In fresh water, yes. Great boats till the rivets start leaking in 25-30 years. Salt water OTOH, is very corrosive to aluminium which I usually shorten to alu.
Ocean air is not the only corrosion to worry about. I've no clue what they intend to use to protect the alu hull with.
Story time folks, been told before but there may be new readers here.
In '59, I had the pleasure of being a bench tech, at a little place on Mission Bay called Oceanographic Engineering, helping to assemble the electronics for the 2 cameras that were mounted on the Trieste when it went down onto the mohole in the Pacific a few months later. The Navy had come in and bought the first 2 we made but instead of the cases we were going to use for towing them thru sewers to inspect the sewers, they gave us specs for a bronze case, with quartz windows they supplied. Designed to withstand about 25 kpsi, its 17 or 18 kpsi in the mohole. But they wanted to play a bit before the real show and asked us to make the first one out of 7078-T6 alu. It took us about 6 weeks to get a lathe that big AND accurate setup and we made the first case out of a 6" diameter alu rod about 2 feet long. Fixed it up with all the packing glands it would need. They picked up the whole kit on a smallish cruiser, 65' for so and took it out about 50 miles to give it a dunk test. We had sent it out and had the heaviest cad plate we could get put on it. They brought it back the next day and having been scratched by rolling around on the deck deep enough to penetrate the plating, and in one days time over the side and down about a thousand feet, those scratches came back to us 1/2" wide and an inch deep, just from being in the sea water for about 12 hours.
Needless to say, the real cases for the Trieste trip were cut from some special bronze that started out nearly 8" in diameter. The camera itself was 2.5" in diameter, so we bored a 3" hole for it in the bronze and padded it with weather stripping to hold it centered in the hole. Those 2 cameras, a rounded box with some relays in it to turn the stuff around and switch the lights, and the gondola of the Trieste were all that was pressure sealed, everything else was running at the ambient pressure which was considerable. Except for chewing thru the rubber diaphram separating the sea water from the oil in the pan & tilts for one of the cameras, that trip down with Picard and Walsh, it all worked. The P&T wasn't disabled & still worked when they came back up. With some very interesting pix I got to see a few of.
And Steve had it made with an ALU hull? 'scuse me, but... I predict it will spend a lot of time in dry-dock, getting patched. It likely won't last much longer than I will since I have a 78 year head start on it.
AMD are doing real long term innovation with integrating CPU and GPU.
No shit sherlock. AMD buying ATI was the dumbest thing they ever did. Its likely, and I'm guessing here, that the ATI division has eaten their profits from the cpu business because somebody convinced AMD that ATI was the Next Big Thing.
I have purchased, and thrown out, 3 fairly top of the line ATI video cards over the last decade because I always wanted to support the underdog. And every time I have been burned because their drivers are such crap and unstable. Each time, before I purchased, I was in contact with one of their software honcho's, who each time proclaimed this time it would be different, but it never was right. Their linux drivers were faster than the linux drivers but not by day & night diffs, both used a lot of cpu & theirs tore up the machines latency where the vesa driver didn't. The linux drivers were slower often displaying what my machine was doing a second or more after the machine had done it, but were stable. But they were always very careful about throwing code over the fence to the linux folks, and they always did it 6 months after the card the code was for was out of the supply pipeline. Couple that with changing the card so it wasn't compatible with even the commercially available drivers I ordered specifically for that card, at $50, and when it arrived, it wouldn't run the card, ATI had changed the card in the box without changing the color of a single dot above an i on the box, or on any of the enclosures. No refunds available, and no, we don't have a driver for that card yet. The situation did improve slightly with the next 2 cards, at least linux could run them in the vesa mode, at limited resolution of course.
Nvidia is finally getting religion, throwing usable code over the fence for the neauvou driver while the cards are still on the dealers shelves, so while I might not be able to do 500 fps on this linux box, it is now my connection when a video I'm watching stutters. Running the neauvou driver. Dead stable too.
After a while, its so nice to quit hammering yourself in the head, trying to support a company that refuses to support the customer. This nvidia card is now getting long in the tooth, I finally had to replace that puny bushing grade fan a few months ago, but it still Just Works. That is all I ever asked.
Grin, yeah, it was a typu, but in retrospect I agree, it works better that way. But we won't ask how much, based on the theory that if you have to ask, you can't afford it, and I, on SS, damned sure don't think I can afford 4 more years of the same old same old....
And who the hell are you to define bias? This was the one place where we could come and post our general distrust of the filtering of the news that the MSM does on a second by second basis.
For instance, there are polls being conducted that show that Libertarian Gary Johnson could, in the most optimistic circumstances take over 20% of the vote on Nov 6th. But to allow his name to appear in the MSM is universally deemed to be a waste of precious time & bandwidth. He can't even get an invite to one of the so-called 'debates' which in reality are nothing more than the 2 top crooks of the 2 party system, each trying to make themselves the lessor of 2 evils.
There is NO Constitutional mandate for a 2 party system, but of all the election laws passed in the last 150 years, the intent is to protect TPTB.
For Gary to be polling at such high rates despite the lack of mention in the MSM, tells me that the general public, the sheeple if you will, are about to do 2 things, one being that because of the votes they'll "steal", Obama gets another term.
The second thing is that if the sheeple vote Nov 6th like they are saying now, that cannot be ignored, it will be a shot across the bow of the ship of state that cannot be ignored. If Gary doesn't win, and that is unlikely this Nov 6th, that 'shot across the bow' will at least steer the ship of state away from its present path of selling out to the highest bidder.
The worst part is that the protections of the Constitution, as amended, are only one more Obama appointed Justice away from just being an interesting footnote in the history of what was once the most respected Nation on the planet. Of the important cases before the court the last 3 years, the Constitution won by only one vote each time. That alone should scare the sheeple, but TPTB manufactured current economy means the sheeple have what they think are more important things to be afraid of.
At the moment, I can't muster up much in the way of Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Also why not do a case study for thresholds where the bomb might be useful. An asteroid that threatens the planet may not be stopped, but something that could wipe out a metropolitan area and cause trillions of dollars of damage might be a size that could be. An asteroid on that scale may do less or no damage if it could be broken into small enough pieces before it hits the atmosphere.
I don't believe even the no physical damage case to be exactly benign. Breaking it into cubic foot sized pieces, some of those would survive to the surface. The real damages in this case would still be from the heat pulse into our atmosphere. If you think this years hottest July on record, at 3.3F above the long term average, was bad, you haven't seen anything yet. That of course would be followed in a few months by the winter created by the dust, which by changing the albedo of the planet, might take several years to return to some semblance of the new normal. It may well be sufficient that in 1000 years, this planet may have a new dominant species.
Also anyone remember that Deep Impact mission with the copper slug slammed into an asteroid some years back? That inert chunk of metal also happened to be very close to the volume and mass of a common nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal. (Looking at those numbers, it doesn't appear too random.) It seems somebody was seriously considering the idea.
I wondered about that myself. Its encouraging to see that someone else made that connection. However, I have my doubts that one of our nukes could survive that "burying it in the asteroid impact" without either going off prematurely, or failing to trigger once it had stopped at the target depth.
I'd almost have to agree since I was reading "Docs" work in the early 40's, it was I believe, the first non-educational material I read after mastering McGuffy's, so I guess you could call me as being from that era.
But more recently, as in the last 40 years, an alias, Jack Williamson sticks out in my memory. There was enough stuff in "Fire Starter" to make a trilogy, but I never saw that name on the shelves again. And of course we shouldn't forget Orson scott Card and Spider Robinson (Callahans Bar among others), two more rather widely read names that haven't been mentioned.
This isn't the first time I have seen this suggestion, but to me, its the most sensible solution to the present patent fiasco. Because something better WILL come along, and sales of the old stuff will dwindle. When it costs 50% of the profits to register it for another year, just let it expire. That could be a bookkeeping problem because there would have to be very strictly applied rules forbidding the transfer of another products profits into the book for this one, and as usual, loopholes would be bought, and bookkeepers able to hide such creative accounting would have to be figured into the P&L statement FOR that product.
By and large I think its a good idea, but as usual, the devil will be in the details. Stuff like this, since its usually written by lawyers we've elected, is guaranteed to look good on the front page of the daily fish wrap, and is also guaranteed to have loopholes that are for sale to the highest bidder in the campaign finance wars.
As for software, no patents, copyrights only, and to encourage innovation, and even 5 years is excessive IMO. And for $DEITIES sake, go back to registered copyrights so there is actually a computer searchable database allowing one to search for previous copyrights that might cover this amazing little 5 line code snippet you dreamed about last night. But do not quote the copyrighted material as a return, only the owners contact details and its registration number. Hopefully, this would encourage private exchanges between the individuals to determine if your little magic incantation is infringing or not.
But since that would put lawyers into the soup lines all over, we'll never see such an idea promulgated anyplace but/. If it came to be, I'd have reason to be happy, but at my age, it cannot even be wishful thinking, not enough time left since I expect it will take at least another 25 years for the idea to mature into actual practice. That would make my diabetic body over 100. Not bloody likely as the Brits would say.
That to me is the 64 million dollar question. And likely one that we will never ever get a truthful answer to. There is too much at stake in the marketing of HFCS to ever let an FDA regulation even attempt to control it, or any pollutants it may carry.
As for the linkage between CCD and HFCS that has been treated with this insecticide, it makes just as much sense to me as any one of the other theories, and more sense than most of them.
In the meantime, over 20% of the population that has been sucking this shit up in a many a day sugary pop habits, are now type 2 diabetic, with projections being made that at the presently rising rate, 50% of the population will be by 2030. In case you missed it, we went ape shit over polio before it got to 10% of the kids, and it was called an epidemic then.
Only the entrenched agribusinesses intent on selling all this sugar have now apparently bought, or threatened with billion dollar legal actions, anyone who knows how to spell "epidemic".
I'm in that type 2 group, forced to limit my intake of damned near anything with starches in it because it is instant sugar when digested. That means no white breads, no potato's, damned little fruit because its naturally sweet, leaving the meats as low sugar foods, or fish as a no sugar food. So you have a sweet tooth, you go buy the "sugar free" crap that has 22 grams of "sugar alcohols" in it, thinking it really is sugar free. First off, that crap ain't an alcohol, and second its worth about half those grams in effective sugar, third off, it, like the left handed fats in some of those potato chips, gives you a good case of the trots that won't stop until you are cleaned out. Not a bit pleasant and often quite painful.
Anybody who claims sugar, in whatever form, is not a poison in the quantities we now consume because its everywhere, is a future type 2 diabetic, so enjoy it while you can. When you can't, and the circulation in your feet gets so poor you literally can't go out when the temps are below 65F, or even worse they start dying and have to be amputated to stop the gangrene, come back to me then (if I'm still around, I'm 77 now and could have a diabetic effects related heart attack before I can hit send) and claim sugar isn't a poison. In the meantime the deniers really ought to STFU, you have not experienced it, so it, to you, doesn't exist. That's your problem, I can testify it is very real.
Hell, for all I know, maybe its population control, just a hell of a lot more subtle than the famines & wars in Africa. Slower action, like cooking the frog I guess.
I think all the posts so far have missed the point entirely.
To me, anyone who targets a child's natural curiosity for that sort of exploitation is demonstrating just how badly the planets gene pool filters need cleaning.
If, in the governments collective wisdom (now there is an oxymoron for you), they would re-instate the days when the post office posters said "wanted, dead or alive", which encouraged the bounty hunters to bring em back draped over a saddle, I think I might be interested in making a little extra money to supplement my meager SS check.
To exploit a child in that manner ought to be subject to capital punishment.
Gene pool filter cleaning as it were. Removing the genes that think like that, has to be good for the race as a whole.
Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Obama is a singular individual who can kill this bill directly. He has more power over it becoming law than anyone else.
I've got this horrible feeling it will pass with a veto proof majority. These folks simply, and only, understand one thing and that is how much who paid for a vote one way or the other.
Damn right we need to know what his position on this bill is and why.
I agree wholeheartedly.
The next most important influences on this bill becoming law are Reid (already betrayed us by bringing it up for a vote) and Boehner (very likely to betray us by bringing SOPA to a vote in the house).
Well, if its on the agenda, they eventually need to do something with it. If they bring it up and it fails then they have done their job. If they bring it up and it passes it must be the will of the people (who wrote all those checks of course, nothing to do with constituent email blasting it)
I just can't shake the feeling that when SOPA/PIPA passes, that the Internet will catch fire and rain down torment on 'our' elected officials and the content industry.
Which they will have coming, so I have -zero or less sympathy, and they'll be so busy gloating over it they won't pay attention to anything but the box being down 50% because people are pissed, so they clamor for even more draconian measures until you can't legally take a picture of your grand children and email them to their Aunt Tillie.
The only way I see that is good for our so-called "government" is to copy out and print that list of who got how much from the link at the head of this thread, and if you live where you can vote in their district, vote for anyone else BUT them. Fortunately for them, none of the 3 reps nor the 2 senators that I get to vote for, are listed as having been enriched by this scheme.
Perhaps all the shooting in the next revolution will happen online.
Don't you wish it would be that quiet? I recommend the purchase of some decent shooting muffs, and as always, keep the faith and your powder dry. You will likely need both...
Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
No, I don't think they "have a very good understanding of technology"
Many moons ago, when I setup my first NATed local network here, I bought a Siemans router. I set it up with a 12 character PW for admin purposes, the maximum it would allow. It was rooted and bricked 3 days later. If it was that easily attacked, I sure as hell didn't want it and took it back to Circuit City. They agreed, and weren't surprised that it came back.
So I next brought home a Linksys BESFR41, which in a pinch I can still use. But it was eventually replaced with dd-wrt running on an old x86 box, whose radio never worked despite registering it, so now I have a netgear something or other whose radio used wpa2 with about a 120 char passphrase, and Just Works(TM).
Maybe things have changed in the last decade, but I personally don't use the word Siemans and technology in the same sentence.
Now, for the person who used Bumfuck, Utah as an example, what makes you think they would have anything more sophisticated than a pressure switch, adjusted for the height of the water storage tank, to control their water pumps?
Sheesh, that ain't high tech, needing a computerized system to run it. The town clerk probably goes around reading the meters & sending out the bills on an old pentium powered box running winderz 3.1 from floppies, likely without any connection except the printers parport cable.
So Bumfuck, Utah's water supply is not subject to a terrorists attack via this here intertubes, and far safer than any bigger towns that is all "modern & computerized".
I was doing great reading the article linked to, until I got to the part where the optical goodies are built to withstand 6 atmospheres or 20,000 feet of pressure.
'Scuse me, but according to my calculator, and knowing that 34 feet of water is one atmosphere, then 6 is a measly 204 feet. 20,000 feet would be, in slightly rounded figures, 600 atmospheres. And since the Med. Sea is salty, its safe to reduce that to 200 feet.
Its amazing that in all the posts to this story ahead of mine, no one has mentioned the missing word after the 6 "hundred".
Shame on you all, blathering away on stuff that if this is true, will have zip effect because it will fail spectacularly, both in terms of results per unit of money, and the scientific disappointment.
In terms of knowledge gained vs money spent, it certainly seems like its worthwhile to do. Doing it in the Med. also spans a much wider bit of the universe due to the planets rotation in comparison to ICECUBE, which is aimed more along the polar axis.
My unasked till now question though is: Is there enough daytime sunlight penetration at that depth in the Med. to represent a background noise level that will have to be subtracted, and how will this limit its ultimate sensitivity? Secondarily, what is the clarity of the water from the top of those 800 meter towers on down? Given that its sea water, with the detrious of life falling through it from the oxygenated surface layer 1000 feet above, there is zero chance in hell its not somewhat absorbtive of the emitted photons from a neutrino event.
My $0.02 (in 1934 dollars, adjust for inflation of 77 years)
99% seems like a reasonable SWAG to me based on recent experience. I just went through 4 routers that were either defective out of the box, or not configurable enough to handle my little 4 or 5 machine home network, finally finding a Netgear WNR3500 that worked, including the radio. My new Nook Color needed a passphrase entry for WPA-2, and it Just Worked(TM) This included some $250 Cisco units that didn't work, or worked like a 2400 baud dialup modem for achieved speeds.
Every damned one of them is hard coded to DynDns. So they now have a liplock monopoly on the market. And they know it.
It is not a non-story as you seem to imply. I too got caught with the change (but it was several months ago), having one name registered there. It died through no action on the monthly update update because I am now on a cable modem & the ip is assigned to the modem, never changes. dd-wrt didn't do the auto-update because it hadn't changed, so it expired. So now I've had to register again, but with a much longer hostname now that advertizes that its a free dyndns account. The did it with dd-wrt for me when combined with brainslayers refusal to reply to any messages sent regarding a registered dd-wrt install, so I went out and bought another router (another story all by itself, it was 5 each, 60 mile trips to where I could look at routers & read specs before I actually got one that could be configured to work) and this one is hard coded for dyndns.
I suspect that part of the foot dragging on the part of cisco/linksys/netgear is related to the protocols that other such providers use to maintain active accounts, and tracking them all would quickly make them use a bigger eprom, which in addition to having to write the code, a one time cost, but raises the hardware costs by 13 cents a unit, something the numbskull MBA's just won't accept.
I did run without a dns name for a while, which worked fine AFAIWC, but my sent email got filtered to the spam folder at a lot of the recipients sites because of the ip address contained in the sig where the name should have been. Damned if I do, and damned if I didn't. Since my site serves as a backup repo of a lot of software for a 25 year old computer, if it goes dark, that is just one more nail in the lid of that old & greatly loved machine.
"It wont be until the rest of us demand proper support any vendor will put the time and money into a proper solution"
Precisely. Here at the coyote.den, I've been NATing all my stuff to a 192.158.xx.xx scheme and will never ever use even the last block of 254 addresses fully. But that is whats forced on the home user because his ISP only gives us one address.
ALL of the existing, can be purchased from Amazon, reference books are both quite a few years old now, and damned expensive in dead tree formats, too damned expensive. Yes, you can get the e-book versions for a $20 bill, but Amazon won't sell it to you without the kindle itself logging in somehow. So they are not accessable without first dropping the card for the Kindle at $200 and up. That's bull shit but it won't grow any corn where I come from.
Amazon should make up their mind, either sell books, or Kindles but not both.
Then, figuring if I could buy the e-book I could read it with Calibre, but figured I had better check out the e-pub compatible reader (an Aluratek Libre!) that I bought the missus for Christmas last year (which supposedly came with a 1 year warranty that has about a week to run), I pulled it out and discovered it is deader than a 5 year old mouse. Plugged its charger in, no response. Plugged the charger into one of those universal usb powered read/write anything adapters, one that when plugged into a normal usb port, lights up the whole room with an erie blue light. Nothing, charger is dead.
Plug the reader into a usb port, which Aluratek claims can charge it in 8 hours. 16 hours later, still dead. Now, since I am a C.E.T., I open the thing up, a 3.7 volt battery reads 4.7 _millivolts_but even with power on the usb plug, no charging current is getting to the battery. So, it appears to me that the charger may have gone wild before it failed completely, and let the magic smoke out of the internal charge regulation parts, but very close inspection with a very high powered magnifying lens doesn't disclose anything that looks to be damaged, and a simple ohmmeter test of the transistors says they are good. I wrote Aluratek at their email support site asking, but of course its the weekend, and by the time a reply gets here, the warranty will be fini.
I might buy another, but the warranty had better read damned good before I drop the card.
Back to ipv6: The relatively elder age of the available books on the subject means they will cover only the RFC's for it, and likely zero content will actually address what, where & how we should attack the problem with our favorite editors, in my case vim.
So, the bottom line is this: Google needs to write an e-book documenting how it is actually done, and likely make it available in a non-drm'd format for a $20 bill. At that point, ipv6 might take off, perhaps at 1% of the ISP's in the next year.
Until such time as the implementation details are actually published at an affordable by Joe & Jill Lunchbucket price, google may well find they are virtually the only ones in this truly humungous ipv6 pond. The rest of us, ISP's included, will go about the daily business without worrying about it until the address crunch really happens. Since most ISP's have 3 to 20 times the address space assigned than they are actually using, TPTB simply cannot see any reason to spend even a $20 bill on ipv6. And at the end of the day, I see no real reason to call mine up and do anything more than ask when ipv6 services may become available. I did that shortly before that national test last summer, and got a "what's ipv6?" reply.
Anyway, since folks are saying it, so will I. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Adjust for inflation though, it only took $0.05 to buy a loaf of bread when I was born.
Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> Most people eat as though they were fattening themselves for market.
-- E.W. Howe
"And isn't iron a fairly common element in planets, hence molten core, hence magnetic field protecting the surface from cosmic rays and all that."
But please recall that to get that iron, it had to come from the core of a previous supernova that marked the violent end of a previous generation star. It is the fusion to make iron that needs more energy than it releases as it fuses. This then is the end of a formerly massive star because when that process starts in the core of the star, the core cools. And without the heat and light holding up the overlaying material pressing down on the core with several hundred million atmospheres of gravity, it collapses inward, literally at C speed, often forming a black hole. But it rarely collapses to totally within the event horizon, instead throwing large amounts of the overlying surface material out into space so violently that there can even be fusion to make iron for a few milliseconds as the explosive compression wave moved outward through the mass.
Eventually that iron cooled enough to start collecting into clumps, then balls, growing big enough by its gravity pulling in even lighter materials. 5 billion years later it has cooled enough to make a solid rock crust for life to walk on. And another couple billion years finds us here, discussing it on/.
That is where we are now...
Could this happen someplace else in this galaxy? Absolutely. In other galaxies of this universe? Absolutely.
Are we out of sync with any other life form's "radio active cycle, where such as we now have tv programs like I Love Lucy which is 60 lights years out and pretty weak"? Compare that to our impending cessation of such "radio" activities by putting it all on optical fiber and we might have been broadcasting to the neighborhood for 150 years. But we've only been listening for the neighbors for what, 50 years? Will we, because of the shortness of "radio active" time compared to when some plankton turned green & started growing on the rocks, miss the neighbors similar broadcasts? To a sigma 4.999 certainty? Absolutely.
If there is indeed life on Europa, given the time & temps, it is unlikely to have progressed beyond the plankton stage using our methods of measuring such things. Does it deserve to suffer from our meddling, however well meaning we are? Absolutely not!
I sincerely hope that not even a microbe or a virus survives on whatever they intend to hit Europa with, lest we contaminate and kill whatever might be there. That would to me, be mankind's biggest insult to the universe ever, and grounds to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Is there life elsewhere in the universe that is not based on the carbon/oxygen chemical processes? There cannot help but be. Will we find it? Probably not since one environment would be instantly lethal to the other and preventing the discovery for long periods of time.
I think this about sums up my feelings too. I have an Aluratek Libre, a version of what is supposed to be a kindle compatible reader. I wanted to buy a book on bind configuration for ipv6 stuffs, and went to amazon to see what they had. 7 or 8 year old stuff, surely out of date by now was more than I felt it was worth, so I checked e-books too, and could get it for $19.95. That much I was willing to gamble on. But when I clicked on the download button, it downloaded it 'to the cloud' which isn't something I want to expose myself to. But no plastic numbers had changed hands yet, so I backed out, and tried to find a way to download it to my machine, from which I could maybe read it with calibre or copy it to the Aluratek.
No way, if the kindle itself didn't log in, screw you. So I went away.
Then their billing automat started spamming my email address 1 to 3x times a day for the next several weeks, claiming there must be something wrong with my credit card.
That has finally petered out, maybe someone realized, finally, that they never got the card in the first place, but to me it shows the mentality that says if you don't buy a kindle for 3x what I paid for the aluratek, we certainly aren't interested in the e-book sale.
Well, guess what, I never saw the book, and I'll be damned if I will pay for it, by any means until it has been delivered to a medium that I have control over.
If you are an author, tell amazon you don't have a quarter to call anyone to see if they have a genuine kindle before the sale is made, just make the frigging sale. Seems pretty damned clear to me, after all, you hold the copyright and should be able to dictate the terms of the sale.
Cheers, Gene -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." Ed Howdershelt (Author)
>Well, now I don't remember. Did the 6309 expand DP? No, it was still an 8 bit register. >Anyway, I'd have started by expanded the index registers, to make it possible to directly address a reasonably wide pixel display buffer and such. (Per the 68HC16 or whatever that was/is.) Widened DP to make it possible to reasonably use it to base process local variables in a large process space. Added another index register (and kept the U) to ease direct execution of p-machine or Forth kinds of intermediate code. Stuff in that vein.
And likely that would not have fit in the register decoding scheme. The extra registers/accumulators it got were, if my memory is correct:
A mode register, called MD, setting or clearing a couple of bits of that could switch the speedup stuffs on/off, so that with everything off, which was not the default, it ran exactly like the 6809 to preserve timing loops and such. The default mode had the instruction prefetch enabled. There was another bit too, but I don't recall its function ATM.
2 new 8 bit accumulator registers, E & F, with 16 bit load/store when addressed as W, and all 4 for 32 bit load/stores when addressed as Q which loaded or stored ABEF in that byte order. Data moves were a little faster since it didn't need a 2nd instruction fetch to load or store 32 bits.
Level 2 os9 brought us the ability to address 2 megabytes of main memory, but tandy didn't build the hardware into the GIME chip for the last 2 bits, so the stock coco3 has only a 512k memory capability. Tony DiStefano made a kit that added the last 2 bits expanding that to 2024K (decimal) and I have one of those kits in my coco3. The paging scheme within the S-U-X-Y accessible range puts any 8k block of that main memory into any 8k block of the processors 64k address space. So when I wrote 'myram', a ramdisk, only an 8k block of that memory was mapped into cpu space at any one microsecond, but the whole thing was available transparently to a program using/r0 as its virtual disk drive. However it is not noticeably faster than/dd or/s1, which are a pair of 1Gb seagate hawk scsi drives accessed by a Cloud9 TC^3 controller in the mpi's slot 2 (base 0 numbering). To move a megabyte from either storage medium is about (6309) 11 or (6809) 13 seconds and is controlled by how fast the cpu can do a block move. The diff between myram and everybody else's is that myram self formats to whatever size in 8k blocks is set in the 'cyl' variable in the descriptor, doing this in about 50 milliseconds before allowing the first access, and the deiniz operation returns every byte to the free memory pool. Very transparent to the user.
To get back to to 63x09, its being cmos meant little or no heating, so little that once I had pulled the psu stuffs out of mine and it is now powered by the same old AT psu that powers all the drives and the mpi, the heat rise there is, is right over the 2 dimms of memory, and is 2 degrees F!
Looking at the waveforms around this C rated (4mhz) chip in mine, with a 100 mhz scope, tells me it should be capable of operating at a considerably higher speed than the max of 1.79 mhz it does run at. At one point several years ago I was running 2 monitors by way of a WP-RS card in slot 1, which would have isolated that video from the cpu clock speed, and subbing a vco for the crystal that I could crank up to 10 or 20 mhz. But I think that would have been doomed to fail the irreplaceable GIME from over heating, so that never got 'tested'. Putting the video into the GIME torpedoed its power budget, and if I were young enough (I'm 77 now) to consider making a coco4, that would have been excised and put into a dedicated video chip. Something with enough output transistors in the design to pull to either rail in say 1/4 of a clock cycle. The existing GIME has a video output rise or fall time nearly twice the NTSC time of 110 ns, or about 240ns. So it cannot even explore the full bandwidth of an NTSC monitor.
(And the 6309 took the design the wrong direction for that.)
Maybe, but having those additional commands and register resources sure made optimizing the os9 code a bunch easier. Enough that it is about twice as fast as os9 was now because we fixed some bugs in the process, then ported the bugfixes back to the 6809 versions. We now build nitros9 for either cpu from the same src's.
I did the initial and next couple of rbf.mn conversions myself. Plus I re-wrote the serial mouse driver just 3 years ago. The project is now called nitros9, and disk images to install it and make new boot disks are downloadable from the sourceforge site, and all the tools to rebuild it for winders/mac/linux are available from OpenCoco too. That is called "Toolshed". I keep a repo clone of both here on this machine.
There, I fixed it for you. You see the 6309 was the result of Hitachi obtaining a permission to build a 6809 that was a functional clone of the 6809, but had to call it something else other than its being a cmos 6809 chip, and were enjoined from ever saying there was a difference other than the resultant design was in cmos.
But something odd happened on the way to the foundry. When the 6809's op-codes were put into a map whose x/y was the value of the nibbles, there was quite a number of 'holes', so Hitachi filled them in with enhanced feature op-codes. Op-codes it remained for the users to discover because even when disclosed, Hitachi was prevented from even confirming their existence. Such things as several more accumulator registers (E,F, and Q which meant A,B,E,F combined for 32 bits), and where the 6809 had some mul functions that gave 16 bit answers, the 6309 had a new 16x16 multiply with a 32 bit answer, and a divide of 16 bits into 32 bits with a 16 bit answer and a 16 bit remainder in 39 clocks worst case. Loads and stores could be 32 bits wide, a slight speedup because it skiped an instruction fetch in the middle, and a switchable ability to pipe line the next instruction fetch during an otherwise idle bus cycle which made it about 10% faster because you actually had to turn it off by a write to the MD register.
The net result for the color computers OS9 operation system was, when combined with some bug fixing, nearly twice as fast at the same clock speed. FWIW, I have one in my 'coco3', running right now. We call it Nitros9 now. Community supported.
If this 'sheet of paper' can get to a 2 mhz clock speed, I can see newer developments made even easier already. A notebook coco3 for instance. Just turn the 'page' to run a different test configuration.:)
That is obviously for winderz, this is linux. I finally hardcoded the script for/, but that is too wide a brush and eventually reset the system, probably out of ram, only 4Gb in this box.
I did the copy/paste myself, from that web page and it sucks to have to fix all the gawddamned tabs the html engine or the copy paste inserts needlessly. Where the hell is the download button?
But I did it, good enough that it runs, but its done instantly, so I guess I try my hand at editing a real python file to put in some prints and see what is null, it pays no attention to what would be argc[2]. If anyone has a clue what this line is supposed to do on a linux box, speak up, python total new bee here.
rootdir = sys.argv[1]
If its supposed to take a cli argument, how is it passed to a python script?
Slashdot Mirror
In fresh water, yes. Great boats till the rivets start leaking in 25-30 years. Salt water OTOH, is very corrosive to aluminium which I usually shorten to alu.
Ocean air is not the only corrosion to worry about. I've no clue what they intend to use to protect the alu hull with.
Story time folks, been told before but there may be new readers here.
In '59, I had the pleasure of being a bench tech, at a little place on Mission Bay called Oceanographic Engineering, helping to assemble the electronics for the 2 cameras that were mounted on the Trieste when it went down onto the mohole in the Pacific a few months later. The Navy had come in and bought the first 2 we made but instead of the cases we were going to use for towing them thru sewers to inspect the sewers, they gave us specs for a bronze case, with quartz windows they supplied. Designed to withstand about 25 kpsi, its 17 or 18 kpsi in the mohole. But they wanted to play a bit before the real show and asked us to make the first one out of 7078-T6 alu. It took us about 6 weeks to get a lathe that big AND accurate setup and we made the first case out of a 6" diameter alu rod about 2 feet long. Fixed it up with all the packing glands it would need. They picked up the whole kit on a smallish cruiser, 65' for so and took it out about 50 miles to give it a dunk test. We had sent it out and had the heaviest cad plate we could get put on it. They brought it back the next day and having been scratched by rolling around on the deck deep enough to penetrate the plating, and in one days time over the side and down about a thousand feet, those scratches came back to us 1/2" wide and an inch deep, just from being in the sea water for about 12 hours.
Needless to say, the real cases for the Trieste trip were cut from some special bronze that started out nearly 8" in diameter. The camera itself was 2.5" in diameter, so we bored a 3" hole for it in the bronze and padded it with weather stripping to hold it centered in the hole. Those 2 cameras, a rounded box with some relays in it to turn the stuff around and switch the lights, and the gondola of the Trieste were all that was pressure sealed, everything else was running at the ambient pressure which was considerable. Except for chewing thru the rubber diaphram separating the sea water from the oil in the pan & tilts for one of the cameras, that trip down with Picard and Walsh, it all worked. The P&T wasn't disabled & still worked when they came back up. With some very interesting pix I got to see a few of.
And Steve had it made with an ALU hull? 'scuse me, but... I predict it will spend a lot of time in dry-dock, getting patched. It likely won't last much longer than I will since I have a 78 year head start on it.
Cheers, Gene
AMD are doing real long term innovation with integrating CPU and GPU.
No shit sherlock. AMD buying ATI was the dumbest thing they ever did. Its likely, and I'm guessing here, that the ATI division has eaten their profits from the cpu business because somebody convinced AMD that ATI was the Next Big Thing.
I have purchased, and thrown out, 3 fairly top of the line ATI video cards over the last decade because I always wanted to support the underdog. And every time I have been burned because their drivers are such crap and unstable. Each time, before I purchased, I was in contact with one of their software honcho's, who each time proclaimed this time it would be different, but it never was right. Their linux drivers were faster than the linux drivers but not by day & night diffs, both used a lot of cpu & theirs tore up the machines latency where the vesa driver didn't. The linux drivers were slower often displaying what my machine was doing a second or more after the machine had done it, but were stable. But they were always very careful about throwing code over the fence to the linux folks, and they always did it 6 months after the card the code was for was out of the supply pipeline. Couple that with changing the card so it wasn't compatible with even the commercially available drivers I ordered specifically for that card, at $50, and when it arrived, it wouldn't run the card, ATI had changed the card in the box without changing the color of a single dot above an i on the box, or on any of the enclosures. No refunds available, and no, we don't have a driver for that card yet. The situation did improve slightly with the next 2 cards, at least linux could run them in the vesa mode, at limited resolution of course.
Nvidia is finally getting religion, throwing usable code over the fence for the neauvou driver while the cards are still on the dealers shelves, so while I might not be able to do 500 fps on this linux box, it is now my connection when a video I'm watching stutters. Running the neauvou driver. Dead stable too.
After a while, its so nice to quit hammering yourself in the head, trying to support a company that refuses to support the customer. This nvidia card is now getting long in the tooth, I finally had to replace that puny bushing grade fan a few months ago, but it still Just Works. That is all I ever asked.
Cheers, Gene
Grin, yeah, it was a typu, but in retrospect I agree, it works better that way.
But we won't ask how much, based on the theory that if you have to ask, you can't afford it, and I, on SS, damned sure don't think I can afford 4 more years of the same old same old....
Cheers, Gene
And who the hell are you to define bias? This was the one place where we could come and post our general distrust of the filtering of the news that the MSM does on a second by second basis.
For instance, there are polls being conducted that show that Libertarian Gary Johnson could, in the most optimistic circumstances take over 20% of the vote on Nov 6th. But to allow his name to appear in the MSM is universally deemed to be a waste of precious time & bandwidth. He can't even get an invite to one of the so-called 'debates' which in reality are nothing more than the 2 top crooks of the 2 party system, each trying to make themselves the lessor of 2 evils.
There is NO Constitutional mandate for a 2 party system, but of all the election laws passed in the last 150 years, the intent is to protect TPTB.
For Gary to be polling at such high rates despite the lack of mention in the MSM, tells me that the general public, the sheeple if you will, are about to do 2 things, one being that because of the votes they'll "steal", Obama gets another term.
The second thing is that if the sheeple vote Nov 6th like they are saying now, that cannot be ignored, it will be a shot across the bow of the ship of state that cannot be ignored. If Gary doesn't win, and that is unlikely this Nov 6th, that 'shot across the bow' will at least steer the ship of state away from its present path of selling out to the highest bidder.
The worst part is that the protections of the Constitution, as amended, are only one more Obama appointed Justice away from just being an interesting footnote in the history of what was once the most respected Nation on the planet. Of the important cases before the court the last 3 years, the Constitution won by only one vote each time. That alone should scare the sheeple, but TPTB manufactured current economy means the sheeple have what they think are more important things to be afraid of.
At the moment, I can't muster up much in the way of Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
That is just novel enough of an idea that I think it would work!
Does anyone have the address of these jerks so we know what court district or country we'd have to file the damage suit in?
Triple damages to be applied of course, since they would have zero problems doing that to any one of us.
Hell of an idea, hitch up the legal horses and take 200 heaping loads of it to the appropriate courts.
Cheers, Gene
Also why not do a case study for thresholds where the bomb might be useful. An asteroid that threatens the planet may not be stopped, but something that could wipe out a metropolitan area and cause trillions of dollars of damage might be a size that could be. An asteroid on that scale may do less or no damage if it could be broken into small enough pieces before it hits the atmosphere.
I don't believe even the no physical damage case to be exactly benign. Breaking it into cubic foot sized pieces, some of those would survive to the surface. The real damages in this case would still be from the heat pulse into our atmosphere. If you think this years hottest July on record, at 3.3F above the long term average, was bad, you haven't seen anything yet. That of course would be followed in a few months by the winter created by the dust, which by changing the albedo of the planet, might take several years to return to some semblance of the new normal. It may well be sufficient that in 1000 years, this planet may have a new dominant species.
Also anyone remember that Deep Impact mission with the copper slug slammed into an asteroid some years back? That inert chunk of metal also happened to be very close to the volume and mass of a common nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal. (Looking at those numbers, it doesn't appear too random.) It seems somebody was seriously considering the idea.
I wondered about that myself. Its encouraging to see that someone else made that connection. However, I have my doubts that one of our nukes could survive that "burying it in the asteroid impact" without either going off prematurely, or failing to trigger once it had stopped at the target depth.
Encouraging thoughts, not!
Cheers, Gene
I'd almost have to agree since I was reading "Docs" work in the early 40's, it was I believe, the first non-educational material I read after mastering McGuffy's, so I guess you could call me as being from that era.
But more recently, as in the last 40 years, an alias, Jack Williamson sticks out in my memory. There was enough stuff in "Fire Starter" to make a trilogy, but I never saw that name on the shelves again. And of course we shouldn't forget Orson scott Card and Spider Robinson (Callahans Bar among others), two more rather widely read names that haven't been mentioned.
Cheers, Gene
This isn't the first time I have seen this suggestion, but to me, its the most sensible solution to the present patent fiasco. Because something better WILL come along, and sales of the old stuff will dwindle. When it costs 50% of the profits to register it for another year, just let it expire. That could be a bookkeeping problem because there would have to be very strictly applied rules forbidding the transfer of another products profits into the book for this one, and as usual, loopholes would be bought, and bookkeepers able to hide such creative accounting would have to be figured into the P&L statement FOR that product.
By and large I think its a good idea, but as usual, the devil will be in the details. Stuff like this, since its usually written by lawyers we've elected, is guaranteed to look good on the front page of the daily fish wrap, and is also guaranteed to have loopholes that are for sale to the highest bidder in the campaign finance wars.
As for software, no patents, copyrights only, and to encourage innovation, and even 5 years is excessive IMO. And for $DEITIES sake, go back to registered copyrights so there is actually a computer searchable database allowing one to search for previous copyrights that might cover this amazing little 5 line code snippet you dreamed about last night. But do not quote the copyrighted material as a return, only the owners contact details and its registration number. Hopefully, this would encourage private exchanges between the individuals to determine if your little magic incantation is infringing or not.
But since that would put lawyers into the soup lines all over, we'll never see such an idea promulgated anyplace but /. If it came to be, I'd have reason to be happy, but at my age, it cannot even be wishful thinking, not enough time left since I expect it will take at least another 25 years for the idea to mature into actual practice. That would make my diabetic body over 100. Not bloody likely as the Brits would say.
Cheers, Gene
That to me is the 64 million dollar question. And likely one that we will never ever get a truthful answer to. There is too much at stake in the marketing of HFCS to ever let an FDA regulation even attempt to control it, or any pollutants it may carry.
As for the linkage between CCD and HFCS that has been treated with this insecticide, it makes just as much sense to me as any one of the other theories, and more sense than most of them.
In the meantime, over 20% of the population that has been sucking this shit up in a many a day sugary pop habits, are now type 2 diabetic, with projections being made that at the presently rising rate, 50% of the population will be by 2030. In case you missed it, we went ape shit over polio before it got to 10% of the kids, and it was called an epidemic then.
Only the entrenched agribusinesses intent on selling all this sugar have now apparently bought, or threatened with billion dollar legal actions, anyone who knows how to spell "epidemic".
I'm in that type 2 group, forced to limit my intake of damned near anything with starches in it because it is instant sugar when digested. That means no white breads, no potato's, damned little fruit because its naturally sweet, leaving the meats as low sugar foods, or fish as a no sugar food. So you have a sweet tooth, you go buy the "sugar free" crap that has 22 grams of "sugar alcohols" in it, thinking it really is sugar free. First off, that crap ain't an alcohol, and second its worth about half those grams in effective sugar, third off, it, like the left handed fats in some of those potato chips, gives you a good case of the trots that won't stop until you are cleaned out. Not a bit pleasant and often quite painful.
Anybody who claims sugar, in whatever form, is not a poison in the quantities we now consume because its everywhere, is a future type 2 diabetic, so enjoy it while you can. When you can't, and the circulation in your feet gets so poor you literally can't go out when the temps are below 65F, or even worse they start dying and have to be amputated to stop the gangrene, come back to me then (if I'm still around, I'm 77 now and could have a diabetic effects related heart attack before I can hit send) and claim sugar isn't a poison. In the meantime the deniers really ought to STFU, you have not experienced it, so it, to you, doesn't exist. That's your problem, I can testify it is very real.
Hell, for all I know, maybe its population control, just a hell of a lot more subtle than the famines & wars in Africa. Slower action, like cooking the frog I guess.
Cheers, Gene
I think all the posts so far have missed the point entirely.
To me, anyone who targets a child's natural curiosity for that sort of exploitation is demonstrating just how badly the planets gene pool filters need cleaning.
If, in the governments collective wisdom (now there is an oxymoron for you), they would re-instate the days when the post office posters said "wanted, dead or alive", which encouraged the bounty hunters to bring em back draped over a saddle, I think I might be interested in making a little extra money to supplement my meager SS check.
To exploit a child in that manner ought to be subject to capital punishment.
Gene pool filter cleaning as it were. Removing the genes that think like that, has to be good for the race as a whole.
Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to
change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Obama is a singular individual who can kill this bill directly. He has more power over it becoming law than anyone else.
I've got this horrible feeling it will pass with a veto proof majority. These folks simply, and only, understand one thing and that is how much who paid for a vote one way or the other.
Damn right we need to know what his position on this bill is and why.
I agree wholeheartedly.
The next most important influences on this bill becoming law are Reid (already betrayed us by bringing it up for a vote) and Boehner (very likely to betray us by bringing SOPA to a vote in the house).
Well, if its on the agenda, they eventually need to do something with it. If they bring it up and it fails then they have done their job. If they bring it up and it passes it must be the will of the people (who wrote all those checks of course, nothing to do with constituent email blasting it)
I just can't shake the feeling that when SOPA/PIPA passes, that the Internet will catch fire and rain down torment on 'our' elected officials and the content industry.
Which they will have coming, so I have -zero or less sympathy, and they'll be so busy gloating over it they won't pay attention to anything but the box being down 50% because people are pissed, so they clamor for even more draconian measures until you can't legally take a picture of your grand children and email them to their Aunt Tillie.
The only way I see that is good for our so-called "government" is to copy out and print that list of who got how much from the link at the head of this thread, and if you live where you can vote in their district, vote for anyone else BUT them. Fortunately for them, none of the 3 reps nor the 2 senators that I get to vote for, are listed as having been enriched by this scheme.
Perhaps all the shooting in the next revolution will happen online.
Don't you wish it would be that quiet? I recommend the purchase of some decent shooting muffs, and as always, keep the faith and your powder dry. You will likely need both...
Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
No, I don't think they "have a very good understanding of technology"
Many moons ago, when I setup my first NATed local network here, I bought a Siemans router. I set it up with a 12 character PW for admin purposes, the maximum it would allow. It was rooted and bricked 3 days later. If it was that easily attacked, I sure as hell didn't want it and took it back to Circuit City. They agreed, and weren't surprised that it came back.
So I next brought home a Linksys BESFR41, which in a pinch I can still use. But it was eventually replaced with dd-wrt running on an old x86 box, whose radio never worked despite registering it, so now I have a netgear something or other whose radio used wpa2 with about a 120 char passphrase, and Just Works(TM).
Maybe things have changed in the last decade, but I personally don't use the word Siemans and technology in the same sentence.
Now, for the person who used Bumfuck, Utah as an example, what makes you think they would have anything more sophisticated than a pressure switch, adjusted for the height of the water storage tank, to control their water pumps?
Sheesh, that ain't high tech, needing a computerized system to run it. The town clerk probably goes around reading the meters & sending out the bills on an old pentium powered box running winderz 3.1 from floppies, likely without any connection except the printers parport cable.
So Bumfuck, Utah's water supply is not subject to a terrorists attack via this here intertubes, and far safer than any bigger towns that is all "modern & computerized".
Cheers & a merry Christmas to all, Gene
I was doing great reading the article linked to, until I got to the part where the optical goodies are built to withstand 6 atmospheres or 20,000 feet of pressure.
'Scuse me, but according to my calculator, and knowing that 34 feet of water is one atmosphere, then 6 is a measly 204 feet. 20,000 feet would be, in slightly rounded figures, 600 atmospheres. And since the Med. Sea is salty, its safe to reduce that to 200 feet.
Its amazing that in all the posts to this story ahead of mine, no one has mentioned the missing word after the 6 "hundred".
Shame on you all, blathering away on stuff that if this is true, will have zip effect because it will fail spectacularly, both in terms of results per unit of money, and the scientific disappointment.
In terms of knowledge gained vs money spent, it certainly seems like its worthwhile to do. Doing it in the Med. also spans a much wider bit of the universe due to the planets rotation in comparison to ICECUBE, which is aimed more along the polar axis.
My unasked till now question though is: Is there enough daytime sunlight penetration at that depth in the Med. to represent a background noise level that will have to be subtracted, and how will this limit its ultimate sensitivity? Secondarily, what is the clarity of the water from the top of those 800 meter towers on down? Given that its sea water, with the detrious of life falling through it from the oxygenated surface layer 1000 feet above, there is zero chance in hell its not somewhat absorbtive of the emitted photons from a neutrino event.
My $0.02 (in 1934 dollars, adjust for inflation of 77 years)
Cheers, Gene
99% seems like a reasonable SWAG to me based on recent experience. I just went through 4 routers that were either defective out of the box, or not configurable enough to handle my little 4 or 5 machine home network, finally finding a Netgear WNR3500 that worked, including the radio. My new Nook Color needed a passphrase entry for WPA-2, and it Just Worked(TM) This included some $250 Cisco units that didn't work, or worked like a 2400 baud dialup modem for achieved speeds.
Every damned one of them is hard coded to DynDns. So they now have a liplock monopoly on the market. And they know it.
Cheers, Gene
Support? Not really, so that box is shut off forever at my 20.
It is not a non-story as you seem to imply. I too got caught with the change (but it was several months ago), having one name registered there. It died through no action on the monthly update update because I am now on a cable modem & the ip is assigned to the modem, never changes. dd-wrt didn't do the auto-update because it hadn't changed, so it expired. So now I've had to register again, but with a much longer hostname now that advertizes that its a free dyndns account. The did it with dd-wrt for me when combined with brainslayers refusal to reply to any messages sent regarding a registered dd-wrt install, so I went out and bought another router (another story all by itself, it was 5 each, 60 mile trips to where I could look at routers & read specs before I actually got one that could be configured to work) and this one is hard coded for dyndns.
I suspect that part of the foot dragging on the part of cisco/linksys/netgear is related to the protocols that other such providers use to maintain active accounts, and tracking them all would quickly make them use a bigger eprom, which in addition to having to write the code, a one time cost, but raises the hardware costs by 13 cents a unit, something the numbskull MBA's just won't accept.
I did run without a dns name for a while, which worked fine AFAIWC, but my sent email got filtered to the spam folder at a lot of the recipients sites because of the ip address contained in the sig where the name should have been. Damned if I do, and damned if I didn't. Since my site serves as a backup repo of a lot of software for a 25 year old computer, if it goes dark, that is just one more nail in the lid of that old & greatly loved machine.
Yeah, it is a story, and a PIMA too.
Cheers, Gene
"It wont be until the rest of us demand proper support any vendor will put the time and money into a proper solution"
Precisely. Here at the coyote.den, I've been NATing all my stuff to a 192.158.xx.xx scheme and will never ever use even the last block of 254 addresses fully. But that is whats forced on the home user because his ISP only gives us one address.
ALL of the existing, can be purchased from Amazon, reference books are both quite a few years old now, and damned expensive in dead tree formats, too damned expensive. Yes, you can get the e-book versions for a $20 bill, but Amazon won't sell it to you without the kindle itself logging in somehow. So they are not accessable without first dropping the card for the Kindle at $200 and up. That's bull shit but it won't grow any corn where I come from.
Amazon should make up their mind, either sell books, or Kindles but not both.
Then, figuring if I could buy the e-book I could read it with Calibre, but figured I had better check out the e-pub compatible reader (an Aluratek Libre!) that I bought the missus for Christmas last year (which supposedly came with a 1 year warranty that has about a week to run), I pulled it out and discovered it is deader than a 5 year old mouse. Plugged its charger in, no response. Plugged the charger into one of those universal usb powered read/write anything adapters, one that when plugged into a normal usb port, lights up the whole room with an erie blue light. Nothing, charger is dead.
Plug the reader into a usb port, which Aluratek claims can charge it in 8 hours. 16 hours later, still dead. Now, since I am a C.E.T., I open the thing up, a 3.7 volt battery reads 4.7 _millivolts_but even with power on the usb plug, no charging current is getting to the battery. So, it appears to me that the charger may have gone wild before it failed completely, and let the magic smoke out of the internal charge regulation parts, but very close inspection with a very high powered magnifying lens doesn't disclose anything that looks to be damaged, and a simple ohmmeter test of the transistors says they are good. I wrote Aluratek at their email support site asking, but of course its the weekend, and by the time a reply gets here, the warranty will be fini.
I might buy another, but the warranty had better read damned good before I drop the card.
Back to ipv6: The relatively elder age of the available books on the subject means they will cover only the RFC's for it, and likely zero content will actually address what, where & how we should attack the problem with our favorite editors, in my case vim.
So, the bottom line is this: Google needs to write an e-book documenting how it is actually done, and likely make it available in a non-drm'd format for a $20 bill. At that point, ipv6 might take off, perhaps at 1% of the ISP's in the next year.
Until such time as the implementation details are actually published at an affordable by Joe & Jill Lunchbucket price, google may well find they are virtually the only ones in this truly humungous ipv6 pond. The rest of us, ISP's included, will go about the daily business without worrying about it until the address crunch really happens. Since most ISP's have 3 to 20 times the address space assigned than they are actually using, TPTB simply cannot see any reason to spend even a $20 bill on ipv6. And at the end of the day, I see no real reason to call mine up and do anything more than ask when ipv6 services may become available. I did that shortly before that national test last summer, and got a "what's ipv6?" reply.
Anyway, since folks are saying it, so will I. That's my $0.02 on the subject. Adjust for inflation though, it only took $0.05 to buy a loaf of bread when I was born.
Cheers, Gene
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
Most people eat as though they were fattening themselves for market.
-- E.W. Howe
"And isn't iron a fairly common element in planets, hence molten core, hence magnetic field protecting the surface from cosmic rays and all that."
/.
But please recall that to get that iron, it had to come from the core of a previous supernova that marked the violent end of a previous generation star. It is the fusion to make iron that needs more energy than it releases as it fuses. This then is the end of a formerly massive star because when that process starts in the core of the star, the core cools. And without the heat and light holding up the overlaying material pressing down on the core with several hundred million atmospheres of gravity, it collapses inward, literally at C speed, often forming a black hole. But it rarely collapses to totally within the event horizon, instead throwing large amounts of the overlying surface material out into space so violently that there can even be fusion to make iron for a few milliseconds as the explosive compression wave moved outward through the mass.
Eventually that iron cooled enough to start collecting into clumps, then balls, growing big enough by its gravity pulling in even lighter materials. 5 billion years later it has cooled enough to make a solid rock crust for life to walk on. And another couple billion years finds us here, discussing it on
That is where we are now...
Could this happen someplace else in this galaxy? Absolutely. In other galaxies of this universe? Absolutely.
Are we out of sync with any other life form's "radio active cycle, where such as we now have tv programs like I Love Lucy which is 60 lights years out and pretty weak"? Compare that to our impending cessation of such "radio" activities by putting it all on optical fiber and we might have been broadcasting to the neighborhood for 150 years. But we've only been listening for the neighbors for what, 50 years? Will we, because of the shortness of "radio active" time compared to when some plankton turned green & started growing on the rocks, miss the neighbors similar broadcasts? To a sigma 4.999 certainty? Absolutely.
If there is indeed life on Europa, given the time & temps, it is unlikely to have progressed beyond the plankton stage using our methods of measuring such things. Does it deserve to suffer from our meddling, however well meaning we are? Absolutely not!
I sincerely hope that not even a microbe or a virus survives on whatever they intend to hit Europa with, lest we contaminate and kill whatever might be there. That would to me, be mankind's biggest insult to the universe ever, and grounds to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Is there life elsewhere in the universe that is not based on the carbon/oxygen chemical processes? There cannot help but be. Will we find it? Probably not since one environment would be instantly lethal to the other and preventing the discovery for long periods of time.
Food for thought.
Cheers, Gene
I think this about sums up my feelings too. I have an Aluratek Libre, a version of what is supposed to be a kindle compatible reader. I wanted to buy a book on bind configuration for ipv6 stuffs, and went to amazon to see what they had. 7 or 8 year old stuff, surely out of date by now was more than I felt it was worth, so I checked e-books too, and could get it for $19.95. That much I was willing to gamble on. But when I clicked on the download button, it downloaded it 'to the cloud' which isn't something I want to expose myself to. But no plastic numbers had changed hands yet, so I backed out, and tried to find a way to download it to my machine, from which I could maybe read it with calibre or copy it to the Aluratek.
No way, if the kindle itself didn't log in, screw you. So I went away.
Then their billing automat started spamming my email address 1 to 3x times a day for the next several weeks, claiming there must be something wrong with my credit card.
That has finally petered out, maybe someone realized, finally, that they never got the card in the first place, but to me it shows the mentality that says if you don't buy a kindle for 3x what I paid for the aluratek, we certainly aren't interested in the e-book sale.
Well, guess what, I never saw the book, and I'll be damned if I will pay for it, by any means until it has been delivered to a medium that I have control over.
If you are an author, tell amazon you don't have a quarter to call anyone to see if they have a genuine kindle before the sale is made, just make the frigging sale. Seems pretty damned clear to me, after all, you hold the copyright and should be able to dictate the terms of the sale.
Cheers, Gene
--
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
Ed Howdershelt (Author)
>Well, now I don't remember. Did the 6309 expand DP?
/r0 as its virtual disk drive. However it is not noticeably faster than /dd or /s1, which are a pair of 1Gb seagate hawk scsi drives accessed by a Cloud9 TC^3 controller in the mpi's slot 2 (base 0 numbering). To move a megabyte from either storage medium is about (6309) 11 or (6809) 13 seconds and is controlled by how fast the cpu can do a block move. The diff between myram and everybody else's is that myram self formats to whatever size in 8k blocks is set in the 'cyl' variable in the descriptor, doing this in about 50 milliseconds before allowing the first access, and the deiniz operation returns every byte to the free memory pool. Very transparent to the user.
No, it was still an 8 bit register.
>Anyway, I'd have started by expanded the index registers, to make it possible to directly address a reasonably wide pixel display buffer and such. (Per the 68HC16 or whatever that was/is.) Widened DP to make it possible to reasonably use it to base process local variables in a large process space. Added another index register (and kept the U) to ease direct execution of p-machine or Forth kinds of intermediate code. Stuff in that vein.
And likely that would not have fit in the register decoding scheme. The extra registers/accumulators it got were, if my memory is correct:
A mode register, called MD, setting or clearing a couple of bits of that could switch the speedup stuffs on/off, so that with everything off, which was not the default, it ran exactly like the 6809 to preserve timing loops and such. The default mode had the instruction prefetch enabled. There was another bit too, but I don't recall its function ATM.
2 new 8 bit accumulator registers, E & F, with 16 bit load/store when addressed as W, and all 4 for 32 bit load/stores when addressed as Q which loaded or stored ABEF in that byte order. Data moves were a little faster since it didn't need a 2nd instruction fetch to load or store 32 bits.
Level 2 os9 brought us the ability to address 2 megabytes of main memory, but tandy didn't build the hardware into the GIME chip for the last 2 bits, so the stock coco3 has only a 512k memory capability. Tony DiStefano made a kit that added the last 2 bits expanding that to 2024K (decimal) and I have one of those kits in my coco3. The paging scheme within the S-U-X-Y accessible range puts any 8k block of that main memory into any 8k block of the processors 64k address space. So when I wrote 'myram', a ramdisk, only an 8k block of that memory was mapped into cpu space at any one microsecond, but the whole thing was available transparently to a program using
To get back to to 63x09, its being cmos meant little or no heating, so little that once I had pulled the psu stuffs out of mine and it is now powered by the same old AT psu that powers all the drives and the mpi, the heat rise there is, is right over the 2 dimms of memory, and is 2 degrees F!
Looking at the waveforms around this C rated (4mhz) chip in mine, with a 100 mhz scope, tells me it should be capable of operating at a considerably higher speed than the max of 1.79 mhz it does run at. At one point several years ago I was running 2 monitors by way of a WP-RS card in slot 1, which would have isolated that video from the cpu clock speed, and subbing a vco for the crystal that I could crank up to 10 or 20 mhz. But I think that would have been doomed to fail the irreplaceable GIME from over heating, so that never got 'tested'. Putting the video into the GIME torpedoed its power budget, and if I were young enough (I'm 77 now) to consider making a coco4, that would have been excised and put into a dedicated video chip. Something with enough output transistors in the design to pull to either rail in say 1/4 of a clock cycle. The existing GIME has a video output rise or fall time nearly twice the NTSC time of 110 ns, or about 240ns. So it cannot even explore the full bandwidth of an NTSC monitor.
(And the 6309 took the design the wrong direction for that.)
Maybe, but having those additional commands and register resources sure made optimizing the os9 code a bunch easier. Enough that it is about twice as fast as os9 was now because we fixed some bugs in the process, then ported the bugfixes back to the 6809 versions. We now build nitros9 for either cpu from the same src's.
I did the initial and next couple of rbf.mn conversions myself. Plus I re-wrote the serial mouse driver just 3 years ago. The project is now called nitros9, and disk images to install it and make new boot disks are downloadable from the sourceforge site, and all the tools to rebuild it for winders/mac/linux are available from OpenCoco too. That is called "Toolshed". I keep a repo clone of both here on this machine.
Which direction would you have taken the 6309?
Thanks & Cheers, Gene
"63C09 processor on a sheet of paper."
:)
There, I fixed it for you. You see the 6309 was the result of Hitachi obtaining a permission to build a 6809 that was a functional clone of the 6809, but had to call it something else other than its being a cmos 6809 chip, and were enjoined from ever saying there was a difference other than the resultant design was in cmos.
But something odd happened on the way to the foundry. When the 6809's op-codes were put into a map whose x/y was the value of the nibbles, there was quite a number of 'holes', so Hitachi filled them in with enhanced feature op-codes. Op-codes it remained for the users to discover because even when disclosed, Hitachi was prevented from even confirming their existence. Such things as several more accumulator registers (E,F, and Q which meant A,B,E,F combined for 32 bits), and where the 6809 had some mul functions that gave 16 bit answers, the 6309 had a new 16x16 multiply with a 32 bit answer, and a divide of 16 bits into 32 bits with a 16 bit answer and a 16 bit remainder in 39 clocks worst case. Loads and stores could be 32 bits wide, a slight speedup because it skiped an instruction fetch in the middle, and a switchable ability to pipe line the next instruction fetch during an otherwise idle bus cycle which made it about 10% faster because you actually had to turn it off by a write to the MD register.
The net result for the color computers OS9 operation system was, when combined with some bug fixing, nearly twice as fast at the same clock speed. FWIW, I have one in my 'coco3', running right now. We call it Nitros9 now. Community supported.
If this 'sheet of paper' can get to a 2 mhz clock speed, I can see newer developments made even easier already.
A notebook coco3 for instance. Just turn the 'page' to run a different test configuration.
Cheers, Gene
That is obviously for winderz, this is linux. I finally hardcoded the script for /, but that is too wide a brush and eventually reset the system, probably out of ram, only 4Gb in this box.
Thanks & Cheers, Gene
I did the copy/paste myself, from that web page and it sucks to have to fix all the gawddamned tabs the html engine or the copy paste inserts needlessly. Where the hell is the download button?
But I did it, good enough that it runs, but its done instantly, so I guess I try my hand at editing a real python file to put in some prints and see what is null, it pays no attention to what would be argc[2].
If anyone has a clue what this line is supposed to do on a linux box, speak up, python total new bee here.
rootdir = sys.argv[1]
If its supposed to take a cli argument, how is it passed to a python script?
Cheers, Gene