buescher

Just wait until they shred all the old useless books

True, but “normal schedule” is hiding a bit of subtlety there: the hpv vaccine was recommended for women up to 26 at the time, so the oldest women who got it then would be pushing 50 now.

You're supposed to be able to order "a" 5532 without specifying the supplier

This is not true.

because many vendors produce "a" 5532

This is true, in the sense of a "5532-type part". But you will note that all the 5532 variants have different manufacturer's part numbers (prefixes and suffixes) to prevent this confusion. They don't just do that for branding.

and they're all the same.

This is emphatically and trivially not true, and it tells me you haven't done the work of carefully comparing data sheet specs across suppliers. Try it, you'll learn something.

Different vendors' 5532s are supposed to be able to be treated as the same SKU — literally dumped into co-mingled stock in warehouses — with no ill consequence!

That might happen somewhere, but authorized distributors do not do this and volume manufacturers do not do this. You might have an internal part number with an authorized suppliers list that includes more than one variant of 5532 that has been vetted for production.

And yes, until TI's recent move, that was true of the 5532. All the other vendors' 5532s had matching datasheet specs

Again, emphatically and trivially not true. Take a careful look at the NJM and On Semi data sheets. Spec by spec. Do the work and be amazed.

the warehouse they're sourcing from has comingled any TI 5532s into the general 5532 stock

Authorized distributors do not do this. It gets hairy when you're sourcing NOS from grey market dealers for old designs or in severe part crunches like 2020-2022 era, but that's a different story.

no real recourse except to change your entirely supply chain to one that specifically excludes TI

This concept is backwards. You would have an internal part number for 5532-type op amp, and it would have an authorized vendors list that would only include vetted parts. "Any 5532 but TI" is asking for trouble from someone else.

And parts do change or get updated and if you are buying from authorized distributors for production you and your supply chain and quality people will get product change notices. At that point it's your job (or the component engineer's, if you're fortunate enough to have one) to validate the new version or find a suitable alternate.

No, I’m talking about the guy that builds prototypes out of his magic parts box and says “oh, you can still get those” when the last direct substitute was obsoleted in 2008. Or he’s using the old version of a part like this in a “proven” subcircuit and NOT checking for change notices or other the new data sheets. That’s what I mean by the “magic parts box”. Buy new parts for new prototypes and read all the latest data, folks.

They’re just not really standardized at all, especially semiconductors. Not in the sense you’d expect naively. Some were a long time ago, and supposedly the old Japanese sc parts were, down to die geometry and process. But otherwise, the part number means “this is like the part with a similar number first made by someone else”, not “this is an exact replacement in every way”

It annoys me too but part numbers are not a spec but more of a strong hint. The attitude of the industry is that it’s up to you to read data sheets carefully and test. Even for a 2N2222 or whatever.

This is why you should always order new parts for a new design and never, never trust the old guy with the magic parts box. Also why learning to read and compare data sheets skeptically is a fundamental skill.

There is a C.S. Lewis quote that is as good as St. Paul and I don’t say that lightly: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

Hard, isn’t it? The highest ideals are.

The clankers are just very big machine spirits. Treat them as such.

I guess it could be if you left out the bacon… and the rabbit.

When I put together my telescope setup I got a manual equatorial thinking I’d add a clock drive and my next telescope would have a go-to mount. It’s been about 20 years now.

On-screen tablet/phone keyboards seem perfect for apl to me.

There’s an iOS port of J but it’s no longer available on the App Store.

I got a VIC-20 when I was about 12? Jim Butterfield loomed impossibly large over all things Commodore at that time. One of the first things I typed in on it was his TINYMON, a <1kbyte “monitor” (for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microcomputing) before I had any idea what it was.

At some point you have to go from S-100 to original “8-bit” ISA. There might have been a combo backplane in period.

How did the skedd connectors work out? I assume Wuerth redfit? I'm looking at ordering some to try them.

Yes. For about 98% of embedded, you want the pinout for the TC2030-FTDI-C232HD-DDHSP-0-DTR cable that has DTR and RTS on it for STM32, ESP32, and Arduino-style bootloaders. It's 3.3V only iirc. Power is delivered by the cable on pin 1 so leave that terminal disconnected if it's an issue.

You can "break glass" and get the off the shelf cable delivered overnight (and you can spec it if you need a spec cable) or you can make an adapter for the 6-pin tag-connect cable and the TTL-serial adapter that you have.

Yes. Look at the old national app notes for the lm339 family of comparators.

Piezo harvesting switches and similar (I think there’s a flywheel design out there too) are quite expensive, not terribly reliable or consistent, and require substantial activation force. Conventional switches and batteries that can last for years in remote push buttons and sensors are extremely inexpensive in volume.

Right, and they were superseded by battery-powered infrared remotes for good reasons. I would recommend revisiting those reasons before proposing this sort of technology for wireless sensors.

My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it.

That is good advice. Nethack “spoilers” are more like being let in on an “in-joke” than being told the solution to a puzzle or the ending of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

It’s about humans presenting something plausibly awful in a deceptive way, and using a machine to be plausible and deceptive.

That’s exactly what a clanker would say, isn’t it?

The amyloid hypothesis and associated fraud covered in the TFA.

No.

Just have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.

Because it told you so!

I am reminded of the passage in Umberto Eco's _Foucault's Pendulum_ where they reconstruct a particularly wild weekend for a Templar based on the rule of the Templars and the idea that a rule exists because it's something people do.

Fresh produce is pretty inexpensive here for the most part. But fresh herbs (like thyme, not a euphemism) are sold in small quantities (15g-20g) in plastic clamshell packaging in groceries for $2-$4 each.

You don’t need a $900 gadget to grow fresh herbs, either, of course. But that’s one way you could think of it “recouping” the capital.

You can turn almost all of those buttons off in the settings and save it as a template. The only complaint I ever got was from somone who wanted to use the highlighter instead of the built-in comment management system.

"Can" does not mean "always will without fail". On the flip side, you will never catch things in review if you don't review.

Having a specific review for new parts helps to keep footprint errors from "passing through". I've never seen a general layout review catch a footprint error: if you're used to using internal library parts, no one thinks to check them.

There's another updated version of that prolog here along with some links, including an archived article from Microsoft Research on how it was (once upon a time) used in Windows NT network configuration: https://github.com/opless/small-prolog