-vaporizing method fail to deliver, was the use of a Free Electron Laser, which can produce a huge range of wavelengths directly. However, since compact FEL's are not really feasible, this would mean a single source for an entire fab, with complex infrastructure required to distribute the EUV light to multiple scanners. Far from ideal.

No, it's not. Maybe where you're at, but not where I'm at.

FTA: "He highlighted how complicated history has woven the borders in the area close to where Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany touch, leaving enclaves and strangely twisted borders"

Hah, that's one way to describe it. There are pieces of the Netherlands inside pieces of Belgium inside the Netherlands, e.g.: https://www.google.com/maps/place/51%C2%B026'55.8%22N+4%C2%B...

They do have an Android app, but I must admit I haven't used it on an Android tablet, so maybe it is only for phones?

As I understand it, this does not mean you can power your laptop forever with a single charge, only that it can be recharged an indefinite number of times.

> you are forgetting that Greece made a lot of tough decisions for its people when asked by its creditors to "reform" yet it is just not sustainable, it's like asking the greeks to commit suicide.

No, I am not forgetting this. The Greek people are certainly suffering from the reforms. But this suffering would have happened anyway, with or without the Euro.

Greece has made such a mess of its finances, in a number of ways, that even if it had never joined the Euro, it would have gone bankrupt at some point anyway.

> The euro is an insane experiment anyway. It cannot work. Too many structural and economical differences between euro countries.

Perhaps, but I hope you're wrong :).

> It seems that the only country really profiting from this is Germany.

There is free trade between all EU countries, not just the Euro countries. It is this free trade that Germany is profiting from, not the Euro currency.

While I am certainly sympathetic to the Greeks for the hardships they have faced and will undoubtedly face in the years to come, it is incredibly unfair to deny the Greeks' own responsibility in all this.

This entire mess started with Greece not having its finances in order, and essentially lying about this for years to the rest of the Eurogroup. After it became clear how dire the situation was, the Eurogroup stepped in and helped Greece by giving them money (LOTS of money). Had the Eurogroup not done this, Greece would have defaulted on its debts years ago, and the country would have gone bankrupt.

Now if someone offers to help you by giving you money, provided you meet certain conditions, you can either accept and comply with the conditions, or you can refuse. The fact is that Greece gladly accepted the billions upon billions of euros, and the conditions that money came with.

I am fully aware that the measures demanded by Greece's creditors are tough. Some would say it is doubtful whether they are actually effective at all. And the demanded measures are certainly driven partly by political motives. All this is true.

But it is mind-boggling to me that after the Eurogroup provided several hundred billion euro's in aid to Greece, anyone would turn around and claim the current crisis is in no way the Greeks' own fault.

I visited Tuol Sleng in 2007. It was very disquieting to walk past row after row and room after room filled with boards holding thousands upon thousands of pictures, and realize that every single one of those people was murdered right there, in that building.

I don't really understand the fascination with nominal GDP, be it in US$ or PPP. Those numbers are heavily influenced by the size of a country's population, which according to wikipedia ranges from something like 100,000 all the way up to 1.3 billion. That's four orders of magnitude!

That's like comparing a Formula 1 car and a Peugeot 107, and then deciding the guy in the Formula 1 car is a better driver because his lap times are faster.

I am somewhat skeptical about this.

It sounds like they tried to apply thin-film optics for this material, given their talk of layers that are both extremely thin and precisely defined. Thin-film optics relies on interference effects between transmitted and reflected light, and enables very specific optical behavior. For example, using thin films it is possible to make a stack of layers that reflects a very specific, narrow band of wavelenghts, while transmitting everything else. In real-life, rewritable optical media such as CD-RW and DVD-RW make use of thin-film optics.

The point though is that thin-film optics only works for coherent light, such as laser light. Sunlight is not coherent, and you will not get the desired interference effects, because the light waves are not "synchronized", as it were.

So while I could be wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if the performance of this reflective sheet is very low, and nowhere near what would be required to replace air-con.

I'm not sure what you expect of scifi; the same can be said of Heinlein and Clarke (maybe Heinlein a bit more than Clarke).

Night's Dawn (Hamilton's second trilogy) was pretty well done in that respect if you ask me. Sure, the premise is far-fetched, but the background and technology was pretty compelling in my view. Hamilton clearly has a grasp of orbital mechanics, for example. And you gotta admit you would _love_ to get a set of Neural Nanonics installed :).

I don't know, but I just can't fathom classifying Banks and Hamilton as anything other than hard scifi.

Thanks, I'll give him a try when I have the chance.