foofoo55

One of our vendors is a contract electronic manufacturer (circuit board stuffer) that has a wave soldering machine running MS-DOS on a PC that's built into the control cabinet. It uses the parallel port to communicate with Opto22 industrial i/o modules, which then is wired to all the temp sensors, relays, etc. It just keeps working.

s/better/less bad/

> I am not your QA department

The article is a lovely cathartic rant against agile software development methodologies applied in the wrong place in the wrong way, whether or not the software(s) in question used such methods. On of the worst assumptions, I believe, is that the end-user is willing and able to function as testing/QA without detriment to the product and company.

Have a look at these [1] polar diagrams for tall sailing ships. The radial distance from the center is the theoretical boat speed and the angle is the direction that the wind is hitting the boat, with zero on the nose and 180 from the stern. Each plotted line is the boat speed for a given wind speed. They show how the square-rigged ships can't sail upwind any closer than 55 degrees or so and are fastest on a broad reach (wind from just back of the side). You can also see how longer boats are generally faster, but a smaller boat with triangle sails ("Bermuda rigged") could easily get away from a big square-rigged ship by heading more upwind.

[1] https://forum.zegluj.net/download/file.php?id=23628&mode=vie...

For a close second here's a 1985 issue of the TPUG Magazine [1], from the Toronto PET Users Group. I attended a few meetings of the Niagara Commodore Users Group and spent all of my paper-route and fruit-picking income on arcade games and my C64 system.

[1] https://www.tpug.ca/tpug-media/tpugmag/TPUG_Issue_15_1985_Ju...

> [distributes] AND [facilitates the download of]

Grouping braces and capitalization mine. So distributing also required. However it's still overly broad, vague, and ambiguous.

Supply management does have its problems, but given the involvement of imperfect humans nothing will be without problems. Canadian pork, beef, and vegetable farmers that I personally know also complain that they can't enact supply management for their sector. They also envy the appearance of high profits, an easy life, and government subsidies & bailouts (yes, Canadian dairy farmers still receive those) for those in a supply managed sector.

At the end of the day, consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices and supply, while farmers also get stable income.

A farm on the western side of Canada has been doing something similar for years:

https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...

My experience supports nearly all of this. In 2022 I decided to keep my 2019 F-150 gasser instead of getting a Lightning because the Lightning was ridiculously expensive, even though Covid kept the value of my truck close to what I paid for it. I also didn't want all the Lightning's luxury features that tend to fail and highly depreciate over time. We do >12hr drives for work & family through remote BC and I was still willing to try the EV for such trips but didn't see the payback. In hindsight it was a good choice given the actual range experienced by Lightning owners.

Our favorite is still PDF-XChange [1] which has been our daily driver for years. Only dislike is the difficulty in opening a document in a separate application window. It's either everything in one window or everything in its own window.

[1] https://www.pdf-xchange.com/

> Since a human uses ~100W of power, the .24Watt-hours of energy > for an AI prompt is about 40human-seconds of energy.

.24 Watt-hours is 864 Watts for one second, so a 100W human takes ~9 seconds for that output.

Why are the Arxiv and Nature versions so different, even the text?

They have their beauty as objects of art, but certainly not as a place that I would enjoy occupying or being around. Brutalist architecture with a Chinese flair.

$1400 a year in electricity at a high rate of $0.15/kWhr for all 8,760 hours in a year is about 1 kW in power savings. Reality check:

A typical 3-phase 2hp industrial motor [1] is over 85% efficient and typical 10:1 reduction gearbox [2] is 94% efficient, which results in about 3kW power usage and 20% power lost to heat, or approx 0.6 kW. If their motor is 100% efficient, used in a 100%-duty-cycle application, in an area with high electrical costs, and with similar reliability to the standard AC motor, this gives $800 or so in savings per year.

In a more typical application with a 50% operating duty cycle and $0.10/kWhr, and guessing at 96% efficiency for their motor, we're down to maybe $200 per year in savings. Larger (>=5hp) motors can be 91% or higher efficiency bringing savings down even more. I can't imagine how C-Motive will equal the reliability, so any extra maintenance could quickly wipe out the savings.

I would guess that a variable-frequency drive (VFD) on the above AC motor, used to control speed and improve the power factor, would have the same efficiency as their motor controller. So I only looked at the AC motor + gearbox versus the C-motive motor + fluid pump.

[1] - https://www.baldor.com/catalog/CEM3558T-5#tab=%22performance... [2] - https://www.bostongear.com/ecatalog?page=product&cid=worm_ge...

I often ponder what the generator algorithm might be when I am solving "insane" 13x17 Kakuro puzzles [1], because there always seems to be just enough logical paths to solve each puzzle. Well done!

[1] - https://krazydad.com/kakuro/index.php?sv=13x17I_v1

All the underlying claims by the author really need the sources referenced.

I would suggest the same hardware solution, where the USB powers a device-side presentation of the raw data into a more universal mass storage device. This also allows file transfer to any device without requiring special software. I did something like this in 2008 or so (using a FTDI chip and PIC mcu, and boy was it ever slow).

As usual it's complicated, and it depends on which study you pick, and which model and parameters the researchers used. This study suggests that more anthropogenic sulfate aerosols in the air (usually from burning coal and other fossil fuels) could cool Artic summers from low clouds but warm Artic winters due to high clouds:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.7665...

Absolutely essential. Fumes from lead-free solder fluxes are nasty [1]. I find that bench-top "fume extractors", consisting of a fan and thin dust filter, are extremely noisy and essentially useless. I love my Hakko FA430-16. It's relatively quiet such that a regular conversation can be had in its presence, and it really works with the right hose & hood setup.

1: https://www.hse.gov.uk/lung-disease/electronics-soldering.ht...

The F-22 service ceiling is 60,000 ft so it can get up there too. The U2, however, flies relatively slow (< 400 kn) at that altitude so is ideal for an up-close inspection.

I would think that the U2 internal cameras were designed for a long focal length and for objects below the aircraft. I wonder if they made modifications for balloon photos.

And here's Dick Proenneke's way of doing it, pre-Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss

[edit: originally stated he was an Army engineer, but turns out he had various hands-on jobs, one being a Navy carpenter during the second World War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke]

In a similar vein, I quite dislike Microsoft's personification of Windows in the messages such as "We couldn't log in ...", "Let's finish setting up ..." or "We are adding new features ..."

Hmm. An engineered tree introduced to the ecosystem. What could possibly go wrong?

The fluorescence is so weak that the ambient conditions need to be dark and the concrete needs to be hit with only a narrow band of the light spectrum. Then you need a tuned detector to pick up the weak fluorescence, after which the SNR is still so low that the raw data must be processed to produce a meaningful result.

All very doable, but I don't think this would work using a standard CCTV looking at an area bigger than a metre (few feet) across.

A long time ago in a place far far away, I was part of a team that did exactly this to differentiate between healthy and possibly pre-cancerous tissue.

Most of the mapped flashing dots in NW WA & SW BC don't match actual lights, nor do most of the charted physical lights have a flashing dot.

I find their public response unprofessional and immature. The Nuclear regulatory process is similar to other federal and international public-safety regulatory processes such as aviation, medical, and wireless: companies soon learn that it is best to work with the regulations and regulators and not fight them.

Stainless steel needs oxygen[1], otherwise it will eventually corrode with pitting and "crevice corrosion"[2]. I wonder what the ingredients are in stainless rebar, and what the oxygen environment is like.

[1] https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/metals/is-stainless-steel-...

[2] https://www.cruisingworld.com/how/beware-stainless-steel-cor...

One could also take the ferry to Vancouver Island, drive north to Port Hardy, take another ferry to Prince Rupert, then drive on a highway that isn't actually washed out.

Or just fly. Airports are fine.

Yes. Vancouver sits in a little triangle of land in the south-west (bottom-left?) corner of Canada, completely surrounded by mountains to the north and east. We heavily rely on the highway south through the state of Washington.

Railways to the east are also washed out. [1] And the farm country in the cities of Abbotsford and Chilliwack to the east of Vancouver, which supplies most of the local dairy & poultry, is now either completely flooded or cut off. [2]

[1] https://www.radionl.com/2021/11/15/cn-cp-trains-out-of-servi...

[2] https://www.abbynews.com/news/immediate-evacuation-order-due...