4. ..... Don't apply solder to the iron; apply it to the heated work.....

This is the single most worthless thing that is _always_ said. You even contradict it in the sentence before you said this, however given you say this and _everyone_ else says this, this is what will be remembered.

I can put a hot iron against a component and put solder against the other side of the same component, and it will just sit there all day and do _nothing_. You should _not_ apply solder to the component, you should apply solder to a liquid pool of solder. When you have enough on the tip, it should flow to the component, around the lead, over the pad, and seal the connection. With flux, this happens easily, quickly, and in a very pretty manner.

Granted, I selected "competent" rather than "BGA Chef" because I tend to apply too much solder, but touching the solder to the component does not work. If you're starting out, get that thought out of your head now.

8. Use flux. Get a 2$ tub of flux off one of the chinese deal sites (dealextreme, dhgate), and USE IT. It makes a WORLD of difference, both when soldering and desoldering. (You can't use solder wick without flux, In my experience. No one ever told me that, and I could never get wick to work well, so I gave up on solder wick and bought a desolder station long before I discovered the benefits of flux.)

Then there are the Hyper power supplies that die and I bring home from work. 60W iron, large tip, and that desolder station can't melt a single solder joint, regardless of size. geez. So much for salvaging those components. (Maybe if I add solder _and_ add flux.. hmm. But the components just aren't valuable enough for me to waste so much solder.)

The whole article is worded as though written by an advertiser. This is nothing but Slashdot Market Research. Either it will be a hit business article, "What Not to Try and Virtualize, Straight from the Engineers" or research into how segments of the industry can convince you to virtualize that anyway.

Must be nice, buy one website and you end up with a corralled group of wise and experienced IT gurus. Then slaughter them like sheep. This post was nothing but Market Research. Move along.

This happened to me. Around October last year, I logged in, checked e-mail, and left the tab to do something else. About 20 minutes later, I went back to the tab, clicked Inbox, and... nothing happened. Clicked a few more things, nothing expected was happening. Hit refresh, was redirected to the login page. This is _not_ typical.

When I logged in again, I had 30 bounceback e-mails. I checked sent items, I had 50 new sent e-mails, about 5 addresses each, to my entire contact list with a slew of bad URLs. A couple people contacted me about it. I checked the sent e-mail headers, and the sending IP had an address from Russia, China or some such.

Compromised password? Not likely -- the password on my e-mail is completely unique, had never been used anywhere else, greater than 10 characters, computer-generated. I never type it on public machines, and hadn't used Hotmail on anything but my work machine, home machine (Gentoo) and Ubuntu box in... a long, long time. They would've needed a keylogger to get it. I scanned my work machine for viruses. Nothing. Perhaps there's an Ubuntu bug that somehow got exploited on me, but that box has never connected directly to the internet.

I did some research, and the best that I could come up with is a 2011 attack where if an attacker sent you a bad URL, and you opened the e-mail, they could get your session cookie, log in and act like you. That is the _only_ thing that I found. But it was supposed to be fixed earlier in the year, and I don't recall opening any odd e-mails -- clearing the junk folder, seeing the subject, but not opening them. A few from expected sources, sure, but nothing that struck me as odd.

So I changed my password and immediately stopped using the Hotmail web interface. The problem has not recurred, so suggests it's not an Ubuntu bug. This suggests, then, that there is still a session-hijacking bug in Hotmail somewhere that persists to today.

Don't always assume it's user error if you can't figure out the flaw.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=949053&cid=24814727:

[The "rapid" BSE test in question] can detect abnormal prions only if they exist in a relatively high concentration, and abnormal prions typically reach detectable concentrations only two to three months before an animal exhibits observable symptoms. The incubation period for BSE (i.e., from infection to observable symptoms) is two to eight yearsâ"the average being five yearsâ"and cattle younger than thirty months are rarely symptomatic. Because most cattle for slaughter in the United States go to market before they are twenty-four months old, ...

http://www.mad-cow.org/00/dec00_mid2_news.html:

Asked what scientific evidence he could give to reassure the public that a negative BSE test result was not a "false negative," Schimmel replied: "Nobody can do that." The report said it is usual for all biochemical tests used in medicine or animal welfare to be assessed against hundreds or even thousands of different samples to test how sensitive they are at detecting "true" negatives, and how specific they are at determining "true" positives.

However, this has not been done with any of the Commission-approved BSE tests, used in the context of assessing whether an apparently healthy animal is incubating the disease.

"This is SOPA being passed in smaller chunks."

So long as all law is made solely to restrict people and _never_to recagnize rights or prevent abuses such as this, it will just be attempt after attempt until a given law passes. It is absolutely inevitable.

Congress must enact law that supercedes any prior or later law indicating that personal communications CANNOT be intercepted with anything short of a court order. This, for the various things that are trying to be passed now. Only when they have to fight for the revokation of these protective laws before they can bribe their desired laws into affect will we be in any way safe.

But it'll never happen.

I'm seriously looking for jobs outside this country (anyone in Sweden need an IT worker that can fill just about any role but Senior?), but this one, in particular, strikes me as "SO WHAT?"

Seriously. Is your manly body so private that another man cannot lay eyes upon it? Is your womanly body so special that a female officer must not gaze upon you? As you're in the process of being thrown into a cell?

What the hell is all this nonsense about nudity? It's a damn body. The person examining you has one just like it. Get the hell over it.

Move on with ACTUAL rights violations, like being arrested without being charged.

They should allow the in-store tryout and purchase of the cheap *-Network-only games. Those are games people don't see anywhere else, can't rent, and they're cheap enough to be impulse buys. Tack a dollar or two on, specify login name as a "Buy For" option, all the payment goes through Microsoft/Sony/whatever, and ends up on the user's machine at home when they turn it on.

It's a whole area that isn't available to any retailers that they should be clamoring for the ability to sell to. Provide all of them as playable demos on the special demo boxes, or with store credentials. The people can play for 5 minutes or something before a game over or level end, maybe. Instantly switchable between games, with no downloads required in-store -- it can already be there.

Life: something which defies the apparent path of least resistance (which would be to sit down and do nothing/die.)

Conciousness, of course, is much more involved.

Yes. Though I'm not the OP. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since 2002, have experience in everything from writing shell scripts to mirroring websites ("intelligent" processing, in bash, for a standard page format, not just wget -r) to setting up multiple RAID5's and restoring them when multiple drives fail (think cabling issue, then power outtage, ugh) -- something that is _not_ well documented, and can happen in miraculous ways. Still, for that last one, if you know the data's valid, it can be recovered.

Programming languages include C (favorite), perl, bash (most-used), java, php (hate it), SQL, and as with any decent programmer I can pick up whatever you want me to learn fairly quickly. The goal, of course, is to make computers do things. My life's goal is to automate the whole world out of required work. One step at a time..

I lack enterprise experience, but that's primarily because it's difficult to set up an enterprise in a small apartment -- or at least, to justify its use. Give me the tools, and I'll learn it. That last part -- learning -- it's my favorite thing to do :-)

If you're interested, please contact for a resume: suse jobs dot 10 dot drkshadow at spamgourmet.com

The cambridge location is especially appealing, but I wouldn't consider that exclusive.

Forgive me for the attention-seeking headline, but I've read very interesting things about Antarctica and its ice sheets.

Primarily, there were maps made in the 1500's that closely resemble an ice-free Antarctica. They document mountains we've detected in the 1900's by sonar, and reflect the Antarctic coastline closely.

If these maps are correct, and there was no ice in the 1500's... how were these ice cores found?

If the ice cores were found, and they date back to 1000 AD, how were these maps made with knowledge of Antarctica having no ice?

I'm very curious. One good article I found is here:
http://www.diegocuoghi.it/Piri_Reis/PiriReis_Hoye-Lunde.htm

Quite plausibly, it seems that the maps are, in fact, not maps of Antarctica. I wonder how that affects the arguments given... thoughts?

Console:

firefox -ProfileManager --no-remote

This will bring up a profile window, and you can choose which profile you want to use. Only browser sessions after the first must use --no-remote, but it must be there on all but the first.

I find it very convenient to run two firefox sessions -- one on my local computer, one on a USB key...

-DrkShadow