Shoppa, Tim wrote: That's because you use Windows. I get it in seconds. Every time. And if you are lucky the fifth or sixth hit is a *free* pdf.

I have never found any useful information on ICs using Google. As you say, you get plenty of sites that claim they can sell you the IC.. COnsideirng that sometimes the number I have entered is a custom part (or an HP house-number or...) I wonder how genuine these ICs are. Or are they any device with the right package renumbered. After all, it it deosn't work in my circuit, that's my fault... I find http://www.datahseetarchive.com/ and http://www.digchip.com/ have many, but by no means lal, of the data sheets I need. For current devices the manufacturer's site generally has a data sheet to download, but a lot of the devices I need data on have been out of prodcution for many years. but the web sites rarely have access to obsolete device data sheets. (I can still rememebnr Motorola sending me photocopies of ancient linear IC data sheets stampped 'This is for inforamtion only, device no longer avaialble' or something like that. Great, it told me what the defective part was and I could design a replacement,) Anyway, fidning data on an IC when you know the neumber is a totally differnt ptoblem to finding out what ICs are avaialble, and what their interesting features are. That I used to do by reading data books. And as I've said repeatedly, I can't do that on the web.

Shoppa, Tim wrote: I use a combination of DownThemAll and the Download Statusbar plugins for Firefox. DTA is great for grabbing a page full of linked files (I've seen instances where people have scanned >100-page manuals to PDF as individual pages... makes it a bit of a pain to get the whole document). It's also terrific for big files -- it supports resuming downloads and multipart downloading ("download acceleration"). I usually leave multipart turned off (it has basically no effect on ADSL), but the resume feature is terrific. Especially when your DSL connection decides to drop out 99.5% through downloading a Linux ISO... The Download Statusbar plugin gets rid of the blasted download window (and its annoying habit of stopping all your downloads when you close it) and moves it to the status bar. This tends to be better for small files (<20MB usually). I don't think it's *that* much of a generalisation. My mother and brother are incessant link-clickers. If it says "free stuff, click here, just keep clicking 'OK' when it gives you a security warning, this isn't a virus, honest!", they'll click the link. Net result being that the machine ends up turning into a virus-infested slush pile by the end of the day it was set up. I had to re-image my brother's XP machine six times in a week on one occasion. On the 6th occasion I imaged the machine and gave him a recovery DVD. "This will obliterate everything on your C drive, make sure anything important is backed up onto the fileserver." He ignored the warning, but that's another thing. It's not been as bad since he installed Windows 7, but I still have a recovery image on standby. My mother has gotten the hint that clicking random links will f00k a PC very quickly. I'm reasonably convinced that letting her loose on an XP machine isn't a Really Bad Idea. In any case, when she bought her new laptop (one of the Asus 1008HA netbooks), I gave her an Ubuntu Live CD to play with. She loves it -- to the point where a week later she asked me to install it on the hard drive. She still uses XP for a few things that don't work on Linux (notably web-based training and seminars) but >90% of the time she's using Ubuntu. Haven't had to do a reinstall in nearly a year, and she's only installing software from the main, well-known repositories (I think I turned multiverse on, then set up medibuntu). 90% of the problem is the users.. even if they're told "don't click things like that", they will. IIRC it's called the "dancing bunnies problem" (also known as the "dancing pigs problem" or "dancing bears problem", depending on who you ask). Basically, many computer users, when presented with a button that says "click here to see the dancing bunnies", will click said button and dismiss any security alerts keeping them away from said bunnies. Move users onto Linux or OSX and the viruses stop working :) It probably helps that most Linux/OSX devs have better things to be doing than writing malware. The small market share relative to Windows is probably a factor, too. Go for the big, insecure target, or the little one that's armoured at least as well as Fort Knox? I know which one I'd pick... :) (Wasn't it OpenBSD who started harping on about there being "no security holes in the base install since $DATE", then having a huge kernel bug found a couple of weeks later? I think I'd counter with "but what can you do with the base install, anyway?" :-) ) -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/