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Comment Re:Make sure your project is ready for the real wo (Score 1) 107

I've seen boards where all the decoupling caps are bunched together in a corner of the board, far away from the action.

Yeah, kinda defeats the purpose. I've seen something dumber though - many years back, a friend of a friend tried to get rid of the ignition noise coming over the radio in his car by installing a filter cap across the battery terminals and then wondered why it didn't make any difference. Guy was an electronics tech in the Navy, for crying out loud.

Comment Re:speed isn't everything (Score 1) 241

I've never experienced that, ever, in my 35 years of computing on various platforms and various text/document editors.

It happens to me occasionally on my Win7 box at work, and sometimes requires firing up Process Explorer to find out who still has a lock on the file if the file had been closed a while back. Getting out of the editor is the only thing that releases the lock in those cases. It's happened in Word, Notepad++, and UltraEdit.

Comment Re:I, for one... (Score 1) 615

I think more of the problem is so much stuff gets sent by truck when rail would be cheaper and faster. Unfortunately the U.S. doesn't have anywhere near the rail infrastructure that Europe does. I live about a mile from the Florida East Coast railway tracks. The next closest set of tracks belongs to CSX, and is about 100 miles away.

Comment Re:Won't save most of the 4000 lives (Score 1) 615

In the U.S. at least, it's very unusual to see a 60-ton truck on the highway - most are limited to 40 tons, with special permitting needed for heavier loads. Australia's a whole different story, but their road trains have many more brakes to distribute the energy across.

And that means it's going to take a while as that heat dissipates - the brakes will literally melt if you try to brute-force a shorter braking distance, for example by increasing braking system pressure.

Increasing the pressure will lock the wheels up (not taking ABS into account), at which point the rotors/drums aren't absorbing any more heat and stopping distance is determined by the friction of the sliding tires. That said, truck brakes are *big*, and are quite capable of handling a 50 mph panic stop without damage to the brakes.

Comment Re:Entire OS in about 1/3 of i7 Cache (Score 2) 368

I read somewhere (Can't remember where :/) that the fastest assembly code produced to date was written by a human, not a computer; again, google returns nothing.

Michael Abrash's ancient-but-awesome book, "The Zen of Graphics Programming", contains a chapter called "Heinlein's Crystal Ball, Spock's Brain, and the 9 Cycle Dare" that 's about Abrash's adventures in coming up with the fastest CPU-driven texture mapper he could write in hand-written assembly for his X-Sharp graphics library (he eventually ended up with 16 million texture-mapped pixels per second on a 90 MHz Pentium). Might that be what you're thinking of?

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