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Comment: Re:Good idea (Score 1) 147

by qvatch (#43676999) Attached to: New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW
it depends what you call passed. 50%, 65%, 80% (here, that's the min undergrad, honours, grad grade to "pass"). Passing means you know enough to do that material, not that you understand it well enough to apply it without effort while learning the next level, so if you stopped there you could be considered to know the material.

Comment: Re:$4.30 MSP430 Launchpad for starters (Score 2) 228

by qvatch (#42722575) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Electronics Prototyping Platform?
I started with arduino, and I had no microcontroller experience. The community, examples from the absolute ground up, and vendor (sparkfun, adafruit, etc) support is excellent. It all makes for a really enjoyable experience. Digikey and mouser get you parts fast. Ebay and random asian websites get you parts slow but cheap. If you want graphics (eg. TV, or monitor) though, best go with the pi. A pi costs less than an arduino graphics shield. Ethernet is doable at least.

Comment: Re:The problem with CFC (Score 1) 211

by qvatch (#42104669) Attached to: Hairspray Could Help Us Find Advanced Alien Civilizations
not only that, but it isn't something that you keep using, so even if civilization continues, CFC's probably won't (at high levels). The consequences of high atmospheric CFC's are enough to push them out of use. It'll be like high powered omnidirectional TV and radio signals. Those stopped too, yet we continue.

Comment: Re:Lots of work has been done here (Score 1) 62

by qvatch (#41421403) Attached to: All Over But the Funding: Open Hardware Spectrometer Kit
LEDs will still have a pretty broad spectral response so you'd have overlap, and need quite a bit of gain. Try one of the taos colour sensing chips, those do RGB+all with programmable gain and digital output, it'll make the project pretty simple and much more repeatable. you can also do one clear NIR phototransistor with selectable filters for colours. That'd be manageable. For my project, I am using, currently, a clear phototransistor and illuminating the target with a specific LED colour. I think someone has done something pretty similar (but reflection rather than transmission) on instructables too, but I can't dig it up.

Comment: Re:Hah! Take that, my bank! (Score 1) 497

by qvatch (#41421291) Attached to: Hotmail No Longer Accepts Long Passwords, Shortens Them For You
TD bank in canada: 5-8 letters, no symbols. Sure you have to answer a few (random 3 of 5) quiz-of-your-life-history questions after, but really. http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/banking/electronic-banking/faq-idplus.jsp Passwords must: - be 5 to 8 characters in length - not contain spaces or special characters (e.g. #, &, @)

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?

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