mng2

Japanese characters can have multiple readings. For most words and phrases, there is a standard correct reading, but for names, things get more complicated. Presumably 'Kanda' is the most common reading.

http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E7%A5%9E%E7%94%B0&eng=&dict=enam...

What are you guys doing for physical verification, static timing analysis, stuff like that? As far as I know those tools still cost big bucks.

Modifying the masks struck me as a fairly farfetched scenario. I don't know how many spare gates a processor ships with but you would have to know the design pretty intimately to be able to include something malicious by remapping, both in terms of logic and physical constraints.

There's no substitute for actually working through the equations and math, but working with simulations can help drive concepts home. For example, PhET has a virtual capacitor lab (it's a Java applet).

http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/capacitor-lab

If you have multivariable calculus under your belt, then don't be too afraid of jumping into something like Griffiths E&M.

I wouldn't call it 'scary', myself, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly useful feature. In software, a single slow subroutine can simply take up more cycles. But in hardware, a slow path becomes your critical path, and you have a hard clock cycle requirement. (Sure, you can use multi-cycle paths and/or change clock speed, but those generally have to be adjusted manually/physically, and not all design situations will have that flexibility.)

If you're talking about the 1400x900 screen, I agree, the viewing sweet spot is nearly nonexistent. I actually swapped out the top shell of my X200s and so I could put in an AFFS panel.

(Running Mint 17.1, which broke the display popup for brightness, but curiously not for audio.)

Doubtful. As a reference point, typical guidelines for baking out moisture (prior to assembly) are 24 hours at 150C.

I've heard, perhaps apocryphally, that binary blobs are one roadblock IC makers set up to keep rivals from going through their implementations and finding stuff to base patent-infringement lawsuits on. (Just as in software, there are dumb hardware patents too.) I wonder if this 3rd-party disclosure might open MT up to lawsuits.

The journal article says that they even set the brightness of the "LE-eBook" (iPad) to maximum.

I guess we'll have to wait for more detailed studies.

They were definitely out of stock this summer, when I was looking at updating my BB project to BBB.

I've been using the highlighting feature on errors in order to appease my OCD. The fact that Amazon has added error reporting seems like a hopeful sign and an admission that there is a widespread problem. The question is, are they actually going to make the fixes?

I think the GP is basically saying, how would you propose to run an internet survey asking anonymous audiophiles to blindly A/B (no peeking at the bits) full and truncated files? The dithering is probably the least questionable part of the methodology.

What costs money is the spectrum analyzer, network analyzer, and Microwave Studio license.

For tokamaks, there's an idea that we can take all the relevant size and plasma parameters for a bunch of different experiments, run a fit on them, and come up with a set of scaling factors that will tell us how well a reactor of size x is going to perform. The prediction is that the bigger the reactor, the better things get, which is why ITER is the biggest tokamak yet.

People call it 'wind tunnel scaling', so I presume this is an empirical method borrowed from aerodynamic modeling. Nowadays we can actually do computational fluid dynamics to some extent, but a full-on electromagnetic plasma simulation remains intractable on the macroscopic/machine scale. And we remain limited on theoretical approaches, so we are stuck with actually having to build the darn things before we know they'll work.

The grandparent is responding to the article, which is talking about general purpose computation. There's no question that your application is a prime use case for an FPGA.

Wouldn't an ASIC have hard macros anyway? It sounds to me more like the author is annoyed that "it's 2014 and we are still using HDL", and also that FPGAs are somehow supposed to be readily exploitable for general-purpose computation.

Going over 50 cm of Twinax is great and all, but that's the ideal environment. When you guys put 16 of these things on a board, routing that PCB and getting good signal integrity is not going to be fun, even after you throw in pre-emphasis and so on.

I was expecting this to be about Silego products since that's what was featured in a recent newsletter. All of these parts seem pretty niche though.

X-series tablet models have a 'T' at the end.

The Letter Spirit project (a Douglas Hofstadter thing) is sort of in that vein, but less prosaic in its objectives.

Count your blessings -- I would be quite happy to pay $30 for 10/1. Where I live, $30 with AT&T gets you 3 Mbps down, and that's the promo price.

I am curious but skeptical. Curious as in, what kind of bus architecture are they running? PCIe with aggressive power management is my guess.

Modularity is cool but the infrastructure always adds to the cost. The more I think about it, Ara makes no sense in the phone market. This initiative is more about the tricorder market, if you will.

A photomultiplier is a special kind of vacuum tube, but it's a pretty niche market. Plus avalanche photodiodes are making inroads.

Let me add: another important part of soldering is understanding flux. Most spools of solder are not just lead/tin/etc, they include some chemicals that eat away the oxide layer on metals so that the solder can better adhere. When you solder to a PC board you get a pool of goop around the solder pad; this is the flux.

When soldering in the air, it is harder for the flux to go where it needs to go. When soldering wires/leads to each other, it helps to apply flux beforehand, say with a flux pen.

The question is, what did they simulate and how? A full-on dynamical plasma simulation of the entire machine is intractable, and every approximation technique has its blind spots.

JT-60 in Japan has done about half a minute, actually. There is less of an issue with sustaining reactions (since there has been steady progress over the years) than with coming up with materials that would stand up under a commercial fusion reactor's duty cycle.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/48/8/085002

The DOE actually provides research funding for most 'hard' sciences. Particle physics and supercomputing are primarily funded by DOE, for example. Unless it's classified, the research is open.

Having worked with Roomba SCI a while back, a few things come to mind. First is a lack of integrity checking. The default baud rate of 57600 is too high (at least for the 6-ft mini-DIN cables we could find), and it's really annoying when your Roomba goes careening off in a weird direction because your command got corrupted. Thankfully the baud rate can be reduced, but there really ought to be something in the next layer to check integrity, as the Roomba firmware is a black box.

Also, it's kinda obvious in retrospect, but Roombas were not designed to drive in straight lines. Which can be annoying if you want to use them as a robotics platform.

I went ECC a couple months ago and managed to find some parts that didn't break the bank, mostly because I held back and stayed a generation behind: GA-6UASL3, E3-1230V2. There are other sacrifices: the motherboard is rather no-frills, and the memory bandwidth isn't that great.

Besides price, another issue against server hardware is that it's generally designed for a server case and therefore doesn't play well with enthusiast cases. The board I got is a little odd in that it uses a layout more typical of consumer boards, though the socket placement is still not ideal.

Yeah, I've also found that the abstract approach is what pays the most dividends. When I taught electronics lab, the physics students would get wrapped up in trying to think from the point of view of fields and charges, which honestly isn't that helpful for electronics (unless, as mentioned above, you're doing device physics).

On the other hand, research (by the PhET folks in Colorado I believe) has shown that having students play with a Java applet beforehand (that shows electrons moving through wires) really helps their performance in a basic electronics lab activity. This would be measuring voltage, resistance, current. However it's likely that the sandbox nature of the applet is what helps, not so much the moving charge concept.