Somewhere I have an old DEC PDP-8 handbook. They released a native FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-8. It just shows what you can do with clever coding and lots of overlays.
The U.S. Air Force developed special parachutes for nuclear weapons that allowed a high-speed aircraft to drop a parachute-retarded bomb on a target. These parachutes can be deployed at high-speed without self-destructing or putting unacceptable loads on the nuclear weapon.
There are "stealth" antennas made for automobiles that are almost invisible. The top of the antenna is flush with the outer surface of the body of the automobile.
I had a teacher who enjoyed explaining, in gory detail, how they sawed his sternum in two, pried open his rib cage,, fixed his heart problem, and then stapled his sternum back together. This new technique sounds much less painful.
Re:Does anyone actually know what a nuke would do?
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Stopping Killer Asteroids
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· Score: 3, Informative
A nuclear weapon detonated in space produces a burst of soft x-rays (from black-body radiation). It does not produce the blast and thermal effects seen when the device is detonated in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is relatively opaque to soft x-rays. This results in a complex sequence of events, involving repeated absorption and reemission of photons, that produce the fireball, thermal radiation and shock waves.
If you look at the films of high-altitude nuclear tests, they are rather boring in comparison to atmospheric tests. You can see an expanding shell-like cloud composed of the remnants of the nuclear device.
Stalin was deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War. He provided the Republicans with substantial quantities of arms, military advisors and "volunteers". He also exported his paranoia and the purges to Spain. The PCE (Communist Party of Spain) often seemed more interested in fighting its perceived enemies in the Republicans than it did in fighting the Nationalists.
The FBI did have a legitimate national security interest in the Fischers. His mother lived and attended medical school in the Soviet Union.
The KGB and GRU recruited agents from foreign students attending schools in the Soviet Union.
His father fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. That in itself isn't a problem, but it puts him in a group that was heavily infiltrated and influenced by the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence operations. The FBI didn't have the right to harass the Fischers, but I think they had a legitimate national security interest in investigating their activities to see if they were involved in espionage or other crimes.
The CPUSA (Communist Party USA) was heavily involved in Soviet espionage operations.
Companies may sell below cost because the parent country is desperate for hard currency to pay for imports. If the only viable export they have is steel, they will lower the export price of steel to the point that the increased sales of steel brings in the needed amount of hard currency. They may consider the production costs irrelevant if they are paid for in the local currency.
Living in a state that spent money like a drunken sailor in a whorehouse when the booming economy artificially boosted tax receipts, and now has a 1.7 billion dollar hangover, I might suggest that they spend less money.
It's a fairly arbitrary decision. The minimum packet size can be derived from collision detection scheme used by Ethernet and the maximum length of an Ethernet segment. The maximum size is a compromise between efficiency, network latency and keeping the memory allocated to packet buffers to an affordable size. DIX Ethernet (10 Megabit/Sec) was scaled up from experimental Ethernet (3 Megabit/Sec), which limited packet size to approx. 4000 bits. See the original papers by Metcalfe and Boggs.
NASA used them for many years, well into the Shuttle program, as telemetry, command and communications computers in their satellite tracking stations. How many people can say they have a computer with a "Battle Short" switch?
I remember people bragging about the LPM (lines-per-minute) on their line printer. High-end line printers were fascinating to watch. They made a loud buzzing noise when they printed. Each column on the paper had a corresponding print hammer that would be fired when the appropriate character on the character drum was spinning by. They could chew through a box of fanfold paper in minutes. Truly impressive pieces of engineering.
I believe drums were used for paging store on some of the early VM systems.
Drums were popular on early military computers.
I used to use several minicomputers (PDP-11/20, Honeywell H316) that ran off head-per-track disks. The seek time was reduced to the time needed to electronically switch heads.
AT&T Unix (V5, V6, V7) and BSD Unix (2.X) started out as 16-bit operating systems. They weren't ported to 32-bit systems (VAX, 370) until later. Even after they were running on 32-bit machines, there were still releases that supported 16-bit systems. I used to run AT&T System V Unix on an 80286 based computer.
The plane has been stripped of everything that can be sold for spare parts. What's the point of having an airplane if the cockpit has been gutted of the seats and instrument panels?
I don't think it would be possible, at least not with the lasers that are used for lunar ranging. I watched a TV documentary on the laser ranging system that described the operation of the system. Even though they use a high-powered pulsed laser, the path loss between the Earth and the Moon is so high that only a few photons make it back to the detector in the ranging system. The laser beam is about 4 miles in diameter when it hits the moon.
In the good old days, when mainframes ruled the earth, you could order "computer grade" electrolytic capacitors from electronics parts companies. I never saw a definition of what exactly "computer grade" was, but they were noticeably more expensive than generic electrolytic capacitors.
Part of the problem may be that the engineers are underspecing the capacitors in an effort to cut costs. A friend of mine used to have a job evaluating component reliability. He had lots of graphs that showed reliability as a function of how hard the component was driven in the circuit, for example dissipating 5W in a 5W transistor instead of using a beefier transistor.
Public safety radio communications started out in the VHF low-band (30-50 MHz) back in the 1950s. As usage grew, they expanded into the VHF high-band (150-174 MHz). Eventually, all of the VHF channels were exhausted in many major metropolitan areas. To accommodate further growth in public safety communications, the FCC allocated parts of the low end of the UHF TV band (470-512 MHz, equivalent to UHF channels 14-20) to public safety communications in selected areas. This had to be coordinated with existing UHF TV stations that already used that part of the UHF TV band. For example, there may already be UHF TV stations on channels 14 and 20. Public safety users can be allocated frequencies in between channels 14 and 20.
When I lived in Hawaii, I witnessed tropospheric ducts between Hawaii and California that made it possible to talk to amateur radio operators in California on the 144 MHz amateur radio band with relatively low-powered FM transceivers. That is about 5000 miles for a frequency band that is normally line-of-sight propagation. It would usually happen a few time a year. You had to be at the right altitude in Hawaii to get a signal into the duct.
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Somewhere I have an old DEC PDP-8 handbook. They released a native FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-8. It just shows what you can do with clever coding and lots of overlays.
Probably OS/8, which if I remember correctly, was a multi-user operating system. You can run a multi-user system on a PDP-8 with 32KW of core.
The U.S. Air Force developed special parachutes for nuclear weapons that allowed a high-speed aircraft to drop a parachute-retarded bomb on a target. These parachutes can be deployed at high-speed without self-destructing or putting unacceptable loads on the nuclear weapon.
There are "stealth" antennas made for automobiles that are almost invisible. The top of the antenna is flush with the outer surface of the body of the automobile.
Where do you think the cable company gets their video feeds?
I had a teacher who enjoyed explaining, in gory detail, how they sawed his sternum in two, pried open his rib cage,, fixed his heart problem, and then stapled his sternum back together. This new technique sounds much less painful.
If you look at the films of high-altitude nuclear tests, they are rather boring in comparison to atmospheric tests. You can see an expanding shell-like cloud composed of the remnants of the nuclear device.
It could be worse. I used to have a modem that had more MIPS than the PC it was connected to.
I'm sure my local volunteer fire department will be able to successfully bid against Verizon for their emergency communications channels.
Stalin was deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War. He provided the Republicans with substantial quantities of arms, military advisors and "volunteers". He also exported his paranoia and the purges to Spain. The PCE (Communist Party of Spain) often seemed more interested in fighting its perceived enemies in the Republicans than it did in fighting the Nationalists.
The FBI did have a legitimate national security interest in the Fischers. His mother lived and attended medical school in the Soviet Union. The KGB and GRU recruited agents from foreign students attending schools in the Soviet Union. His father fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. That in itself isn't a problem, but it puts him in a group that was heavily infiltrated and influenced by the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence operations. The FBI didn't have the right to harass the Fischers, but I think they had a legitimate national security interest in investigating their activities to see if they were involved in espionage or other crimes. The CPUSA (Communist Party USA) was heavily involved in Soviet espionage operations.
Companies may sell below cost because the parent country is desperate for hard currency to pay for imports. If the only viable export they have is steel, they will lower the export price of steel to the point that the increased sales of steel brings in the needed amount of hard currency. They may consider the production costs irrelevant if they are paid for in the local currency.
Living in a state that spent money like a drunken sailor in a whorehouse when the booming economy artificially boosted tax receipts, and now has a 1.7 billion dollar hangover, I might suggest that they spend less money.
It's a fairly arbitrary decision. The minimum packet size can be derived from collision detection scheme used by Ethernet and the maximum length of an Ethernet segment. The maximum size is a compromise between efficiency, network latency and keeping the memory allocated to packet buffers to an affordable size. DIX Ethernet (10 Megabit/Sec) was scaled up from experimental Ethernet (3 Megabit/Sec), which limited packet size to approx. 4000 bits. See the original papers by Metcalfe and Boggs.
It corresponds to the maximum packet size for Ethernet.
NASA used them for many years, well into the Shuttle program, as telemetry, command and communications computers in their satellite tracking stations. How many people can say they have a computer with a "Battle Short" switch?
I remember people bragging about the LPM (lines-per-minute) on their line printer. High-end line printers were fascinating to watch. They made a loud buzzing noise when they printed. Each column on the paper had a corresponding print hammer that would be fired when the appropriate character on the character drum was spinning by. They could chew through a box of fanfold paper in minutes. Truly impressive pieces of engineering.
Drums were popular on early military computers.
I used to use several minicomputers (PDP-11/20, Honeywell H316) that ran off head-per-track disks. The seek time was reduced to the time needed to electronically switch heads.
AT&T Unix (V5, V6, V7) and BSD Unix (2.X) started out as 16-bit operating systems. They weren't ported to 32-bit systems (VAX, 370) until later. Even after they were running on 32-bit machines, there were still releases that supported 16-bit systems. I used to run AT&T System V Unix on an 80286 based computer.
The plane has been stripped of everything that can be sold for spare parts. What's the point of having an airplane if the cockpit has been gutted of the seats and instrument panels?
Party lines used to be common in rural areas. I'm not sure how many people still have them. You can't legally use a modem on a party line.
I don't think it would be possible, at least not with the lasers that are used for lunar ranging. I watched a TV documentary on the laser ranging system that described the operation of the system. Even though they use a high-powered pulsed laser, the path loss between the Earth and the Moon is so high that only a few photons make it back to the detector in the ranging system. The laser beam is about 4 miles in diameter when it hits the moon.
Part of the problem may be that the engineers are underspecing the capacitors in an effort to cut costs. A friend of mine used to have a job evaluating component reliability. He had lots of graphs that showed reliability as a function of how hard the component was driven in the circuit, for example dissipating 5W in a 5W transistor instead of using a beefier transistor.
Public safety radio communications started out in the VHF low-band (30-50 MHz) back in the 1950s. As usage grew, they expanded into the VHF high-band (150-174 MHz). Eventually, all of the VHF channels were exhausted in many major metropolitan areas. To accommodate further growth in public safety communications, the FCC allocated parts of the low end of the UHF TV band (470-512 MHz, equivalent to UHF channels 14-20) to public safety communications in selected areas. This had to be coordinated with existing UHF TV stations that already used that part of the UHF TV band. For example, there may already be UHF TV stations on channels 14 and 20. Public safety users can be allocated frequencies in between channels 14 and 20.
When I lived in Hawaii, I witnessed tropospheric ducts between Hawaii and California that made it possible to talk to amateur radio operators in California on the 144 MHz amateur radio band with relatively low-powered FM transceivers. That is about 5000 miles for a frequency band that is normally line-of-sight propagation. It would usually happen a few time a year. You had to be at the right altitude in Hawaii to get a signal into the duct.