Radio Shack seemingly has stripped away all but tools, connectors and power supplies. They have very little in the way of chips or transistors.
If you want to dig into electronics you have several directions to go-- amature robotics (feedback and control ciruits, sensors & programming), microcomputers (straight digital stuff usually), alarm systems (digital/analog hybrid), radio transmission and/or reception (mostly analog unless you dig DSP [digital signal processing]), computer interfacing through a board- home automation anyone? or even R/C planes or boats (modelling mixed with proportional controls)which is similar to what's happening in controllers for model trains these days.
The ARRL yearly big book is a great overview of electronics by elementary theory and keeps up with what's available on the market as the years change. It tends towards ham radio, of course, but the basics of the field are there, and have been fine-tuned over the years.
Jameco corporation is fast and fairly comprehensive as to general interest components and covers all above except R/C planes. Their catalog comes out frequently. One of the big book shops is Mouser. They market towards the professional field but they have no minimum order that I know of. You'd better know what you're looking for, though. The catalog is huge. Good luck, and have fun!
(ham radio kits are like high-tech version of fly-tying--meticulous work with amazing results.)
When the OS fit on one floppy and I knew what every file did I was happy. When I could follow the explicit logic of the boot process I was happy. Then things got out of control--mandatory GUI, DLL hell without management tools, etc. Then things started disspearing. My favorite editor was Brief by Underwear. (Yeah, team!) Microsoft ate it without please, thank you or burp. Foxpro, a beautifully designed algol-style language built around a damned-near universal database implementation and having a _really_ slick and fast SQL implementation. The help file was a wonder to behold. Gulp. Burp. What came out was Visual Foxpro, one of the worst examples of bloatware and speed degredation I've ever had the dire misfortune to witness.
What do you use for an OS? I used to use BRIEF until it was eaten by MS. Now my editor of choice under MS is TextPad. Vim is nice enough, but sometimes too many features get in the way. Spending 4 hours on a tool in an extensible editor language for a one-shot task may seem elegant at the time, but it's a replacement for walk-away-from-it time that would clear your head for a nice overview or second-guessing. As stated above, YMMV.
Hmm. Stanley Steamers. Boilers wound with piano wire to eliminate burst boilers killing people when the regulators failed.
either the answer of a flash boiler or a pre-heater would probably suffice. If you ran out of water on the interstate, you wouldn't destroy your engine, just quietly coast to the edge of the road amidst profuse profanity aimed at whosever job it was to fill the resevoir before the trip....
Check out a steam plowing show sometime...two giant traction engines at either side of a field THROWING a plow across the field with the aid of woven steel hawsers. Kind of like air hockey with a half-ton puck. Awesome.
look it up-- the first time anyone figured out "hey, ANFO blows up!" a transport SHIP full of ammonium nitrate bags had become contaminated by fuel oil.
The port city of Texas City underwent catastrophic, sudden zoning changes.
I don't remember the amount, but a few tens of pallets of ANFO is a respectable amount, much less the possible THOUSANDS of pallets. Lord, what a bang.
what defines an explosive? I believe that any compound or chemical which has speed of oxidation that exceeds the speed of sound within the medium itself constitutes an explosive due to the formation of a concussive shockwave. Ignoring nuclear nasties, this lets out CO2 bombs and such and confines itself to chemical reactions. However, the fact that the rate of deflagration (burning) of gunpowder confined in a moderately compressed form such as a wooden shipping barrel WILL give a heck of a concussive effect (personal experience with empty grain silos attest to this) would seem to shut down the theory that a simple deflagrant is anything to laugh at in its proper form. True, a higher rate-of-propagation gives a higher "brisance", or shockiness to the explosion, but sometimes you just want lots and lots of KE with little shock, such as in mining or loosening rock for a quarry. Then, you WANT a low explosive. You don't want powder, you want pieces. in other words, Fooey. Blooie!
I've heard this exclaimed several times, by people you never would have thought to have had an opinion about politics, on college campuses and various other establishments where people consume oxidants.
if so, try what I did for my boss at a computer company a few years ago.
dust off your old BBS-client software, plug their sales response number (if 800, mind you.) into your software phone book, and set the retries to 99 (or 999 if you can). then script the thing to keep dialling the number all night.
800 numbers are charged back to the owner on a per-call basis. even if it's just a 3-5 second delay, then a hang up.
Charge THEM for your time using the same medium that they are. There is an elegance in eye-for-an-eye.
for the same purpose, we use patched XP and Deep Freeze. You don't even need virus protection-- the next time the system boots, the thing goes back to a snapshot image.
every review I've read here gets trashed by people that write as if they're proof that life exists at -6 sigma. Trust me. We and this website will NOT catch fire and die if someone bursts into spontaneous politeness, once in a while, eh? They may hyperventilate a bit, but it's good for you. Just try to STOP breathing for a while.
When I stepped back to chew over your post, I realize that I agree.
However, I must say 'thanks' once in a while in a public forum, where the author can get a little approbation in front of his/her audience.
too much bitterness--lack of sweetness and light.. sugar low-- blacking out...
Re:Maybe this is a stupid question...
on
Practical mod_perl
·
· Score: 1
Naah. It isn't stupid, at all.
Have you looked over the docs for Apache?
no examples. zip. nada. nothing.
I find examples more precious than jewels, for they don't just sit there and glitter, they're useful. Condensed syntax-only guides always leave me suspicious. This isn't FORTRAN66. The syntax is mean.
everyone in the lab started dying of brain cancer at a rate that would make any statistician very, very nervous. NiGas immediately closed off the lab area and started figuring out just what happened. I have no further information about results, lawsuits or out-of-court settlements.
a freshly cleaned diskette drive, and six hours of downloads at 2400 baud. them were the days.
When you got X up and running on your monitor, you really HAD something. FAQ entries were a woundrous archive of arcane material that made you want to call up the author and say "Thanks, man!" Motherboards that topped out at 64 MB.
Wow.
I STILL remember comparing it to the SCO I had at work, and kept comparing the man pages to the IBM XENIX manuals I had stashed away.
It's an old theory, and science fiction gedenken experiments have beaten it to death. Using an ion engine to gain a net charge on the sail, thus polarizing it, would repel those sticky ions in the solar wind, yet still properly reflect the radiation as desired. ( but where would you place the emitter? on a boom sunward of your craft, at maximum distance from the sail? would it work, or would the ions turn tail and glom back on to the closest reverse charged object, i.e. the sail?) The trouble with this is, you lose a proportion of your efficiency by replacing part of your solar sail with solar cells to power the ion engine. I believe that you can get a reverse net charge by reversing the polarity on the power feed to the ion engine. Am I correct? Yes, I know that an ion engine is a very low power thrust source, and there is usually a conversion loss in changing an energy form. However, mass gain over a long journey could keep the vessel from maneuvering or even slowing within expected parameters at its destination, and ion engines have been billed as an unusually efficient thrust source. (I know, I'm talking generation ships here, not intra-system, unless you're taking a flight path thru the outer system with planets at antipodes with a dip thru the inner system)
What about the old saw:
If carpenters built houses the same way programmers designed code the first woodpecker that came around would destroy civilization.
Let's just say that there'd BETTER be some redundant code in there, guys. Let's hear it for organic checksums.
Also, has anybody thought about the concept that this gives a whole new twist to computer viruses?
Do we have computer languages sophisticated, durable and trustable enough to trust with letting loose on the REAL global infrastructure? I believe that the same case can be made as if talking about organic nanites. Can you see a seething black mass of disassemblers where Earth used to be? I don't know about you, but it would really put a crimp in MY summer vacation.
Now, add in the concept of prions, and mix well.
I don't WANT computers and organics to mix until we can isolate the labs on the other side of at least 60 miles of vacuum, with a nice, hot re-entry burn bewteen us. Debugging could be a real bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry Niven's Ringworld or Ringworld Engineers has an appendix that describes the physics of a ringworld. Very eye-opening.
Radio Shack seemingly has stripped away all but tools, connectors and power supplies. They have very little in the way of chips or transistors.
If you want to dig into electronics you have several directions to go-- amature robotics (feedback and control ciruits, sensors & programming), microcomputers (straight digital stuff usually), alarm systems (digital/analog hybrid), radio transmission and/or reception (mostly analog unless you dig DSP [digital signal processing]), computer interfacing through a board- home automation anyone? or even R/C planes or boats (modelling mixed with proportional controls)which is similar to what's happening in controllers for model trains these days.
The ARRL yearly big book is a great overview of electronics by elementary theory and keeps up with what's available on the market as the years change. It tends towards ham radio, of course, but the basics of the field are there, and have been fine-tuned over the years.
Jameco corporation is fast and fairly comprehensive as to general interest components and covers all above except R/C planes. Their catalog comes out frequently. One of the big book shops is Mouser. They market towards the professional field but they have no minimum order that I know of. You'd better know what you're looking for, though. The catalog is huge. Good luck, and have fun!
(ham radio kits are like high-tech version of fly-tying--meticulous work with amazing results.)
When the OS fit on one floppy and I knew what every file did I was happy.
When I could follow the explicit logic of the boot process I was happy.
Then things got out of control--mandatory GUI, DLL hell without management tools, etc.
Then things started disspearing. My favorite editor was Brief by Underwear. (Yeah, team!)
Microsoft ate it without please, thank you or burp.
Foxpro, a beautifully designed algol-style language built around a damned-near universal database
implementation and having a _really_ slick and fast SQL implementation. The help file was a
wonder to behold. Gulp. Burp. What came out was Visual Foxpro, one of the worst examples of
bloatware and speed degredation I've ever had the dire misfortune to witness.
Arr. Death to the evil empire.
What do you use for an OS?
I used to use BRIEF until it was eaten by MS. Now my editor of choice under MS is TextPad. Vim is nice enough, but sometimes too many features get in the way. Spending 4 hours on a tool in an extensible editor language for a one-shot task may seem elegant at the time, but it's a replacement for walk-away-from-it time that would clear your head for a nice overview or second-guessing. As stated above, YMMV.
Hmm. Stanley Steamers. Boilers wound with piano wire to eliminate burst boilers killing people when the regulators failed.
either the answer of a flash boiler or a pre-heater would probably suffice. If you ran out of water on the interstate, you wouldn't destroy your engine, just quietly coast to the edge of the road amidst profuse profanity aimed at whosever job it was to fill the resevoir before the trip....
Check out a steam plowing show sometime...two giant traction engines at either side of a field THROWING a plow across the field with the aid of woven steel hawsers. Kind of like air hockey with a half-ton puck. Awesome.
Good on you-- Thanks for keeping me honest.
look it up--
the first time anyone figured out "hey, ANFO blows up!"
a transport SHIP full of ammonium nitrate bags had become contaminated by fuel oil.
The port city of Texas City underwent catastrophic, sudden zoning changes.
I don't remember the amount, but a few tens of pallets of ANFO is a respectable amount, much less the possible THOUSANDS of pallets. Lord, what a bang.
what defines an explosive?
I believe that any compound or chemical which has speed of oxidation that exceeds the speed of sound within the medium itself constitutes an explosive due to the formation of a concussive shockwave. Ignoring nuclear nasties, this lets out CO2 bombs and such and confines itself to chemical reactions. However, the fact that the rate of deflagration (burning) of gunpowder confined in a moderately compressed form such as a wooden shipping barrel WILL give a heck of a concussive effect (personal experience with empty grain silos attest to this) would seem to shut down the theory that a simple deflagrant is anything to laugh at in its proper form. True, a higher rate-of-propagation gives a higher "brisance", or shockiness to the explosion, but sometimes you just want lots and lots of KE with little shock, such as in mining or loosening rock for a quarry. Then, you WANT a low explosive. You don't want powder, you want pieces. in other words, Fooey. Blooie!
I've heard this exclaimed several times, by people you never would have thought to have had an opinion about politics, on college campuses and various other establishments where people consume oxidants.
ahh, but grasshopper, you will BECOME beef jerky.
or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
if so, try what I did for my boss at a computer company a few years ago.
dust off your old BBS-client software, plug their sales response number (if 800, mind you.) into your software phone book, and set the retries to 99 (or 999 if you can). then script the thing to keep dialling the number all night.
800 numbers are charged back to the owner on a per-call basis. even if it's just a 3-5 second delay, then a hang up.
Charge THEM for your time using the same medium that they are. There is an elegance in eye-for-an-eye.
for the same purpose, we use patched XP and Deep Freeze. You don't even need virus protection-- the next time the system boots, the thing goes back to a snapshot image.
Oh My God.
do you WANT people to hunt you down and play loanshark upon your person?
Ye gods and little kittens.
Of course, no jury of their peers in the world would ever convict them.
Nope, nope, nope, nope.
I'm climbin' on my high horse, here.
every review I've read here gets trashed by people that write as if they're proof that life exists at -6 sigma. Trust me. We and this website will NOT catch fire and die if someone bursts into spontaneous politeness, once in a while, eh? They may hyperventilate a bit, but it's good for you. Just try to STOP breathing for a while.
Arr. yeah.
When I stepped back to chew over your post, I realize that I agree.
However, I must say 'thanks' once in a while in a public forum, where the author can get a little approbation in front of his/her audience.
too much bitterness--lack of sweetness and light.. sugar low-- blacking out...
Naah. It isn't stupid, at all. Have you looked over the docs for Apache? no examples. zip. nada. nothing. I find examples more precious than jewels, for they don't just sit there and glitter, they're useful. Condensed syntax-only guides always leave me suspicious. This isn't FORTRAN66. The syntax is mean.
Yup. The cleanup pretty well takes care of itself if you configure the threads not to be persistent.
.exe and by .dll...
You can attach Perl to Apache by
how does mod_perl activate? must one compile it in, or is it a configuration switch?
Thank you for the review.
There. Isn't a little common courtesy refreshing?
Yes!
SCO: "I challenge you to combat by Sheer Effrontery"
Linus" "Tag--You Lose."
everyone in the lab started dying of brain cancer at a rate that would make any statistician very, very nervous. NiGas immediately closed off the lab area and started figuring out just what happened. I have no further information about results, lawsuits or out-of-court settlements.
a freshly cleaned diskette drive, and six hours of downloads at 2400 baud. them were the days.
When you got X up and running on your monitor, you really HAD something. FAQ entries were a woundrous archive of arcane material that made you want to call up the author and say "Thanks, man!" Motherboards that topped out at 64 MB.
Wow.
I STILL remember comparing it to the SCO I had at work, and kept comparing the man pages to the IBM XENIX manuals I had stashed away.
Thanks for the memories, Slakware!
Here's a dangerous application for a rather new field: GIS.
Plastic freezes polycarbons for generations in landfills.
Internal combustion engines have shaped our landscape and controlled the structure of our society in many ways.
Power lines? deep cell protein denaturalization? Neuron deformation? who knows (nobody wants to find out-- too costly at this time)
very few swords of science have one edge.
name me one that doesn't, eh?
I love it.
Is this a way of saying that they've got brass B*lls?
all payload, no delivery system.
(come on, it's not off topic, it's social commentary.)
It's an old theory, and science fiction gedenken experiments have beaten it to death. Using an ion engine to gain a net charge on the sail, thus polarizing it, would repel those sticky ions in the solar wind, yet still properly reflect the radiation as desired. ( but where would you place the emitter? on a boom sunward of your craft, at maximum distance from the sail? would it work, or would the ions turn tail and glom back on to the closest reverse charged object, i.e. the sail?) The trouble with this is, you lose a proportion of your efficiency by replacing part of your solar sail with solar cells to power the ion engine. I believe that you can get a reverse net charge by reversing the polarity on the power feed to the ion engine. Am I correct? Yes, I know that an ion engine is a very low power thrust source, and there is usually a conversion loss in changing an energy form. However, mass gain over a long journey could keep the vessel from maneuvering or even slowing within expected parameters at its destination, and ion engines have been billed as an unusually efficient thrust source. (I know, I'm talking generation ships here, not intra-system, unless you're taking a flight path thru the outer system with planets at antipodes with a dip thru the inner system)
Let's just say that there'd BETTER be some redundant code in there, guys. Let's hear it for organic checksums.
Also, has anybody thought about the concept that this gives a whole new twist to computer viruses?
Do we have computer languages sophisticated, durable and trustable enough to trust with letting loose on the REAL global infrastructure? I believe that the same case can be made as if talking about organic nanites. Can you see a seething black mass of disassemblers where Earth used to be? I don't know about you, but it would really put a crimp in MY summer vacation.
Now, add in the concept of prions, and mix well.
I don't WANT computers and organics to mix until we can isolate the labs on the other side of at least 60 miles of vacuum, with a nice, hot re-entry burn bewteen us. Debugging could be a real bitch.