I've visited Jack's layout several times. To say it's impressive would be an understatement.
Jack is *the* expert on the Yosemite Valley Railroad and has modeled it down to the smallest detail, including time-table operation for the scheduling of the trains based on what was actually running on the real railroad in August of 1939.
And his craftsmanship is outstanding.
Jack is an engineer and is very familiar with computers and has used CAD to design to construct his layout.
To put it another way, Jack is an ESR or Linus equivalent in the model railroad community.
Well, I *am* a geologist (although my speciality isn't petroleum) and from what I've read and heard, the likelyhood of our present reserves of oil, gas, and coal being abiogenic is about as likely as it being discovered that Windows XP was secretly coded by Linus Torvalds in his "off" hours.
Now, it is believed that abiogenic hydrocarbons do occur in some instances. But they are limited in scope in volume. All the commercial accumulations of hydrocarbons are derived from organic orgins. A lot of evidence supports this all the way from where these reserves are found to chemical analysis.
To quote "Elements of Petroleum Geology" by Selley:
In concluding this review of theories for the abiogenic origin of petroleum hydrocarbons, it must be stressed that the apparently unquestionable instances of indigenous oil in basement are rare and not commercially important. Not only are the volumes of hydrocarbons trappen this way insignificant but the "reservoirs" are impermeable unless fractured.
We built a site for the New York Review of Books years ago with an online subscription model and it's been very successful.
The key -- that some folk seem to miss -- is that you need content that people are willing to pay to access. All too often the content provided by a subscription site isn't worth the price even if it was free. It also helps if your publication's demographic actually has money.
Other folks that know tools will make fun of you. A Milwaukee is a Real Man's(TM) tool. Seriously, it make little difference -- working on PCs isn't like driving screws through hardwood so any tool will get the job done.
Why do you own a separate set of nut drivers? Wouldn't it make more sense to have nut bits for your electric screwdriver?
I don't remember why I have them, but yes, a bit set for the electric screwdriver would do the job, too. But I don't use the nut drivers too often and usually have just a few fasteners of that type to do so it's just as easy to use a manual tool instead of swapping out the philips bit in the electric driver.
Here's a few suggestions from my toolkit that I've put together over the years. I might work on anything from a Sun server to a Wintel or Mac so the tools are pretty generic.
A power screwdriver. Most PCs have a large number of screws and doing them all by hand is (literally) a pain. I like the Milwaukee 2.4-Volt 2-Speed Cordless Screwdriver -- it's more expensive than some but is a quality tool that'll last. Get several extra batteries and an extra-long driver bit for easier access to motherboard screws.
A set of nut drivers. These are screwdrivers for nuts, especially those little nut-screws on the back of the PC that hold the serial and video connectors on.
A multimeter. Useful for all sorts of things from checking power at the outlet to grounding. Skip past the Wal-Mart cheapies and get a quality instrument like a Fluke.
A set of ball-drivers. These are hex (a.k.a. Allen head) driver tools with a ball on the end so you can work at an angle.
Torx drivers. Handy for working on laptops or newer machines. When you need it you need it -- no other tool will work.
A DOS boot disk.
An assortment of cables: a normal Ethernet, a cross-over, IDE, Floppy, USB, and serial. If you work on Unix or Linux servers or routers you might need to be able to hook up a serial terminal connection. I also like to have a set of extension cables for keyboard, mouse, and video for hooking up to equipment on racks.
Several extra PC power cords.
A cordless soldering iron (and the knowledge to use it). Not used very often but you never know...
And, last, a book: "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" by Scott Mueller. This books is an amazing resource -- it'll tell you the pin-outs for everything from an ATX power supply to an IDE hard drive. It's handy to have when working with old or odd hardware.
You can get 60 generic 1800mAh NiMH batteries for $54.95 US. They have some nice chargers, too.
Most of the NiMH batteries on the market are made by the same few companies and branded for the US market. You can save a load of money by buying un-branded generic cells from an importer and get the exact same battery with a different wrapper.
Or you can go to Home Depot and buy a 2 horsepower woodworking router with electronically governed speeds from 10k to 30k rpm. And it'll only cost you $100 bucks or so and will have no problem spinning a CD.
Plus, you have a very useful tool -- it's probably the most useful woodworking tool you can own.
I ordered a M10000 with a 1-GHz C3 CPU several weeks ago and expected it to be a Nehemiah core chip. I was disappointed to find it using the Ezra core since I really wanted to play with the hardware RNG.
Still, it's a nice setup.
BTW, the Red Hat 9 installer would kernel panic during startup but Red Hat 8 worked fine. I suspect the 9 installer is trying to run a i686 kernel when you really need a i386 for the VIA C3 CPU.
If you're lucky you'll have a late-model car that has the ability to plug in one of these adapters. It seems they plug into the wiring harness of factory units that have an option to add an OEM cd changer.
The choice of red for the PC is interesting in that it draws your eye to it. I downloaded one of the graph and switched the colors of the bars. Then on first glance the eye is drawn to the Mac and your first thought is that it won whatever the test was about.
If they really wanted to show info rather than a predetermined conclusion they would have done both bars in the same color.
Interesting jpeg artifacts in the gif files, too. Probably resaved as gif from jpegs done on a Mac!
I saw Mr. Lucus several times at the Borders bookstore in San Rafael.
Once, in the pre-Episode 1 days I was looking for a new book by Greg Bear and this fellow came up behind me to look at the Star Wars books shelved at the top of the book case in the new release Sci-Fi section. It was him. I figured he'd know all he needed about Star Wars, but hey, who knows.
Another time I was behind him in the check out line and he had a pile of Abbott & Costello videos. They best part was the check out girl freaking out when she saw the name on his credit card.
Someone should do this with cars, too. Let's put a Dodge Neon SRT-4 up against a BMW 325i. And when the tests prove the Dodge is much quicker than the BMW we can all have a good laugh at those poor fools that have BMWs and like them. And look how much more they paid. They obviously don't know what they're missing and secretly want a Dodge.
But, you know, there is more to the driving experience than raw performance. Likewise with computing.
I have a D100 and have had a D30 and will probably pick up a D1x in the near future.
I don't believe all the hype. Beside the obvious problem of how are you going to read these digital files (I assume you're using the RAW file format to get 12-bit color data) 50 years from now, I skeptical of claims that the current 6-megapixel or even 11-megapixel cameras can match the resolution of a properly exposed drum-scanned 35mm Velvia slide. And it'll be quite some time before digital can match the resolution and tonality of an 8x10 large-format film image.
Clipping the highlights and a limited dynamic range are still problems in the current crop of cameras, too.
And these things are expensive. Sure it'll come down, but I don't think the price of a computer system capable of editing and processing these 30 MB+ images files is going to get much cheaper. And you're going to need a wopper of a RAID to archive these images. Remember, CD-ROMs are only good for 10 years or so.
But, you're right--film photography is soon to be an alternative process. Most pros have little reason to stick with film since they can capitalize the cost of the equipment and make up the cost on savings in film processing and quicker turnaround.
Mom and Dad love digital as they can print and email family pictures to everyone and create their own christmas cards.
And grandparents love digital as they can get emailed pictures of all the grandkids as often as they'd like.
And they're all going to hate digital when all the pictures go poof when their cheap Windows machine crashes taking all the family photos with it. Backup, that much data? By Mom and Dad? I don't think so.
Many fine-art photographers, especially those using medium and large-format and B&W, are going to be sticking with film for quite some time.
And that's cool. I'm sticking with film for my medium and large format B&W work myself.
Astro cameras have very specialized chips. Most have some sort of active cooling to keep dark noise down and are of fairly low resolution compared to still digital cameras.
And they're normally monochrome, too. Color is achived by using filters and combining exposures.
...but then OOPS! The Mac's Finder would've choked on having more than a few hundred files in one directory.
Say what?
I just checked, using finder, a directory with 670 large TIFF files on my lowly dual 800-MHz G4 and it seems to work fine. Application problem? Nope, Photoshop works fine with 'em, too.
First I've heard of this problem. What's this about?
Had a similar thing happen here in New Hampshire. Complaints did no good to stop the flow of unwanted campaign ads. I had to block at the mail server the entire/24 network of their ISP--they were running their own SMTP server off a DHCP dialup....
...about two-way satellite Internet is that it can be mobile. I have one of these and it's pretty cool--you can surf from anywhere: http://www.furfly.net/winnebago/
With the Directway commerical plans the upload is still pretty slow but the downlink can exceed T1 speed. But, like cable modem, you're sharing the connection with large numbers of people and during peak hours the connection slows down.
Oh, man, you folks got beat to the punch on the water computing jokes. Another fellow did something similar awhile back. Search for "Guy Steele", "Crunchly", and "The Great Quux".
The New York Central did this in 1966 by sticking some surplus J-47 engines onto a regular passenger rail car. The M-497 reportedly got up to 155-mph, occasionally leaving the tracks from time to time over grade crossings.
You can read more about it here or look it up in a back issue of Invention & Technology Magazine from several years ago.
Then there was the UP gas turbines, some steam turbines, and even some government research into nuclear-powered steam turbine locomotives.
In short, a lot of reseach as been done in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I've visited Jack's layout several times. To say it's impressive would be an understatement.
Jack is *the* expert on the Yosemite Valley Railroad and has modeled it down to the smallest detail, including time-table operation for the scheduling of the trains based on what was actually running on the real railroad in August of 1939.
And his craftsmanship is outstanding.
Jack is an engineer and is very familiar with computers and has used CAD to design to construct his layout.
To put it another way, Jack is an ESR or Linus equivalent in the model railroad community.
Now, it is believed that abiogenic hydrocarbons do occur in some instances. But they are limited in scope in volume. All the commercial accumulations of hydrocarbons are derived from organic orgins. A lot of evidence supports this all the way from where these reserves are found to chemical analysis.
To quote "Elements of Petroleum Geology" by Selley:
For even more fun, use the following script to generate two random words:
/usr/share/dict/words` /usr/share/dict/words`
(watch for word wrap)
#!/bin/sh
#
dl=`wc -l
RND=`date '+%H%S%d%M'`
RND1=`date '+%y%S'`
RND=`expr $RND + $RND1`
bilge=`expr $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND`
dw1=`expr $RND % $dl`
dw2=`expr $bilge % $dl`
echo `sed -e ${dw1}p -e ${dw2}p -e d
So far, "pectoral undaunted", "adjudicates battlefield", "numerous quark" and "camouflaged todays" work as expected in google.
We built a site for the New York Review of Books years ago with an online subscription model and it's been very successful.
The key -- that some folk seem to miss -- is that you need content that people are willing to pay to access. All too often the content provided by a subscription site isn't worth the price even if it was free. It also helps if your publication's demographic actually has money.
Other folks that know tools will make fun of you. A Milwaukee is a Real Man's(TM) tool. Seriously, it make little difference -- working on PCs isn't like driving screws through hardwood so any tool will get the job done.
I don't remember why I have them, but yes, a bit set for the electric screwdriver would do the job, too. But I don't use the nut drivers too often and usually have just a few fasteners of that type to do so it's just as easy to use a manual tool instead of swapping out the philips bit in the electric driver.
Here's a few suggestions from my toolkit that I've put together over the years. I might work on anything from a Sun server to a Wintel or Mac so the tools are pretty generic.
A power screwdriver. Most PCs have a large number of screws and doing them all by hand is (literally) a pain. I like the Milwaukee 2.4-Volt 2-Speed Cordless Screwdriver -- it's more expensive than some but is a quality tool that'll last. Get several extra batteries and an extra-long driver bit for easier access to motherboard screws.
A set of nut drivers. These are screwdrivers for nuts, especially those little nut-screws on the back of the PC that hold the serial and video connectors on.
A multimeter. Useful for all sorts of things from checking power at the outlet to grounding. Skip past the Wal-Mart cheapies and get a quality instrument like a Fluke.
A set of ball-drivers. These are hex (a.k.a. Allen head) driver tools with a ball on the end so you can work at an angle.
Torx drivers. Handy for working on laptops or newer machines. When you need it you need it -- no other tool will work.
A DOS boot disk.
An assortment of cables: a normal Ethernet, a cross-over, IDE, Floppy, USB, and serial. If you work on Unix or Linux servers or routers you might need to be able to hook up a serial terminal connection. I also like to have a set of extension cables for keyboard, mouse, and video for hooking up to equipment on racks.
Several extra PC power cords.
A cordless soldering iron (and the knowledge to use it). Not used very often but you never know...
And, last, a book: "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" by Scott Mueller. This books is an amazing resource -- it'll tell you the pin-outs for everything from an ATX power supply to an IDE hard drive. It's handy to have when working with old or odd hardware.
Go here: www.batteryspace.com
You can get 60 generic 1800mAh NiMH batteries for $54.95 US. They have some nice chargers, too.
Most of the NiMH batteries on the market are made by the same few companies and branded for the US market. You can save a load of money by buying un-branded generic cells from an importer and get the exact same battery with a different wrapper.
What's even funnier is the Ebert & Roper review at http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/ebertandroeper/tod ay.html
Ebert actually liked it (and the first one he says). Roper thought it was junk and said Ebert must be smitten by Angelina Jolie.
This is just a wild guess, but the Landsat 7 satellite ran by the US Geological Survey probably doesn't have much to do with astronomy...
Or you can go to Home Depot and buy a 2 horsepower woodworking router with electronically governed speeds from 10k to 30k rpm. And it'll only cost you $100 bucks or so and will have no problem spinning a CD.
Plus, you have a very useful tool -- it's probably the most useful woodworking tool you can own.
You got that right.
I ordered a M10000 with a 1-GHz C3 CPU several weeks ago and expected it to be a Nehemiah core chip. I was disappointed to find it using the Ezra core since I really wanted to play with the hardware RNG.
Still, it's a nice setup.
BTW, the Red Hat 9 installer would kernel panic during startup but Red Hat 8 worked fine. I suspect the 9 installer is trying to run a i686 kernel when you really need a i386 for the VIA C3 CPU.
"The Mac is not a Typewriter" by Robin Williams.
This book is cicra 1990 but the basics of accenting and typing special characters on the Mac hasn't changed.
Check out http://www.rcainput.com/
If you're lucky you'll have a late-model car that has the ability to plug in one of these adapters. It seems they plug into the wiring harness of factory units that have an option to add an OEM cd changer.
... mine's labled as "sports". WTF...
...a Polaroid camera. They even have a model called the "JOBPRO" that's "designed for the construction professional".
A digital would just sit around in the glovebox and it's battery would always be dead when you needed it.
...if you like chartjunk.
The choice of red for the PC is interesting in that it draws your eye to it. I downloaded one of the graph and switched the colors of the bars. Then on first glance the eye is drawn to the Mac and your first thought is that it won whatever the test was about.
If they really wanted to show info rather than a predetermined conclusion they would have done both bars in the same color.
Interesting jpeg artifacts in the gif files, too. Probably resaved as gif from jpegs done on a Mac!
I saw Mr. Lucus several times at the Borders bookstore in San Rafael.
Once, in the pre-Episode 1 days I was looking for a new book by Greg Bear and this fellow came up behind me to look at the Star Wars books shelved at the top of the book case in the new release Sci-Fi section. It was him. I figured he'd know all he needed about Star Wars, but hey, who knows.
Another time I was behind him in the check out line and he had a pile of Abbott & Costello videos. They best part was the check out girl freaking out when she saw the name on his credit card.
Good idea.
Someone should do this with cars, too. Let's put a Dodge Neon SRT-4 up against a BMW 325i. And when the tests prove the Dodge is much quicker than the BMW we can all have a good laugh at those poor fools that have BMWs and like them. And look how much more they paid. They obviously don't know what they're missing and secretly want a Dodge.
But, you know, there is more to the driving experience than raw performance. Likewise with computing.
I have a D100 and have had a D30 and will probably pick up a D1x in the near future.
I don't believe all the hype. Beside the obvious problem of how are you going to read these digital files (I assume you're using the RAW file format to get 12-bit color data) 50 years from now, I skeptical of claims that the current 6-megapixel or even 11-megapixel cameras can match the resolution of a properly exposed drum-scanned 35mm Velvia slide. And it'll be quite some time before digital can match the resolution and tonality of an 8x10 large-format film image.
Clipping the highlights and a limited dynamic range are still problems in the current crop of cameras, too.
And these things are expensive. Sure it'll come down, but I don't think the price of a computer system capable of editing and processing these 30 MB+ images files is going to get much cheaper. And you're going to need a wopper of a RAID to archive these images. Remember, CD-ROMs are only good for 10 years or so.
But, you're right--film photography is soon to be an alternative process. Most pros have little reason to stick with film since they can capitalize the cost of the equipment and make up the cost on savings in film processing and quicker turnaround.
Mom and Dad love digital as they can print and email family pictures to everyone and create their own christmas cards.
And grandparents love digital as they can get emailed pictures of all the grandkids as often as they'd like.
And they're all going to hate digital when all the pictures go poof when their cheap Windows machine crashes taking all the family photos with it. Backup, that much data? By Mom and Dad? I don't think so.
Many fine-art photographers, especially those using medium and large-format and B&W, are going to be sticking with film for quite some time.
And that's cool. I'm sticking with film for my medium and large format B&W work myself.
Astro cameras have very specialized chips. Most have some sort of active cooling to keep dark noise down and are of fairly low resolution compared to still digital cameras.
And they're normally monochrome, too. Color is achived by using filters and combining exposures.
Say what?
I just checked, using finder, a directory with 670 large TIFF files on my lowly dual 800-MHz G4 and it seems to work fine. Application problem? Nope, Photoshop works fine with 'em, too.
First I've heard of this problem. What's this about?
Had a similar thing happen here in New Hampshire. Complaints did no good to stop the flow of unwanted campaign ads. I had to block at the mail server the entire /24 network of their ISP--they were running their own SMTP server off a DHCP dialup....
But they won the election...
...about two-way satellite Internet is that it can be mobile. I have one of these and it's pretty cool--you can surf from anywhere: http://www.furfly.net/winnebago/
With the Directway commerical plans the upload is still pretty slow but the downlink can exceed T1 speed. But, like cable modem, you're sharing the connection with large numbers of people and during peak hours the connection slows down.
Oh, man, you folks got beat to the punch on the water computing jokes. Another fellow did something similar awhile back. Search for "Guy Steele", "Crunchly", and "The Great Quux".
Sure, easy retrofit.
The New York Central did this in 1966 by sticking some surplus J-47 engines onto a regular passenger rail car. The M-497 reportedly got up to 155-mph, occasionally leaving the tracks from time to time over grade crossings.
You can read more about it here or look it up in a back issue of Invention & Technology Magazine from several years ago.
Then there was the UP gas turbines, some steam turbines, and even some government research into nuclear-powered steam turbine locomotives.
In short, a lot of reseach as been done in this area.