About all I recall after 44 years is the name Emory Cook, I never managed to meet the man, and AFAIK no relation to the Emory Koch of dragster fame back in '58-59 or so. From the Koch & Bedwell pairing, built the first rail job that went over 160mph in the 1/4 mile. That one spoke very poor english either time I talked to him at the AATA strip in Cordova IL that I frequented back in my 'salad days'. But he sure could make what was fast stuff back then. His biggest bitch about dragging was the $40 everytime the light turned green. Today, I'd expect its about $400 per trigger pull... Expensive hobbies, sound & dragging... Go-Kart was cheaper by far, so I did a lot of that. I've had the blacktop going by at >130mph less than an inch below my rectum for miles at a time. Several times, its great fun, and very educational. It will make a better driver out of you out on the street too IF the machine has the horsepower to explore the envelope. Kart track karts with a 5hp briggs should all be crushed, absolutely worthless for the driving lessons. You need 30+ horsepower to play in that league. I've also managed about half a million on 2 wheels (only 2 broken bones in that distance!), but never actually raced a bike.
Not that I'm aware of. The heyday of 78rpm lp records was rather short, pretty much doomed by the onslaught of stereo lp's back then.
The average set of tin ears never appreciated the difference, and a 12 minute play time, reduced to about 6 for the earthquake record because the grooves were so far apart in the real time section, meant they only sold to the golden ear crowd.
If you find one of the cook 78's in an estate auction, (or even better at a flea market) listening to it will be a brand new experience unless somebody has tried to play it in an old acoustic, steel needle player. But you'll see that, the grooves will not be nice and shiny. Leave that one in the box of junk its probably rattling around in.
If you had read the article you linked to, all you'd find was that some sales dweeb has managed to make a paper cone made out of pulp like most of the rest, sound like its a super special, gold plated, Larry Klien said so, version just because they started the pulp with spruce!
They're not overly fussy what they make pulp from, and there is probably a measureable amount of spruce in any pulp preparation including the average newsprint recycled paper.
Actually, the vast majority of speaker cabinets are made out of MDF, or Medium Desnsity Fiberboard,
Now I have to relate a story that I witnessed as an employee of a hi-fi business in so-cal back in about 1960. The above statement hasn't always been true.
We had just received a pair of new Bozak B-305 speakers, and the store owner/manager was a bit of an audio engineer, with as golden a set of ears as mine were at the time.
He took just one of the two speaker cabinets apart, added some additional bracing struts from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side, then filled it up with about 5x as much of that expanded kraft paper deadening material as the box originally had. Lots of epoxy glue, and even a screw or 20 carefully laid in under the veneer on what started out as a 1" thick plywood box.
When the glue had cured and it was all back together, with the only external differences seen being a few screws in the back panel, that box sounded like a solid block of marble when tapped with a hammer. I mean it just clicked, no thump at all. The factory stock box still had a bonk to the sound when tapped with the hammer.
A fellow by the name of Cook had some experimental 78 rpm lp recordings out at the time, from unusual sources, like seismographic sounds of earthquakes in both real time, and sped up so they could be heard, also some persussion solo's on various instruments. The most impressive of these was a tympani solo, where at the end of each phrase of the music, the player released the pedal that tightened the skin, and you could, on the unmodified speaker, hear the squeek of the pedal as it was released, but that was the end of the sound.
Throwing the switch to the modified box, and replaying that section of the record (we were using a Withers variable capacitor cartridge in its own arm and turntable at the time, a great cartridge, unforch stereo the design couldn't do) the squeek of the pedal was heard just as clearly, but then the air pressure waves in the room told you that the now loose skin was still flapping for about 3 or 4 more bounces. Literally, the room was moving up and down according to your senses.
Both drivers were the special 'AL' models, and could throw the cones nearly 3/4" both ways from resting without botttoming, or generating any detectable 3rd harmonics from doing it. And they were somewhat more efficient than the soon to come on the market Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers that gave the world halfway decent, compact sound for the first time. We were using a Harmon Kardon amp, the first decent transistorized amp ever, and their magazine advs at the time called it a straight piece of wire with gain. 100 watts, response to almost DC, and was to DC if the input capacitor was shorted via a switch on the rear apron.
I've since experimented some on my own, but nothing that matched that for shear, stand the hair up on the back of your neck, realism.
It showed me that you can't make a speaker cabinet too solid. A couple inch thick slab of marble ought to work just fine for box walls.
Yeah, and then we'ed contract with the army to do a COD delivery. What better way to cuff & stuff that jerk? Oh wait, the text said you'd have to arrange your own pickup. That would take quite a crew just to reduce that to shippable pieces. Maybe we could just collect the whole lot of them when they came to get it? Interesting play on the "what ifs" there...
Seriously, I'd imagine that machine could speed up the digging at Yucca Mountain, so I'd imagine that several company boards are meeting as we blythely type away, discussing just what their maximum bid should be.
An old chinese proverb about living in Interesting Times comes to mind:-)
Only cosmology and black hole physics can really test GR.
Humm, methinks you may well have the black hole physics part of it backwards. One thing we get damned little out of a black hole is information about its characteristics. We can get a general, plus or minus 20% guess on its mass by measuring the orbital velocities and distances to all the other stars in the locality.
The only other tidbit of info we can eek out of the observations is the miss-match between expected velocities of the really nearby stars, and the predicted velocity at that distance based on the above SWAG on its mass from averageing the orbits of the more distant stars.
From that we can deduce the direction and speed of the hole rotation as directly evidenced by the orbital errors of these nearby stars caused by what may well be frame dragging from the rotation of the black hole.
However, the closest such black hole isn't easily observable (IIRC it's Saggitarious B) due to all the dirt and dust from previous supernova's surrounding the center of our own galaxy, the thing you know as the Milky Way. Our far infrared capabilities that can see better thru all that junk will come online with the James Webb telescope and hopefully give us a better view.
In the meantime we have to look to other, much more distant galaxies, where the sheer distances preclude making truely accurate measurements on any one object. I think we do more by doppler effects causeing line spreading, and statistical analysis of that spreading, than by any direct observations of any individual stars in those distant galaxies. Statistics tend to be fuzzy as we all know.
This device, by giving us a very good signal to noise ratio calibration point, will let us analyse those distant objects with considerably more precision than we currently can do. It has the potential of tightening up our "guesses" by at least 2 orders of magnitude, maybe more. Thats worthwhile science, and will narrow the field of candidates for the TOE considerably.
feels they have the right and responsibility to drive exactly the speed limit.
Yes, there are those, blissfully running on cruise control, and they stay in the left lane because it cuts way down on the number of times they have to take corrective action, resetting the speed slighlty to miss some dumb-fsck yakking on his cell phone or arguing with the kids in the back seat.
Those bother me, but the one that really bothers me is the jerk with a 120+hp car, who creeps up on a truck or other slightly slower vehicle, pulls out to pass just as the truck starts up a hill, further slowing the truck. Instead of maintaining their speed and sailing by the truck in good time since the truck is now down by 4 gears doing 37 miles per hour, this jerk also slows down, very, very carefully maintaining only a.5 mph advantage on the slower vehicle and taking 3/4ths of a mile to pass and another half a mile to pull back in, by which time they are both over the hill and headed down the other side and *both* are doing 77 mph in a 70 zone. I don't know of the times I've seen this same personality suddenly discover he is speeding, nail the brakes, and damned near get flattened by that same truck as the truck driver struggles to either brake hard enough, or repass cause theres another hill coming and he doesn't want to lose the speed. Your car weighs 2 to 5k lbs, but that truck, with 3 to 5 times the horsepower, weighs 80k lbs and gets 4 mpg on flat land. Do the math. What speed you can gain to do a decent pass costs you a couple of teaspoons extra fuel, for him its half a gallon or more for everytime he has to hit the brakes and dump 15 mph to miss some candidate for the darwin award.
I drive a vehicle like its a ballistic missle, planning my lane changes, braking and so on usually well in advance, based on what the other traffic is doing. The idea is to synchronize my motion so that when I get there, the gap in the traffic in the left lane has opened up, I can swing out, pass and pull back in, often without having to tweek the cruise control with anything but a gentle nudge of my right foot to pick up 2 or 3 mph and 'get synchronized'. And I do all this without causeing anyone else to have to take *any* evasive action a very very large percentage of the time.
In the above case, my steam gets let off when, as soon as he/she has cleared the slower vehicle, I'm down 2 gears, will have passed the slower vehicle, pulled back into the right lane, and if I don't see any motion of the pokeymobile still in the left lane in front of me, moving toward the right lane, will blow by him at a 25+mph speed advantage while not personally exceeding the 70mph local interstate speed limit. Illegal most places, but it does send a message unless the other driver is truely unconsious. Obviously the left foot is laying on the brake pedal about an ounce for reduced reaction times in case the jerk does decide to pull in. I've had to use the brakes maybe once in 500 times because the other driver is usually that unconsious and doesn't even know I'm there until my front end is 6 to 8 feet in front of theirs, by which time there isn't anything they can do about me, they don't have the horsepower.
My wife thinks the truck I just pulled in front of is going to hit us, when in reality, that truck isn't even a measureable part of the picture once I'm past it unless he suddenly fires a 8 pack of jato bottles giving him an extra 50,000 horsepower to overtake and hit me with. I've not seen such an equipt truck anyplace but the drags. It went 200+ mph, but he wasn't pulling a 50 foot Wilson with 55,000 bushels of corn under the tarp either.
Are you guilty of the 'just barely creep by pass' syndrome? If you are, you cause at least as much road rage around you as any other bad driving habit anyone can have. If you are gonna pass, check the left lane, if clear then get the hell out there, give it enough of that Good Gulf to maintain your cruiseing speed and do the pass, then get back in
Because the last "8" version was hard coded in the installer so that it would only install on one, then getting very old, linux release of their own. If you had the balls to dare make a new kernel install, the installer was dead.
I've still got that package in its original box on the shelf above me, and AFAIC they owe me about a 90 buck refund (interest accrues on money loaned does it not?).
It has never, and I even copied the script to my HD where I could edit it, been able to install and run here.
I called them at the time, (on my nickle!) and was basicly told that if I wanted support, to install their old crappy version of linux. Early 2.2 series kernel and all...
'scuse me but fsck 'em, and the camel that rode in on them.
Frankly, I don't care about the protocol, what I want to know is either what compression reduced 4Gb to pigeon carriable weight, or how many pigeons did it take, and if more than one, what are the packet loss stats? In some locales, pigeons make a great lunch for something or someone...
Oh wait, it was 4/1 when this story was posted. Damn..
Well, first I'd have to sign up with PayPal, and thats something I have no intentions of doing after my last reading of their TOS. Very few people have access to my bank account besides me, and PayPal isn't one of them.
I think the Ninja is a very good bike, and for a 160+ MPH ride, I've observed that its surprisingly docile around town. If I were 20 years younger, I'd probably have one. The Ninja has finally lived down the Kawi's reputation for taking you anyplace, but always comeing home in a pickup. I had an old KZ-750 for a couple of years and lost track of the number of times it came back from someplace in a pickup, usually because the countershaft and front sprocket had parted company. That eventually ran me back to a Suzuki, which always brought me home but it was too big and got traded down for a 500cc v-twin Honda which usually brought me home.
But reflexes get slow, and I figured it was time to hang it up sometime around my 67th birthday a couple of years ago & sold it.
Back to the girl & her site, you are correct in that this sort of thing needs to be encouraged. I just don't know that a PayPal donation would do any good, and in any event, she'll need to ask for it. We can't force PayPal to run her down and hand her money AFAIK if she doesn't setup the account from her end.
There is no deuterium production in the earth, and it is at the ~0.15% level naturally since large stars that supernova rarely eject burnt fuel, just their outer layers.
I'm not an atomic type, just been lassoing electrons for the last 55 years for a living.
So why does every magazine article written by someone associated with whats now the Iter project, go to the trouble to point out that the deuterium supply is unlimited because its constantly being regenerated by the incomeing gamma radiation?
Or are they figureing that this lead pencil sized stream of deuterium seperated from the seawater is, AFA mankind is concerned, unlimited because we'll never get it all. If its percentage in sea water starts at ~0.15%, then we have, just a SWAG of course, several dozens of cubic miles of the stuff. The energy content of all that, properly recovered, probably represents 10,000 times that of the fossil fuel we've burnt to date!
ITER is expected to break even in a couple of years.
Uh huh. Thats the same logic that says pigs fly too, and its been repeated annually for what, 30 years now? Methinks the people working on that thing have managed to figure out that if they ever make it work, they're out of a job, so its being run like one big WPA project. The operative keyword in front of progress, is slow. Or, "This ones promising, we seem to be headed in the right direction, but now we need another 10 billion dollar grant to build the next, scaled up 10x, test model that will presumably break even. IMO, that 10 billion should have been put into the Supercollider that got (Bush, Clinton?) canceled. It, once up and running, could probably have furrnished the data needed to step directly to a 300 MW production model with widely held confidence that it would work from the git-go.
I better quit, before I really lose my temper over some of the dumbassed things done in the name of economy by our supposedly elected officials over the last 10 years.
Yes, but without that direct human action in the form of interference with the automatic systems, TMI would still have been nothing more than a valve repair for the maintainance people. The automatics were working just fine till some shithead turned it off.
Your analogy regarding the incoming vs whats in the bank falls slightly short.
The incoming also creates a small amount of 'heavy water' in the oceans. The creation process I've been told is forever as long as the sun shines, and has long ago, as in billions of years, reached an equalibrium point. If a reactor could be designed to make use of this, it would only take a lead pencil sized stream of this heavy water to power every currently fossil fueled device on the planet. In simpler terms, we have enough in the bank, drawing interest, the interest being more than sufficient to power mankinds sometimes evil schemes.
Extracting that quantity from the seawater would not, even over millions of years, materially effect the concentration balance of this isotope in the seawater.
The one item I can't drag up from memory is the byproducts of its fusion. About the only thing that I recall is that its output would be steam, aka water, and some apparentlly benign gas, probably hydrogen, but I'll let the real experts testify on that point.
The real trick is that this isn't fission, its fusion. Relatively much more difficult to achieve in that most of the tokamak type devices built so have not made break even in power output. OTOH, data on such research seems to have gone underground in the last 10 years.
Maybe its time some of the people playing with this gave us a progress report?
Humph! I don't even consider english english and american english to be the same languages any more.
Written is close, spoken gets seperated by the accentuation used, to the point of occasionally missing the meaning altogether because so much time is spent mentally translating the accents.
However, I'd also note that the differences are actually becoming less over the last 20 years, thanks to the universality and pervasiveness of satellite news. I'd imagine that in another 50 years, the differences will become ever less as the next generations mature. As to who is correct, I won't say because its such a moving target.
I wish I hadn't made that statement now. Its so petty and inconsequential when compared to the story being told, and makes me out to be a bigot, something that offends me. But I did make it, and its been one of the most controversial statements I've made. Unfortunately, later apologies cannot undo...
Well, as I've been told by several people now, the site itself is free. And, judgeing from her manner of dress and a $15,000 bike, my guess is that she isn't terribly in need to funds to continue. Obviously she has income for discretionary spending, unlike most in that vast country, whose lives have not been materially enhanced by Putin's now over-extended tenure.
That said, if there was a donation page, or a useable address at least, it would be nice to send a message that what she is doing is publishable, with some actual profit to her being accrued.
Thank God there aren't any more Chernobyls. Yes we had TMI, but it was contained, so Chernobyl is a unique place on this planet, and in history.
It needs to be documented for future generations. She is doing that, but really, these 2 tours and a few more like it to expand upon the tragedy, could and should be committed to a more durable medium than some hard drive with a 3 year lifetime at an ISP. I'd love the chance to be some place where I could have turned by last big bike loose without having to worry about a radar gun over the next hill. There is something about that sort of freedom that not even MasterCard can buy.
Archival quality hardcopy, for sale at B&N or Waldenbooks for instance. I'd pay 30 USD for this on decent paper, and 50 if a couple more fills of the memory card in her camera were added, along with more captions to ident exactly where and when the shot was taken.
It would become in time, a far better testimony to mans inability to truely control the atom than anything done before. Governments try to cover their asses, or find scapegoats. What she has done so far doesn't seem to be tainted by any attempts to do anything else but show whats there now, often including the dosimeter readings.
Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.
Me too. Its a rather sad state of affairs when someone like Elena takes the time, fuel, and a camera along and lets the rest of the world see what its really like, and then might have to pay for the bandwidth to boot.
For the visual information that came out of her camera, I'll gladly forgive her occasionaly poor command of the english language. The pictures tell the story far better than any amount of words anyway. I followed the whole site, wondering when the server was going to melt down like it did the last time, apparently before I even got there, but this time it held up quite well.
Many thanks to a totally cool lady. And to the hosting site for putting up with the rest of the geek world that represents the average/. reader.
In previous public statements, and those are darned rare, he had said as much. When it was included in the OS distro, he was supposed to get a royalty. But that was about the time the exec offices were moved to the beach chairs in the Bahamas. He claimed at the time that no check for royalties had ever been cut, and he was less than ecstatic about it. AFAIK, that was his last public statement regarding Commie.
In terms of his working on linux kernel stuff, I know he has a directory for his stuff on kernel.org, but there isn't anything to speak of in it, and (I'm checking now) that directory was last touched Monday Aug 4, 1998. Today its empty, and I don't recall if there ever was anything in it. And I don't recall ever seeing his name in the credits for anything linux related either.
And thats sad IMO, he was a talented programmer.
So was Mark Downing, currently at FoMoCo. He did the only true compiler for arexx. Its output was standalone binary executables that ran about 5x faster than the scripts did, and ran on about that much less cpu. Called RexxPlus, I have a copy, and the only patch we had to do to it was a one byte patch to make it compatible with the 68060.
Old, fond memories these, except for Medhi Ali and company.
I thought that sig was vaguely familiar. I thought, and still do, that the majority of you guys did indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.
Too bad Mehdi Ali and company was far more interested in looting the company, than in actually running it. Todays amiga might have 2GHZ PPC's in them, and decent memory management, but I'd bet they would still feel like an amiga. Fscking jerks. I hope somebody figures out a way to slip some cyanide in their martini's someday.
Mmmm, I wonder how much they got from M$ under the table for taking Commode Door down? Now that we've had another decade to see how M$ works, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that was true, with monthly payments from Redmond (thoroughly "laundered" of course) still coming in.
To be truthfull, I never installed it (yam), but I did download it, and while the majority seemed to be C, all the glue scripts that I looked at were arexx. I lost interest when the first script I really studied had 2 syntax errors in the first two screens on a Pic-II running at 1024x768.
I did run Thor for several years, driving it with ezcron launched arexx scripts. Thor itself seemed to have more than a passing aquaintance with arexx, using several of its libraries, and ISTR only one glue script wasn't written in arexx.
The lack of action on the dbl-click may have been a datatype error on the part of yam. But thats just a SWAG, nothing official.:-)
I think Thor's more polished performance was as much attributable to the fact that each piece had its own author, or in some cases, pair of authors. All told, at one time 8 or so years ago I could recite at least 7 names that worked on Thor.
What did you expect? rx is the name of the executable interpretor once rexxmaster was started in your startup-sequence. Feed an ARexx script to rx, and it will try to execute it. If the script is good, then of course it will do the job it was written to do.
Now if you wanted to view it, there was a more, and a less, and of course there was CED. That was one of the better editors on this planet by the time it got up to version 4.20. I miss CED, a lot.
Yam, and Thor also, were written rather largely in arexx, and could be scripted to run totally autonomously by EzCron, itself written in arexx (I helped write EzCron and EzHome), so your daily hit of email and news was just reading and replying, the arexx scripts took care of everything else.
KMail comes close in terms of automation, but doesn't do news. Amiga's Thor blended them together so seemlessly you had to check the messages header to determine if you were replying to an email, or to a newsgroup message.
I did download PyIPC.tar.gz a couple of days ago, but the excrement seems to have hit the fan hard enough around here to preclude my doing any in-depth study of it yet. I spent about 10 hours yesterday afternoon/evening on an audio problem at the tv station, in the middle of which the starter solenoid on my elderly ('88) Nissan 4x4 decided to stick on, so it came home on a rollback. Hooked the battery back up today and damned if it isn't working 100% normally. That starter sure made a lot of underhood smoke last night though, sitting there spinning at about 10 grand for about 15 minutes before I turned off the engine and could hear it plainly. And it was a fresh one about 90 days ago...
PyIPC is of course is a python extension, and I'd have to use a new language to manage the project.
Methinks if there are stuffs in bash that could do that sort of thing, it would almost be easier for this old fart (I'm 69) to rewrite the app in bash.
To me, having grown up so to speak, with assembly on the 1802 back in the '70's, then on the Z-80 and again assembly on the 6809, C on the 6809, and Basic09 on the 6809, all running on the OS9 OS, then C or ARexx on the amiga, and now linux (C again, and of course Bash), any truely new language may be beyond my quick grasp. Piece of cake when I was cranking out code 15 years ago, but getting more difficult as the years pile up. And not really abetted much by the state of language documentation for languages other than ANSI C or Bash. Most of these new 'languages' are in serious need of a document like the K&R-II, or the Postscript Language Reference Manual. Something that 'sets the standard syntax' of the language and explains exactly how each call or function works.
I don't recommend getting old, its not all its cracked up to be.
Slashdot Mirror
About all I recall after 44 years is the name Emory Cook, I never managed to meet the man, and AFAIK no relation to the Emory Koch of dragster fame back in '58-59 or so. From the Koch & Bedwell pairing, built the first rail job that went over 160mph in the 1/4 mile. That one spoke very poor english either time I talked to him at the AATA strip in Cordova IL that I frequented back in my 'salad days'. But he sure could make what was fast stuff back then. His biggest bitch about dragging was the $40 everytime the light turned green. Today, I'd expect its about $400 per trigger pull... Expensive hobbies, sound & dragging... Go-Kart was cheaper by far, so I did a lot of that. I've had the blacktop going by at >130mph less than an inch below my rectum for miles at a time. Several times, its great fun, and very educational. It will make a better driver out of you out on the street too IF the machine has the horsepower to explore the envelope. Kart track karts with a 5hp briggs should all be crushed, absolutely worthless for the driving lessons. You need 30+ horsepower to play in that league. I've also managed about half a million on 2 wheels (only 2 broken bones in that distance!), but never actually raced a bike.
Humm, I guess I got off topic, sorry.
Cheers, Gene
Not that I'm aware of. The heyday of 78rpm lp records was rather short, pretty much doomed by the onslaught of stereo lp's back then.
The average set of tin ears never appreciated the difference, and a 12 minute play time, reduced to about 6 for the earthquake record because the grooves were so far apart in the real time section, meant they only sold to the golden ear crowd.
If you find one of the cook 78's in an estate auction, (or even better at a flea market) listening to it will be a brand new experience unless somebody has tried to play it in an old acoustic, steel needle player. But you'll see that, the grooves will not be nice and shiny. Leave that one in the box of junk its probably rattling around in.
I wish I had better news, but... sorry.
Cheers, Gene
If you had read the article you linked to, all you'd find was that some sales dweeb has managed to make a paper cone made out of pulp like most of the rest, sound like its a super special, gold plated, Larry Klien said so, version just because they started the pulp with spruce!
They're not overly fussy what they make pulp from, and there is probably a measureable amount of spruce in any pulp preparation including the average newsprint recycled paper.
Breakthrough technology indeed...
This one needs a reality check.
Cheers, Gene
Actually, the vast majority of speaker cabinets are made out of MDF, or Medium Desnsity Fiberboard,
Now I have to relate a story that I witnessed as an employee of a hi-fi business in so-cal back in about 1960. The above statement hasn't always been true.
We had just received a pair of new Bozak B-305 speakers, and the store owner/manager was a bit of an audio engineer, with as golden a set of ears as mine were at the time.
He took just one of the two speaker cabinets apart, added some additional bracing struts from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side, then filled it up with about 5x as much of that expanded kraft paper deadening material as the box originally had. Lots of epoxy glue, and even a screw or 20 carefully laid in under the veneer on what started out as a 1" thick plywood box.
When the glue had cured and it was all back together, with the only external differences seen being a few screws in the back panel, that box sounded like a solid block of marble when tapped with a hammer. I mean it just clicked, no thump at all. The factory stock box still had a bonk to the sound when tapped with the hammer.
A fellow by the name of Cook had some experimental 78 rpm lp recordings out at the time, from unusual sources, like seismographic sounds of earthquakes in both real time, and sped up so they could be heard, also some persussion solo's on various instruments. The most impressive of these was a tympani solo, where at the end of each phrase of the music, the player released the pedal that tightened the skin, and you could, on the unmodified speaker, hear the squeek of the pedal as it was released, but that was the end of the sound.
Throwing the switch to the modified box, and replaying that section of the record (we were using a Withers variable capacitor cartridge in its own arm and turntable at the time, a great cartridge, unforch stereo the design couldn't do) the squeek of the pedal was heard just as clearly, but then the air pressure waves in the room told you that the now loose skin was still flapping for about 3 or 4 more bounces. Literally, the room was moving up and down according to your senses.
Both drivers were the special 'AL' models, and could throw the cones nearly 3/4" both ways from resting without botttoming, or generating any detectable 3rd harmonics from doing it. And they were somewhat more efficient than the soon to come on the market Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers that gave the world halfway decent, compact sound for the first time. We were using a Harmon Kardon amp, the first decent transistorized amp ever, and their magazine advs at the time called it a straight piece of wire with gain. 100 watts, response to almost DC, and was to DC if the input capacitor was shorted via a switch on the rear apron.
I've since experimented some on my own, but nothing that matched that for shear, stand the hair up on the back of your neck, realism.
It showed me that you can't make a speaker cabinet too solid. A couple inch thick slab of marble ought to work just fine for box walls.
Cheers, Gene
Yeah, and then we'ed contract with the army to do a COD delivery. What better way to cuff & stuff that jerk? Oh wait, the text said you'd have to arrange your own pickup. That would take quite a crew just to reduce that to shippable pieces. Maybe we could just collect the whole lot of them when they came to get it? Interesting play on the "what ifs" there...
:-)
Seriously, I'd imagine that machine could speed up the digging at Yucca Mountain, so I'd imagine that several company boards are meeting as we blythely type away, discussing just what their maximum bid should be.
An old chinese proverb about living in Interesting Times comes to mind
Cheers, Gene
Which is why I had the IIRC in there...
Only cosmology and black hole physics can really test GR.
Humm, methinks you may well have the black hole physics part of it backwards. One thing we get damned little out of a black hole is information about its characteristics. We can get a general, plus or minus 20% guess on its mass by measuring the orbital velocities and distances to all the other stars in the locality.
The only other tidbit of info we can eek out of the observations is the miss-match between expected velocities of the really nearby stars, and the predicted velocity at that distance based on the above SWAG on its mass from averageing the orbits of the more distant stars.
From that we can deduce the direction and speed of the hole rotation as directly evidenced by the orbital errors of these nearby stars caused by what may well be frame dragging from the rotation of the black hole.
However, the closest such black hole isn't easily observable (IIRC it's Saggitarious B) due to all the dirt and dust from previous supernova's surrounding the center of our own galaxy, the thing you know as the Milky Way. Our far infrared capabilities that can see better thru all that junk will come online with the James Webb telescope and hopefully give us a better view.
In the meantime we have to look to other, much more distant galaxies, where the sheer distances preclude making truely accurate measurements on any one object. I think we do more by doppler effects causeing line spreading, and statistical analysis of that spreading, than by any direct observations of any individual stars in those distant galaxies. Statistics tend to be fuzzy as we all know.
This device, by giving us a very good signal to noise ratio calibration point, will let us analyse those distant objects with considerably more precision than we currently can do. It has the potential of tightening up our "guesses" by at least 2 orders of magnitude, maybe more. Thats worthwhile science, and will narrow the field of candidates for the TOE considerably.
Cheers, Gene
feels they have the right and responsibility to drive exactly the speed limit.
.5 mph advantage on the slower vehicle and taking 3/4ths of a mile to pass and another half a mile to pull back in, by which time they are both over the hill and headed down the other side and *both* are doing 77 mph in a 70 zone. I don't know of the times I've seen this same personality suddenly discover he is speeding, nail the brakes, and damned near get flattened by that same truck as the truck driver struggles to either brake hard enough, or repass cause theres another hill coming and he doesn't want to lose the speed. Your car weighs 2 to 5k lbs, but that truck, with 3 to 5 times the horsepower, weighs 80k lbs and gets 4 mpg on flat land. Do the math. What speed you can gain to do a decent pass costs you a couple of teaspoons extra fuel, for him its half a gallon or more for everytime he has to hit the brakes and dump 15 mph to miss some candidate for the darwin award.
Yes, there are those, blissfully running on cruise control, and they stay in the left lane because it cuts way down on the number of times they have to take corrective action, resetting the speed slighlty to miss some dumb-fsck yakking on his cell phone or arguing with the kids in the back seat.
Those bother me, but the one that really bothers me is the jerk with a 120+hp car, who creeps up on a truck or other slightly slower vehicle, pulls out to pass just as the truck starts up a hill, further slowing the truck. Instead of maintaining their speed and sailing by the truck in good time since the truck is now down by 4 gears doing 37 miles per hour, this jerk also slows down, very, very carefully maintaining only a
I drive a vehicle like its a ballistic missle, planning my lane changes, braking and so on usually well in advance, based on what the other traffic is doing. The idea is to synchronize my motion so that when I get there, the gap in the traffic in the left lane has opened up, I can swing out, pass and pull back in, often without having to tweek the cruise control with anything but a gentle nudge of my right foot to pick up 2 or 3 mph and 'get synchronized'. And I do all this without causeing anyone else to have to take *any* evasive action a very very large percentage of the time.
In the above case, my steam gets let off when, as soon as he/she has cleared the slower vehicle, I'm down 2 gears, will have passed the slower vehicle, pulled back into the right lane, and if I don't see any motion of the pokeymobile still in the left lane in front of me, moving toward the right lane, will blow by him at a 25+mph speed advantage while not personally exceeding the 70mph local interstate speed limit. Illegal most places, but it does send a message unless the other driver is truely unconsious. Obviously the left foot is laying on the brake pedal about an ounce for reduced reaction times in case the jerk does decide to pull in. I've had to use the brakes maybe once in 500 times because the other driver is usually that unconsious and doesn't even know I'm there until my front end is 6 to 8 feet in front of theirs, by which time there isn't anything they can do about me, they don't have the horsepower.
My wife thinks the truck I just pulled in front of is going to hit us, when in reality, that truck isn't even a measureable part of the picture once I'm past it unless he suddenly fires a 8 pack of jato bottles giving him an extra 50,000 horsepower to overtake and hit me with. I've not seen such an equipt truck anyplace but the drags. It went 200+ mph, but he wasn't pulling a 50 foot Wilson with 55,000 bushels of corn under the tarp either.
Are you guilty of the 'just barely creep by pass' syndrome? If you are, you cause at least as much road rage around you as any other bad driving habit anyone can have. If you are gonna pass, check the left lane, if clear then get the hell out there, give it enough of that Good Gulf to maintain your cruiseing speed and do the pass, then get back in
Because the last "8" version was hard coded in the installer so that it would only install on one, then getting very old, linux release of their own. If you had the balls to dare make a new kernel install, the installer was dead.
I've still got that package in its original box on the shelf above me, and AFAIC they owe me about a 90 buck refund (interest accrues on money loaned does it not?).
It has never, and I even copied the script to my HD where I could edit it, been able to install and run here.
I called them at the time, (on my nickle!) and was basicly told that if I wanted support, to install their old crappy version of linux. Early 2.2 series kernel and all...
'scuse me but fsck 'em, and the camel that rode in on them.
Gawd, am I glad 4/01 is over...
Cheers, Gene
Do you mean a TCP pigeon or a UDP pigeon? =)
Frankly, I don't care about the protocol, what I want to know is either what compression reduced 4Gb to pigeon carriable weight, or how many pigeons did it take, and if more than one, what are the packet loss stats? In some locales, pigeons make a great lunch for something or someone...
Oh wait, it was 4/1 when this story was posted. Damn..
Cheers, Gene
Well, first I'd have to sign up with PayPal, and thats something I have no intentions of doing after my last reading of their TOS. Very few people have access to my bank account besides me, and PayPal isn't one of them.
I think the Ninja is a very good bike, and for a 160+ MPH ride, I've observed that its surprisingly docile around town. If I were 20 years younger, I'd probably have one. The Ninja has finally lived down the Kawi's reputation for taking you anyplace, but always comeing home in a pickup. I had an old KZ-750 for a couple of years and lost track of the number of times it came back from someplace in a pickup, usually because the countershaft and front sprocket had parted company. That eventually ran me back to a Suzuki, which always brought me home but it was too big and got traded down for a 500cc v-twin Honda which usually brought me home.
But reflexes get slow, and I figured it was time to hang it up sometime around my 67th birthday a couple of years ago & sold it.
Back to the girl & her site, you are correct in that this sort of thing needs to be encouraged. I just don't know that a PayPal donation would do any good, and in any event, she'll need to ask for it. We can't force PayPal to run her down and hand her money AFAIK if she doesn't setup the account from her end.
Cheers, Gene
There is no deuterium production in the earth, and it is at the ~0.15% level naturally since large stars that supernova rarely eject burnt fuel, just their outer layers.
I'm not an atomic type, just been lassoing electrons for the last 55 years for a living.
So why does every magazine article written by someone associated with whats now the Iter project, go to the trouble to point out that the deuterium supply is unlimited because its constantly being regenerated by the incomeing gamma radiation?
Or are they figureing that this lead pencil sized stream of deuterium seperated from the seawater is, AFA mankind is concerned, unlimited because we'll never get it all. If its percentage in sea water starts at ~0.15%, then we have, just a SWAG of course, several dozens of cubic miles of the stuff. The energy content of all that, properly recovered, probably represents 10,000 times that of the fossil fuel we've burnt to date!
ITER is expected to break even in a couple of years.
Uh huh. Thats the same logic that says pigs fly too, and its been repeated annually for what, 30 years now? Methinks the people working on that thing have managed to figure out that if they ever make it work, they're out of a job, so its being run like one big WPA project. The operative keyword in front of progress, is slow. Or, "This ones promising, we seem to be headed in the right direction, but now we need another 10 billion dollar grant to build the next, scaled up 10x, test model that will presumably break even. IMO, that 10 billion should have been put into the Supercollider that got (Bush, Clinton?) canceled. It, once up and running, could probably have furrnished the data needed to step directly to a 300 MW production model with widely held confidence that it would work from the git-go.
I better quit, before I really lose my temper over some of the dumbassed things done in the name of economy by our supposedly elected officials over the last 10 years.
Cheers, Gene
Yes, but without that direct human action in the form of interference with the automatic systems, TMI would still have been nothing more than a valve repair for the maintainance people. The automatics were working just fine till some shithead turned it off.
Cheers, Gene
Your analogy regarding the incoming vs whats in the bank falls slightly short.
The incoming also creates a small amount of 'heavy water' in the oceans. The creation process I've been told is forever as long as the sun shines, and has long ago, as in billions of years, reached an equalibrium point. If a reactor could be designed to make use of this, it would only take a lead pencil sized stream of this heavy water to power every currently fossil fueled device on the planet. In simpler terms, we have enough in the bank, drawing interest, the interest being more than sufficient to power mankinds sometimes evil schemes.
Extracting that quantity from the seawater would not, even over millions of years, materially effect the concentration balance of this isotope in the seawater.
The one item I can't drag up from memory is the byproducts of its fusion. About the only thing that I recall is that its output would be steam, aka water, and some apparentlly benign gas, probably hydrogen, but I'll let the real experts testify on that point.
The real trick is that this isn't fission, its fusion. Relatively much more difficult to achieve in that most of the tokamak type devices built so have not made break even in power output. OTOH, data on such research seems to have gone underground in the last 10 years.
Maybe its time some of the people playing with this gave us a progress report?
Cheers, Gene
Humph! I don't even consider english english and american english to be the same languages any more.
Written is close, spoken gets seperated by the accentuation used, to the point of occasionally missing the meaning altogether because so much time is spent mentally translating the accents.
However, I'd also note that the differences are actually becoming less over the last 20 years, thanks to the universality and pervasiveness of satellite news. I'd imagine that in another 50 years, the differences will become ever less as the next generations mature. As to who is correct, I won't say because its such a moving target.
I wish I hadn't made that statement now. Its so petty and inconsequential when compared to the story being told, and makes me out to be a bigot, something that offends me. But I did make it, and its been one of the most controversial statements I've made. Unfortunately, later apologies cannot undo...
Cheers, Gene
Who's with me?
Well, as I've been told by several people now, the site itself is free. And, judgeing from her manner of dress and a $15,000 bike, my guess is that she isn't terribly in need to funds to continue. Obviously she has income for discretionary spending, unlike most in that vast country, whose lives have not been materially enhanced by Putin's now over-extended tenure.
That said, if there was a donation page, or a useable address at least, it would be nice to send a message that what she is doing is publishable, with some actual profit to her being accrued.
Thank God there aren't any more Chernobyls. Yes we had TMI, but it was contained, so Chernobyl is a unique place on this planet, and in history.
It needs to be documented for future generations. She is doing that, but really, these 2 tours and a few more like it to expand upon the tragedy, could and should be committed to a more durable medium than some hard drive with a 3 year lifetime at an ISP. I'd love the chance to be some place where I could have turned by last big bike loose without having to worry about a radar gun over the next hill. There is something about that sort of freedom that not even MasterCard can buy.
Archival quality hardcopy, for sale at B&N or Waldenbooks for instance. I'd pay 30 USD for this on decent paper, and 50 if a couple more fills of the memory card in her camera were added, along with more captions to ident exactly where and when the shot was taken.
It would become in time, a far better testimony to mans inability to truely control the atom than anything done before. Governments try to cover their asses, or find scapegoats. What she has done so far doesn't seem to be tainted by any attempts to do anything else but show whats there now, often including the dosimeter readings.
Thats 'priceless' as the MC commercial says.
And preferably on tear proof paper.
Cheers, Gene
Touche` My knowledge of Russian is absolutely zip, and in fairness, I should never have mentioned it.
The story was in the pictures, which really have no "native" language. Very humbling pictures.
Cheers, Gene
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all, it was very poor taste on my part.
Cheers, Gene
Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.
/. reader.
Me too. Its a rather sad state of affairs when someone like Elena takes the time, fuel, and a camera along and lets the rest of the world see what its really like, and then might have to pay for the bandwidth to boot.
For the visual information that came out of her camera, I'll gladly forgive her occasionaly poor command of the english language. The pictures tell the story far better than any amount of words anyway. I followed the whole site, wondering when the server was going to melt down like it did the last time, apparently before I even got there, but this time it held up quite well.
Many thanks to a totally cool lady. And to the hosting site for putting up with the rest of the geek world that represents the average
Cheers and many thanks Elena, Gene
In previous public statements, and those are darned rare, he had said as much. When it was included in the OS distro, he was supposed to get a royalty. But that was about the time the exec offices were moved to the beach chairs in the Bahamas. He claimed at the time that no check for royalties had ever been cut, and he was less than ecstatic about it. AFAIK, that was his last public statement regarding Commie.
In terms of his working on linux kernel stuff, I know he has a directory for his stuff on kernel.org, but there isn't anything to speak of in it, and (I'm checking now) that directory was last touched Monday Aug 4, 1998. Today its empty, and I don't recall if there ever was anything in it. And I don't recall ever seeing his name in the credits for anything linux related either.
And thats sad IMO, he was a talented programmer.
So was Mark Downing, currently at FoMoCo. He did the only true compiler for arexx. Its output was standalone binary executables that ran about 5x faster than the scripts did, and ran on about that much less cpu. Called RexxPlus, I have a copy, and the only patch we had to do to it was a one byte patch to make it compatible with the 68060.
Old, fond memories these, except for Medhi Ali and company.
Cheers, Gene
I thought that sig was vaguely familiar. I thought, and still do, that the majority of you guys did indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.
Too bad Mehdi Ali and company was far more interested in looting the company, than in actually running it. Todays amiga might have 2GHZ PPC's in them, and decent memory management, but I'd bet they would still feel like an amiga. Fscking jerks. I hope somebody figures out a way to slip some cyanide in their martini's someday.
Mmmm, I wonder how much they got from M$ under the table for taking Commode Door down? Now that we've had another decade to see how M$ works, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that was true, with monthly payments from Redmond (thoroughly "laundered" of course) still coming in.
Cheers, Gene
To be truthfull, I never installed it (yam), but I did download it, and while the majority seemed to be C, all the glue scripts that I looked at were arexx. I lost interest when the first script I really studied had 2 syntax errors in the first two screens on a Pic-II running at 1024x768.
:-)
I did run Thor for several years, driving it with ezcron launched arexx scripts. Thor itself seemed to have more than a passing aquaintance with arexx, using several of its libraries, and ISTR only one glue script wasn't written in arexx.
The lack of action on the dbl-click may have been a datatype error on the part of yam. But thats just a SWAG, nothing official.
I think Thor's more polished performance was as much attributable to the fact that each piece had its own author, or in some cases, pair of authors. All told, at one time 8 or so years ago I could recite at least 7 names that worked on Thor.
Cheers, Gene
What did you expect? rx is the name of the executable interpretor once rexxmaster was started in your startup-sequence. Feed an ARexx script to rx, and it will try to execute it. If the script is good, then of course it will do the job it was written to do.
Now if you wanted to view it, there was a more, and a less, and of course there was CED. That was one of the better editors on this planet by the time it got up to version 4.20. I miss CED, a lot.
Yam, and Thor also, were written rather largely in arexx, and could be scripted to run totally autonomously by EzCron, itself written in arexx (I helped write EzCron and EzHome), so your daily hit of email and news was just reading and replying, the arexx scripts took care of everything else.
KMail comes close in terms of automation, but doesn't do news. Amiga's Thor blended them together so seemlessly you had to check the messages header to determine if you were replying to an email, or to a newsgroup message.
Cheers Gene
I did download PyIPC.tar.gz a couple of days ago, but the excrement seems to have hit the fan hard enough around here to preclude my doing any in-depth study of it yet. I spent about 10 hours yesterday afternoon/evening on an audio problem at the tv station, in the middle of which the starter solenoid on my elderly ('88) Nissan 4x4 decided to stick on, so it came home on a rollback. Hooked the battery back up today and damned if it isn't working 100% normally. That starter sure made a lot of underhood smoke last night though, sitting there spinning at about 10 grand for about 15 minutes before I turned off the engine and could hear it plainly. And it was a fresh one about 90 days ago...
PyIPC is of course is a python extension, and I'd have to use a new language to manage the project.
Methinks if there are stuffs in bash that could do that sort of thing, it would almost be easier for this old fart (I'm 69) to rewrite the app in bash.
To me, having grown up so to speak, with assembly on the 1802 back in the '70's, then on the Z-80 and again assembly on the 6809, C on the 6809, and Basic09 on the 6809, all running on the OS9 OS, then C or ARexx on the amiga, and now linux (C again, and of course Bash), any truely new language may be beyond my quick grasp. Piece of cake when I was cranking out code 15 years ago, but getting more difficult as the years pile up. And not really abetted much by the state of language documentation for languages other than ANSI C or Bash. Most of these new 'languages' are in serious need of a document like the K&R-II, or the Postscript Language Reference Manual. Something that 'sets the standard syntax' of the language and explains exactly how each call or function works.
I don't recommend getting old, its not all its cracked up to be.
Cheers, Gene
So strong I've never heard of it,
Then I submit that you've not done a very extensive search. The top link of a google search should be to the IBM/Rexx homepage.
Cheers, Gene