The key feature of these technologies is passive below ambient cooling.
"Such novel technology is often based on coating materials that reflect solar energy in visible near-infrared wavelength range (0.3–2.5 μm) and send infrared heat to the universe through atmospheric transparency window". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00323...
Any other benefit including solar water heating or photovoltaic generation is just burying the lede. 60We/m2 is just fine if it is sharing space with other applications. The fact that they are achieving this with basically doped silicone caulking rather than something like indium tin oxide is fantastic news. Dumping heat into space rather than our oceans and atmosphere is going to matter a whole lot more in the near future, and it even works when it is cloudy.
Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up.
I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.
The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".
CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.
I bought a Pinecil so I could run it off a battery. I really came to appreciate the excellent temperature control and rapid heating, and use it instead of my soldering station for jobs away from the bench.
I have felt absolutely no need to touch the firmware. I try to forget that it is more powerful than my first three personal computers combined. Plug in, turn on, get hot. It meets my needs and exceeded my expectations. I suppose I could run a website from it if I wanted to make a point but as long as it doesn't require wifi and phone home to verify the license and leak my biometric data I expect to use it until I wear it out.
I saw one useful feature added, which was support for lower resistance tips. You can also get it to report on the input voltage which is marginally useful if running on battery.
Most of it seems to be people having fun. Animations, enabling Bluetooth, web interfaces over aforementioned Bluetooth, etc. That's all pretty cool and hacker news is hardly the place to question why you'd want to do it, but I'll admit I find the number of people interested in hacking on a soldering iron a bit of a surprise!
Do you run it at 20V or USB 5V? I ask because I found it heated up very slowly at 5V (and had trouble maintaining high heat), while once I got a nice USB PD power supply, it worked very well.
It replaced my weller almost instantly (the weller just inserts heat insert nuts now).
20v everywhere plus I made up a high power DC power cord with a barrel connector. My company’s marketing department has really nice USB-C power bricks emblazoned with our logo. I also invested in a biggish Anker battery with full USB-PD support.
Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.
My dad was offered a buyout when he was around my current age. It included 10 years seniority added to his pension and health insurance until Medicare kicked in. He never looked back.
Question from an European: Why did they need to be so generous? From what we hear over here you have at will employment so they can just fire you on the spot, no need to pay anything, no? But then I read stories like these which are the opposite. I'd kill for something like this over here.
Paying an expensive senior (older) employee to quietly and happily go away without raising a fuss may have saved money in the long term. I am sure they did not offer the same deal to everyone.
I think for them likely better to preserve a relationship rather than have it adversarial in future. It would definitely pay dividends over the potential issues it may cause.
To retain and recruit talent, and protect from lawsuits (you usually have to sign a release to receive severance/a buyout). Generally only difficult to recruit and highly in-demand employees get these packages - most people over here would also kill for something like this.
Wrongful termination lawsuits are a thing, and the law protects workers from various things, including age discrimination. There are also limits on mass layoffs. All of these combine to make firing people much harder than folks think, especially at larger companies, and especially especially when large numbers of people are affected.
In short, don’t believe Internet memes. The US isn’t the capitalist hellscape disaffected commenters pretend it is.
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
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"Such novel technology is often based on coating materials that reflect solar energy in visible near-infrared wavelength range (0.3–2.5 μm) and send infrared heat to the universe through atmospheric transparency window". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00323...
Any other benefit including solar water heating or photovoltaic generation is just burying the lede. 60We/m2 is just fine if it is sharing space with other applications. The fact that they are achieving this with basically doped silicone caulking rather than something like indium tin oxide is fantastic news. Dumping heat into space rather than our oceans and atmosphere is going to matter a whole lot more in the near future, and it even works when it is cloudy.