The veep of Engineering was a total moron, chosen because he must have been blowing the CEO behind closed doors. Anyways, one day while he was out with a large potential customer, trying to sell them scads of huge automotive engine testers, he was asked "What operating system does it use?"
He told them, "Word." They, apparently, believed him., as they bought a bunch of them.
Ny sister had a cat who ficured out how to open the fridge. One thanksgiving, after everything was put away and she and her husband were in bed, they awoke to hear a terrible loud crash from downstairs. When John turned on the light, cats scattered from the turkey carcass - all but the one who opened the door. Sluggo wasn't leaving till he'd eaten his fill:)
She has since learned to wedge a diningroom chair so as to keep the door from being opened. She still has to do this, many years after Sluggo passed on, because he taught the other cats how.
Cats are much smarter than people think. Sluggo would have laughed at this feeble attempt to constrain him:)
The makers of the boards *are* taxed, just like those who make the cases, power supplies, and little rubber feet. Each company pays taxes. Why should a software company be different?
Years ago, while working at Sun Electric, we were hit with a patent infringement suit. A competitor's unit displayed a cylinder's firing event, as did ours. They used a circuit to determine when to start sampling the waveform; we sampled continuously, and determined when to start in software. The ruling went against us - the judge decreed that anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware, therefore our software approach violated their patent. While I personally think the judge was unable to determine the difference between his anal orifice and a hole in the ground, I suppose that same line of reasoning could be applied here.
I was working at a small plastics company, as their programmer / designer. We were using an H-89 that the president of the company had built:) and I was writing their accounting system on it.
We had a company picnic, and I was stuck on the softball team with the guys, wearing our "MCP" tee-shirts (I was #101, binary, for the geek factor). I recall seeing the movie afterwards, and actually catching so many of the little "in" jokes - things like the map of what "sector" Tron was in on the wall, the disk read/write head used to move programs around, and the spindle where the evil MCP lived (the hub on the hard drive).
It was awesome, and the sound track was just as good - yay, Wendy Carlos! I may have to go buy a dvd player for this one:)
What the changes in impedance will be from user to user? Will having sweaty palms make much difference? And, while a larger antenna might seem better, would it be directional, varying with the shape of the phone?
I'm not sure that I want my hand and face even closer to the source of the RF radiation. Doesn't the field strength vary with the inverse cube of distance? There's not much distance when you're touching the antenna.
Um, hello! I still HAVE my old Pioneer laserdisk player, and about a dozen disks as well. It could stand a tune-up - it's having trouble reading all of Grease 2 and a Linda Ronstadt concert - but it still runs. Far as I know, the thing was supposedly able to do data as well, but I never tried that (could never find any data laserdisks).
I'm sure that I'm not the only one out here. Heck, there was at least one videogame, a while back, that used a laserdisk inside it. Surely some gamer has one of those.
At the risk of bucking the trend here, the service I've gotten from PayPal has been pretty good. I mostly buy stuff online, and much prefer PayPal to sending a check, or, worse, a money order.
I'm disabled. Getting out to buy stamps, or a money order, is difficult. It takes several hours, and a few tries, to write out the envelope. Add to that, using snail mail from Seattle to anyplace *but* the West coast takes a full week. So, if I must pay by check, we've added a week's mail lag, then ten days for the check to clear, then it's a week more to get the item. By then, I've been dying to get it for weeks. Using PayPal cuts two weeks off of that delay. I like it.
The few times I've been paid with PayPal it's taken 5 days for my money to show up in my bank account, but they say that it might take that long. I wish they were faster - just how long does it take electrons to flow from them to my Seattle bank? - but they're likely making money on the "float", and I cannot begrudge them that perk.
I'll have to try this out. If it works right, I might even be able to go back to using my old favorite word processor / text editor, Wordstar 3.3.
I've been unable to use it under Windows because their "DOS box" does not implement the old CPM-style file control blocks. The program runs, you can type whatever you want, and when you save it, it gives no errors, but doesn't save anything. I've had to learn a whole new editor, just to be able to survive.
If this works, I'll be a VERY happy camper indeed! Now, to resurrect my old 84-key keyboard...:)
Given the problems already showing up with Dolly the sheep, already having problems associated with old age, why not try cloning from a stem cell?
I'd think that, by using the nucleus of an adult stem cell, you'd get all the DNA needed. Every strand of the DNA would then still have the telomers on it that gradually get "used up" when a normal cell divides. Perhaps that way, all the cells in the cloned animal would start out eactly the same as a normal embryo's cells.
Perhaps that's the way to go, not by taking the nucleus out of just any old cell, but by using an adult stem cell. They seem to have found these in several sites on the adult body - in fat removed by liposuction, and in the fat behind the kneecap in humans. I'm sure they can find them in analogous places on animals.
I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it.
So what if they do? First thing you do is grow an extra arm and leg, to pay their fee, and from there, you're home free.
Now, just what these guys will do with all these spare arms and legs, I shudder to guess. Maybe they're planning a new arms race? Or they just want to eercise their 2nd Amendment right to keep (and bear) arms?
Oh please yourself! Have you ever checked the laws in the US? And the workings of the IRS?
If you, as a business, don't make a profit, of any amount, every "X" years, they decide to shut you down. Jeff knows that, he's not a dummy. (I know him, I used to work with him before he started Amazon.)
So, for "X" years minus a quarter, he poured every cent back into the company, building it up as fast as he could. When the time hit, he suddenly made a profit... and, on that profit, he'll pay taxes.
His business model works well. He's no dummy, even if he did let Annette go from his life.
No, I'm not trying to make a perpetual motion machine here. The net effect of running the Greenvolt unit is that it creates saltier water. The Coleman unit likely creates plain water. Add the two and you still have residue - salty water, in excess of what's needed.
What I'm trying to show is that it's a cool way to get even more electricity from the Greenvolt units (which are fairly low-power, a couple of amps at 6 to 12 volts), by turning the "waste" into fuel for another stage. Reduce, re-use, recycle indeed.
It'd likely take a whole lot of the Greenvolt units to supply enough hydrogen for the Coleman unit. I'm not really sure what could use 12 volts at, say, a hundred amps. Still, I used to run a whole computer from 12 volts, as an emergency unit (even had the monitor running from 12 volts, tho it was only a black&white VGA unit. This set-up made a fantastic Field Day packet radio machine:)).
The Greenvolt units mentioned in the article require a special, dry anode and cathode, which are activated by adding salt water. The by-product of this, aside from electricity, is pure hydrogen.
I wonder, how many Greenvolt units would be required to produce the fuel needed for the Coleman unit? That would be so cool, running one off of the "waste" of the other:)
Some other things you will soon notice... same newscast on different competing channels. Television stations can own more than one in any particular area.
Gee, that explains why KING 5 news is also run on KONG 16 here in Seattle.
but I'm at their introductory limit (I don't recall the amount -- $200?)
That's $200 per something like months, as I recall.
why should I give PayPal an open pipeline into my checking account when I intend to pay with my credit card?
Because that's how they'll pay everything, henceforth. See, the credit card company still charges a fee, about 4%, and PayPal eats this up front, for a while. After a bit, tho, they want direct access to the cash.
I've been using PayPal for well over a year now, with no problems whatsoever. I mostly use it to buy stuff on eBay, but I've also sold a bit, and had money sent to me and sent money to a charity, too. No problems whatsoever. Sure, it can be a tad slow, getting cash into my account, but a lot of that's just my big, faceless, doesn't-care-about-customers-with-less-than-a-mill ion-balance bank.
The computers in the shop are typically PCs housed in a big console with several cables coming out. The cables are simply a black box to the parallel port. There is no reason that this black box cannot be made available in you local Discount Auto.
Actually, as of several years ago, when I worked at Sun Electric (I helped make the first PC-based automotive engine tester), the car's computers used serial, at some very non-standard baud rates (well, except for Ford's. Those used just plain old pulses to send information - and you had to count pulses to see what was going on).
The newest stuff I'd seen also had limited bi-directional capability, in that you could tell the engine's computer to do things. It was possible to cause damage, if given the wrong command, that's why the non-standard baud rates and proprietary protocols.
Mind you, the small fact that these proprietary protocals also meant that you needed to get all the equipment from the auto manufacturer, at a tremendous mark-up, was just frosting on the cake for car-makers. Heck, we had God's own bear of a time trying to get all these protocols as they came out, and then it was my job to figure out how to make our eisting hardware read them.
Intel's new terahertz transistor promises smaller, faster and lower-power. AMD's new transistor is smaller and faster, but did nothing much about the power.:(
Wouldn't it be just too much to hope for, that they both try to incorporate similar ideas from each other into their newest products? Imagine, much smaller, much faster *and* lower power consumption. To me, that sounds like a great idea. 'S a pity that our "compete at all costs" system won't really allow this to happen, though *sigh*
I thought Pompeii was hit with a pyroclastic flow, rather like what happened at Mt. St. Helens - a fast-flowing glowing "cloud" of superheated, highly-pressurised rock-with-gas-dissolved, a la "pop rocks", not a puddle of liquid lava. As it fell, the rocks broke apart as the dissolved gasses suddenly un-dissolve, thus, in effect, providing its own gas cushion to move like an air-hockey puck. The hyperhot rocks then fragment, repeating until it's all powder.
The survival of this village's population would depend not only on how far away it was, but the intervening terrain. If it was still downhill, the flow would be fast. If it was more flat, the flow would slow greatly.
It's still fascinating. I wonder why this event wasn't shown on Roman coins? The reverses display many other things - wars, natural phenomenom, even voting. I'll have to look harder:)
Actually, after sleeping on it overnight, the radiator and engine block *won't* be good places for these. If they need 250 degrees C to work, they'll only get that at the catalytic convertor, and may get near that in the exhaust manifold. Most of the engin runs near the boiling point of antifreeze, at most. While that's hot, it isn't likely 250 C.
Example: You put a heat-based gizzmo on your car's exhaust pipe. The temerature (and thus pressure) in the exhaust system goes up, making the engine less efficient and making you use more fuel to go the same distance.
Um, the catalytic convert is already there, and it gets rather hot. Bolting a few of these gadgets there, and on the engine block and in the radiator, won't make the temperature go up any, nor will it impede the flow of exhaust.
Mind you, I doubt it'd fully replace an alternator, but it'd help. The alternator robs horsepower, too, and if these gadgets are "free" (as in do not take more work to run), the net effect should be to increase fuel economy.
This says nothing about the cost and complexity, however. I'm not sure that making these cheap, robust and able to run along with an alternator will be a trivial exercise.
/me blows the dust off the old Zorba "portable", hauls out those ancient 5.25" floppies, and tries to remember how to run DDT and the assembler.:)
Gads, it's been too long! I grew up with CPM, and then MPM, ZCPR, Fidonet, MODEM7, all those oldies:) I even bought a used 10 meg HD from Randy, who said it had been used in his and Ward's BBS (one of many HDs they used over the years).
It's great to see that the source is now available (well, once the site recovers from the/. effect).
OK, they implant the genes into a new cell, and hope it turns into the critter. However, that's utterly ignoring the mitochondrial DNA, which also makes the animal unique. Unless they have that, *and* remove all the mitochondrial DNA from the new cell, what they'll get is an erzatz animal, one that may or may not be close enough to the original to give the desired results.
This is the same reason why, even though frozen Wooly Mammoths can be found in Siberia, they have yet to make a new living mammoth. Jurassic Park totally ignored this whole point, which, to me, made the whole premise rather lame:(
One reason that ebooks haven't taken off yet is that it's rather cumbersome, carrying your laptop all over creation just to read a book. Using this as a power source, and a single-page lcd screen, you might just have an ebook that was portable enough to carry around like a regular paperback.
The battery is replaceable, and it shouldn't be hard to download different texts into it... or, maybe, store the texts on a novram card. Sell whole textbooks like this, and make it easier for students to carry the whole load.
These paper batteries could easily be used, whereas conventional batteries are rather heavy and bulky, still.
Still utterly unused, in anti-static foam, three Intel 4004s. My roommate decided to start collecting old CPUs, and I managed to find these, free. I still want to make a very simple blinking-lights toy with one of these, and proudly put the "Intel Inside" sticker on the box:)
Goddess, this brings back memories! Hanging out at the library, using their terminal to call (at 300 baud, that was *fast!*) the HP-2000 system at Harper College, and chatting with friends who had serious money (Jeff actually *built* an Imsai 8080 unit, though he got many of the parts free by schmoozing the sales person).
30 years, gads. Back then, having even a floppy disk was a wild dream, now we have 100+ gigabyte hard disks. Back then, having one whole K of ram was heaven - last week, I bought 512 meg for $20. Back then, the clock oscillator could be made from a simple L-C circuit, and it ran several hundred kilohertz. Now, it's a PLL-controlled internal oscillator, using an external crystal oscillator, all running at frequencies that make a microwave oven look slow.
All this, in thirty years. That *really* makes me feel old:)
Didn't you people see the movie, Allegro non troppo? Remember where the spacecraft visiting a barren world throws a mostly-empty Coke bottle out the airlock just before takeoff, and how, to the tune of Ravel's "Bolero", the micro-organisms in the liquid evolve?
Maybe that's how our civilization came into being. It would sure explain why advertising is so pervasive these days:)
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The veep of Engineering was a total moron, chosen because he must have been blowing the CEO behind closed doors. Anyways, one day while he was out with a large potential customer, trying to sell them scads of huge automotive engine testers, he was asked "What operating system does it use?"
He told them, "Word." They, apparently, believed him., as they bought a bunch of them.
Ny sister had a cat who ficured out how to open the fridge. One thanksgiving, after everything was put away and she and her husband were in bed, they awoke to hear a terrible loud crash from downstairs. When John turned on the light, cats scattered from the turkey carcass - all but the one who opened the door. Sluggo wasn't leaving till he'd eaten his fill :)
:)
She has since learned to wedge a diningroom chair so as to keep the door from being opened. She still has to do this, many years after Sluggo passed on, because he taught the other cats how.
Cats are much smarter than people think. Sluggo would have laughed at this feeble attempt to constrain him
The makers of the boards *are* taxed, just like those who make the cases, power supplies, and little rubber feet. Each company pays taxes. Why should a software company be different?
Years ago, while working at Sun Electric, we were hit with a patent infringement suit. A competitor's unit displayed a cylinder's firing event, as did ours. They used a circuit to determine when to start sampling the waveform; we sampled continuously, and determined when to start in software. The ruling went against us - the judge decreed that anything that can be done in software can be done in hardware, therefore our software approach violated their patent. While I personally think the judge was unable to determine the difference between his anal orifice and a hole in the ground, I suppose that same line of reasoning could be applied here.
I was working at a small plastics company, as their programmer / designer. We were using an H-89 that the president of the company had built :) and I was writing their accounting system on it.
:)
We had a company picnic, and I was stuck on the softball team with the guys, wearing our "MCP" tee-shirts (I was #101, binary, for the geek factor). I recall seeing the movie afterwards, and actually catching so many of the little "in" jokes - things like the map of what "sector" Tron was in on the wall, the disk read/write head used to move programs around, and the spindle where the evil MCP lived (the hub on the hard drive).
It was awesome, and the sound track was just as good - yay, Wendy Carlos! I may have to go buy a dvd player for this one
What the changes in impedance will be from user to user? Will having sweaty palms make much difference? And, while a larger antenna might seem better, would it be directional, varying with the shape of the phone?
I'm not sure that I want my hand and face even closer to the source of the RF radiation. Doesn't the field strength vary with the inverse cube of distance? There's not much distance when you're touching the antenna.
Um, hello! I still HAVE my old Pioneer laserdisk player, and about a dozen disks as well. It could stand a tune-up - it's having trouble reading all of Grease 2 and a Linda Ronstadt concert - but it still runs. Far as I know, the thing was supposedly able to do data as well, but I never tried that (could never find any data laserdisks).
I'm sure that I'm not the only one out here. Heck, there was at least one videogame, a while back, that used a laserdisk inside it. Surely some gamer has one of those.
At the risk of bucking the trend here, the service I've gotten from PayPal has been pretty good. I mostly buy stuff online, and much prefer PayPal to sending a check, or, worse, a money order.
I'm disabled. Getting out to buy stamps, or a money order, is difficult. It takes several hours, and a few tries, to write out the envelope. Add to that, using snail mail from Seattle to anyplace *but* the West coast takes a full week. So, if I must pay by check, we've added a week's mail lag, then ten days for the check to clear, then it's a week more to get the item. By then, I've been dying to get it for weeks. Using PayPal cuts two weeks off of that delay. I like it.
The few times I've been paid with PayPal it's taken 5 days for my money to show up in my bank account, but they say that it might take that long. I wish they were faster - just how long does it take electrons to flow from them to my Seattle bank? - but they're likely making money on the "float", and I cannot begrudge them that perk.
I'll have to try this out. If it works right, I might even be able to go back to using my old favorite word processor / text editor, Wordstar 3.3.
... :)
I've been unable to use it under Windows because their "DOS box" does not implement the old CPM-style file control blocks. The program runs, you can type whatever you want, and when you save it, it gives no errors, but doesn't save anything. I've had to learn a whole new editor, just to be able to survive.
If this works, I'll be a VERY happy camper indeed! Now, to resurrect my old 84-key keyboard
Given the problems already showing up with Dolly the sheep, already having problems associated with old age, why not try cloning from a stem cell?
I'd think that, by using the nucleus of an adult stem cell, you'd get all the DNA needed. Every strand of the DNA would then still have the telomers on it that gradually get "used up" when a normal cell divides. Perhaps that way, all the cells in the cloned animal would start out eactly the same as a normal embryo's cells.
Perhaps that's the way to go, not by taking the nucleus out of just any old cell, but by using an adult stem cell. They seem to have found these in several sites on the adult body - in fat removed by liposuction, and in the fat behind the kneecap in humans. I'm sure they can find them in analogous places on animals.
I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it.
So what if they do? First thing you do is grow an extra arm and leg, to pay their fee, and from there, you're home free.
Now, just what these guys will do with all these spare arms and legs, I shudder to guess. Maybe they're planning a new arms race? Or they just want to eercise their 2nd Amendment right to keep (and bear) arms?
Oh please yourself! Have you ever checked the laws in the US? And the workings of the IRS?
... and, on that profit, he'll pay taxes.
If you, as a business, don't make a profit, of any amount, every "X" years, they decide to shut you down. Jeff knows that, he's not a dummy. (I know him, I used to work with him before he started Amazon.)
So, for "X" years minus a quarter, he poured every cent back into the company, building it up as fast as he could. When the time hit, he suddenly made a profit
His business model works well. He's no dummy, even if he did let Annette go from his life.
No, I'm not trying to make a perpetual motion machine here. The net effect of running the Greenvolt unit is that it creates saltier water. The Coleman unit likely creates plain water. Add the two and you still have residue - salty water, in excess of what's needed.
:)).
What I'm trying to show is that it's a cool way to get even more electricity from the Greenvolt units (which are fairly low-power, a couple of amps at 6 to 12 volts), by turning the "waste" into fuel for another stage. Reduce, re-use, recycle indeed.
It'd likely take a whole lot of the Greenvolt units to supply enough hydrogen for the Coleman unit. I'm not really sure what could use 12 volts at, say, a hundred amps. Still, I used to run a whole computer from 12 volts, as an emergency unit (even had the monitor running from 12 volts, tho it was only a black&white VGA unit. This set-up made a fantastic Field Day packet radio machine
The Greenvolt units mentioned in the article require a special, dry anode and cathode, which are activated by adding salt water. The by-product of this, aside from electricity, is pure hydrogen.
:)
I wonder, how many Greenvolt units would be required to produce the fuel needed for the Coleman unit? That would be so cool, running one off of the "waste" of the other
Some other things you will soon notice... same newscast on different competing channels. Television stations can own more than one in any particular area.
Gee, that explains why KING 5 news is also run on KONG 16 here in Seattle.
I wondered about that.
but I'm at their introductory limit (I don't recall the amount -- $200?)
l ion-balance bank.
That's $200 per something like months, as I recall.
why should I give PayPal an open pipeline into my checking account when I intend to pay with my credit card?
Because that's how they'll pay everything, henceforth. See, the credit card company still charges a fee, about 4%, and PayPal eats this up front, for a while. After a bit, tho, they want direct access to the cash.
I've been using PayPal for well over a year now, with no problems whatsoever. I mostly use it to buy stuff on eBay, but I've also sold a bit, and had money sent to me and sent money to a charity, too. No problems whatsoever. Sure, it can be a tad slow, getting cash into my account, but a lot of that's just my big, faceless, doesn't-care-about-customers-with-less-than-a-mil
The computers in the shop are typically PCs housed in a big console with several cables coming out. The cables are simply a black box to the parallel port. There is no reason that this black box cannot be made available in you local Discount Auto.
Actually, as of several years ago, when I worked at Sun Electric (I helped make the first PC-based automotive engine tester), the car's computers used serial, at some very non-standard baud rates (well, except for Ford's. Those used just plain old pulses to send information - and you had to count pulses to see what was going on).
The newest stuff I'd seen also had limited bi-directional capability, in that you could tell the engine's computer to do things. It was possible to cause damage, if given the wrong command, that's why the non-standard baud rates and proprietary protocols.
Mind you, the small fact that these proprietary protocals also meant that you needed to get all the equipment from the auto manufacturer, at a tremendous mark-up, was just frosting on the cake for car-makers. Heck, we had God's own bear of a time trying to get all these protocols as they came out, and then it was my job to figure out how to make our eisting hardware read them.
Intel's new terahertz transistor promises smaller, faster and lower-power. AMD's new transistor is smaller and faster, but did nothing much about the power. :(
Wouldn't it be just too much to hope for, that they both try to incorporate similar ideas from each other into their newest products? Imagine, much smaller, much faster *and* lower power consumption. To me, that sounds like a great idea. 'S a pity that our "compete at all costs" system won't really allow this to happen, though *sigh*
I thought Pompeii was hit with a pyroclastic flow, rather like what happened at Mt. St. Helens - a fast-flowing glowing "cloud" of superheated, highly-pressurised rock-with-gas-dissolved, a la "pop rocks", not a puddle of liquid lava. As it fell, the rocks broke apart as the dissolved gasses suddenly un-dissolve, thus, in effect, providing its own gas cushion to move like an air-hockey puck. The hyperhot rocks then fragment, repeating until it's all powder.
:)
The survival of this village's population would depend not only on how far away it was, but the intervening terrain. If it was still downhill, the flow would be fast. If it was more flat, the flow would slow greatly.
It's still fascinating. I wonder why this event wasn't shown on Roman coins? The reverses display many other things - wars, natural phenomenom, even voting. I'll have to look harder
Actually, after sleeping on it overnight, the radiator and engine block *won't* be good places for these. If they need 250 degrees C to work, they'll only get that at the catalytic convertor, and may get near that in the exhaust manifold. Most of the engin runs near the boiling point of antifreeze, at most. While that's hot, it isn't likely 250 C.
Example: You put a heat-based gizzmo on your car's exhaust pipe. The temerature (and thus pressure) in the exhaust system goes up, making the engine less efficient and making you use more fuel to go the same distance.
Um, the catalytic convert is already there, and it gets rather hot. Bolting a few of these gadgets there, and on the engine block and in the radiator, won't make the temperature go up any, nor will it impede the flow of exhaust.
Mind you, I doubt it'd fully replace an alternator, but it'd help. The alternator robs horsepower, too, and if these gadgets are "free" (as in do not take more work to run), the net effect should be to increase fuel economy.
This says nothing about the cost and complexity, however. I'm not sure that making these cheap, robust and able to run along with an alternator will be a trivial exercise.
/me blows the dust off the old Zorba "portable", hauls out those ancient 5.25" floppies, and tries to remember how to run DDT and the assembler. :)
:) I even bought a used 10 meg HD from Randy, who said it had been used in his and Ward's BBS (one of many HDs they used over the years).
/. effect).
Gads, it's been too long! I grew up with CPM, and then MPM, ZCPR, Fidonet, MODEM7, all those oldies
It's great to see that the source is now available (well, once the site recovers from the
OK, they implant the genes into a new cell, and hope it turns into the critter. However, that's utterly ignoring the mitochondrial DNA, which also makes the animal unique. Unless they have that, *and* remove all the mitochondrial DNA from the new cell, what they'll get is an erzatz animal, one that may or may not be close enough to the original to give the desired results.
:(
This is the same reason why, even though frozen Wooly Mammoths can be found in Siberia, they have yet to make a new living mammoth. Jurassic Park totally ignored this whole point, which, to me, made the whole premise rather lame
One reason that ebooks haven't taken off yet is that it's rather cumbersome, carrying your laptop all over creation just to read a book. Using this as a power source, and a single-page lcd screen, you might just have an ebook that was portable enough to carry around like a regular paperback.
The battery is replaceable, and it shouldn't be hard to download different texts into it... or, maybe, store the texts on a novram card. Sell whole textbooks like this, and make it easier for students to carry the whole load.
These paper batteries could easily be used, whereas conventional batteries are rather heavy and bulky, still.
Still utterly unused, in anti-static foam, three Intel 4004s. My roommate decided to start collecting old CPUs, and I managed to find these, free. I still want to make a very simple blinking-lights toy with one of these, and proudly put the "Intel Inside" sticker on the box :)
:)
Goddess, this brings back memories! Hanging out at the library, using their terminal to call (at 300 baud, that was *fast!*) the HP-2000 system at Harper College, and chatting with friends who had serious money (Jeff actually *built* an Imsai 8080 unit, though he got many of the parts free by schmoozing the sales person).
30 years, gads. Back then, having even a floppy disk was a wild dream, now we have 100+ gigabyte hard disks. Back then, having one whole K of ram was heaven - last week, I bought 512 meg for $20. Back then, the clock oscillator could be made from a simple L-C circuit, and it ran several hundred kilohertz. Now, it's a PLL-controlled internal oscillator, using an external crystal oscillator, all running at frequencies that make a microwave oven look slow.
All this, in thirty years. That *really* makes me feel old
Maybe that's how our civilization came into being. It would sure explain why advertising is so pervasive these days :)