This one makes my blood boil, and it isn't volatile. I really wonder whether the Nazis would have been as bold, in 1933. Whether this is a major test of our nation's sanity, I'm not sure, but folks like Ralph Nader, the ACLU, and others must regard it as a delightfully clear-cut case. It's crucially important to fight this. I suspect that the absurdity of its being illegal to criticize will be its Achilles' heel. This one got me upset enough to actually go over to where I keep my passwords and dig out the little slip of paper, and log in, and that's something.
It also is a really sorry body of evidence that such legislation should be considered; my historical knowledge is not great, but seems nothing like this has been proposed since the Sedition Acts (?) around the time of Jefferson.
It's also a sorry indication of the pathetic lack of emotional maturity shown by its creators, as well as those who allowed it to become a possibility. Taken down to its essentials, it is really brats in a sandbox who holler "You can't say anything nasty about me, or I'll kill you!" (Of course, it's grimly possible that a brat might have a real handgun and literally carry out that threat....)
Folks, we gotta fight this. It stinks to high Heaven, no less.
Found/. busy, at this hour! Had to wait ~5 min. to get the reply-post screen from/.'s server.
Nicholas Bodley// somewhat incoherent at this hour.
The recent story about AOL being sued surely applies here. I'm the other Lynx addict who reads and posts to/. Saw nothing but page titles, if even those; rest of the screen was blank, repeatedly. Just fthi, I hit '\' to see the source code, and saw the JavaScript stuff. I edited the current URL (Shift-G) to change its tail to the filenames embedded in the JavaScript, and was taken (usually) to more JavaScript (hit frames once). This kind of Web page nav. is only for geeks, and tedious. No easy way to reach them. Was looking for an image of the kybd; gave up. This is the most Lynx-hostile Web site I have ever hit. (They really want to minimize sales; must have hired some former Amiga sales types!)
There's a keyboard with a computer built into it; it's advertised in the back of PC Week.
Thanks for the correction
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 1
(The Subject line says it.) There are similar, indecent percentages (or totals, such as the number of homeless) that are a real disgrace in a society that has a national budgetary surplus as large as it is. There's currently far too much selfishness; but, this is getting off topic. I've been close to homeless (or living with relatives who really didn't have the space) and blocked out of my own apartment by a mentally-ill sister who refused to get prof. help. No picnic!
Thanks!
Re:Welcome to RealWorld(tm)
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 2
I gave up when I reached my 62nd birthday; went for early-retirement Social Security, and by doing so, took a large hit in my monthly payment (I get about 2/3). Nevertheless, I have several $100/mo. after food and rent are considered. Not much, but far better than being homeless. (I'm single.)
I've been a mechanical analog computer tech., a Flexowriter tech., Philco 2000 assembler programmer (coding forms, have them keypunched and verified, and do not drop your card deck!!!), but primarily an electronic tech in field service and manufacturing. Was first downsized in 1964 from my only engineering job. Joined the working poor in 1991; since then, have made over $9/hour for only a few months. No car, either; that really cut me off from 90%-95% of all jobs. My work situations were very benign compared to what's described in the book, but I well know the feeling of being valued as much as the card that falls out of your magazine as you look at it next to the rack in a store. What these poor devils don't yet experience is age prejudice; I did, and didn't think of trying to prove it. (I'm lucky: I look as though I'm about 45 or 50. Still doesn't matter.)
I get somewhat peeved to hear of the wonders of our economy. What is it--10% of our kids are living without enough to eat?
Since Uncle Ronnie was elected, selfishness has become something to celebrate rather than to be ashamed of. The concept of "noblesse oblige" never made it across the Atlantic.
A rising tide sinks most boats in our society, and that's not global warming and sea level, either.
It's an amazing situation, and surprisingly few people know about it. The "terrestrial" (RF link from transmitter antenna to receiver antenna) standard adopted by the USA has such severe problems with multipath as to be useless in many urban areas with indoor antennas. (This was known a year ago, at the NAB Symposium (?) held in Washington, DC. I was there.) Digital TV (not all digital TV is HDTV, btw) really should be able to use the same paths (terrestrial RF, cable, and satellite) as used by analog TV (NTSC, PAL, SECAM). In all but the USA (and possibly Argentina), the terrestrial RF link uses a system called COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplex, iirc) that is marvelously resistant to degradation by multipath interference. There's even an anecdote about the coax. from a DTV receiver that was connected to nothing at the far end, and someone stuck a bent paper clip into the center conductor, and got a good picture. The transmitter antenna wasn't right next door, either. COFDM is great, very succesful for mobile and portable reception, but 8VSB is useless for both of those. COFDM even uses the reflections of multipath to enhance the signal. The US terrestrial DTV broadcast standard is ATSC (Advanced TV Systems Committee, iirc), and it specifies a modulation scheme that uses vestigial sideband (VSB), with the digital data transmitted 3 bits at once (must be) by choosing one of eight levels. Multipath echoes confound this signal easily and make it unusable. (The bit rate (or baud) is quite high.) Any multipath echo will arrive long after a given 3-bit level has been sent, and is quite likely to confound the transmitted levels. Since most of DTV's potential viewers live in environments subject to multipath, they will require the likes of 30-foot towers and (likely) highly-directional antennas aimed carefully, just to obtain a decent signal. Rotators will be required if there are geographically separate transmitter antenna sites. (I posted a message to a mailing list about how channel surfers would require fast servos, and reinforced antennas and towers, and also who would be the first to have a chimney torn apart by too much channel surfing. The story was included in the next issue of the newsletter.) In tests (reported at the NAB Symposium in Washington a year ago), indoor antennas were often useless, or required locating at certain place (not necessarily convenient!) in an apartment, and careful aiming. Many apartments simply couldn't use indoor antennas. The standard-setters in the USA are in a fantastic state of denial about this dirty secret. The broadcasters are worried. If you have DTV broadcasts in ypour area, try to contact the chief engineer at the station, and see what he (or she!) says. While COFDM is not 100% better (only maybe 98%?), its usage in the UK has proven to be extremely successful. Other European countries are having similar good luck, and mobile reception is just fine.// COFDM uses oodles of narrow-band carriers (something like 2,000, iirc) that individually have a quite-low bit rate. Schemes generally like those used to encode CD audio (I think COFDM uses Reed-Solomon coding) protect the data. The receivers can ignore a few carriers, if there's narrow-band interference. Guard bands (apparently periods when there's no data) help accomodate multipath, as I understand it.// Btw, I saw HDTV on a Philips 16:9 studio CRT monitor withh about a 33 inch (0,9 metre?) diagonal, in the harris DTV truck. It was from a satellite downlink, and the program material (a travelogue, low-altitude aerial shots over Ireland) was gorgeous. Image quality was so good that it was almost painful to stop watching it. Think high-quality travel poster, not bleached by the sun, in a travel agency. After making such wild statements, I feel terribly irresponsible not to have a URL to go to; my sources have been industry insiders, including forwards from the OpenDTV mailing list, which carries the comments by Dermot Nolan and Craig Birkmaier; also a newsletter put out by Larry Bloomfield. I have saved some verbose text on this topic, though. Perhaps the best source for the truth is Sinclair Broadcasting, which held some serious tests recently to compare 8VSB with COFDM. I believe Sinclair is in the Baltimore area.// If you think Microsoft is out to give Linux a bad name, the pro-8VSB characters are doing something similar (more like ostriches with heads a foot below grade level, though). I apologize for the disorganization of this message, as well; I really wanted to get the word out, and would edit the text if I could. Currently, the response online is frustratingly erratic (must be very busy!), which didn't help. Sorry for any remaining typos! I do know how to spell.
Seems that you don't follow the news, and maybe those who replied to your message don't, either. There was a very sad school "shooting" in Dunblane, Scotland, I'm just about sure. Really shocked the daylights out of the Scots; I think they're very fine folks, on the whole. I'm almost sure there were other cases outside the USA; Montreal and England?
I'm saddened to see how little response there was to this message. I think desensitizing is quite significant; I was shocked when TV images of the Iraqi bombardment were compared to video games. Video games simulate destruction, but never simulate the terrible pain and suffering that follows. No wonder perceptions are skewed! It's not just violence that kids are being desensitized to; also ugliness and deformity; in general, all things any sane person in preceding certuries would have gone to great length to avoid. I also definitely feel that parents are out of touch with their kids; essential "socialization" is rare or missing.
Teacher of the Year, as I recall; NYC area, I think. However, as I remember, he finally had "had it" with the dictatorial Educational Establishment, and managed to remain a perceptive, intelligent, independent, and sympathetic thinker. Try looking for a book or two by him with a search engine. Not sure I remember all this correctly, though.
Teacher of the Year, as I recall; NYC area, I think. However, as I remember, he finally had "had it" with the dictatorial Educational Establishment, and managed to remain a perceptive, intelligent, independent, and sympathetic thinnker. Try looking for a book or two by him with a search engine. Not sure I remember all this correctly, though.
I cut my teeth on a one-of-kind all-discrete machine built with germanium PNP transistors in TO-5 cans. It had a 19-bit word length, was programmed in absolute base-32 (duotricenary), had 4K of core (not enough), and backup program storage was head-per-track mag. drum. Had no OS at all. Console typewriter was a Flexowriter (before Teletypes became commonplace). Had a maint. console that was a hacker's paradise: Every FF in the machine (except for the mem. address reg.) had its own lighted pushbutton. Floor space was maybe 400 sq. ft. Next door was a Philco 2000, which had a rather-disgusting instruction set; 48-bit words.
The Amiga 1000 was, too. I thought both were good; I wasn't a screaming brat partisan. Btw, the Amiga was Latin-1 compatible, 'way back in early 1986! I wondered why my dealer recommended the printer they did (a Seikosha MP-1300AI, similar to an Epson JX-80, iirc). It had the Latin-1 char. set, back in 1986! Think I'll keep it for a second Linux printer. Interesting beast; downloadable char set (but no software to do that).
You ask whether Windows and M$ did this; 'fraid so. That's what the fuss is about. Call it intellectual cancer, maybe?
I e-mailed KryoTech, suggesting that they might
on
Extreme CPU Cooling
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· Score: 1
open up a chip package, protect the bonding wires, and coat the chip with a protective layer, then spray chilled liquid refrigerant onto the chip. Idea would be evap. cooling. Got back a very nice message that said they're sticking to vapor-phase cooling for now, iirc. Popping open a CPU takes a lot of courage (and knowledge of how to keep it alive); I'd say you need to know more than you do to work on the head & disk assy. in a HD.
How about that wonderful collection of Victor Borge-like words (many monosyllabic) in (iirc) Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File? We know about things like . = "dot", ! = "bang", * = "star", etc. Again-iirc, probably almost all characters used in programming have monosyllabic equivalents. Humorless people would be in deep trouble, though! Maybe another language? (Probably not COBOL!) There ought to be a decent programming language somewhere that is easier to speak than C or C++. (Yes, / = "slash". I finally remembered to include that.:)
don't know their Greek roots. Unless I'm way off-base, it essentially means cannibalism, specifically eating children. Maybe it's happening in Kosovo. I surely hope not.
God, yes! I use Lynx exclusively (although my vision is normal), for reasons not important here. Two things really bug me: Totally-blank pages, and forms (even on/.!) that have Submit buttons that reply with the error message, "No form action defined". Think what a disappointment *that* is to someone who's spent two hours filling out a form with a mouth stick and a keyboard. (Thanks be, my hands are nearly normal, so far.)
1) Scroll wheels predate commonplace mice; Tektronix CRT terminals (big, hi-res monochrome screens, used for CAD, some with direct-view storage tubes) had two finger-operated scroll wheels near their keyboards, mounted at 90 degrees, one for X, the other for Y. Being able to move the cursor on only one axis at a time is extremely desirable for CAD. (The scroll wheels didn't have the detents many mice have; they were smooth, I'm just about positive.) ===== 2) The conventional mouse mechanism is very much like a basic mechanism occasionally found in mechanical analog computers; almost sure it's called a Ventola integrator. Think of a drive roller under the ball, another idler roller above it with gearing, etc. to keep its spin axis parallel to the roller below. Making the drive roller turn on its spin axis rotates the mouse ball (made of hardened steel; no rubber). The spin axis of the drive roller can be positioned through 360 degrees, so the coupling between the drive roller spin input and the output rollers can be sine/cosine functions of the drive roller spin input. It could be used in a Fourier analyzer, although as described, it can't be especially accurate. See also Henrici harmonic analyzers; fairly sure these were mechanical analog Fourier analyzers (used for tidal curve analysis, among other things.) = = Nicholas Bodley nbodley@alumni_dot_princeton.edu (Permanent e-ddress)(Obvious anti-spam stuff in it) Desperately wanted: Mechanical schematic of the Navy Mk1A computer (or any complex mechanical analog computer!).
While a fast (?) correlator is relatively exotic, we don't squawk about what's inside our Pentiums, do we? Speculative execution of both branches and out-of order execution + reordering are quite amazing to this old puppy who cut his teeth on an all-discrete machine that ran 40 k instructions/sec. and had a Flexowriter for a console typewriter. Point is that if the technology is cost-effective, it's now sometimes quite OK to use it.
a change! Another thing Macrosoft (spelling courtesy of the Boston Globe) does right, and has done, is to include Latin-1 in their character set. (This is from Win 3.1, at least.) They also are wise to include Unicode capability into their code. ===== Codepage 819: Complete Latin-1 compatibility for DOS
Although I haven't been *that* close to such design decisions, one reason could be damage during production; if a subassembly isn't physically rugged, it can be damaged easily. Two circuit boards joined by soldered wires is awful. If one is bad, it has to be sent somewhere for costly and (relatively) skilled hand desoldering, with possible damage to the holes. Reconnecting means more costly hand labor. Troubleshooting and repair at the manufacturing stage is really costly; being able to connect and disconnect is really worth it. As well, one circuit board could come from Taiwan, another from Mexico, and hand-soldering a connector cable is just too labor-intensive. This is as I see it.
Slashdot Mirror
It also is a really sorry body of evidence that such legislation should be considered; my historical knowledge is not great, but seems nothing like this has been proposed since the Sedition Acts (?) around the time of Jefferson.
It's also a sorry indication of the pathetic lack of emotional maturity shown by its creators, as well as those who allowed it to become a possibility. Taken down to its essentials, it is really brats in a sandbox who holler "You can't say anything nasty about me, or I'll kill you!" (Of course, it's grimly possible that a brat might have a real handgun and literally carry out that threat....)
Folks, we gotta fight this. It stinks to high Heaven, no less.
Found /. busy, at this hour! Had to wait ~5 min. to get the reply-post screen from /.'s server.
Nicholas Bodley // somewhat incoherent at this hour.
Psion for me, once my debts are paid.
Thanks!
I've been a mechanical analog computer tech., a Flexowriter tech., Philco 2000 assembler programmer (coding forms, have them keypunched and verified, and do not drop your card deck!!!), but primarily an electronic tech in field service and manufacturing. Was first downsized in 1964 from my only engineering job. Joined the working poor in 1991; since then, have made over $9/hour for only a few months. No car, either; that really cut me off from 90%-95% of all jobs. My work situations were very benign compared to what's described in the book, but I well know the feeling of being valued as much as the card that falls out of your magazine as you look at it next to the rack in a store. What these poor devils don't yet experience is age prejudice; I did, and didn't think of trying to prove it. (I'm lucky: I look as though I'm about 45 or 50. Still doesn't matter.)
I get somewhat peeved to hear of the wonders of our economy. What is it--10% of our kids are living without enough to eat?
Since Uncle Ronnie was elected, selfishness has become something to celebrate rather than to be ashamed of. The concept of "noblesse oblige" never made it across the Atlantic.
A rising tide sinks most boats in our society, and that's not global warming and sea level, either.
It's an amazing situation, and surprisingly few people know about it. The "terrestrial" (RF link from transmitter antenna to receiver antenna) standard adopted by the USA has such severe problems with multipath as to be useless in many urban areas with indoor antennas. (This was known a year ago, at the NAB Symposium (?) held in Washington, DC. I was there.) Digital TV (not all digital TV is HDTV, btw) really should be able to use the same paths (terrestrial RF, cable, and satellite) as used by analog TV (NTSC, PAL, SECAM). In all but the USA (and possibly Argentina), the terrestrial RF link uses a system called COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplex, iirc) that is marvelously resistant to degradation by multipath interference. There's even an anecdote about the coax. from a DTV receiver that was connected to nothing at the far end, and someone stuck a bent paper clip into the center conductor, and got a good picture. The transmitter antenna wasn't right next door, either. COFDM is great, very succesful for mobile and portable reception, but 8VSB is useless for both of those. COFDM even uses the reflections of multipath to enhance the signal. The US terrestrial DTV broadcast standard is ATSC (Advanced TV Systems Committee, iirc), and it specifies a modulation scheme that uses vestigial sideband (VSB), with the digital data transmitted 3 bits at once (must be) by choosing one of eight levels. Multipath echoes confound this signal easily and make it unusable. (The bit rate (or baud) is quite high.) Any multipath echo will arrive long after a given 3-bit level has been sent, and is quite likely to confound the transmitted levels. Since most of DTV's potential viewers live in environments subject to multipath, they will require the likes of 30-foot towers and (likely) highly-directional antennas aimed carefully, just to obtain a decent signal. Rotators will be required if there are geographically separate transmitter antenna sites. (I posted a message to a mailing list about how channel surfers would require fast servos, and reinforced antennas and towers, and also who would be the first to have a chimney torn apart by too much channel surfing. The story was included in the next issue of the newsletter.) In tests (reported at the NAB Symposium in Washington a year ago), indoor antennas were often useless, or required locating at certain place (not necessarily convenient!) in an apartment, and careful aiming. Many apartments simply couldn't use indoor antennas. The standard-setters in the USA are in a fantastic state of denial about this dirty secret. The broadcasters are worried. If you have DTV broadcasts in ypour area, try to contact the chief engineer at the station, and see what he (or she!) says. While COFDM is not 100% better (only maybe 98%?), its usage in the UK has proven to be extremely successful. Other European countries are having similar good luck, and mobile reception is just fine. // COFDM uses oodles of narrow-band carriers (something like 2,000, iirc) that individually have a quite-low bit rate. Schemes generally like those used to encode CD audio (I think COFDM uses Reed-Solomon coding) protect the data. The receivers can ignore a few carriers, if there's narrow-band interference. Guard bands (apparently periods when there's no data) help accomodate multipath, as I understand it. // Btw, I saw HDTV on a Philips 16:9 studio CRT monitor withh about a 33 inch (0,9 metre?) diagonal, in the harris DTV truck. It was from a satellite downlink, and the program material (a travelogue, low-altitude aerial shots over Ireland) was gorgeous. Image quality was so good that it was almost painful to stop watching it. Think high-quality travel poster, not bleached by the sun, in a travel agency. After making such wild statements, I feel terribly irresponsible not to have a URL to go to; my sources have been industry insiders, including forwards from the OpenDTV mailing list, which carries the comments by Dermot Nolan and Craig Birkmaier; also a newsletter put out by Larry Bloomfield. I have saved some verbose text on this topic, though. Perhaps the best source for the truth is Sinclair Broadcasting, which held some serious tests recently to compare 8VSB with COFDM. I believe Sinclair is in the Baltimore area. // If you think Microsoft is out to give Linux a bad name, the pro-8VSB characters are doing something similar (more like ostriches with heads a foot below grade level, though). I apologize for the disorganization of this message, as well; I really wanted to get the word out, and would edit the text if I could. Currently, the response online is frustratingly erratic (must be very busy!), which didn't help. Sorry for any remaining typos! I do know how to spell.
Seems that you don't follow the news, and maybe those who replied to your message don't, either. There was a very sad school "shooting" in Dunblane, Scotland, I'm just about sure. Really shocked the daylights out of the Scots; I think they're very fine folks, on the whole. I'm almost sure there were other cases outside the USA; Montreal and England?
I'm saddened to see how little response there was to this message. I think desensitizing is quite significant; I was shocked when TV images of the Iraqi bombardment were compared to video games. Video games simulate destruction, but never simulate the terrible pain and suffering that follows. No wonder perceptions are skewed!
It's not just violence that kids are being desensitized to; also ugliness and deformity; in general, all things any sane person in preceding certuries would have gone to great length to avoid.
I also definitely feel that parents are out of touch with their kids; essential "socialization" is rare or missing.
Teacher of the Year, as I recall; NYC area, I think.
However, as I remember, he finally had "had it" with the dictatorial Educational Establishment, and managed to remain a perceptive, intelligent, independent, and sympathetic thinker. Try looking for a book or two by him with a search engine.
Not sure I remember all this correctly, though.
Teacher of the Year, as I recall; NYC area, I think.
However, as I remember, he finally had "had it" with the dictatorial Educational Establishment, and managed to remain a perceptive, intelligent, independent, and sympathetic thinnker. Try looking for a book or two by him with a search engine.
Not sure I remember all this correctly, though.
IIrc, there was at least one school shootup in the U.K., sorry to say.
I cut my teeth on a one-of-kind all-discrete machine built with germanium PNP transistors in TO-5 cans. It had a 19-bit word length, was programmed in absolute base-32 (duotricenary), had 4K of core (not enough), and backup program storage was head-per-track mag. drum. Had no OS at all. Console typewriter was a Flexowriter (before Teletypes became commonplace). Had a maint. console that was a hacker's paradise: Every FF in the machine (except for the mem. address reg.) had its own lighted pushbutton. Floor space was maybe 400 sq. ft.
Next door was a Philco 2000, which had a rather-disgusting instruction set; 48-bit words.
The Amiga 1000 was, too. I thought both were good; I wasn't a screaming brat partisan. Btw, the Amiga was Latin-1 compatible, 'way back in early 1986! I wondered why my dealer recommended the printer they did (a Seikosha MP-1300AI, similar to an Epson JX-80, iirc). It had the Latin-1 char. set, back in 1986! Think I'll keep it for a second Linux printer. Interesting beast; downloadable char set (but no software to do that).
You ask whether Windows and M$ did this; 'fraid so. That's what the fuss is about. Call it intellectual cancer, maybe?
open up a chip package, protect the bonding wires, and coat the chip with a protective layer, then spray chilled liquid refrigerant onto the chip. Idea would be evap. cooling. Got back a very nice message that said they're sticking to vapor-phase cooling for now, iirc. Popping open a CPU takes a lot of courage (and knowledge of how to keep it alive); I'd say you need to know more than you do to work on the head & disk assy. in a HD.
you can have hi-temp superconductors on-chip.
That will be quite interesting.
How about that wonderful collection of Victor Borge-like words (many monosyllabic) in (iirc) Eric S. Raymond's Jargon File? We know about things like . = "dot", ! = "bang", * = "star", etc. Again-iirc, probably almost all characters used in programming have monosyllabic equivalents. Humorless people would be in deep trouble, though! :)
Maybe another language? (Probably not COBOL!) There ought to be a decent programming language somewhere that is easier to speak than C or C++.
(Yes, / = "slash". I finally remembered to include that.
don't know their Greek roots. Unless I'm way off-base, it essentially means cannibalism, specifically eating children. Maybe it's happening in Kosovo. I surely hope not.
God, yes! I use Lynx exclusively (although my vision is normal), for reasons not important here. Two things really bug me: Totally-blank pages, and forms (even on /.!) that have Submit buttons that reply with the error message, "No form action defined". Think what a disappointment *that* is to someone who's spent two hours filling out a form with a mouth stick and a keyboard. (Thanks be, my hands are nearly normal, so far.)
1) Scroll wheels predate commonplace mice; Tektronix CRT terminals (big, hi-res monochrome screens, used for CAD, some with direct-view storage tubes) had two finger-operated scroll wheels near their keyboards, mounted at 90 degrees, one for X, the other for Y. Being able to move the cursor on only one axis at a time is extremely desirable for CAD. (The scroll wheels didn't have the detents many mice have; they were smooth, I'm just about positive.)
=====
2) The conventional mouse mechanism is very much like a basic mechanism occasionally found in mechanical analog computers; almost sure it's called a Ventola integrator.
Think of a drive roller under the ball, another idler roller above it with gearing, etc. to keep its spin axis parallel to the roller below. Making the drive roller turn on its spin axis rotates the mouse ball (made of hardened steel; no rubber). The spin axis of the drive roller can be positioned through 360 degrees, so the coupling between the drive roller spin input and the output rollers can be sine/cosine functions of the drive roller spin input. It could be used in a Fourier analyzer, although as described, it can't be especially accurate. See also Henrici harmonic analyzers; fairly sure these were mechanical analog Fourier analyzers (used for tidal curve analysis, among other things.)
=
=
Nicholas Bodley
nbodley@alumni_dot_princeton.edu (Permanent e-ddress)(Obvious anti-spam stuff in it)
Desperately wanted: Mechanical schematic of the Navy Mk1A computer (or any complex mechanical analog computer!).
Hmmm... Wonder whother optical shops could use it as a quick check for surface quality?
While a fast (?) correlator is relatively exotic, we don't squawk about what's inside our Pentiums, do we? Speculative execution of both branches and out-of order execution + reordering are quite amazing to this old puppy who cut his teeth on an all-discrete machine that ran 40 k instructions/sec. and had a Flexowriter for a console typewriter.
Point is that if the technology is cost-effective, it's now sometimes quite OK to use it.
a change!
Another thing Macrosoft (spelling courtesy of the Boston Globe) does right, and has done, is to include Latin-1 in their character set. (This is from Win 3.1, at least.) They also are wise to include Unicode capability into their code.
=====
Codepage 819: Complete Latin-1 compatibility for DOS
makes a motion-sensing TV camera, right? Might need lots of light, but an array of IR LEDs might work fine.
Although I haven't been *that* close to such design decisions, one reason could be damage during production; if a subassembly isn't physically rugged, it can be damaged easily. Two circuit boards joined by soldered wires is awful. If one is bad, it has to be sent somewhere for costly and (relatively) skilled hand desoldering, with possible damage to the holes. Reconnecting means more costly hand labor. Troubleshooting and repair at the manufacturing stage is really costly; being able to connect and disconnect is really worth it.
As well, one circuit board could come from Taiwan, another from Mexico, and hand-soldering a connector cable is just too labor-intensive.
This is as I see it.