Managing a large facility like this is not a job in which the person at the top makes the decisions about details. They have to be on top of the big picture. I am an engineer who works on radio telescopes, so I am familiar with the sort of issues that come up. The biggest issue by far is making sure that your facility has funding to carry out its mission. Next is finding people who can handle all the details. Then making sure that useful science is being carried out, so that the funding will stay in place and the people won't leave.

Journals are traditionally published by a couple Dutch companies, and cost a lot in order to make these publishers wealthy. The academics go along with it because they want to be published. These mutinies are trying to wrest control of the journals away from the for-profit Dutch publishers and back into academia where it ought to be. More power to them!

Intel and AMD have had some cross licensing arrangement from the late seventies, which I'm sure we are not able to view. But patents on a 40 year old architecture might be a wee bit expired by now.

Of course the entire point of Windows 10 was to make them able to generate income from something other than OS installs. Why else would it automatically replace your Windows 7 with itself?

One more demonstration that I appear to have done the right thing by installing 7 on my shiny new HP laptop four months ago.

With all due respect, Woz wears the one that I make.

The point is, you can put them above the traffic for a small fraction of the cost of putting them below the traffic. More efficient, too. Cover every rooftop with solar shingles before laying the first solar road. It's just common engineering sense.

There must be people in high places who can't add, for these projects to be getting built.

This justifies why I went to such great lengths to prevent them from upgrading my computers to 10.

I recently switched from my aging MacBook Pro to a 17" HP Envy running Windows 7, because HP at least hasn't removed all the useful ports, and the older OS will run happily without a cloud. Oh, and it can run all that engineering software I need to do my work.

It is a rather badly worded description of how an accurate clock keeps time. It makes much more sense to say that it has a timekeeping error of less than 1 billionth of a second per year. Such a clock will only run for 10 to 20 years, so saying what it will do in a billion years is meaningless.

I was expecting this. Just ordered a Lenovo P70 laptop yesterday, since Apple seems to be headed down the path of removing any reason whatsoever for an engineer to use their products. I switched to a Nexus phone a few months ago.

I just wish the P70 had a COM port.

Finally, a thread about vibrator design!

I just started working on a job in Vivado, which is Xilinx's new development environment for their latest multi-thousand dollar FPGAs. The supplied editor does not know what VHDL is. I use Emacs to edit my source code, because it has a VHDL template processor. If only the people developing the latest IDEs had any idea what their customers actually did or a living...

I program little tiny things that run on PIC16Fxxx processors, clocked at 32.768 kHz. C is not feasible for this environment. If you think no one uses this shit, ask the Woz what wristwatch he wears. http://www.nixiewatch.com/firm...

My brother used that same piece of fine old music The Blue Danube) in our Typewriter Repairmen underwater robot video. YouTube saw fit to mute the sound due to some copyright claim. Bastards.
http://selectric.org/nurc/introfinal.wmv