Posts by Death Boffin
17 posts • joined Wednesday 19th November 2008 06:07 GMT
Re: Massive
The sun has been remarkably stable for 4 Billion years. If it had been shooting off life threatening flares, well life would be gone and you wouldn't be here.
Technology is another issue. Another Carrington event would do bad things to our technological society. The human race would probably recover, but it might take a while.
Nothing like a thermonuclear eruption to ruin your whole day...
Re: Brassed off
The cartridge has very little metal in it. You have more metal in your zipper, underwire bra, or studded jeans than is in a cartridge. The metal detectors have to be set so these things do not set them off all the time. Otherwise, you would be getting a feel-up from the TSA on a much more regular basis.
Re: Build a big one....
Think of something like this attached to a MV-22 Osprey. The name even fits... AWESOME!
And just what happens....
...when a micrometeor pierces the hull? Brings new meaning to the term "meteor storm".
Posted in Any storm in a port
Disk Drive Power Connectors
The large 4 pin ones. Somehow they were not keyed as well as they could have been. Trying to get them in whilst hanging upside down over a Compaq case was always a problem. They were invisible behind the all the other framework and other cabling. Anyway, power-up was always exciting as it occasionally resulted in popping sounds as the little chips flew off the board when the power connector ended up in the wrong way. Icon for what happened to the drive...
Re: Crud generators.
Five so far. Coming across auto accidents in areas where there was no cell coverage. One was a rollover accident where 4 of the 5 passengers were ejected. Resulted in 1 fatality and 3 airlifted to the hospital. The other was a head on collision with 1 fatality and 2 severely injured. In both cases ham radio cut the medical response time by 20-30 minutes. Look up "golden hour" to see how effective that can be.
Re: The 80's joke was "GaAs, the material of the future"
No one is seriously considering using GaAs or InGaAs for processors. SiGe (Silicon Germanium) is the current best hope for very high speed digital devices. It is not too expensive as it is grown on top of standard Si wafers. It has better speed than Si and works pretty well for mixed signal applications.
Re: Gallium arsenide has been talked up for decades now
Huh? MBE - Molecular Beam Epitaxy is used to lay down the active layers on the wafer. AlGaAs or InGaAs or some such. The gates are made using either photolithography or electron beam writing. The e-beam writing is for the short gate lengths. It is a serial process, so it is slow for large numbers of FETs. Photolithography is a parallel process, but starts to have problems below 20nm.
Old is as Old does
Had my first one at 43 and now I am 51 with a 5 month old. We just start late in my family, my mom was 42 when she had me and 43 when she had my brother. No serious mutations seen, but an unusual number of the family are engineers and accountants...
Who indeed?
>Who still has an Air Force that isn't on our side?
NORKS
PRC
Come to think of it, Vladimir Putin hasn't been too friendly lately.
And France of course.
Eurosomething
It looks so... European!
Posted in .NET spell-checker trips over hypenation
That's pants
Sandy Berger was the Clinton administration official convicted of stuffing secret documents down his trousers and walking out of the National Archives.
Posted in NZ woman sacked for SHOUTY EMAILS
GREEN KEYS
RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY
YOU KIDS ARE TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER REAL TELETYPE
WHERE THE TELEPRINTER WAS DRIVEN BY VALVES AND
RELAYS
RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY
Now where did I leave my coat?
Mars Attacks
That is all.
Posted in RIP tennis gal's DD jubs
@Surgery
Unfortunately, job related cosmetic surgery for most of us would involve hemorrhoid removal.
IE6 only
The US Navy NMCI system is also stuck with IE6 as the leading technology. They have also mandated no other browsers. Of course it took them a long time to transition from sail power as well.
Epic Fail
Unfortunately this report card doesn't go back to the thirty-some years of Apple. Apple managed to cut a couple of zeros off their sales figures by going to the Mac. The Apple II had great market share and had a great support ecosystem of third party software and hardware suppliers around it. By going to the closed Mac design, the Steves forfeited the market to the IBM PC and Microsoft. This has also probably cut a couple of zeros off the share price as well. I was a happy Apple II+ owner; haven't had an Apple since then.
3D0G
