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You may not know his name, but you've encountered Hans Camenzind's designs countless times. He was also one of the first independent semiconductor designers, famed for hitting a home run with his first solo design–the 555 timer chip that has been incorporated into countless inexpensive electronic devices. Incredibly, over one billion 555 timer chips are sold each year. It's a simple little 10 cent device that makes it possible to build devices that flash, buzz or turn on and off at variable intervals. Incredibly, he created the chip alone, spending a year designing it by hand as a freelancer. Flip-flop, flip-flop... silence.
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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RIP.
I used the NE555 timer several times when I was hacking hardware in the 70s.
/ravi
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I gave myself an electric shock using a 555 timer when I was an apprentice.
I was using it as a timer to generate a 50hz cycle as part of a 12Vdc to 240Vac inverter I was making as a little project. Damn what a kick I got from the ac side!
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Yikes!
Did you also play with the Intersil 8038 (function gen)? One of my favorite chips! I built a neat VCO (sine, square and triangle outputs) for next to nothing using the chip's standard application circuit guide. Amazing little device! Sometimes I miss the smell of burning solder...
/ravi
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It’s a big day here at Bitbucket HQ. The Bitbucket team is unveiling a brand new, redesigned Bitbucket. Our goal for this huge release was to rethink and rebuild the Bitbucket web experience from the ground up. Today, we’re are excited to introduce the new Bitbucket – faster, easier and more beautiful than ever. It looks a lot like Github... and that ain't a bad thing.
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Once a year we are given carte blanche to commune with the dead, to cast spells and to become the evil that we otherwise fear in the world. We let the fear in, let it dance around in our heads and give us nightmares. This year, we're digging up a few buried horrors for you, and we've called upon the spirit of the NES to conjure up some newer scares as well. From the sublimely terrifying to the ridiculous, here are 15 games full of 8-bit scares to fill your Octoberween. Click through the links to get in the spirit and play, purchase or download each of these retro scare-fests. Out in those woods, in the dark... something... that's pixelated.
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Another website that makes you click 16 times to be able to view each item.
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Microsoft has been working for the past few years to convince users, especially business users, they don't need to wait until the first service pack to deploy a new Windows release. With Windows 8, Microsoft officials believe they've gotten a step closer, by rolling out via Windows Update on October 9 the “Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 General Availability Cumulative Update.” This update provides post-RTM (release to manufacturing) updates around performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility. Bonus: you'll have updates waiting as soon as you install. Oh happy days!
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A new survey finds that the more women executives that are involved in a startup, the more likely it is to succeed. Here's one theory why... [ITworld]
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Alternate theory hypothesis: there are so few women in startups, the ones that are there are the top of the pack. If they look at the top men running startups, the percentage would probably be higher (especially if the criterion for "top men" means the ones that are successful ).
A similar perspective is that men are more likely to take risks, and so are more likely to be involved and to fail.
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I agree with the second hypothesis - it can be hard for women to be taken seriously in the IT business. Consequently, if they are good, then they tend to be darn good.
I say this as one of the few women in the business who is basically just coasting along
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There's nothing wrong with a bit of coasting, in fact I recommend it as an anti-burnout strategy.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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If there were far more women in the IT field it would be a much better place to work since so much has become a daily experience in brutality as a result of outsourcing and the continued use of incompetent managers.
More women would make them feel less inclined to act like men and be more of themselves, which would most likely bring a calming effect to a field that has been fraught with high stress, ridiculous expectations, massive project failure, and just general poor working conditions...
Steve Naidamast
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@ix.netcom.com
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I couldn't agree more.
Anna
Tech Blog | Visual Lint
"Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Steve Naidamast wrote: If there were far more women in the IT field it would be a much better place to
work since so much has become a daily experience in brutality as a result of
outsourcing and the continued use of incompetent managers.
Incorrect. Women would not alter either of those.
Steve Naidamast wrote: More women would make them feel less inclined to act like men and be more of
themselves, which would most likely bring a calming effect to a field that has
been fraught with high stress, ridiculous expectations, massive project failure,
and just general poor working conditions...
If you are suggesting that women would fix that then no that is not correct.
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The numbers look a little shaky to me to be drawing that conclusion. 7% on average for all startups, and 7.1% for successful ones - that is not what a reliable study would consider statistically significant, let alone evidence of a causal relationship. Also the fact that the failed companies only had an average of 3.1% as compared to the 7% average indicates that the vast majority of the startups in the survey must have been successful, something well over 90%, which would indicate an unacceptable bias in the survey sample.
Not saying women aren't good for startups, only that the study was so fatally flawed so as to not be able to draw the conclusions they drew.
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Ho Hum.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I'm still waiting for 4G. I don't mean the stuff they market as 4G, I mean actual 4G.
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Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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dyslexics of the world untie !!!
(sorry, couldn't help myself)
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You beta me to it!
(also sorry)
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Pretty much everyone agrees that if you have a choice between a simpler software design and a more complex design, all else being equal, that simpler is better. It is also widely thought to be worthwhile to deliberately invest in simplicity — for example, to spend effort refactoring existing code into a cleaner design — because the one-off cost of refactoring today is easily offset by the benefits of easier maintenance tomorrow. Also, much thought by many smart people has gone into finding ways of breaking down complex systems into manageable parts with manageable dependencies.... But there is a subtlety that I have been missing in discussions about software complexity, that I feel somewhat ambivalent about, and that I think is worth discussing. It concerns the points where external humans (people outside of the team maintaining the system) touch the system — as developers using an API exposed by the system, or as end users interacting with a user interface. One could even argue that the utility of a product is a subset of its user experience.
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In the spirit of the early days of PC programming, here is my proposal to all of you: The 50 Line Small Basic Challenge! I proposed this challenge about three years ago as the "25 Line Challenge", and it was such a success that it spawned a competition to see who could squeeze the most complex code into the smallest space. The results were brilliant. It was quickly discovered that you could use the String and Stack based nature of the arrays to produce some startlingly compact, obfuscated and unreadable code. 50 lines of Basic ought to be enough for anyone.
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