Please, I'll take you on in whistler with some all wheel drive from my Audi S4.
Now, that's a challenge I will *not* accept in my Chevette. [grin]
But if you want to go off-roading, we can take my '76 Ram (not actually my Ram, but similar) down some old logging trails, summer or winter. The winner gets to pop her into four-wheel-low and back over the loser's car. Game?
Re:In car talk, this would be called a "Sleeper".
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Neat IBM 5150 Case Mod
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· Score: 2
Drag racing is a purer test of the car itself.
Drag racing is all about how well you know your engine's torque curve and how good your timing is. Most of the challenge of drag racing is the scientific and intellectual pursuit of lowering the car's weight and improving things like power and traction.
Most of the guys who are really into it are very bright, but they're not educated. They seem to mostly work on unrefined gut. It's an interesting crowd.
Juan Montoya could probably outdrive any one of us on a road course even if we were in his FW23 and he were in that '93 Prelude or that Chevette.
For sure. But a Chevette maintains the advantage of being rear-wheel-drive, which makes it a *lot* more predictable in high-speed cornering. So you can push it harder.
If we were talking about anything rear-wheel-drive, I wouldn't have offered to race for pink slips.
but any car can be reasonably fast in a straight line. Show me a Chevette that can out-corner a 93 Prelude and I'll bow at your feet.
Who cares?
Most of Saturday night confrontation is stoplight to stoplight. That's straight line, baby.
Do you want a pissing contest between a Chevette with more than double the displacement of your silly little Honda? A rear-wheel-drive setup which is far better for handling and cornering?
Gimme two hours, I'll swap the front and rear shocks from drag shocks to a better rate for rally racing. Your only advantage with the Honda will be your independent rear suspension.
But, like every front wheel drive car, you won't be able to fishtail around corners.
That Chevette also has Fiero brake rotors and calipers on the front, Ford Crown Victoria full-size station wagon drums on the back, a roll-cage front to back, and I cut the dashboard in half to save six pounds. Six. The interior is a steel can with a driver's seat. That's it. And I personally bored that motor 0.030" over, shaved the heads to bring the compression ratio to 9.3:1, and ported and polished the intake and ports. The carb is a 600 CFM Carter ThermoQuad with a cool-can on the fuel line and a phenolic spacer to keep the float bowl from getting warm.
I'm a computer geek, but I'm also an old-school gear-head. I built the motor in my car. At this point, it's basically a NASCAR motor with two cylinders missing. You probably took yours to be "tuned" at a "speed shop" that deals in emasculated 4-bangers.
If you're like most Prelude owners I know, you've added 300lbs in stereo equipment, tinted the windows, put on $1,200 rims, and a big "Powered By Honda" sticker. (The "Powered By Honda" sticker might be impressive if you'd earned the right to put it on a Tercel.)
You're outclassed.
As a final warning, I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. Prime snowbelt. Lemme tell you, you learn quickly why cops and racecars *aren't* front wheel drive. And I've raced in several classes at both Luskville Dragway and Capital City Speedway.
Wanna go?
Care to race for pink slips?
Still so sure, buddy-boy?
I'd look forward to driving around with the crushed remains of a Prelude as the winter ballast in the back of my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram.
Seriously though, it's great to see the cool things people do with their old computers.
For sure!
I built a server once for a guy who didn't want to replace an old case he had kicking around. It wasn't quite of this class, it was a really nasty old 486DX-25 fullsize tower generic clone. But he *loved* that case, and wanted it to have a little more oomph.
Into that case, I was able to stuff an Asus ATX motherboard with a Pentium II 350 (back when they were still current), with many of the same obstacles this guy had in building his Barney case.
In the end, the ole 486 looked completely original. Keyboard adapter to get a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard (the old two-tone brown one) connected to it, and an NEC Multisync 3D. He used it more as a lightweight server, but especially enjoyed the look of the front LED display on the case still set to 25MHz.
One of my favorite pastimes is working on old cars, and this is very much the high-tech equivalent to stuffing a 7.2L Chrysler big-block V8 into a four door 1970 Dodge Dart. It's a Granny Car with an attitude. And I think a Celeron under the hood of an original PC certainly qualifies - especially with more attention to having it look dead original.
Here's my own sleeper. It's a Chevette with a Buick 231 V6 stuffed under the hood. It looks crusty, with faded paint and a cheesy hood scoop on it. But it pulls 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile, which is faster than the 13.1 the guy in the Camaro beside me pulled. Heheheh.
I love sleepers, whether they're computers or cars.
Re:Too Neat for a Real Workshop - Photos
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Ethernet MP3 Player
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· Score: 2
Hmmm. I see no static control at all, no wrist straps, no static mats, no ionizers, I hope the air conditioning is off when they build boards...
Yeah. It's like speaking to the head tech at a sucky little computer store somewhere. "Nah, you don't really need to worry about that." Course, he can't figure out why most of his systems come back with intermittant crashes and similar silly problems.
I didn't notice that right away, actually. Most of my design and development has always been with analog parts, and there's little CMOS there.:)
Thus the term 'sweatshop' Although the ionic contamination of the solder pads from sweat and skin oils wont help either...
I wonder what the yield-rate on hand-soldered SMT ICs is, in a production environment. Even with an artist at work, I can't imagine it being all that high.
That's a nice workshop, but I don't think they do much prototyping there - it looks great for small assembly runs.
Wanna see what a real radar prototyping and development workshop looks like? Check this out.
That looks insanely hard to solder. Wow. I'd not believe it, but look at all those chips. A good fake if it is fake.
Without a hot air rework station, it's pretty hard to do SMT by hand... it's possible, though. I did several video buffer circuits by hand, then I contracted out the rest because it was cheaper than my time.
I once knew a guy who could solder a surface-mount 486 into place with an ordinary soldering iron. It was terrifying to behold.
Yea really... This is about as usefull as the classic BBS text file on how to assemble a nuclear weapon.
"Step 3) Okay, now you need to do is steal some weapons grade plutonium"
Bah. Just go to Home Depot and special-order 500,000 smoke detectors. Americium 241 is fissionable.
yea, okay... Thanks for that tid bit.
Note that all you need to do is call up the phone company and get a bare leased line. If a taxi company in Ottawa can do it, so can you.
Then, go to Fry's or whoever, buy two DSL modems, plug them into each side of the line, and you're up and running. There's gonna be some configuration there, but that's it.
Speaking as one who has bought and installed dozens of leased bare copper lines (mostly for old FSK modem data), the hardest part is explaining to the (non-technical) salesperson at the telco what kind of line I need.
Incidentally, Miralla Lunardo at Bell Canada needed it explained to her that Pearson International Airport's Terminal Three doesn't actually have a street address.
One thing you have to remember is most T-1, DSL, etc contracts specifically state you can not resell bandwidth. If you were going to do this you better make sure whatever you use for your uplink legally lets you resell bandwidth (99% of the time its going to be illegal).
That's why the contract you sign with the guy states that the rental is chargeable on the 1 square foot occupied by the modem.
If you haven't read Cringley before, he's in an area where he can't get DSL access. However, if you can talk a business (who has a T-1 or better) or a local ISP to let you set one end of your connection there, then you're in business.
And just think, you'd have your own DSL, on your own private loop, *without PPPoE*!
While Roaring Penguin's PPPoE kicks butt, PPPoE is still a messy kludge, and being able to get away from it is reason enough to attempt something like this.
I'm hardly a neophyte when it comes to technical stuff, but a lot of this article went over my head. Am I alone here? Maybe I'm just tired right now.
It's really that easy.
All you're ordering from the phone company is a pair of copper wires going from point A to point B. The names differ depending on the phone company, but that's all it is. Two pieces of copper wire, which go from your house to your friend's house.
Now, within reason, you can pump anything you want across that wire. Voice, ordinary modem data, etc.
DSL is simply a special kind of 56k modem. It carries the data exactly the same way as an ordinary modem, but it uses a few tricks so that you can use the telephone line at the same time. For one thing, it carries the data at higher frequencies than voice communications - that's how it doesn't interfere with voice. The next thing is that it doesn't load down the telephone line enough for the telephone company's equipment to detect that a phone is off-hook. But aside from that, it's just a 56k modem.
An ordinary modem is restricted to run no higher than about 3kHz, leaving a small pipe to carry the data. On the other hand, DSL typically starts at about 5kHz, and depending on circuit (line) quality, can go up to about 256kHz. That's a lot more bandwidth than a 56k modem has available; as a result, using 56k modem modulation techniques (QUAM, it's called, "QUadrature Amplitude Modulation"), you can carry a lot more data.
If you connect two DSL modems to the copper pair that you get from the telephone company, they should connect and communicate, just like two 56k modems on the same line. (Hell, you could even do it simultaneously!) That's all there is to it.
An established ISP merely has the telephone company connect a modem at the phone company's central office. Today, they're usually built into your "loop card", which is the device that connects your telephone line to the switching system.
Problems with a do-it-yourself copper line from the phone company could arise with distance (since the dry pair will probably go to the phone company and will be manually patched on the other customer's dry pair) and with EMI line coils. (Telephone companies will often put inductors across the line to help with stability for voice communications; often, these interfere with the high frequency DSL signal.)
If the sawtooth is a problem, why not drive with a square wave :
draw from left to right, drop down a line, then draw back from right to left?
Uhhh... Okay. Very basic here.
A sweep circuit basically turns a given voltage into a beam position.
It does it like an oscilloscope graphs voltages by pulling the vertical sweep up or down based on the voltage applied to the input.
Now, this is oversimplifying for a variety of reasons, but follow me. Let's say you have a yoke that wants from 0-50 volts. 0 volts gives you a beam at the far left of the screen, and 50 volts puts it at the far right of the screen.
Since you want the beam to draw a line (in sync with the TV station's camera, no less) you have to ramp the voltage up from 0 to 50V.
Now, once you've achieved 50V and the beam is at the far right of the screen, you want it to go back to the left hand side of the screen as quickly as possible and do the sweep again. The voltage is dropped from 50V to 0 as quickly as possible. You've just described a sawtooth wave.
Let's say you're feeling creative and want to try a square wave. 0V 50V 0V 50V - the beam would be dragged across the screen far too quickly to draw a useable sweep. Sure, you could slow it down by increasing the inductance of the yoke - then it would take more time for the yoke to respond to the changes in voltage. First problem with that is that it would happen in both directions, even when you want the beam to return to its starting point as quickly as possible. If you plotted the voltage on a scope, you'd get a mushy exponential curve in each direction. And the beam deflection would occur with the same ugly lack of linearity... the beam would actually speed up and slow down during the sweep. Showing a circle on such a TV set would be less than satisfying.
Sure you'd need to buffer the incoming signal but so what?
Most TV sets and xVGA computer monitors are still analog, so buffering it and trying to sync the buffer to the sweep would be another level of complexity.
then as the field in the yoke decays, the Damper (say a 6AX4) starts conducting to finish the sweep.
Uhhh... The damper works simply to recapture energy that would otherwise cause barkhausen (sp?) oscillations. Pull out the damper, you'll still have full sweep (and maybe flyback, output and yoke damage). There'll be a hell of a ring at the right hand side of the screen, though.
What happens is that as the flux collapses (mostly in the flyback), the output circuit, which is designed to be resonant at 15,750Hz, rings like a bell at a higher harmonic.
During the tube era, if you look at a TV schematic, most of the dampers were even run off a separate winding on the flyback. The separate winding damped the oscillation and provided a nice bonus: the damper rectified the induced voltage, and it was fed to many output stages in the set as something called "B+ Boost".
I've got a fairly comprehensive collection of old TV sets. Of course, almost all the paper and early electrolytic capacitors are shot when you get an antique TV set. In one of them, a 1953 General Electric, I measured the B+ boost as 550V. It was used to drive the vertical and audio output stages. Symptomatically, it's like a modern TV set: if anything is wrong with the horizontal circuit, the set plays dead. Tube filaments with their cheery glow, but nothing else.
This isn't true, at least for horizontal deflection (which requires the most energy). The output amplifier is basically running in switching mode; the sawtooth is generated by the energy stored in and released from the yoke's inductance. The dI/dt energy released can be stored elsewhere for the next cycle (in another inductor or in a capacitor) or just dissipated -- but not in the amplifier.
It's nice to finally hear from someone else on Slashdot who apparently has some clue of electronics!:)
But I beg to differ. Maybe not in more modern TV sets and monitors, but on most stuff right up to the mid-80s, you could clearly pull the sawtooth off the plate of the horizontal oscillator or vertical oscillator using an oscilloscope.
Resonance is what keeps the TV set efficient enough to be practical, but it's not what makes the sawtooth. It's far too fundamental to be trusted simply to the resonance of the yoke.
I've looked for power amplifier ICs, but have not found them. I think that an IC package is just not suitable for power dissapation.
One. Power ICs are usually not in DIP packages.
Two. You'll seldom find them at Radio Shack.
Examples of *common* power ICs: LM383 audio amplifier. LM78xx and LM79xx voltage regulators. The big flat-pack voltage regulators you find in lots of VCRs.
This is a new technology that can integrate into existing production lines and can halve the depth of a CRT type tube. A TV normally 22 inches deep would be only 11 inches
This is nothing new, but it's an incremental improvement. I'd like some technical info before I can decide whether or not this is just a marketing stunt or other dubious improvement.
When TV sets first came out in the 1940s, their CRTs more resembled oscilloscopes. They were long, and with small screens. Their deflection angles were about 25 degrees.
As the early 1950s dawned, TV sets started to feature electromagnetic deflection. New, horizontal and vertical ouput tubes were suddenly able to support the current requirements of deflecting the beam 45 degrees towards a new big-screen 17" display.
The 1960s saw the beginning of the embrace of color television. As there are three electron beams in color TV sets, the neck was bigger than in monochrome sets. More deflection current was required to drive a 17" color set than a 17" black and white. High-tech new beam power amplifier tubes were developed to deal with the loads - compactron tubes like the 6LU8 and 21GY5 replaced the venerable 6BQ6. The spillover was that the mass-produced new high-power deflection tubes could also be used to make tighter deflection angles on black and white sets; the 19DUP4 was a Philco B&W picture tube released in 1965. It had a whopping 110 degree deflection angle, making for a TV set that had a 19" display but was only a foot deep.
Solid state TV sets using high-power MOSFET transistors have been able to handle the bigger current to drive new tight-deflection 110 degree color tubes. So far, it's been incremental.
But there remains a problem. A TV set's deflection yoke has to be driven with a sawtooth wave. There's a slow ramp up in voltage, then it quickly snaps down to off. Then another slow ramp and another quick snap. This corresponds to the beam sweeping sideways across the screen and then resetting to the left hand side very quickly.
Because the output amplifiers are neither fully on nor fully off, they're running in linear mode. All the energy not actually used to drive the yoke during the ramp is simply wasted as heat. But that energy isn't free... won't these things be meant to deal with Energy Star and other certifications? Tighter deflection means more deflection current means more wasted power in the amplifiers... and if the EPA buckles by defining a new guideline for thin monitors like these will purport to be, they'll be in competition with LCD monitors.
LCD will win.
The CRT will always be with us, but its time in the mainstream is coming to an end. This sounds too much like a marketing ploy, and goes too far against physics to be anything else.
Don't be an idiot. Railing against Canadian Content ignores the fact that without it, VERY LITTLE Canadian music would get played on the radio.
If it were good, people would want to listen to it, and it would therefore get airplay, all without laws which erode my freedom.
The problem, if there is one, is the perception that "mediocre music" gets forced onto the air, excluding better American music. That's a load of sh*t.
If it were good, you wouldn't need to force people to listen to it.
Unfortunately, Canadian society is full of sufficient people who are similarly-minded to yourself that the problem isn't going to go away. Canadian society is full of the rust-holes of government intervention, and people have been used to it since Trudeau.
Canada is too broken to bother attempting to fix.
Equating it to a car, it's been very expensive, it's always broken, it gets terrifically poor gas mileage (sucking up over 50% of my income), gets mediocre performance, and has those nasty automatic seatbelts that assume you're not smart enough to wear them of your own accord. In short, it would be precisely the sort of car for which scrap-metal handling equipment was invented.
if they say 'sudio', does this mean they are subject to the "Genesis Tax" (AKA, the "Phil Collins Tax")?
Even worse. Since the Canadian government has decided that we citizens of the great white arctic hell aren't smart enough to choose our own music, the CRTC (Canadian equivalent to the FCC) forces it on us with the Canadian Content act.
All Canadian radio and television broadcasters must play at least 40% Canadian content.
That was bumped up nationally, from 35%, in response to the fact that Q107 Toronto started syndicating the Howard Stern Radio Show.
And the media tax goes to support all those Canadian "artists" who are being "robbed" by piracy. The talented Canadian musicians get Green Cards and get the hell out pretty quickly, leaving only the chaff. Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.
Ah, I love my government. I get to listen (WAV, others available) to the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon twice a day on my local radio station because they can't play what people want to hear.
Further, American TV networks are frequently censored on Canadian cable systems, based on Canadian broadcast law. Here's what you get when they do that.
I feel so trapped by my government.
I wonder if the lack of a free Canadian broadcast media is grounds for me to claim refugee status in the United States...
According to HP's Agilent optoelectronics spinoff, in the time it takes for the tungsten filaments in your car's brake lights to become red hot, at 75 MPH, your car would have travelled 25 feet.
I've already got some on my 1976 Dodge Ram. When the brake or turn signals go on, it looks like one of those new Cadillac Eldorados.:) Any news of newer and brighter LEDs is always welcomed. They affect our lives in myriad ways.
You just have to laugh out loud when you read something like this. A company that has so much scrutiny focused on it for underhanded tactics - is using some of the most fraudulent tactics known to man.
Oh, I agree, it's funny as all hell. But the lobbying groups are doing it.
A parallel pretty close to home for both of us is the Walkerton water crisis.
The mayor didn't supervise the water supply very well and has even helped to keep PR nightmares (like people getting sick from the water) quiet.
Now, his minions are taking the fall, but you'd think that it would have killed his credibility. No way! The idiot residents of Walkerton re-elected him.
It's as dumb as Detroiters voting for Coleman Young over and over and over... despite his noble views, he was clearly destructive to the city.
Just like these mayors, Microsoft will manage to skirt the PR nightmare. Just you watch.
Freeway Guardrail Ping-Pong - An Analogy
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Code Red Refunds?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Quoting from article:
Steve Larsen, who heads the attorney general's new Cyber consumer resource center, said in a message to Mangus: "It seems reasonable that a customer should not have to pay for service they can't get. If you can't watch your cable TV or your newspaper doesn't show up for days/weeks at a time, I assume you won't pay. I believe that is all your customers ask here regardless of fault."
Scenario. Some idiot is driving a poorly-maintained car which was ill-conceived at the design stage. Maybe he didn't even know he was driving...
A wheel breaks off and his car plays Guardrail Ping-Pong on the turnpike.
The ensuing traffic jam shuts down the city's busiest artery, halting all commerce in the city. Your newspaper doesn't arrive as a result.
Why don't we go after the bigger problem and charge the jackasses who designed perpetually failure-prone cars and the jackass owners who don't maintain them?
If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.
Where I used to work, we had a cranky old curmudgeon of an engineer. He was great fun; he knew how to use AutoCAD, but he hated it. Every time Windows would BSoD on him, out would come the slide rule from its padded case. And he was an artist with it.
the 'geographical' excuse is a pretty big one tho' I'm in rural England, and the earliest DSL will be available here is most likely 2003, cable is just.. not going to happen.. >:(
Oh, I'm sorry, that really sucks.
There are a couple of things. If you have a cable TV provider, there is *no reason* why they'd have technical limitations to providing high speed access within their coverage areas - it's just a question of whether or not they're willing to spend all the money to retrofit all the distribution amplifiers to be bidirectional. After all, cable Internet is nothing compared to a TV channel in bandwidth. NTSC and PAL both require about 6MHz of bandwidth for video only; by contrast, through basically the same tricks as a 56k modem uses to get that speed on a 5kHz telephone line, my DSL achieves 1.2Mbps within about 192kHz of bandwidth. One allocated "TV channel" could serve hundreds of users.
Upstream is trickier, of course, but again, that's at least bidirectional RF distribution amplifiers, if not an inelegant but effective kludge like using your existing 56k modem and dial-up for uploading.
I'm judging from that you have either no cable television service nearby, or your CATV provider is pretty backwards. Sorry.
DSL is a very neat hack, but distance tends to attenuate the low-frequency RF carrier that the telco cleverly superimposes on your phone line.
Around here, we've got another option besides a cable monopoly and several DSL flavors: www.look.ca's "UltraFAST 2" wireless high-speed Internet service. Look started out offering a microwave relay-based alternative to cable television or satellite dishes, and when they bought out an ISP, this was the logical extension. I know a couple of their users, and they've been pretty happy with it. One of them is way out in the boondocks so he can't get cable or DSL, but with a little tower in his back yard, he's got line-of-sight to the CN Tower nearly 50 miles away - and therefore microwave "cable" television and wireless high-speed Internet access.
Look has also got points of presence on a few cellular and radio station towers around town, so they're apparently pretty easy to get if you can spot one of their POPs on the horizon.
(He's also an amateur radio operator, so the 75 foot tower already in his backyard helped him convince the installation technician that it would work... [grin])
Good luck getting something like that soon. Like I say, your only excuse is geographical.
The broadband users of the internet are the ones that torment the little people. All too often they forget their true origins; where they came from back in the good old days before there were even 56k modems.
Oh, give me a break. I've got 1.2Mbps DSL with a static IP for $40/mo. As much as I love it, I will *never* forget where I came from.
My first home Internet connection was in 1988, as a kid in high school. It was a shell account on a Sun at Carleton University, and my connection was through a DEC LA-36 teletype and a 110-baud former phone company modem.
(As an aside, anyone else make the mistake of trying to run vi with a teletype? Urk.)
While the teletype was too bulky to keep, I do still have the old 110 baud modem.
Every now and then I'll fire up my old DEC VT-100, hook it up to my FreeBSD box, and log in at 300 baud for nostalgia's sake.
Nope; they're neat, but they're historical, like the 56k modem. Consumer broadband is here. Your only excuse for not having it is geographical.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, I'll take you on in whistler with some all wheel drive from my Audi S4.
Now, that's a challenge I will *not* accept in my Chevette. [grin]
But if you want to go off-roading, we can take my '76 Ram (not actually my Ram, but similar) down some old logging trails, summer or winter. The winner gets to pop her into four-wheel-low and back over the loser's car. Game?
Drag racing is a purer test of the car itself.
Drag racing is all about how well you know your engine's torque curve and how good your timing is. Most of the challenge of drag racing is the scientific and intellectual pursuit of lowering the car's weight and improving things like power and traction.
Most of the guys who are really into it are very bright, but they're not educated. They seem to mostly work on unrefined gut. It's an interesting crowd.
Juan Montoya could probably outdrive any one of us on a road course even if we were in his FW23 and he were in that '93 Prelude or that Chevette.For sure. But a Chevette maintains the advantage of being rear-wheel-drive, which makes it a *lot* more predictable in high-speed cornering. So you can push it harder.
If we were talking about anything rear-wheel-drive, I wouldn't have offered to race for pink slips.
but any car can be reasonably fast in a straight line. Show me a Chevette that can out-corner a 93 Prelude and I'll bow at your feet.
Who cares?
Most of Saturday night confrontation is stoplight to stoplight. That's straight line, baby.
Do you want a pissing contest between a Chevette with more than double the displacement of your silly little Honda? A rear-wheel-drive setup which is far better for handling and cornering?
Gimme two hours, I'll swap the front and rear shocks from drag shocks to a better rate for rally racing. Your only advantage with the Honda will be your independent rear suspension.
But, like every front wheel drive car, you won't be able to fishtail around corners.
That Chevette also has Fiero brake rotors and calipers on the front, Ford Crown Victoria full-size station wagon drums on the back, a roll-cage front to back, and I cut the dashboard in half to save six pounds. Six. The interior is a steel can with a driver's seat. That's it. And I personally bored that motor 0.030" over, shaved the heads to bring the compression ratio to 9.3:1, and ported and polished the intake and ports. The carb is a 600 CFM Carter ThermoQuad with a cool-can on the fuel line and a phenolic spacer to keep the float bowl from getting warm.
I'm a computer geek, but I'm also an old-school gear-head. I built the motor in my car. At this point, it's basically a NASCAR motor with two cylinders missing. You probably took yours to be "tuned" at a "speed shop" that deals in emasculated 4-bangers.
If you're like most Prelude owners I know, you've added 300lbs in stereo equipment, tinted the windows, put on $1,200 rims, and a big "Powered By Honda" sticker. (The "Powered By Honda" sticker might be impressive if you'd earned the right to put it on a Tercel.)
You're outclassed.
As a final warning, I grew up in Ottawa, Canada. Prime snowbelt. Lemme tell you, you learn quickly why cops and racecars *aren't* front wheel drive. And I've raced in several classes at both Luskville Dragway and Capital City Speedway.
Wanna go?
Care to race for pink slips?
Still so sure, buddy-boy?
I'd look forward to driving around with the crushed remains of a Prelude as the winter ballast in the back of my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram.
Seriously though, it's great to see the cool things people do with their old computers.
For sure!
I built a server once for a guy who didn't want to replace an old case he had kicking around. It wasn't quite of this class, it was a really nasty old 486DX-25 fullsize tower generic clone. But he *loved* that case, and wanted it to have a little more oomph.
Into that case, I was able to stuff an Asus ATX motherboard with a Pentium II 350 (back when they were still current), with many of the same obstacles this guy had in building his Barney case.
In the end, the ole 486 looked completely original. Keyboard adapter to get a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard (the old two-tone brown one) connected to it, and an NEC Multisync 3D. He used it more as a lightweight server, but especially enjoyed the look of the front LED display on the case still set to 25MHz.
One of my favorite pastimes is working on old cars, and this is very much the high-tech equivalent to stuffing a 7.2L Chrysler big-block V8 into a four door 1970 Dodge Dart. It's a Granny Car with an attitude. And I think a Celeron under the hood of an original PC certainly qualifies - especially with more attention to having it look dead original.
Here's my own sleeper. It's a Chevette with a Buick 231 V6 stuffed under the hood. It looks crusty, with faded paint and a cheesy hood scoop on it. But it pulls 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile, which is faster than the 13.1 the guy in the Camaro beside me pulled. Heheheh.
I love sleepers, whether they're computers or cars.
Hmmm. I see no static control at all, no wrist straps, no static mats, no ionizers, I hope the air conditioning is off when they build boards...
Yeah. It's like speaking to the head tech at a sucky little computer store somewhere. "Nah, you don't really need to worry about that." Course, he can't figure out why most of his systems come back with intermittant crashes and similar silly problems.
I didn't notice that right away, actually. Most of my design and development has always been with analog parts, and there's little CMOS there. :)
Thus the term 'sweatshop' Although the ionic contamination of the solder pads from sweat and skin oils wont help either...I wonder what the yield-rate on hand-soldered SMT ICs is, in a production environment. Even with an artist at work, I can't imagine it being all that high.
That's a nice workshop, but I don't think they do much prototyping there - it looks great for small assembly runs.
Wanna see what a real radar prototyping and development workshop looks like? Check this out.
That looks insanely hard to solder. Wow. I'd not believe it, but look at all those chips. A good fake if it is fake.Without a hot air rework station, it's pretty hard to do SMT by hand... it's possible, though. I did several video buffer circuits by hand, then I contracted out the rest because it was cheaper than my time.
I once knew a guy who could solder a surface-mount 486 into place with an ordinary soldering iron. It was terrifying to behold.
Yea really... This is about as usefull as the classic BBS text file on how to assemble a nuclear weapon.
"Step 3) Okay, now you need to do is steal some weapons grade plutonium"
Bah. Just go to Home Depot and special-order 500,000 smoke detectors. Americium 241 is fissionable.
yea, okay... Thanks for that tid bit.Note that all you need to do is call up the phone company and get a bare leased line. If a taxi company in Ottawa can do it, so can you.
Then, go to Fry's or whoever, buy two DSL modems, plug them into each side of the line, and you're up and running. There's gonna be some configuration there, but that's it.
Speaking as one who has bought and installed dozens of leased bare copper lines (mostly for old FSK modem data), the hardest part is explaining to the (non-technical) salesperson at the telco what kind of line I need.
Incidentally, Miralla Lunardo at Bell Canada needed it explained to her that Pearson International Airport's Terminal Three doesn't actually have a street address.
One thing you have to remember is most T-1, DSL, etc contracts specifically state you can not resell bandwidth. If you were going to do this you better make sure whatever you use for your uplink legally lets you resell bandwidth (99% of the time its going to be illegal).
That's why the contract you sign with the guy states that the rental is chargeable on the 1 square foot occupied by the modem.
If you haven't read Cringley before, he's in an area where he can't get DSL access. However, if you can talk a business (who has a T-1 or better) or a local ISP to let you set one end of your connection there, then you're in business.
And just think, you'd have your own DSL, on your own private loop, *without PPPoE*!
While Roaring Penguin's PPPoE kicks butt, PPPoE is still a messy kludge, and being able to get away from it is reason enough to attempt something like this.
I'm hardly a neophyte when it comes to technical stuff, but a lot of this article went over my head. Am I alone here? Maybe I'm just tired right now.
It's really that easy.
All you're ordering from the phone company is a pair of copper wires going from point A to point B. The names differ depending on the phone company, but that's all it is. Two pieces of copper wire, which go from your house to your friend's house.
Now, within reason, you can pump anything you want across that wire. Voice, ordinary modem data, etc.
DSL is simply a special kind of 56k modem. It carries the data exactly the same way as an ordinary modem, but it uses a few tricks so that you can use the telephone line at the same time. For one thing, it carries the data at higher frequencies than voice communications - that's how it doesn't interfere with voice. The next thing is that it doesn't load down the telephone line enough for the telephone company's equipment to detect that a phone is off-hook. But aside from that, it's just a 56k modem.
An ordinary modem is restricted to run no higher than about 3kHz, leaving a small pipe to carry the data. On the other hand, DSL typically starts at about 5kHz, and depending on circuit (line) quality, can go up to about 256kHz. That's a lot more bandwidth than a 56k modem has available; as a result, using 56k modem modulation techniques (QUAM, it's called, "QUadrature Amplitude Modulation"), you can carry a lot more data.
If you connect two DSL modems to the copper pair that you get from the telephone company, they should connect and communicate, just like two 56k modems on the same line. (Hell, you could even do it simultaneously!) That's all there is to it.
An established ISP merely has the telephone company connect a modem at the phone company's central office. Today, they're usually built into your "loop card", which is the device that connects your telephone line to the switching system.
Problems with a do-it-yourself copper line from the phone company could arise with distance (since the dry pair will probably go to the phone company and will be manually patched on the other customer's dry pair) and with EMI line coils. (Telephone companies will often put inductors across the line to help with stability for voice communications; often, these interfere with the high frequency DSL signal.)
If the sawtooth is a problem, why not drive with a square wave : draw from left to right, drop down a line, then draw back from right to left?
Uhhh... Okay. Very basic here.
A sweep circuit basically turns a given voltage into a beam position.
It does it like an oscilloscope graphs voltages by pulling the vertical sweep up or down based on the voltage applied to the input.
Now, this is oversimplifying for a variety of reasons, but follow me. Let's say you have a yoke that wants from 0-50 volts. 0 volts gives you a beam at the far left of the screen, and 50 volts puts it at the far right of the screen.
Since you want the beam to draw a line (in sync with the TV station's camera, no less) you have to ramp the voltage up from 0 to 50V.
Now, once you've achieved 50V and the beam is at the far right of the screen, you want it to go back to the left hand side of the screen as quickly as possible and do the sweep again. The voltage is dropped from 50V to 0 as quickly as possible. You've just described a sawtooth wave.
Let's say you're feeling creative and want to try a square wave. 0V 50V 0V 50V - the beam would be dragged across the screen far too quickly to draw a useable sweep. Sure, you could slow it down by increasing the inductance of the yoke - then it would take more time for the yoke to respond to the changes in voltage. First problem with that is that it would happen in both directions, even when you want the beam to return to its starting point as quickly as possible. If you plotted the voltage on a scope, you'd get a mushy exponential curve in each direction. And the beam deflection would occur with the same ugly lack of linearity... the beam would actually speed up and slow down during the sweep. Showing a circle on such a TV set would be less than satisfying.
Sure you'd need to buffer the incoming signal but so what?Most TV sets and xVGA computer monitors are still analog, so buffering it and trying to sync the buffer to the sweep would be another level of complexity.
then as the field in the yoke decays, the Damper (say a 6AX4) starts conducting to finish the sweep.
Uhhh... The damper works simply to recapture energy that would otherwise cause barkhausen (sp?) oscillations. Pull out the damper, you'll still have full sweep (and maybe flyback, output and yoke damage). There'll be a hell of a ring at the right hand side of the screen, though.
What happens is that as the flux collapses (mostly in the flyback), the output circuit, which is designed to be resonant at 15,750Hz, rings like a bell at a higher harmonic.
During the tube era, if you look at a TV schematic, most of the dampers were even run off a separate winding on the flyback. The separate winding damped the oscillation and provided a nice bonus: the damper rectified the induced voltage, and it was fed to many output stages in the set as something called "B+ Boost".
I've got a fairly comprehensive collection of old TV sets. Of course, almost all the paper and early electrolytic capacitors are shot when you get an antique TV set. In one of them, a 1953 General Electric, I measured the B+ boost as 550V. It was used to drive the vertical and audio output stages. Symptomatically, it's like a modern TV set: if anything is wrong with the horizontal circuit, the set plays dead. Tube filaments with their cheery glow, but nothing else.
This isn't true, at least for horizontal deflection (which requires the most energy). The output amplifier is basically running in switching mode; the sawtooth is generated by the energy stored in and released from the yoke's inductance. The dI/dt energy released can be stored elsewhere for the next cycle (in another inductor or in a capacitor) or just dissipated -- but not in the amplifier.
It's nice to finally hear from someone else on Slashdot who apparently has some clue of electronics! :)
But I beg to differ. Maybe not in more modern TV sets and monitors, but on most stuff right up to the mid-80s, you could clearly pull the sawtooth off the plate of the horizontal oscillator or vertical oscillator using an oscilloscope.
Resonance is what keeps the TV set efficient enough to be practical, but it's not what makes the sawtooth. It's far too fundamental to be trusted simply to the resonance of the yoke.
Instead of a big hot power waster being driven in linear mode, we have an array of transistors being snapped on and off in digital mode
Okay. How do you make the big array of transistors output the linear voltage that you need? A big ladder of resistors...
So, instead of having the cost of one transistor, the manufacturer has that much more to deal with. The price rises and the reliability drops.
Remember, these things are gonna be sold to idiot consumers, who can't understand technical benefits of anything.
I've looked for power amplifier ICs, but have not found them. I think that an IC package is just not suitable for power dissapation.
One. Power ICs are usually not in DIP packages.
Two. You'll seldom find them at Radio Shack.
Examples of *common* power ICs: LM383 audio amplifier. LM78xx and LM79xx voltage regulators. The big flat-pack voltage regulators you find in lots of VCRs.
This is a new technology that can integrate into existing production lines and can halve the depth of a CRT type tube. A TV normally 22 inches deep would be only 11 inches
This is nothing new, but it's an incremental improvement. I'd like some technical info before I can decide whether or not this is just a marketing stunt or other dubious improvement.
When TV sets first came out in the 1940s, their CRTs more resembled oscilloscopes. They were long, and with small screens. Their deflection angles were about 25 degrees.
As the early 1950s dawned, TV sets started to feature electromagnetic deflection. New, horizontal and vertical ouput tubes were suddenly able to support the current requirements of deflecting the beam 45 degrees towards a new big-screen 17" display.
The 1960s saw the beginning of the embrace of color television. As there are three electron beams in color TV sets, the neck was bigger than in monochrome sets. More deflection current was required to drive a 17" color set than a 17" black and white. High-tech new beam power amplifier tubes were developed to deal with the loads - compactron tubes like the 6LU8 and 21GY5 replaced the venerable 6BQ6. The spillover was that the mass-produced new high-power deflection tubes could also be used to make tighter deflection angles on black and white sets; the 19DUP4 was a Philco B&W picture tube released in 1965. It had a whopping 110 degree deflection angle, making for a TV set that had a 19" display but was only a foot deep.
Solid state TV sets using high-power MOSFET transistors have been able to handle the bigger current to drive new tight-deflection 110 degree color tubes. So far, it's been incremental.
But there remains a problem. A TV set's deflection yoke has to be driven with a sawtooth wave. There's a slow ramp up in voltage, then it quickly snaps down to off. Then another slow ramp and another quick snap. This corresponds to the beam sweeping sideways across the screen and then resetting to the left hand side very quickly.
Because the output amplifiers are neither fully on nor fully off, they're running in linear mode. All the energy not actually used to drive the yoke during the ramp is simply wasted as heat. But that energy isn't free... won't these things be meant to deal with Energy Star and other certifications? Tighter deflection means more deflection current means more wasted power in the amplifiers... and if the EPA buckles by defining a new guideline for thin monitors like these will purport to be, they'll be in competition with LCD monitors.
LCD will win.
The CRT will always be with us, but its time in the mainstream is coming to an end. This sounds too much like a marketing ploy, and goes too far against physics to be anything else.
Don't be an idiot. Railing against Canadian Content ignores the fact that without it, VERY LITTLE Canadian music would get played on the radio.
If it were good, people would want to listen to it, and it would therefore get airplay, all without laws which erode my freedom.
The problem, if there is one, is the perception that "mediocre music" gets forced onto the air, excluding better American music. That's a load of sh*t.If it were good, you wouldn't need to force people to listen to it.
Unfortunately, Canadian society is full of sufficient people who are similarly-minded to yourself that the problem isn't going to go away. Canadian society is full of the rust-holes of government intervention, and people have been used to it since Trudeau.
Canada is too broken to bother attempting to fix.
Equating it to a car, it's been very expensive, it's always broken, it gets terrifically poor gas mileage (sucking up over 50% of my income), gets mediocre performance, and has those nasty automatic seatbelts that assume you're not smart enough to wear them of your own accord. In short, it would be precisely the sort of car for which scrap-metal handling equipment was invented.
if they say 'sudio', does this mean they are subject to the "Genesis Tax" (AKA, the "Phil Collins Tax")?
Even worse. Since the Canadian government has decided that we citizens of the great white arctic hell aren't smart enough to choose our own music, the CRTC (Canadian equivalent to the FCC) forces it on us with the Canadian Content act.
All Canadian radio and television broadcasters must play at least 40% Canadian content.
That was bumped up nationally, from 35%, in response to the fact that Q107 Toronto started syndicating the Howard Stern Radio Show.
And the media tax goes to support all those Canadian "artists" who are being "robbed" by piracy. The talented Canadian musicians get Green Cards and get the hell out pretty quickly, leaving only the chaff. Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.
Ah, I love my government. I get to listen (WAV, others available) to the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon twice a day on my local radio station because they can't play what people want to hear.
Further, American TV networks are frequently censored on Canadian cable systems, based on Canadian broadcast law. Here's what you get when they do that.
I feel so trapped by my government.
I wonder if the lack of a free Canadian broadcast media is grounds for me to claim refugee status in the United States...
According to HP's Agilent optoelectronics spinoff, in the time it takes for the tungsten filaments in your car's brake lights to become red hot, at 75 MPH, your car would have travelled 25 feet.
I've already got some on my 1976 Dodge Ram. When the brake or turn signals go on, it looks like one of those new Cadillac Eldorados. :) Any news of newer and brighter LEDs is always welcomed. They affect our lives in myriad ways.
You just have to laugh out loud when you read something like this. A company that has so much scrutiny focused on it for underhanded tactics - is using some of the most fraudulent tactics known to man.
Oh, I agree, it's funny as all hell. But the lobbying groups are doing it.
A parallel pretty close to home for both of us is the Walkerton water crisis.
The mayor didn't supervise the water supply very well and has even helped to keep PR nightmares (like people getting sick from the water) quiet.
Now, his minions are taking the fall, but you'd think that it would have killed his credibility. No way! The idiot residents of Walkerton re-elected him.
It's as dumb as Detroiters voting for Coleman Young over and over and over... despite his noble views, he was clearly destructive to the city.
Just like these mayors, Microsoft will manage to skirt the PR nightmare. Just you watch.
Quoting from article:
Steve Larsen, who heads the attorney general's new Cyber consumer resource center, said in a message to Mangus: "It seems reasonable that a customer should not have to pay for service they can't get. If you can't watch your cable TV or your newspaper doesn't show up for days/weeks at a time, I assume you won't pay. I believe that is all your customers ask here regardless of fault."Scenario. Some idiot is driving a poorly-maintained car which was ill-conceived at the design stage. Maybe he didn't even know he was driving...
A wheel breaks off and his car plays Guardrail Ping-Pong on the turnpike.
The ensuing traffic jam shuts down the city's busiest artery, halting all commerce in the city. Your newspaper doesn't arrive as a result.
Multiply that by many, many cars at the same time.
Why don't we go after the bigger problem and charge the jackasses who designed perpetually failure-prone cars and the jackass owners who don't maintain them?
Going after them instead of the local highway contractor seems like a better idea to me.
Especially since these drivers have no excuse for not knowing how dangerous their flawed little cars are.
anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today...
Hey, Cowboy Kneel, Commander Taco, etc.. at least some of your users want to know all about the gory details of how and why the database melted down.
We need you to tell us. We live vicariously through you.
Hope the downtime was the worst of the damage.
If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.
Where I used to work, we had a cranky old curmudgeon of an engineer. He was great fun; he knew how to use AutoCAD, but he hated it. Every time Windows would BSoD on him, out would come the slide rule from its padded case. And he was an artist with it.
the 'geographical' excuse is a pretty big one tho'
I'm in rural England, and the earliest DSL will be available here is most likely 2003, cable is just.. not going to happen..
>:(
Oh, I'm sorry, that really sucks.
There are a couple of things. If you have a cable TV provider, there is *no reason* why they'd have technical limitations to providing high speed access within their coverage areas - it's just a question of whether or not they're willing to spend all the money to retrofit all the distribution amplifiers to be bidirectional. After all, cable Internet is nothing compared to a TV channel in bandwidth. NTSC and PAL both require about 6MHz of bandwidth for video only; by contrast, through basically the same tricks as a 56k modem uses to get that speed on a 5kHz telephone line, my DSL achieves 1.2Mbps within about 192kHz of bandwidth. One allocated "TV channel" could serve hundreds of users.
Upstream is trickier, of course, but again, that's at least bidirectional RF distribution amplifiers, if not an inelegant but effective kludge like using your existing 56k modem and dial-up for uploading.
I'm judging from that you have either no cable television service nearby, or your CATV provider is pretty backwards. Sorry.
DSL is a very neat hack, but distance tends to attenuate the low-frequency RF carrier that the telco cleverly superimposes on your phone line.
Around here, we've got another option besides a cable monopoly and several DSL flavors: www.look.ca's "UltraFAST 2" wireless high-speed Internet service. Look started out offering a microwave relay-based alternative to cable television or satellite dishes, and when they bought out an ISP, this was the logical extension. I know a couple of their users, and they've been pretty happy with it. One of them is way out in the boondocks so he can't get cable or DSL, but with a little tower in his back yard, he's got line-of-sight to the CN Tower nearly 50 miles away - and therefore microwave "cable" television and wireless high-speed Internet access.
Look has also got points of presence on a few cellular and radio station towers around town, so they're apparently pretty easy to get if you can spot one of their POPs on the horizon.
(He's also an amateur radio operator, so the 75 foot tower already in his backyard helped him convince the installation technician that it would work... [grin])
Good luck getting something like that soon. Like I say, your only excuse is geographical.
The broadband users of the internet are the ones that torment the little people. All too often they forget their true origins; where they came from back in the good old days before there were even 56k modems.
Oh, give me a break. I've got 1.2Mbps DSL with a static IP for $40/mo. As much as I love it, I will *never* forget where I came from.
My first home Internet connection was in 1988, as a kid in high school. It was a shell account on a Sun at Carleton University, and my connection was through a DEC LA-36 teletype and a 110-baud former phone company modem.
(As an aside, anyone else make the mistake of trying to run vi with a teletype? Urk.)
While the teletype was too bulky to keep, I do still have the old 110 baud modem.
Every now and then I'll fire up my old DEC VT-100, hook it up to my FreeBSD box, and log in at 300 baud for nostalgia's sake.
Nope; they're neat, but they're historical, like the 56k modem. Consumer broadband is here. Your only excuse for not having it is geographical.