> First their was BCPL, then B, then C. Logically the next language in this family would be P.
No, no, no. First there was CPL.
And logically the next language will be PL.
PL/1, to be precise.
Boy, I do feel old, too.
Re:Servers were never allowed out on cable
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 1
Cable bandwidth is
asymmetric. There's typically a downstream pool of about 27 Mbps (depending on settings) shared among all users, while the upstream pool
is more often in the 2 Mbps or less range. This comes about because upstream has to fit into the narrow patches of usable spectrum below 40
MHz, while downstream just fits among the TV channels between 50 and 750 MHz.
So stick a server out there, get Slashdotted (or even just get mildly popular), and the upstream bandwidth is wiped out for your whole
neighborhood (technically, the area of your optical conversion node and CMTS channel). This is a big risk, so the cable companies don't take
it. Instead, they do give you some free hosting space at their data centers.
The US cable modems run DOCSIS MAC. DOCSIS MAC is designed to prevent bandwidth hogging by a single user.
DOCSIS upstream works on time grants. If CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System, the box at the other end of the cable) doesn't give you the grant, you don't get the bandwidth. Upstream can be limited individually for each CM.
AT&T Broadband in my area sends a lot of snail mail with "upstream limited to 128 Kbps" in tiny print. I don't know if it is really true (I have DSL, thank you), but technically it's no problem to set up a cap like that.
First of all, the four cornerstones of programming:
The Art of Computer Programming -- Donald E. Knuth;
The Practice of Programming -- Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike;
The Science of Programming -- David Gries;
A Discipline of Programming -- Edsger W. Dijkstra.
The last two books are out of print and a little dated - but very, very good.
Here's more:
Design Patterns -- Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides;
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design With Applications -- Grady Booch;
Object Solutions : Managing the Object-Oriented Project -- Grady Booch;
The Mythical-Man Month -- Frederick P. Brooks.
> That's exactly it. Any names, links, other info?
Unfortunately, no.
I've seen it in Moscow's "GosKomGidroMet" - government weather monitoring service. The PC was hooked up to the weather satellite downlink computer and used as a basic satellite image display tool.
> Not knowing much about electronics, how expensive would it be to have a standard keyboard with little (7mm x 7mm)
> LCD or LED displays on each key?
...
> P.S. I was going to patent the idea;)
:) or not, there's prior art, maybe patented already, but patent should have already expired: I've seen the thing live in hardware, COTS, in late 1980s, connected to a PC running MS Windows 1.0 (the one that couldn't overlay windows!) The guy told me his boss paid more than $1000 for it.
Pushing SHIFT changed displays on all the buttons. It was strange.
You could download any font to it. The one I've seen had Cyrillic set up on Caps Lock.
Seems to me that the DNA file system is steganographic.
To the snooping researches data looks like a bunch of drivel. The intendent recipients (cells in different tissues) apply different keys and extract blocks where the key matches.
Funny thing, the slowiness of Yahoo listings worked to my advantage.
Both houses, bought in 1996 and 1998, were already sold when I found them. Well, to be precise, they were under contract. No agent shows their clients houses that are already under contract: it's a waste of time for them.
Both times, my wife and I were able to yank the house by offering better terms (but less money).
I don't think I will be able to pull this trick the third time...
I found my first house in 1996 on Yahoo Real Estate listings.
I fouund my second house in 1998 on Yahoo Real Estate listings.
Now, Slashdot realized that there is something called real estate... Yahoo!?
> Convergence - it's not just for breakfast anymore...
QMS 2001 Knowledge System, an ultimate convergence device, bombed seven years ago.
It was cheaper to buy printer and scanner separately. And if one of them breaks, the other one still works.
Qualcomm PDQ wasn't a hit. Same thing.
PC was not a convergence device - it took off because of new functionality (VisiCalc, Turbo Pascal). Convergence came on-board later, when the price for add-on became lower than the standalone device.
MP3 in Clie is nice, but expansion port and screen resolution are the real thing I would pay my money for.
Here's the working URL to the Indian discussion board thread. They are talking in great detail about GSLV flight profile. Links to the MPEG video of the launch, too.
A copy on one of the posts on this thread:
>>>The vehicle has interesting flight profile: the core first stage burns out first at 100 seconds, and strap-ons are going until 160 sec., hauling an empty steel cylinger for a whole minute before stage separation...
Few points to note before any 'analysis' is done regarding this matter.
GSLV design is NOT altogether a new design. (In fact I would say it a larger PSLV). The constraints for ISRO to go in for altogether a new design is:
a) Resources - Men, Money, experience etc.
b) Time - it would have taken a considerably longer time to design a new vehicle (though more efficient & larger).
c) Proper test facilities - though we have been in the business of sending rockets up (and sometimes down)for quite sometime now, the test facilities available in India are not up to the desired level, I would say.
d) Launch pad - the existing launch pad was basically designed for PSLV. It is due to the redundant strength (higher factor of safety) that it is able to take the GSLV ; vice-versa, the GSLV had to be designed to suit the launch pad!
Based on above (and may be more) constraints, the scientists had to design a vehicle. Hence they used the PSLV core and Vikas engine for first stage, strap-ons and second stage.
Now the question - isn't it inefficient to carry 17 tons of metal for sixty seconds extra? - Yes it is, but there was no alternative because the strap-ons are attached to it.
Why can't the strap-ons be detached when the solid core is burns out, or extend the solid core burn to 160 seconds?
1. The solid core burns 125 tons for 100 secs - i.e., 1.25 ton / sec
2. the strap-ons burn liquid propellents for 162 secs - i.e., about 250 kg/sec/booster.(similar is the rate for second stage also)
(for a moment assume that the variations in propellent loading at different stages doesn't alter the overall thrust requirement, though that is not the case in reality)
If the strap-ons are to be jettisoned after 100 seconds, then (a) they have to burn the propellent at faster rate or (b) the balance (about 60 tons) propellents will have to be shifted to second stage. Alternately (c) make the solid core burn for 160 secs.
(a)is not possible because:
i) The EXISTING design of the vikas engine doesn't allow this since it must already be working at max trust level and propellent flow rate.
ii) there will be drastic increase in acceleration of the vehicle at lift-off, which will complicate matters further (as such from what I can see from the Video, the accelaration is quite good)
(b) is not possible because:
shifting 60 tons of propellent to stage 2 will make the vehicle "top heavy" - i.e., the centre of gravity will shift upwards making the vehicle unstable. Moreover, since the dia of the first and second stage are same, the additional propellent in stage 2 will make the vehicle very long. Result - the vehicle will tumble into the sea soon after lift-off. So this solution is also not workable.
(c) is not possible because:
being a solid core, the only way to manipulate the thrust/burn rate is by controlling the hollow shape at the core (usually a star shape bacause of large surface area). But if you enlarge or decrease the shape at the core, then it will affect the propellent load and also the burn rate. So this also is not a efficient or viable solution.
Agree, it is a waste of energy to carry 17 tons of casing for 60 secs more. But what is the weight of the vehicle after 100 secs? about 175 tons, which, if the empty shell is discarded would be about 158 tons. The penalty is about 10% additional weight. That is the compromise in design.
Then there is another wastage of about 1.2 tons of propellent when the onboard computer 'tests' the parameters before the solid core ignites..may be they will improve upon these wastages subsequently.
Another point to note is that it is not always true that the more the number of stages, the more efficient the design is..there is always a optimum level, and design as usual is a trade-off
From Yahoo: A key aspect of the GSLV is its Russian engine that uses liquid oxygen as a fuel that helps place the satellite in orbit as high
as 36,000 km in space.
It's hydrogen. Oxygen is oxidizer. Hydrogen is fuel.
GSLV uses hodgepodge of technologies: the L40 strap-ons and second stage L37.5 are from Ariane heritage, first solid stage S125 is Indian, the third stage C12 "cryo-12" is Russian KRB 12 "Kryogenic Rocket Block, 12 ton".
The vehicle has interesting flight profile: the core first stage burns out first at 100 seconds, and strap-ons are going until 160 sec., hauling an empty steel cylinger for a whole minute before stage separation.
Our 3-year-old wide format printer... has an internal rasterizer with 32MB RAM
Assuming 720 dpi and 4 primary colors, there is
enough RAM for only 129 square inches (without compression or MEt), not enough even for tabloid 11x17 paper.
So it will have to render in bands.
But to render in bands, PostScript needs to store the whole file (or the graphics primitives generated by the interpreter). 180MB will not fit into 32MB. There are three choices now: 1) printer hard disk, if available; 2) use image compression; 3) die.
Primitives file just maybe may fit: 12M vectors, assuming short vectors, smart encoding and dropping subpixel vectors... but then you have close to no memory for the raster buffer. It will take a long long time to print that file.
Rendering on the host is much better choice.
Original Apple LaserWriter had Motorolla 68000 at 11.16MHz and 1.5MB of memory, more then high-end personal computers at the time (1984).
5 hours does not surprise me at all. PostScript printers are optimized for text rendering, not vector rendering. 180MB of vector image at about 15 bytes per vector will be 12M vectors; the RIP is running at 700 vectors/sec. Not bad for (probably) MIPS running at 200 MHz without floating point - considering that PostScript vectors are rendered as rectangles with end caps and transitions, one-pixel accurate.
Size of the file doesn't matter - each sequence of vectors is rendered separately, slapped on the bit map of the page, and on to the next one.
HPGL/2 will not help - the complexity of the primitives is the same. HP/GL and PostScript share the same rendering backend on some printers.
Most plotters nowdays are wide-format inkjets with the same raster backend as other printers. Old pen plotters can't physically do 700 vectors/sec. No way. More like 25. How about drawing the same thing for five days, switching depleted pens on the fly? (reminds me of the old days... where's the old trusty 7225?)
There were a number of ground crew casualties during ICBM and equipmenttesting; I don't think this counts as manned flights casualties, does it?
This is tough for Americans to swallow. So, there are urban legends about Soviet secret space accidents. So far nothing was confirmed. If you have any hard facts, let me know.
In Russia, they call themself stalkers - after the novel Roadside Picnic and the movie Stalker
Some of them brag that they can get into Moscow Metro-2.
Workers in Chernobyl investigating the remains of the disaster often ignored safety regulations and radiation limits. They also called themselves stalkers.
Slashdot Mirror
> First their was BCPL, then B, then C. Logically the next language in this family would be P. No, no, no. First there was CPL. And logically the next language will be PL. PL/1, to be precise. Boy, I do feel old, too.
Cable bandwidth is asymmetric. There's typically a downstream pool of about 27 Mbps (depending on settings) shared among all users, while the upstream pool is more often in the 2 Mbps or less range. This comes about because upstream has to fit into the narrow patches of usable spectrum below 40 MHz, while downstream just fits among the TV channels between 50 and 750 MHz. So stick a server out there, get Slashdotted (or even just get mildly popular), and the upstream bandwidth is wiped out for your whole neighborhood (technically, the area of your optical conversion node and CMTS channel). This is a big risk, so the cable companies don't take it. Instead, they do give you some free hosting space at their data centers.
The US cable modems run DOCSIS MAC. DOCSIS MAC is designed to prevent bandwidth hogging by a single user.
DOCSIS upstream works on time grants. If CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System, the box at the other end of the cable) doesn't give you the grant, you don't get the bandwidth. Upstream can be limited individually for each CM.
AT&T Broadband in my area sends a lot of snail mail with "upstream limited to 128 Kbps" in tiny print. I don't know if it is really true (I have DSL, thank you), but technically it's no problem to set up a cap like that.
First of all, the four cornerstones of programming:
The Art of Computer Programming -- Donald E. Knuth;
The Practice of Programming -- Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike;
The Science of Programming -- David Gries;
A Discipline of Programming -- Edsger W. Dijkstra.
The last two books are out of print and a little dated - but very, very good.
Here's more:
Design Patterns -- Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides;
Object-Oriented Analysis and Design With Applications -- Grady Booch;
Object Solutions : Managing the Object-Oriented Project -- Grady Booch;
The Mythical-Man Month -- Frederick P. Brooks.
> That's exactly it. Any names, links, other info? Unfortunately, no. I've seen it in Moscow's "GosKomGidroMet" - government weather monitoring service. The PC was hooked up to the weather satellite downlink computer and used as a basic satellite image display tool.
> Not knowing much about electronics, how expensive would it be to have a standard keyboard with little (7mm x 7mm) ;)
> LCD or LED displays on each key?
...
> P.S. I was going to patent the idea
:) or not, there's prior art, maybe patented already, but patent should have already expired: I've seen the thing live in hardware, COTS, in late 1980s, connected to a PC running MS Windows 1.0 (the one that couldn't overlay windows!) The guy told me his boss paid more than $1000 for it.
Pushing SHIFT changed displays on all the buttons. It was strange.
You could download any font to it. The one I've seen had Cyrillic set up on Caps Lock.
Seems to me that the DNA file system is steganographic.
To the snooping researches data looks like a bunch of drivel. The intendent recipients (cells in different tissues) apply different keys and extract blocks where the key matches.
Imagine this in the near future:
http://stats.distributed.net/DNA/
Keyspace Checked: 4.042%
> I know there is definitely some delay
Funny thing, the slowiness of Yahoo listings worked to my advantage.
Both houses, bought in 1996 and 1998, were already sold when I found them. Well, to be precise, they were under contract. No agent shows their clients houses that are already under contract: it's a waste of time for them.
Both times, my wife and I were able to yank the house by offering better terms (but less money).
I don't think I will be able to pull this trick the third time...
I found my first house in 1996 on Yahoo Real Estate listings. I fouund my second house in 1998 on Yahoo Real Estate listings. Now, Slashdot realized that there is something called real estate... Yahoo!?
> Convergence - it's not just for breakfast anymore...
QMS 2001 Knowledge System, an ultimate convergence device, bombed seven years ago.
It was cheaper to buy printer and scanner separately. And if one of them breaks, the other one still works.
Qualcomm PDQ wasn't a hit. Same thing.
PC was not a convergence device - it took off because of new functionality (VisiCalc, Turbo Pascal). Convergence came on-board later, when the price for add-on became lower than the standalone device.
MP3 in Clie is nice, but expansion port and screen resolution are the real thing I would pay my money for.
Interesting... There's no info on KRB-12 on manufacturer's site, the have only 21 ton KVRB for Proton and Angara.
Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica mentions both KRB and KVRB in RD-56M article.
A copy on one of the posts on this thread:
>>>The vehicle has interesting flight profile: the core first stage burns out first at 100 seconds, and strap-ons are going until 160 sec., hauling an empty steel cylinger for a whole minute before stage separation...
Few points to note before any 'analysis' is done regarding this matter.
GSLV design is NOT altogether a new design. (In fact I would say it a larger PSLV). The constraints for ISRO to go in for altogether a new design is:
a) Resources - Men, Money, experience etc.
b) Time - it would have taken a considerably longer time to design a new vehicle (though more efficient & larger).
c) Proper test facilities - though we have been in the business of sending rockets up (and sometimes down)for quite sometime now, the test facilities available in India are not up to the desired level, I would say.
d) Launch pad - the existing launch pad was basically designed for PSLV. It is due to the redundant strength (higher factor of safety) that it is able to take the GSLV ; vice-versa, the GSLV had to be designed to suit the launch pad!
Based on above (and may be more) constraints, the scientists had to design a vehicle. Hence they used the PSLV core and Vikas engine for first stage, strap-ons and second stage.
Now the question - isn't it inefficient to carry 17 tons of metal for sixty seconds extra? - Yes it is, but there was no alternative because the strap-ons are attached to it.
Why can't the strap-ons be detached when the solid core is burns out, or extend the solid core burn to 160 seconds?
1. The solid core burns 125 tons for 100 secs - i.e., 1.25 ton / sec
2. the strap-ons burn liquid propellents for 162 secs - i.e., about 250 kg/sec/booster.(similar is the rate for second stage also)
(for a moment assume that the variations in propellent loading at different stages doesn't alter the overall thrust requirement, though that is not the case in reality)
If the strap-ons are to be jettisoned after 100 seconds, then (a) they have to burn the propellent at faster rate or (b) the balance (about 60 tons) propellents will have to be shifted to second stage. Alternately (c) make the solid core burn for 160 secs.
(a)is not possible because:
i) The EXISTING design of the vikas engine doesn't allow this since it must already be working at max trust level and propellent flow rate.
ii) there will be drastic increase in acceleration of the vehicle at lift-off, which will complicate matters further (as such from what I can see from the Video, the accelaration is quite good)
(b) is not possible because:
shifting 60 tons of propellent to stage 2 will make the vehicle "top heavy" - i.e., the centre of gravity will shift upwards making the vehicle unstable. Moreover, since the dia of the first and second stage are same, the additional propellent in stage 2 will make the vehicle very long. Result - the vehicle will tumble into the sea soon after lift-off. So this solution is also not workable.
(c) is not possible because:
being a solid core, the only way to manipulate the thrust/burn rate is by controlling the hollow shape at the core (usually a star shape bacause of large surface area). But if you enlarge or decrease the shape at the core, then it will affect the propellent load and also the burn rate. So this also is not a efficient or viable solution.
Agree, it is a waste of energy to carry 17 tons of casing for 60 secs more. But what is the weight of the vehicle after 100 secs? about 175 tons, which, if the empty shell is discarded would be about 158 tons. The penalty is about 10% additional weight. That is the compromise in design.
Then there is another wastage of about 1.2 tons of propellent when the onboard computer 'tests' the parameters before the solid core ignites..may be they will improve upon these wastages subsequently.
Another point to note is that it is not always true that the more the number of stages, the more efficient the design is..there is always a optimum level, and design as usual is a trade-off
From Yahoo: A key aspect of the GSLV is its Russian engine that uses liquid oxygen as a fuel that helps place the satellite in orbit as high as 36,000 km in space.
It's hydrogen. Oxygen is oxidizer. Hydrogen is fuel.
GSLV uses hodgepodge of technologies: the L40 strap-ons and second stage L37.5 are from Ariane heritage, first solid stage S125 is Indian, the third stage C12 "cryo-12" is Russian KRB 12 "Kryogenic Rocket Block, 12 ton".
The vehicle has interesting flight profile: the core first stage burns out first at 100 seconds, and strap-ons are going until 160 sec., hauling an empty steel cylinger for a whole minute before stage separation.
> Star City, on the other hand, was a small village evacuated of its original inhabitants
This is Baikonur. Star City is 40 min drive from Moscow. It's a training center. No launches whatsoever.
> Some of Gipsy Smith's multimedia cartoons were shown on Fox News cable TV channel.
Whoops, make it Gypsy Smith.
www.crosscircuit.com has conservative animated cartoons in Flash format. They used to have a bunch of them, but, hey, now it's on CD.
Some of Gipsy Smith's multimedia cartoons were shown on Fox News cable TV channel.
Black Rainbow
Sounds like a project name, doesn't it?
> republican, white congress, some of whom were in office and voted against civil-rights legislation in the 60's
I'm sorry, Senator Robert Byrd is a Democrat.
Our 3-year-old wide format printer ... has an internal rasterizer with 32MB RAM
Assuming 720 dpi and 4 primary colors, there is enough RAM for only 129 square inches (without compression or MEt), not enough even for tabloid 11x17 paper.
So it will have to render in bands.
But to render in bands, PostScript needs to store the whole file (or the graphics primitives generated by the interpreter). 180MB will not fit into 32MB. There are three choices now: 1) printer hard disk, if available; 2) use image compression; 3) die.
Primitives file just maybe may fit: 12M vectors, assuming short vectors, smart encoding and dropping subpixel vectors... but then you have close to no memory for the raster buffer. It will take a long long time to print that file.
Rendering on the host is much better choice.
Original Apple LaserWriter had Motorolla 68000 at 11.16MHz and 1.5MB of memory, more then high-end personal computers at the time (1984).
5 hours does not surprise me at all. PostScript printers are optimized for text rendering, not vector rendering. 180MB of vector image at about 15 bytes per vector will be 12M vectors; the RIP is running at 700 vectors/sec. Not bad for (probably) MIPS running at 200 MHz without floating point - considering that PostScript vectors are rendered as rectangles with end caps and transitions, one-pixel accurate.
Size of the file doesn't matter - each sequence of vectors is rendered separately, slapped on the bit map of the page, and on to the next one.
HPGL/2 will not help - the complexity of the primitives is the same. HP/GL and PostScript share the same rendering backend on some printers.
Most plotters nowdays are wide-format inkjets with the same raster backend as other printers. Old pen plotters can't physically do 700 vectors/sec. No way. More like 25. How about drawing the same thing for five days, switching depleted pens on the fly? (reminds me of the old days... where's the old trusty 7225?)
Sorry, link broken, dynamic site... Here it is:
Molded, self-adjusting, tapered foam ear plugs expand to fit your ear canal. Soil-resistant surface, hypo-allergenic. NRR 29 dB. Disposable. 5 pair per box.
Now if they could just make hard drives silent, we finally could hear ourselves think in a room with 3-4 computers
I use a special device to hear myself think.
we have lost 7 on the challenger and 3 in apollo ground fires... Compare ours with the Russian or Chinese
Russians lost 4 during flights and 1 in Apollo 1-like oxygen fire.
Technically, they lost no manned ships in space (one smashed in the ground, and one returned intact with 3 dead bodies).
Two launch aborts resulted in no casualties: Soyuz 18-1, Soyuz T-10-1.
There were a number of ground crew casualties during ICBM and equipment testing; I don't think this counts as manned flights casualties, does it?
This is tough for Americans to swallow. So, there are urban legends about Soviet secret space accidents. So far nothing was confirmed. If you have any hard facts, let me know.
In Russia, they call themself stalkers - after the novel Roadside Picnic and the movie Stalker
Some of them brag that they can get into Moscow Metro-2.
Workers in Chernobyl investigating the remains of the disaster often ignored safety regulations and radiation limits. They also called themselves stalkers.
C-Cube just announced so-called DoMiNo family of single-chip video codecs. Presumably, these puppies can encode HD at consumer price point.
Govermnent is not the answer.
Government is the question.
The answer is NO.