A long time ago I was an elevator mechanic (the 80's). I was already a licensed electrician so the transition was an easy one. Although there were some things that struck me as odd.
The first thing was the tendency of elevator companies to use their own home-grown parts to control the elevator.
For example, for speed control for some of the lifts used what we called "bedsprings" to limit the current going to the motor. The reason why they were called bedsprings was because that's what they were, bedsprings.
Bigger motors would use fence springs mounted on an insulated backplane (Bakelite?) to limit the current going to them. And yes, it worked with AC motors just fine. Even though the frequency wasn't lowered, the motor would slow to about one third speed (making one hell of a racket as it did).
The control voltage was DC, rectified by selenium rectifiers.
With DC it was easy to make a timer out of a capacitor and a resisitor. The downside was that DC tends to eat up your contacts really quick.
Occasionally you will have a set of contacts open up and the current continue to flow as an arc. The contacts will soon melt down, drip, drip, drip...:)
They could have just used dashpot timers and got away from DC. That shows just how little experience with control systems they had outside of elevators.
For determining what stop you were at some elevators used wooden blocks that were mounted to steel bands (think the metal bands that shippers use around boxes).
These bands went from the pit to the crow's nest. Wherever there was a stop, there were blocks screwed to the bands. Limit switches on the cab hit these blocks and told the cab where to slow down and where to stop.
The cabs, cabling, hydraulics, and various mechanical parts were always robust and seldom wore out (other than the rails, which always needed oiling). You could tell that most elevator mechanics were from the mechanical side and not the controls side.
To be fair, I was working on elevators that were made from the 80's all the way back to 1913. So you couldn't expect the controls to be all that robust.
But I still tell people that if they knew how elevators were built, they would take the stairs.:)
As for what happened over at the Apple store, first off the employees should never try to rescue trapped customers. Someone needs a serious bitch-slapping over that.
Nor would I trust the NYPD, FD, Chamber of Commerce, the ASPCA, or whoever to get me out. These guys don't have the training, it's as simple as that.
And please tell me that they really didn't drain the hydraulic fluid onto the floor because they couldn't figure out how to bypass a valve.
I thought your question at first was innocent. Just another Jew baiter 'eh?
How convenient, the previous poster points out the lack of equal rights given to Arabs in Palestine/Israel areas, and he is immediately labeled a Jew baiter.
Not me, I just hate you fucking Zionists.
For others reading this post:
Keep in mind that Zionists can come from any religion. Here's a good explanation of what a Zionist is:
A comparison can be made between Christians, and the lunatics on the religious right who call themselves Christians. Feel free to replace "Christians" with the religion of your choice.
As for Jews, peaceful, god-fearing, compassionate Jews, I love them. Not just for their disgust of Zionists either.
There is no denying that Israel's long-term goal is to completely take over Palestine (as long as Israel is Zionist controlled that is). A cursory look at historical maps from partitioning to now will show how Israel has stolen Palestinian land over the last 60 years.
As an aside, Gaza is beginning to shape up nicely as a Palestinian concentration camp, don't you think?
Zionists proudly declare that the salvation of their state came at the hand of God. What they don't say is that it was his hand writing on an American checkbook that actually did the saving.
It kinda puts a different light on the divine will of God, doesn't it?
And wasn't it your people that were treated this same way in WWII as you are treating Palestinians today? Are you not ashamed?
And don't try to justify Israel's imperialism/genocide/apartheid by comparing them to the numerous (as in legion) sins of America either. What our government has done in the past, and what it is doing now, is every bit as bad as what is going on in Israel. That doesn't excuse us, and it hardly provides cover for you.
While working for Morrison-Knudsen in Shreveport, I was asked to go out to Denver to "help out" for a couple of weeks on the startup of the baggage handling system.
Since that portion of DIA was DOA, I knew that a couple of weeks could easily turn into a couple of years. I wasn't interested in doing TDY for forever.
What made for sweet irony was that Denver took the baggage system away from MK because, in their words, "we couldn't handle the project".
And since the project had turned into such a political nightmare, I wasn't interested in getting into the middle of that mess.
All h/w I use (as far as I know) is closed-source and I don't find it evil by nature.
Obviously you aren't the one responsible for keeping it running. Maybe you are, but you like paying extra for a piece of crappy hardware that costs in the thousands.
Ever buy an 8k memory card for $2000? We do it all of the time. Do we have a choice? No.
But I don't like it, nor do my leaders like it when they get billed time and time again for hardware that craps way too often and never seems to get repaired properly.
Tell me, why should we put up with this?
It would sure be nice to go out to any normal vendor and get competitive bids on replacement parts. But since they own the design, we don't have much choice, do we?
But hey, that's me. I just don't like getting screwed over by the supplier. You're obviously different.
And why would a h/w malfunction make a closed source design evil? Laws of physics apply to all - it would/could have happened to any type of hardware, not only closed source.
Laws of physics? I believe we are talking about the laws of economics. Pay closer attention next time.
So where do you buy your car parts? The dealer, or from Checker Auto?
More likely that there was a hardware failure of some kind. But you can't rule out crappy software.
We use AGV (Automatic Guided Vehicles) and they have been known to the same thing. Hardly a rampage, more like aimlessly wandering around.
These things are a perfect example of the evils of closed-source design, you are cked into your vendor for everything, and if they can't be bothered with it then it ain't gonna get fixed.
The ones we use (from CEC) have a mixture of commercial and home-grown hardware, most of the stuff we have no other choice but to go to the vendor for replacement parts. Where they charge us out the ass for more of their crappy hardware.
I mean these idiots designed a 28 bit wide input card. Who in the hell uses a 28 bit buss?
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware". Apple prides itself on a quality user experience that approaches a luxury product. Everything from the appearance of the fonts to the way consumers interact with the interface needs to remain consistently "high quality" and I am sure Apple will make efforts to preserve this experience.
Your kidding/evangelizing right?
So Apple is going to show up and set things right in the PC/Intel world?
So it's time to provide relief to the unwashed masses?
Oh sweet day! Somebody shout hallelujah!
You do relalize that once he uses the same chipset, graphics card, hard drive, etc (or be left behind), there's not much left to insure the all-important "high quality hardware" experience for Mac users?
Well, there's always the cases...
Steve is really going to have to crank up his reality distortion zone to get people to believe that Mac on x86 is anything different at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sha^H^H^H S. mirabilis with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
A long time ago I was an elevator mechanic (the 80's). I was already a licensed electrician so the transition was an easy one. Although there were some things that struck me as odd.
/ 034.11/index.s12.html
:)
:)
t or&near=New+York,+NY&sa=X&oi=local&ct=title
The first thing was the tendency of elevator companies to use their own home-grown parts to control the elevator.
For example, for speed control for some of the lifts used what we called "bedsprings" to limit the current going to the motor. The reason why they were called bedsprings was because that's what they were, bedsprings.
Bigger motors would use fence springs mounted on an insulated backplane (Bakelite?) to limit the current going to them. And yes, it worked with AC motors just fine. Even though the frequency wasn't lowered, the motor would slow to about one third speed (making one hell of a racket as it did).
The control voltage was DC, rectified by selenium rectifiers.
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Samples
With DC it was easy to make a timer out of a capacitor and a resisitor. The downside was that DC tends to eat up your contacts really quick.
Occasionally you will have a set of contacts open up and the current continue to flow as an arc. The contacts will soon melt down, drip, drip, drip...
They could have just used dashpot timers and got away from DC. That shows just how little experience with control systems they had outside of elevators.
For determining what stop you were at some elevators used wooden blocks that were mounted to steel bands (think the metal bands that shippers use around boxes).
These bands went from the pit to the crow's nest. Wherever there was a stop, there were blocks screwed to the bands. Limit switches on the cab hit these blocks and told the cab where to slow down and where to stop.
The cabs, cabling, hydraulics, and various mechanical parts were always robust and seldom wore out (other than the rails, which always needed oiling). You could tell that most elevator mechanics were from the mechanical side and not the controls side.
To be fair, I was working on elevators that were made from the 80's all the way back to 1913. So you couldn't expect the controls to be all that robust.
But I still tell people that if they knew how elevators were built, they would take the stairs.
As for what happened over at the Apple store, first off the employees should never try to rescue trapped customers. Someone needs a serious bitch-slapping over that.
Nor would I trust the NYPD, FD, Chamber of Commerce, the ASPCA, or whoever to get me out. These guys don't have the training, it's as simple as that.
And please tell me that they really didn't drain the hydraulic fluid onto the floor because they couldn't figure out how to bypass a valve.
And it's not like there aren't any other options.
http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&lr=&q=otis+eleva
I did a whois on the handsoff.org site (the one that dontregulate.org points you to):
= handsoff.org&InputServer=--automatic--
http://www.kessels.com/whois/whois.php?InputQuery
And came up with "The Mecury Group" as the owner:
http://www.mercgroup.com/
From the site:
"Proven practitioners of persuasive arts..."
Not that this should come as any surprise.
Personally, I'd really like one of these:
r iday-the-orgasmatron-from-sleeper/
http://www.engadget.com/2004/11/19/movie-gadget-f
... all the other kids have one!
Personally, I think that he's grooming himself to take over after Jobs retires.
As for doing my wordprocessing on the net, first I want to know if this project has been brought to you by the nice folks at the NSA.
I thought your question at first was innocent. Just another Jew baiter 'eh?
n ism,%20the%20highest%20form%20of%20imperialism.htm
T ORICAL
e l.html
How convenient, the previous poster points out the lack of equal rights given to Arabs in Palestine/Israel areas, and he is immediately labeled a Jew baiter.
Not me, I just hate you fucking Zionists.
For others reading this post:
Keep in mind that Zionists can come from any religion. Here's a good explanation of what a Zionist is:
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Hassan%20El-Najjar/Zio
A comparison can be made between Christians, and the lunatics on the religious right who call themselves Christians. Feel free to replace "Christians" with the religion of your choice.
As for Jews, peaceful, god-fearing, compassionate Jews, I love them. Not just for their disgust of Zionists either.
http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/
There is no denying that Israel's long-term goal is to completely take over Palestine (as long as Israel is Zionist controlled that is). A cursory look at historical maps from partitioning to now will show how Israel has stolen Palestinian land over the last 60 years.
As an aside, Gaza is beginning to shape up nicely as a Palestinian concentration camp, don't you think?
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/maps/palestine.htm#HIS
And for us Americans, just check out the stats over at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/ to see what is really going on.
This is the statistic that concerns me the most, the fact that we empower Zionist butchery and genocide in the name of spreading democracy.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/cost_of_isra
Zionists proudly declare that the salvation of their state came at the hand of God. What they don't say is that it was his hand writing on an American checkbook that actually did the saving.
It kinda puts a different light on the divine will of God, doesn't it?
And wasn't it your people that were treated this same way in WWII as you are treating Palestinians today? Are you not ashamed?
And don't try to justify Israel's imperialism/genocide/apartheid by comparing them to the numerous (as in legion) sins of America either. What our government has done in the past, and what it is doing now, is every bit as bad as what is going on in Israel. That doesn't excuse us, and it hardly provides cover for you.
Ban American/Israeli goods!
While working for Morrison-Knudsen in Shreveport, I was asked to go out to Denver to "help out" for a couple of weeks on the startup of the baggage handling system.
Since that portion of DIA was DOA, I knew that a couple of weeks could easily turn into a couple of years. I wasn't interested in doing TDY for forever.
What made for sweet irony was that Denver took the baggage system away from MK because, in their words, "we couldn't handle the project".
And since the project had turned into such a political nightmare, I wasn't interested in getting into the middle of that mess.
Not that MK survived much longer...
It's just another /. ad. They gotta make money somehow.
To me, this looks much more interesting:
http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-
detail.php?productid=96&categoryid=18
You'd think it ehy wished the astronauts well then they'd take all expressions of "good karma" happily. But no.
Relax, we don't need you speaking in tongues.
As for persecution, logging in as an AC pretty much prevents that from happening to you, doesn't it?
No kidding.
It was hardly news, and none of it for nerds.
Jamie? Is that you?
Relax, they're just trying to keep you updated.
I don't get it. Why does it have to be either indymedia or foxnews? Why impose the arbitrary limit?
It doesn't have to be, check out LinkTV.
The news shows include:
Democracy Now! (Great show!)
DW Journal
Mosaic (Which won the Peabody Award this year)
Tons of documentaries and great music (check out World Music).
9410 on Dish, 375 on Direct.
If you have Dish, you can check out FSTV (channel 9415 or www.freespeech.org) as well.
It's got some great coverage of stuff that you will not see elsewhere, easily worth it just for that alone.
But FSTV most certainly has a liberal slant to it, sort of the liberal answer to Fox.
Anyone else see the irony of "WTF is indymedia?" being ranked as insightful?
Only on Slashdot...
To pron!
What's next? Google online gambling?
For all I know, the fish is dead and remains that way.
For all I know, it's sleeping with the fishes.
But yeah, that was really weird. And not weird in a good way...
Of course, linux users are as chipper as ever due to the fact that they never seen natural light to begin with so they aren't as affected.
Or have sex...
Evils of closed-source hardware design?
All h/w I use (as far as I know) is closed-source and I don't find it evil by nature.
Obviously you aren't the one responsible for keeping it running. Maybe you are, but you like paying extra for a piece of crappy hardware that costs in the thousands.
Ever buy an 8k memory card for $2000? We do it all of the time. Do we have a choice? No.
But I don't like it, nor do my leaders like it when they get billed time and time again for hardware that craps way too often and never seems to get repaired properly.
Tell me, why should we put up with this?
It would sure be nice to go out to any normal vendor and get competitive bids on replacement parts. But since they own the design, we don't have much choice, do we?
But hey, that's me. I just don't like getting screwed over by the supplier. You're obviously different.
And why would a h/w malfunction make a closed source design evil? Laws of physics apply to all - it would/could have happened to any type of hardware, not only closed source.
Laws of physics? I believe we are talking about the laws of economics. Pay closer attention next time.
So where do you buy your car parts? The dealer, or from Checker Auto?
I believe it can be spelled either way. So feel free to expand your vocabulary.
=
http://www.google.com/search?q=data+buss&hl=en&lr
Thanks for bringing something to the discussion.
A bunch of other people too. 28 bits is real common in audio as well now
Not for digital inputs it isn't. Something about wanting to work with units baised on 8, 16, 32, etc, boundaries.
Either that or bad software design.
More likely that there was a hardware failure of some kind. But you can't rule out crappy software.
We use AGV (Automatic Guided Vehicles) and they have been known to the same thing. Hardly a rampage, more like aimlessly wandering around.
These things are a perfect example of the evils of closed-source design, you are cked into your vendor for everything, and if they can't be bothered with it then it ain't gonna get fixed.
The ones we use (from CEC) have a mixture of commercial and home-grown hardware, most of the stuff we have no other choice but to go to the vendor for replacement parts. Where they charge us out the ass for more of their crappy hardware.
I mean these idiots designed a 28 bit wide input card. Who in the hell uses a 28 bit buss?
Dipshits.
Ok, I'm done ranting...
Whew! For a moment there I thought you were talking about Microsoft Bob!
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware". Apple prides itself on a quality user experience that approaches a luxury product. Everything from the appearance of the fonts to the way consumers interact with the interface needs to remain consistently "high quality" and I am sure Apple will make efforts to preserve this experience.
Your kidding/evangelizing right?
So Apple is going to show up and set things right in the PC/Intel world?
So it's time to provide relief to the unwashed masses?
Oh sweet day! Somebody shout hallelujah!
You do relalize that once he uses the same chipset, graphics card, hard drive, etc (or be left behind), there's not much left to insure the all-important "high quality hardware" experience for Mac users?
Well, there's always the cases...
Steve is really going to have to crank up his reality distortion zone to get people to believe that Mac on x86 is anything different at all.
...and why is that smbol not a part of the charset ?
I dunno, nobody could agree on a codepage for it?