They origonally built this machine to work with the Atari, it died, grabbed one surplus when the US school tossed it and there it is.
At work we just retired an XT based system built in 1984 for in house testing. It was pushing product until the day we pulled the plug and upgraded the system. We actually kept an XT bone yard to keep the system running it's last few years. During the upgrade we kept the instrument and just replaced some of the dated electronics with the current product's brains.
Old computers never die, just leak PCB's everywhere...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I would say Bob & Bob's would be your best bet for a Carbide Lamp...
If not any of those caving events, MAR, NRO, OTR, Convention, TAG Fall Cave In, ect. (or any other cave related event that has the theme crawl till you bawl)
Bob & Bob (caving supplies)
PO Box 441
Lewisburg, WV 24901
800-262-2283 - Fax: 304-772-3076
And yes Bob & Bobs does sell white light LED's (so it is still on topic)
Actually you want Green LED's that matches up with the absorption line of Chlorophyll. Mind you they are expensive and you might be better off with normal plant fluorescent lamps, they have about the same efficiency. But the Chorophyll line is the only line you really need to provide to a plant.
I've been using the White Light LED's caving for the last year. (and yes I mostly cave in Albany County).
My impressions on the White Light LED...
Very Energy Efficient
Very diffuse unfocused light source
Gives you awesome side vision
Don't go very far, because it is not a focused light source.
Great in the tight crawls of NY caves
Suck in large rooms, since they are so diffuse (WV Caves)
Suck when trying to look though semi cloudy water, Blue scatters better than RED turning water milky white. (Most NY Cave Passages)
Incredible battery life
Carbide is still the way to go...
When the white light LED's hit the market a few years back, I a grabbed the spectrum of one off of a Monochromator at work . The White LED's are a Blue Light LED with a Phosphor placed in front. Most of the Energy is emitted in the Blue (that's why the light looks so cold) and excites the Phosphor, which emits light in the other color ranges. I did notice from the trace that LED's have almost no RED component. Wish I had some of the trace data with me, I would post it. The Real trick for LED's is to push them farther and farther into the Deep Blue and UV, If you could get a device to emit at down around 253nm you could basically make a low voltage ballast free high efficiency light replacement that lasts 10,000 maybe 100,000 hours (1 to 11 years continuously on). Compact Low power UV light sources would be very nice, (though I question how long they would last working at 193nm and 157nm (the Photons have enough energy to start breaking atomic bonds in the substrate and window)).
The answer to this is to develop a GPL'd database / search program that will allow a committee too easily classify and dissect a thesis submitted for violation of copyright and due credit for the original work.
And a side benefit would be, a very powerful aid in research. Find what you need so you only invent the part of the wheel you need, not the whole yugo. Would be a very good tool for preventing duplicate work.
Personally, I think the real reason they don't publish them is even the people that wrote them are not always sure of what they are and how they work. Publishing the interface requires you to verify / document / and debug the interface.
This became all clear at windev2000 east on the device drivers track when the instructor implied that they did not implement the USB SYNC FRAME command (which is a required part of the USB spec.) in win98/2000 because they did not understand it.
And you don't even want to know what they had to say about IoCancelIrp...
Windows 2000, 1970's VMS technology for the new millenium. TastesLikeHErringFlavoredChicken
...I just realized that the whole.com side of the internet infringes and subtracts from Microsoft's (tm) COM (tm) technologies reputation and trademark.
Better start forking over those.com domain names before Microsoft (tm) starts to sue us all. Which they are required to do by LAW.
Remember the main business app. (in a brick'en morter) is the main DB, for tracking/billing/inventory ect. You can do that with Interbase (which can run on Linux (OKAY Give m my karma point)) or Oracle. There are non M$ apps out for all the basic functions, Word Processing / Spread Sheets / Email / Browsing / Graphics Programs / CAD. You could do all this with a MAC, Linux (KARMA POINT), Free BSD, a good old fashion Unix box or one of those Java client thingy's.
The problem is not very many people in the buiness enviroment want to "RISK" not using a Winbloze machine without M$ Office. Remember no one ever got fired for using a M$ product ( the companies went belly up instead).
and they are not the only one testing the internet waters, check out this article on wired about India's use of the web help the farmers of the country...
1. cut's out the indivual in TCP-IP service providers. 2. set's up a beuracracy that has no incentive to inovate.
Just look at dialup in the US, unless we pay extra for a "decent" (open to debate) connection (DSL/Cable/T1/T3) we are stuck with a connection of marginal quality that may approach 56K when the moon is in proper alignment with Al Gore. Why, the Telco's have no incentive to expand the networks since it is a local call that they make no money on.
Sadly, I think they will run into similar problems.
Best of luck to them... TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Actually someone is taking odds for it landing on NASA HQ...
The big worry is we will have a coronal mass ejection (like happened thursday) that will arrive at earth saturday night (Like is predicted for tonight) which will cause the earths atmosphere to expand enough to cause it to re-enter early.
Re-enter to early and your in asia Come in one orbit early and your in the jungles of south america...
assuming the concentration is high enough to have any effect on the material, I think they are usually talking the ppm (parts per million) levels when they talk about iridium.
Now what would be cool is a knife made out of an iridium satelite...
At least they are starting to make knives handles out of non-endangered things, maybe it will reignite the space race.
The ginsu space knife, it slices it dices, and when thrown returns to you at a speed of 5 to 7 miles a second!
what is relevant is using the tool that will best get the results you want for the shortest design cycle / lowwest development cost / highest spec compatibility.
Borland's (InPrise) C/C-- Compiler is written in OOP Pascal (product name : Delphi). Actually the Borland OOP Pascal / Java objects models are almost identical. You want native Java code try Delphi (loose32) / Kylix (happy penguin and loose32 with qt ). Different language, same model..., faster (?) code.
and what about swift-X from forth incorporated ? Forth for the Winbloze user... Forth is anything but dead, the problem is when you usually see it, it's embedded and most embedded "appliances" don't tell you squat about what they are using... (raise you hand if your company files the ID off of your MCU's).
I can say with confidence that all the instruments from the divison of the company I work for are FORTH. (and the Windows Apps. are written in Delphi, which in my experience runs quite a bit quicker than Micro$oft C apps).
I love those 4K embedded compilers, just say HELLO to it;-)
BzzzzT... Half right... An emergency space walk was made to fix a jammed antenna just before it was released from the shuttle. The shuttle has not been back since. The shuttle is just so over booked with ISS right now, we've have had, umm 1 shuttle mission this year.
The US had close to 50 ICBM's and nuke equipped bombers that could strike deep inside of russia. The US had IRBM's stationed in Turkey and Britian that could have decimated Eastern Europe and Western Russia.
Russia's ICBM program was a major mess, Turns out they had less than 10 ICBM's and less than 50 bombers that could strike the US.
Placing Nuke's in Cuba to create a credible deterence makes sense to me... Gotta love Khruschchev, he knew how to gamble.
I remember when NASA use to try to squeze every ounce of life out of it's probes, Just look at the history.
Neptune and Uranus where secondary objectives for voyager II if it survived that long.
Pioneer 10 and 11, first probes to cross the asteroid belt, visit jupiter, and visit saturn. They continued obtaining data from them long after the jupiter and saturn(pioneer 11) flybys. Pioneer 10 expired in the mid 90's (launched 1973) and they are predicting pioneer 11 (launched 1972) to kick the bucket anyday now. It is still returning usefull data, though it has no budget!
Pioneer 6, launched in 1965 is considered NASA's oldest operational space craft, I know it was still running in 1996, I think it is still running...
Pioneer Venus launched in 1978 was designed to last a year, they kept it going until 1992.
The Viking missions, launched in 1976, they kept them going till the landers died in the mid 80's.
The Skylab rescue, instead of writing it off they salvaged the derilict space station.
They salvaged and repaired Solar Max with the shuttle, to bad they where to cheap to launch a reboost mission to keep it going later (under the NEW NASA)
And finally the (Orbiting Astronomy Observatory) OAO-3 copernicus. Launched in 1972, it was kept going until the early 1990's. As the Gyro's failed (one by one) the control software was modified to handle first only 2 working gyro's, then only 1 working gyro.
Which btw. is what happened to GRO, it now has only 2 working gyro's. GRO was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle (just like solar max, and hubble). NASA acknowledges that they can modify the software to safely control/re-enter with 1 or 0 operating gyro's.
This is a waste of tax payer money, and a direct effort by the NEW NASA to distance itself from the successful programs of the OLD NASA.
Did you hear since the VP is in charge of the space program that Al Gore invented outer space ?
At least in russia the process and ingredients of all food (and food like) products have to be disclosed to the goverment... With a little western influence and an american freedom of information request (or a well placed bribe, a certain well fed penguin comes to mind) I'm sure we could review the recipe for JOLT and brew our own.
Assuming the process does not require a chemistry set large enough to have the goverment think you are setting up a serious drug lab.
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton only cut NASA's budget 7 of the last 8 Years...
Doubt full,
All shuttle flights launch from Florida (Can We say brother Jeb.)
All US manned flights are directed from Houston Texas (Can we say his home state)
To much pork...
The only parts of NASA to get axed are Dan Goldin and GoreSat
My guess,
They origonally built this machine to work with the Atari, it died, grabbed one surplus when the US school tossed it and there it is.
At work we just retired an XT based system built in 1984 for in house testing. It was pushing product until the day we pulled the plug and upgraded the system. We actually kept an XT bone yard to keep the system running it's last few years. During the upgrade we kept the instrument and just replaced some of the dated electronics with the current product's brains.
Old computers never die, just leak PCB's everywhere...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I would say Bob & Bob's would be your best bet for a Carbide Lamp...
If not any of those caving events, MAR, NRO, OTR, Convention, TAG Fall Cave In, ect. (or any other cave related event that has the theme crawl till you bawl)
Bob & Bob (caving supplies)
PO Box 441
Lewisburg, WV 24901
800-262-2283 - Fax: 304-772-3076
And yes Bob & Bobs does sell white light LED's (so it is still on topic)
Actually you want Green LED's that matches up with the absorption line of Chlorophyll. Mind you they are expensive and you might be better off with normal plant fluorescent lamps, they have about the same efficiency. But the Chorophyll line is the only line you really need to provide to a plant.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I've been using the White Light LED's caving for the last year. (and yes I mostly cave in Albany County).
My impressions on the White Light LED...
Very Energy Efficient
Very diffuse unfocused light source
Gives you awesome side vision
Don't go very far, because it is not a focused light source.
Great in the tight crawls of NY caves
Suck in large rooms, since they are so diffuse (WV Caves)
Suck when trying to look though semi cloudy water, Blue scatters better than RED turning water milky white. (Most NY Cave Passages)
Incredible battery life
Carbide is still the way to go...
When the white light LED's hit the market a few years back, I a grabbed the spectrum of one off of a Monochromator at work . The White LED's are a Blue Light LED with a Phosphor placed in front. Most of the Energy is emitted in the Blue (that's why the light looks so cold) and excites the Phosphor, which emits light in the other color ranges. I did notice from the trace that LED's have almost no RED component. Wish I had some of the trace data with me, I would post it. The Real trick for LED's is to push them farther and farther into the Deep Blue and UV, If you could get a device to emit at down around 253nm you could basically make a low voltage ballast free high efficiency light replacement that lasts 10,000 maybe 100,000 hours (1 to 11 years continuously on). Compact Low power UV light sources would be very nice, (though I question how long they would last working at 193nm and 157nm (the Photons have enough energy to start breaking atomic bonds in the substrate and window)).
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
The answer to this is to develop a GPL'd database / search program that will allow a committee too easily classify and dissect a thesis submitted for violation of copyright and due credit for the original work.
And a side benefit would be, a very powerful aid in research. Find what you need so you only invent the part of the wheel you need, not the whole yugo. Would be a very good tool for preventing duplicate work.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
... Does anyone remember Amstrad Computers. ...
Anyone want to fill in the under 30 crowd one what Intel did to them ?
This is nothing new, it's been the standard Intel tactic for years.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Personally, I think the real reason they don't publish them is even the people that wrote them are not always sure of what they are and how they work. Publishing the interface requires you to verify / document / and debug the interface.
...
This became all clear at windev2000 east on the device drivers track when the instructor implied that they did not implement the USB SYNC FRAME command (which is a required part of the USB spec.) in win98/2000 because they did not understand it.
And you don't even want to know what they had to say about IoCancelIrp
Windows 2000, 1970's VMS technology for the new millenium.
TastesLikeHErringFlavoredChicken
not only do we have to write device drivers for ...
x86-WDM,
x86-win9X,
PowerPC-MacOs,
(and to keep the good karma going...)
x86-Linux/FreeBSD,
alpha-Linux/FreeBSD,
PowerPC-Linux/FreeBSD
but we now need to add x86-MacOS to the fray... Unless they are smart and use the Windows(tm) WDM... please, please, pretty please...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
...I just realized that the whole .com side of the internet infringes and subtracts from Microsoft's (tm) COM (tm) technologies reputation and trademark.
.com domain names before Microsoft (tm) starts to sue us all. Which they are required to do by LAW.
Better start forking over those
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
And watch your productivity soar.
Remember the main business app. (in a brick'en morter) is the main DB, for tracking/billing/inventory ect. You can do that with Interbase (which can run on Linux (OKAY Give m my karma point)) or Oracle. There are non M$ apps out for all the basic functions, Word Processing / Spread Sheets / Email / Browsing / Graphics Programs / CAD. You could do all this with a MAC, Linux (KARMA POINT), Free BSD, a good old fashion Unix box or one of those Java client thingy's.
The problem is not very many people in the buiness enviroment want to "RISK" not using a Winbloze machine without M$ Office. Remember no one ever got fired for using a M$ product ( the companies went belly up instead).
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
If it comes in early it will hit Central / South america.
Now we know where Costa Rica's is getting the computers for it's free internet proposal.
Anyone watching the GRO reentry live ?
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
and they are not the only one testing the internet waters, check out this article on wired about India's use of the web help the farmers of the country...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
bad idea because...
1. cut's out the indivual in TCP-IP service providers.
2. set's up a beuracracy that has no incentive to inovate.
Just look at dialup in the US, unless we pay extra for a "decent" (open to debate) connection (DSL/Cable/T1/T3) we are stuck with a connection of marginal quality that may approach 56K when the moon is in proper alignment with Al Gore. Why, the Telco's have no incentive to expand the networks since it is a local call that they make no money on.
Sadly, I think they will run into similar problems.
Best of luck to them...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
look on the AviationNow site here
Any odds on it landing on NASA HQ ?
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Actually someone is taking odds for it landing on NASA HQ...
The big worry is we will have a coronal mass ejection (like happened thursday) that will arrive at earth saturday night (Like is predicted for tonight) which will cause the earths atmosphere to expand enough to cause it to re-enter early.
Re-enter to early and your in asia
Come in one orbit early and your in the jungles of south america...
So much for reducing risk...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
assuming the concentration is high enough to have any effect on the material, I think they are usually talking the ppm (parts per million) levels when they talk about iridium.
Now what would be cool is a knife made out of an iridium satelite...
At least they are starting to make knives handles out of non-endangered things, maybe it will reignite the space race.
The ginsu space knife, it slices it dices, and when thrown returns to you at a speed of 5 to 7 miles a second!
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
...This is old, Nickle Iron Meteorites where the source of the some of man's earliest METAL knives!
Those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat... I'm waiting for the Amiga to come back myself.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
the language is irrelevant...
what is relevant is using the tool that will best get the results you want for the shortest design cycle / lowwest development cost / highest spec compatibility.
Borland's (InPrise) C/C-- Compiler is written in OOP Pascal (product name : Delphi). Actually the Borland OOP Pascal / Java objects models are almost identical. You want native Java code try Delphi (loose32) / Kylix (happy penguin and loose32 with qt ). Different language, same model..., faster (?) code.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
and what about swift-X from forth incorporated ? Forth for the Winbloze user...
;-)
Forth is anything but dead, the problem is when you usually see it, it's embedded and most embedded "appliances" don't tell you squat about what they are using... (raise you hand if your company files the ID off of your MCU's).
I can say with confidence that all the instruments from the divison of the company I work for are FORTH. (and the Windows Apps. are written in Delphi, which in my experience runs quite a bit quicker than Micro$oft C apps).
I love those 4K embedded compilers, just say HELLO to it
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
BzzzzT...
Half right...
An emergency space walk was made to fix a jammed antenna just before it was released from the shuttle.
The shuttle has not been back since.
The shuttle is just so over booked with ISS right now, we've have had, umm 1 shuttle mission this year.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Let's see...
The US had close to 50 ICBM's and nuke equipped bombers that could strike deep inside of russia.
The US had IRBM's stationed in Turkey and Britian that could have decimated Eastern Europe and Western Russia.
Russia's ICBM program was a major mess,
Turns out they had less than 10 ICBM's and less than 50 bombers that could strike the US.
Placing Nuke's in Cuba to create a credible deterence makes sense to me...
Gotta love Khruschchev, he knew how to gamble.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
I remember when NASA use to try to squeze every ounce of life out of it's probes, Just look at the history.
Neptune and Uranus where secondary objectives for voyager II if it survived that long.
Pioneer 10 and 11, first probes to cross the asteroid belt, visit jupiter, and visit saturn. They continued obtaining data from them long after the jupiter and saturn(pioneer 11) flybys. Pioneer 10 expired in the mid 90's (launched 1973) and they are predicting pioneer 11 (launched 1972) to kick the bucket anyday now. It is still returning usefull data, though it has no budget!
Pioneer 6, launched in 1965 is considered NASA's oldest operational space craft, I know it was still running in 1996, I think it is still running...
Pioneer Venus launched in 1978 was designed to last a year, they kept it going until 1992.
The Viking missions, launched in 1976, they kept them going till the landers died in the mid 80's.
The Skylab rescue, instead of writing it off they salvaged the derilict space station.
They salvaged and repaired Solar Max with the shuttle, to bad they where to cheap to launch a reboost mission to keep it going later (under the NEW NASA)
And finally the (Orbiting Astronomy Observatory) OAO-3 copernicus. Launched in 1972, it was kept going until the early 1990's. As the Gyro's failed (one by one) the control software was modified to handle first only 2 working gyro's, then only 1 working gyro.
Which btw. is what happened to GRO, it now has only 2 working gyro's. GRO was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle (just like solar max, and hubble). NASA acknowledges that they can modify the software to safely control/re-enter with 1 or 0 operating gyro's.
This is a waste of tax payer money, and a direct effort by the NEW NASA to distance itself from the successful programs of the OLD NASA.
Did you hear since the VP is in charge of the space program that Al Gore invented outer space ?
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
While I vent some deep links to nasawatch
comments on the crash
likely excuses by NASA
FAQ on why to crash
SpaceflightNow crash status
At least in russia the process and ingredients of all food (and food like) products have to be disclosed to the goverment... With a little western influence and an american freedom of information request (or a well placed bribe, a certain well fed penguin comes to mind) I'm sure we could review the recipe for JOLT and brew our own.
Assuming the process does not require a chemistry set large enough to have the goverment think you are setting up a serious drug lab.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken