And the guy who sits next to those other people you are constantly coordinating and discussing issues with? The guy who needs to concentrate hard on a one-man project? He is freaking hating it, and by extension, you. Headphones don't eliminate all distraction cues. And you know what? You'd still be able to do your collaboration shtick in cubicles or offices by walking up to folks when you need to.

Open plan might work for some places, but its a fad being adopted by managers following trends without evaluating if they truly make sense for their shop.

That depends on the board design. If the MoBo designer didn't balance the copper density well top-to-bottom it will warp the whole damn thing as if it were a thermostat. Technical term is "potato chip-ing" the board. Seeing as how the initial problem occurred under temperature loads bad design isn't outside the realm of the possible. Or they cheapped out and used thinner copper layers that didn't spread the heat evenly enough laterally. (Though as others have pointed out it may be something INSIDE the chip packages not the MoBo. Also 340F isn't enough to melt solder, particularly lead-free.)

Of course nowadays the question one-level-up from that might be "Where can I get a Sears & Roebuck catalog?" to which the answer is amazon.com, funny enough.

But then the question just becomes "where can I buy a vernier caliper?". It's not like they had amazon.com either, and I doubt it was in the Sears & Roebuck catalog.

No, we should make our acceptance of [the existence of] the problem not be conditioned on (proposed) solutions. You are free to propose other solutions, and the choice of _which_ solution often politics and opinion. It's a variation of "everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts."

Sounds like they have their priors confused with their posteriors.

I'd tell you a joke about TCP but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.

I'd tell you a joke about UDP but you might not get it.

Over at bufferbloat.net we have developed several pretty accurate bandwidth and latency measurement tests, that work at speeds up to 40GigE. We wrap the popular with the linux-netdev's "netperf" tool with something that can aggregate and plot the results, called "netperf-wrapper". The most popular test in the suite is called "rrul" which stands for "Realtime Response Under Load", but there are many others in the suite. It has been used to extensively tune several fair queuing and aqm algorithms, notably "fq_codel" which is in cerowrt, openwrt, and many other 3rd party firmwares. Its been used to debug network hardware, wifi, cablemodems, and most recently during the 40GigE batch-bql patchset now entering the linux kernel. Some examples of use to tune a smarter queue management system against modern day cable modems: http://burntchrome.blogspot.co... http://snapon.lab.bufferbloat.... There are also netperf-wrapper results for 40GigE, DSL, and wifi spread around the Internet. The intermediate format netperf-wrapper uses to store its results are in json and parsable by anything, and I keep hoping someone will get around to writing a web interface for the datafiles... Nothing else I've ever seen even comes close to netperf-wrapper for finding good, accurate, long term numbers and multiple forms of anomoly. Pretty much all the web based tests get increasingly inaccurate above 20Mbits. Single threaded TCP tests are bad also as they generally result in someone defeating TCP congestion avoidance in pursuit of the best benchmark numbers. [2] Far more important to the debloaters is not the bandwidth attained but the latency induced while getting it. [1] We maintain several public servers for netperf-wrapper, all connected via a gigE connection to the internet. Thus far we haven't overloaded them (nor advertised them widely), but if you want to give netperf-wrapper a try, and can't set up your own netperf server on the other side, feel free to ping us on the bloat mailing list for some addresses on various continents. [1] A brief rant: Bandwidth != speed. Bandwidth is capacity/interval. Real perceived speed is obtained via low latency. [2] I really hate that all the web network measurement tests don't simultaneously measure ping while running their upload and downloads. IF ONLY those tests would do that, people would start to realize that there is a huge tradeoff between good latency and high bandwidth, and that they are doing their networks in, by optimizing for bandwidth only. Networks engineered for speedtest's current test, *suck* for voip and gaming. I'd like to petition them to at least report ping times under load to the 98th percentile.

Of the thirty some domains trying to execute javascript from that page, anyone have the secret combination to temporarily let through noscript so the right-arrow "next image" button works? Just discovery.com and their cdn is not sufficient.

While I find the 3d printing damn cool, the editorializing about the waste struck me as an odd comment for subby to make. I'm guessing that a lot of powder gets left over by this new process just as milling from a solid block leaves shavings. But those should be just as easily melted down and recycled in the next job, so not really wasted. (And if they are thrown away, it means that reusing them just isn't economical, so the 'waste' isn't that valuable anyway.)

I think the better argument where 3D wins is the ability to get arbitrary shapes that could be impossible to make with traditional machining or casting.

There's another one with just one L, and he has NO sense of humor.

There's a great short story about an AT-AT test pilot doing war-games for the brass and the weapon's designers. In one test engagement against A-wings he has the new AT-AT kneel down before shooting back. When they ask him why afterwards, he explains that he thought the A-wings might try to trip him up. After horrid stares amongst the designers and their bosses, they decide the best "fix" is to ship his smart ass to Tatooine so they can sweep it under the rug and stay on schedule.

On it's problematic use as rocket fuel oxidizer: "...the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes." -John Drury Clark