the 48GX is a good graphing calc, but the HP 32S II is still at the top of my list for engineering calculations. discontinued at about $60 new, used ones regularly sell for $125-150 on eBay. it has the sanest layout of any calculator I have ever touched, and all the operations I need to use are very fast to key in.
the ugly-ass 33S was designed as a replacement, but it offers negative improvement.
It remains true until the user forces it to be false, such as in comparator operation. But you are of course correct that the virtual short can be defeated.
The op-amp, "operational amplifier", is a transistor device which has two input terminals, the inverting (-) and noninverting (+) inputs, and one output. It also has two voltage supplies, positive and negative. It has the following properties which make it interesting:
The input terminals draw very little current, in other words a "high impedance" input -- in most cases you can assume that it is drawing zero current from its inputs. This means preceding stages in an amplifier achieve the highest gain possible, and don't need to provide much current.
The output terminal is able to provide relatively heavy current supply/sink; in other words, it is a low-impedance output. This means following stages in an amplifier can also achieve maximum gain.
There is a "virtual short circuit" across the input terminals. This is to say that the voltage difference between them is very close to zero at all times.
This gives rise to all sorts of interesting uses. A simple trick involving Kirchhoff's Current Law allows an op-amp, with two or three resistors, to act as a simple gain amplifier with great input, output, and bandwidth performance. Add capacitors in the feedback loop, and you can exploit the exponential characteristics of the capacitor and build a circuit to model differential equations -- you can use these amplifiers to perform operations like differentiation and integration. These are the famous "analog computers" of the 40's-60's which so diligently simulated missile trajectories. Sum or subtract as many inputs as you want.
On the inside, op-amps of today usually have a differential input stage to provide high input impedance and voltage gain, followed by one internal stage of high voltage gain, followed by an output stage to provide high current gain to provide a low-impedance output. Field-effect transistors (FETs) are usually used in the input stage, due to their naturally near-infinite input resistance. High frequency amps sometimes require the use of traditional bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) due to their better HF characteristics (a result of lower internal capacitance); BJTs have significant input current, and care must be taken both by the designer and the engineer to drive them properly.
In short: op-amps are really easy to use and cheap as dirt. Any time someone wants to make a signal louder and not deal with a whole lot of fuss, the op-amp is the natural choice.
I am another dissatisfied Jumpdomain customer. their turnaround time for support was, in my case, 2 weeks. at one point I had opened over fifty support tickets because fuck that place. I lost my domain and it got poached by a cybersquatter called Domain Contender. (more like Domain Cocktaster am I right!)
Is this really a hoax? It sounds like it could be real or fake, but there's no April 1st giveaway on the site -- in fact the pages say they were last edited several days ago.
In any case, here's to Gentoo users being the weeniest of us all.
haha, that reminds me of a project a couple of friends had a few years ago. it was a simple infrared device, which was designed to cheaply communicate fixed information with a PDA; for example, placed next to a museum painting it could beam your PDA information about the painting and artist.
I like Word on OS X, but only after I spend an hour turning off all the blinky shit that Microsoft throws in to "help" the user. It costs way too much though -- I would care about that if I'd ever paid for it.
"industry"? try "bazaar", or more accurately, "bazaar with no buyers".
I'm not trolling here -- in my eyes, there just isn't really much of an industry around free software. Those lucky few who have made a couple bucks tend to have had to do it in a service industry, like technical support or software piracy.
Sure, it's the "Linux way" but sometimes the world is better served by one or two major versions of the same thing, rather than thirty or forty all clamoring for market share. If there were One True Distro, far more people in industry would take Linux seriously; likewise, if there were a single, well-supported, well-equipped Linux desktop system, that would go much further toward widespread adoption than aging computer shops propping themselves up by hiring 17-year-olds to install Mandrake on P3 systems.
Back on the thought of tubes in amplifiers, its funny to me that the reason that tubes are better is specifically because they are less accurate than the transitors. The "crunch" and "warmth" are due to distinct flaws in the signal reproduction that just happen to sound good.
That's only half the story; yes, vacuum tubes (triodes in particular, like the 12AX7/12AT7 input stages of instrument amps) generate a lot of second-order (octave) harmonics, which make the music "sound better", even though total harmonic distortion ends up somewhere around 5-7%.
The other major reasons they are used are because they fail nicely (as opposed to a transistor, which smokes, heats and often explodes), and when overdriven, they clip the signal nicely. Transistors sound god-awful when overdriven.
Proponents of the "flammable fabric" theory contend that the extremely flammable iron oxide and aluminium impregnated cellulose acetate butyrate coating could have caught fire from atmospheric static, resulting in a leak through which flammable hydrogen gas could escape. After the disaster the Zeppelin company's engineers determined this skin material, used only on the Hindenburg, was more flammable than the skin used on previous craft. Cellulose acetate butyrate is of course flammable but iron oxide increases the flammability of aluminium powder. In fact iron oxide and aluminium can be used as components of solid rocket fuel or thermite.
The Hindenburg didn't go down because it was filled with hydrogen; it burned because its skin was basically made of thermite. The hydrogen didn't explode.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the internet exist if somebody is connected?
the 48GX is a good graphing calc, but the HP 32S II is still at the top of my list for engineering calculations. discontinued at about $60 new, used ones regularly sell for $125-150 on eBay. it has the sanest layout of any calculator I have ever touched, and all the operations I need to use are very fast to key in.
/usr/bin/dc variant called dci that comes close.
the ugly-ass 33S was designed as a replacement, but it offers negative improvement.
I love the 32S II so much, I wrote a
It remains true until the user forces it to be false, such as in comparator operation. But you are of course correct that the virtual short can be defeated.
This gives rise to all sorts of interesting uses. A simple trick involving Kirchhoff's Current Law allows an op-amp, with two or three resistors, to act as a simple gain amplifier with great input, output, and bandwidth performance. Add capacitors in the feedback loop, and you can exploit the exponential characteristics of the capacitor and build a circuit to model differential equations -- you can use these amplifiers to perform operations like differentiation and integration. These are the famous "analog computers" of the 40's-60's which so diligently simulated missile trajectories. Sum or subtract as many inputs as you want.
On the inside, op-amps of today usually have a differential input stage to provide high input impedance and voltage gain, followed by one internal stage of high voltage gain, followed by an output stage to provide high current gain to provide a low-impedance output. Field-effect transistors (FETs) are usually used in the input stage, due to their naturally near-infinite input resistance. High frequency amps sometimes require the use of traditional bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) due to their better HF characteristics (a result of lower internal capacitance); BJTs have significant input current, and care must be taken both by the designer and the engineer to drive them properly.
In short: op-amps are really easy to use and cheap as dirt. Any time someone wants to make a signal louder and not deal with a whole lot of fuss, the op-amp is the natural choice.
This article is written more like a 4th grade book report than a technical analysis. It represents about twenty seconds I will never, ever get back.
I am another dissatisfied Jumpdomain customer. their turnaround time for support was, in my case, 2 weeks. at one point I had opened over fifty support tickets because fuck that place. I lost my domain and it got poached by a cybersquatter called Domain Contender. (more like Domain Cocktaster am I right!)
Is this really a hoax? It sounds like it could be real or fake, but there's no April 1st giveaway on the site -- in fact the pages say they were last edited several days ago.
In any case, here's to Gentoo users being the weeniest of us all.
just get him wet, and the population problem is solved.
Judging by your post, I have no choice but to assume that you think a laser printer which can toast designs into bread using PostScript is a 'toy'.
I've got a $45,000 grilled cheese bearing the face of the Blessed Virgin that says you're wrong.
1. It's an institute, not a university;
2. It's an institvte, not an institute;
3. Without Emacs, MIT stops.
Perhaps being right next to the Guinness brewery explains why not much work was done there.
This puts it well within the reach of Slashdot.
Never again will we have to use the crappiest search function ever! God be praised!
and should never be treated as such. If you want security, use strong encryption.
This is as it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago, now, and in the future. Plaintext should be treated as though you were sending a postcard in the mail.
A girl who calls herself "Zoe Flower" is going to lecture us on feminism in video gaming.
I'll go back to playing nethack now.
haha, that reminds me of a project a couple of friends had a few years ago. it was a simple infrared device, which was designed to cheaply communicate fixed information with a PDA; for example, placed next to a museum painting it could beam your PDA information about the painting and artist.
they called the prototype the "iPod".
I like Word on OS X, but only after I spend an hour turning off all the blinky shit that Microsoft throws in to "help" the user. It costs way too much though -- I would care about that if I'd ever paid for it.
It sucked from the get-go, or at least the Mac version did. The Apple ][ version was elite.
I hope Apple writes a winner, I'd love to avoid MS Office in the future.
Although I think the latest rev, 3.4.2, came out last year, nethack gets my vote for this year (and every year, while we're at it).
It's also the only game which runs perfectly on my blessed greased +2 iBook.
"industry"? try "bazaar", or more accurately, "bazaar with no buyers".
I'm not trolling here -- in my eyes, there just isn't really much of an industry around free software. Those lucky few who have made a couple bucks tend to have had to do it in a service industry, like technical support or software piracy.
Combining the weaknesses of five different package managers will surely alleviate "dependency hell."
I'll be over here, playing nethack on my NetBSD box and giggling.
Sure, it's the "Linux way" but sometimes the world is better served by one or two major versions of the same thing, rather than thirty or forty all clamoring for market share. If there were One True Distro, far more people in industry would take Linux seriously; likewise, if there were a single, well-supported, well-equipped Linux desktop system, that would go much further toward widespread adoption than aging computer shops propping themselves up by hiring 17-year-olds to install Mandrake on P3 systems.
Back on the thought of tubes in amplifiers, its funny to me that the reason that tubes are better is specifically because they are less accurate than the transitors. The "crunch" and "warmth" are due to distinct flaws in the signal reproduction that just happen to sound good.
That's only half the story; yes, vacuum tubes (triodes in particular, like the 12AX7/12AT7 input stages of instrument amps) generate a lot of second-order (octave) harmonics, which make the music "sound better", even though total harmonic distortion ends up somewhere around 5-7%.
The other major reasons they are used are because they fail nicely (as opposed to a transistor, which smokes, heats and often explodes), and when overdriven, they clip the signal nicely. Transistors sound god-awful when overdriven.
Proponents of the "flammable fabric" theory contend that the extremely flammable iron oxide and aluminium impregnated cellulose acetate butyrate coating could have caught fire from atmospheric static, resulting in a leak through which flammable hydrogen gas could escape. After the disaster the Zeppelin company's engineers determined this skin material, used only on the Hindenburg, was more flammable than the skin used on previous craft. Cellulose acetate butyrate is of course flammable but iron oxide increases the flammability of aluminium powder. In fact iron oxide and aluminium can be used as components of solid rocket fuel or thermite.
h i/hindenburg_disaster.html
from http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/h/
The Hindenburg didn't go down because it was filled with hydrogen; it burned because its skin was basically made of thermite. The hydrogen didn't explode.
A nuclear disaster would wean the US off a lot of things.... oil, food, water, you name it.