I read the links over at crankorgan and note he's come up with a nice homebrew CNC machine. Note.. if you are gonna brew your own, you might wanna check out any tossed copy machine, printer, or old 5 inch floppy drives. You would be surprised at the wealth of motors, gears, shafts, whatever, you will find in one of those big clunkers! ( Especially those with those big collator bins. ). You not only get the motors, but with a lot of old machines, they were made before everything went ASIC and you can probably retrieve the power supply and basic motor drive circuits intact.
Find the biggest ugliest old battleship printer at the swap meet. Its apt to be brimming over with usable mechanical parts. You may have to haul the thing away in a truck, but you can probably pick one up cheaper than the gas it takes you to get it home. I've seen sellers get so frustrated trying to rid themselves of an old line printer that they gave it away rather than try to pack it up for the next meet. And the older, bigger, heavier, and uglier it is, the more apt it is to have salvageable parts and powerful motors - because they were made from standard parts before everything was mass-produced for a specific use.
As well as being over-designed.
A lot of those old 5 inch floppy drives had a quite decent stepper motor for head positioning that had a standard 1/4" dia shaft. And most had
a standard driver chip for the motor too.. those quad-darlington on a chip things. A little inspection on the circuit board usually confirmed how to hook it up.
A side note - if you luck out and get one of those "pancake" spindle motors, some have one helluva disklike planar magnet in them - already mounted in a steel cup. It has a really unique magnetization pattern to it - where it has alternating patterns of North-South on the face that faces the windings. Once removed, it has an extremely powerful attraction. Do not remove it from its cup. Do not even try. You will ruin it if you do. The cup not only mechanically supports the magnet, it also assists in focusing its field. It makes one helluva "refrigerator magnet"! I would advise gluing a piece of felt to it. This magnet will stay where you put it.
Arethan has a post on this forum about some software his dad coded. . I looked at it and it really looks promising. Note it used the standard CNC G-code language and had a really nice port setup so you could drive the interfaces from a pair of standard run-of-the-mill parallel ports. I cite his post because if you are considering rolling your own, you will probably need something like this. This looks like good practical software.
I use PADS PCB ver 7.0 for DOS to generate the Gerber photoplot, aperture, and excellon drill files. Once I have the fileset intact, I zip them and email my rep ( in my case, Anthony Estes ) over at Advanced Circuits with my zipfile package as an attachment, and about a week later I get a large padded envelope in my mailbox with my boards in it. Every one has been exactly what was ordered. Excellent workmanship. And on time.
Getting started is the hardest part. They know that too, and thats why they have the reps. There is a little hand-holding to be done to make sure you are sending the right stuff, as you do not want a botched job, and they do not want unhappy customers either. When I started off, I first talked via email to my rep, sent him my filesets, and had him review them to make sure they made sense to him too, and were complete and manufacturable. I was impressed with my rep, as he knew just by looking at my files in his viewer if I had screwed up the aperture files or had a bad excellon file. ( The gerber photoplot files shows how the lines are routed, the aperture files show how wide the traces or pads are, and the excellon files show where and what size drill for the holes. You get one photoplot file and one aperture file per layer, and one excellon file per board. )
Once I had confirmed I had a producible fileset, I called him on the phone to set up an account and
get the boards made. Since then, every time I need a board, I email him my fileset, and he sends my boards back.
They have quite a sophisticated system to track the progress of manufacturing the boards. You note that little window on their opening page. When you place your order, they will give you a key number to find your order in their database. They know minute to minute where your order is in the manufacturing process - and you can verify at any time where it is. It looks as if they have some very sophisticated PCB manufacturing automation going on over there. My guess is that its like a giant one-hour photo machine. Files go in, boards come out.
No, I do not work there. I am just a pleased customer. I feel I have spewed enough venom at those who did not come through that I feel I must give equal time commending those who did.
I would bet you in five years time, that DOS system will *still* be chugging along just fine.
I work with systems like this all the time in the robotics world. You do not have to be a gigahertz machine to spin steppers! There is *nothing* to be gained once you can process faster than the physics of mass and energy will allow.
Now, *most* (not all) of my clients are in business to make money. They want to set up a machine to crank out something, and do it for years. I often work with multi-millionaires who have quite "obsolete" machines toiling 24 hours a day making product. The machines, long since paid for, are working far better than the day they came out of the box, as by now, we have found the bugs and have the system tuned to repeatedly make perfect product.
I mentioned not all of my clients thought this way - there are some who just have to have the absolute cutting-edge stuff. Yes, they are the same guys who spend money they don't have, drive really fancy cars, live in fancy homes, and we spend our days raising money and debugging, then after a while, we have to explain why the money is gone and there is no product. Its not a skill I care to develop.
With one paradigm, continuous reliable production supports an almost perpetual research effort into making more product lines and the company tends to grow exponentially. With the other paradigm, our length of employment tends to approximate the total amount of funding received divided by the "burn rate".
Maybe this is flamebait - but I have been involved in both. And I have developed an intense distaste for the latter. There is something in me that writhes in acid when I have to face investors with nothing to show. I know the business books are full of advice on using "other people's money", but I would rather lose my own than take down all those other people with me.
My concern is that right now, we seem to be in the same place in the grand scheme of things as when my grandpa first got electricity. One or two bulbs in the house. I forsee in the future *many* things in the house will be networkable. Just as hooking each light bulb in your house to the power mains through its individual meter and account, or hooking each tub, toilet, and sink to their respective utilities through individual connections and accounting is absurd, so I also see legislation, if it disallows use of NAT, as also patently absurd.
The internet was not designed to have its address space used so frivolously.
Since they apparently passed such an absurd law, it only seems reasonable to pass funding to the internet community to upgrade to ipV6 which will have enough raw address space to accomodate this immense wastage of addressing space. It only seems logical to me that one must pay the piper - if you are going to legislate something so expensive to implement, it should have a rider attached to fund the implementation of the legislated mandate.
On a side note, I addressed in my parent post mostly implementation of NAT. I knew about VPN but was a little fuzzy on its implementation. Some fellow shlashdotters posted some much better references to VPN.
Say, you had a family. Wife, four kids, and a couple of mutts.. etc. You have a computer you do a lot of serious work on, a computer you tinker around with, your kids each have one. There may be another in the den you use to play games on and maybe use in conjunction with the TV and stereo.
But you have one internet connection.
By use of Network Address Translation (NAT), you can set your system up so that all the computers can access the internet through a router/switch. You can dedicate a clunker machine for this, or just use a router/switch designed for this.
The ISP gives you so much bandwidth for so much money. If only one machine is using the connection, it gets all the bandwidth. If more machines start using it, the switch shares the available bandwidth amongst the machines requesting it.
Using NAT, your machines can be configured so they can talk to each other privately without involving the internet - even though they are communicating through the network card - because the switch can be configured to keep local chatter off the net.
Certain IP numbers do not route, such as the 10.xxx.xxx.xxx subnet. So you have an entire class A subnet to play around with for your home or business. Everybody has it. All yours. It won't route. But if you want the internet, the switch will recognize a routable number and gate you onto your internet connection, and provide the necessary address translation so the connection is routed between the appropriate machines.
Personally, I can not determine any difference between whether or not multiple *machines* are using the bandwidth, or multiple instances of browser windows on one machine is using it, as far a paying for bandwidth delivered goes. What puzzles me is how anyone could consider a NAT box illegal, as every packet going through still has completely valid source and destination fields - it won't route through your ISP without them. At the ISP level, its completely traceable as to who's getting what.
So I am puzzled.. I am completely failing to see the logic of this legislation. It makes just about as much sense to me as some sort of legislation mandating each child gets his own mailbox in front of the house.
Yes, I was wondering about this. I am not all that concerned about printer cartridges, but I have seen where business concepts, once ignited, have a tendency to spill over into other areas.
I was in Wal-Mart last week, talking with an old engineer who presently works in their Automotive Goods department - discussing a Group 24F battery I needed. And why my Japanese Toyota car took the same battery as my neighbor's Dodge Monaco. He told me about the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) standards and how - by law - automakers standardized specs for batteries, fluids, tires, lamps, etc. Something to do with antitrust, I suppose. What scares me is to think of the day that every make and model of car will require its own unique consumables - who will be able to stock all of it? I would hate to think of tossing the car to the scrap heap because I could not find the headlamps for it, yet be categorized a criminal if I took something else and adapted it.
Its a shame all this crap is happening in the computer industry.
Even something as common as the power supply is routinely botched up. We deliberately seem to make everything unique - and if necessary, buy a congresscritter to pass some law to give us the protection to make sure no one else can make compatible parts. And we can always seem to make room in the landfills for yet more and more junk. There are only so many square miles of earth - where are we gonna end up putting all this crap we make?
I loved this one too. Probably one of my best remembered of the funny films I have ever seen.
I was later told it was it was one of the least expensive films ever made. No name stars. No expensive props. Which made me even more admiring of those who produced it. It was just so damm funny. I rent it once a year or so. I will probably buy a DVD of it if I find it.
Thanks for the suggestions.. but I simply do not have time to do all that. It just takes me way too long to do that, when I used to just click on a bunch of stuff and run it in the background while I was laying out circuit board.
You are absolutely right, I do prefer to download music. But I don't. Anymore. Since they made it clear to me that they considered it illegal ( even though I still see nothing wrong with it.)
For example, I have purchased all of Enya's disks
( I have four of them - but not the compilation disk )- and I had "met" her on the net. She is the last purchase I made. I no longer have any idea of what the artists sound like, hence, no motivation to buy.
There is also no way I am loading an untrusted (by me) piece of software in my machine required to play music - if its ogg vorbis or mp3, fine, those are public. I know all sorts of knowledgeable people have fished through those and they are not marketing trojans. I already show a tremendous amount of packets coming to me ( which I ignore ) which I have no idea what they are designed to do. All I need is to have some piece of untrusted software foul up my system. If I load their stuff in, will *they* take responsibility if it fouls up my system and reimburse me for the business I lost while redoing my system? I think not. That's "business thinking". They want payments assured, but no liability for results of doing what they demanded to be done to comply with their methods of corraling their customers.
I am not going to buy yet another radio that is usable on only one system. Did you see the article here on what the civilized world is going to do with all the e-junk? I have
an old system (P-166) that runs just fine, but won't support a lot of the new stuff they insist on. It plays MP3 / Ogg Vorbis / MPEG's just fine though. I see no logic in tossing my existing hardware just to be compatible with someone's new whiz-bang marketing software.
If the shoe store makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to buy shoes, I'll just learn to make thongs. Their shoes can stay in their pretty little store and my cash will stay in my wallet.
That way both sides are happy.
Look at almost any big business these days... the most expendable part of the business is the customer base. Efforts are not made to please the customer, instead they want to confine them.
Tried to listen to radio lately? They drive me nuts with all that jabber and playlist stuff - and no matter where I turn, its "clear channel".
Like I posted, I removed the stuff from my system when they made it clear to me that they considered it stealing if I tried before I buyed. But they have also made it clear to me that once I buy and find I don't like, no returns.
I simply can not accept those terms. I decline purchase.
"Your argument holds no water, at all. You simply enjoy stealing music."
I think I just got called a thief in a public forum.
I would like to quote from my own post you replied to:
"But I am also aware that the music industry really frowns on my sampling the music, so I have abandoned it - and I have correspondingly went the longest time now not buying any either. I used to buy about 1 CD a week, but I have not bought one in 6 months now, because I go into the store and have no idea what it is I want."
I did *not* steal. When I became aware that it was bugging them so much that I was researching which products to buy, I simply abandoned my efforts *and* my interest in purchasing any more product. I do not even have Kazaa on my system anymore. Its gone. Could you please read my whole post before calling me a thief?
The only reason I posted is I would hope that people doing market research might be interested in what would motivate the market ( such as me ) to buy their product. And if there is problems brewing, what they are.
Me, as well as many others on Slashdot, are repeatedly telling the Labels we are really getting miffed with the way they want to control everything.
But, then, I am also seeing a complete paradigm shift in business - to the point that everything that happens must have a price tag. As salaries soar, the old simple things get swept under the rug. Trying to tell a person "earning" $100,000 a year to be frugal and cost-conscious seems like telling someone who owns a large lake that he needs to conserve water. As long as that salary is in place and his signature directs millions of dollars, he has to spend a lot of money so his salary looks small by comparison.
Here is a forum where people openly discuss their buying habits and what would persuade them to buy or reject a service. It would behoove a small company that does not have enormous financial resources to use this forum full of raw data for marketing research. More affluent firms, however, would probably feel better if they hired - at considerable expense - consultants to fish through lots of research and statistical massaging until they get the data that those hiring them want to see. Professionally presented by affluent folks wearing suits and ties to give the illusion that their advice is sound. Kinda like how some stockbrokers and investment advisors work. You know, the ones who don't know what they are doing, but they do make a really good presentation.
My guess is this is how small companies become big companies, and how big companies become bankrupt. While the big companies make war against their enemies, proposing all sorts of multi pronged legal maneuvers, legislation, and technological means of coercing the enemy into the corrals, the small business is trying to see what the customer wanted and provide it. In the end, the stakeholders of the big company end up spending millions of dollars of salary money to hear the words emating from the oral orifices and pens of the executives as they declare the losses of the company as customers flock to alternatives.
Thank you for that link to crra. That is quite informative - exactly what I have been fearing.
Our fascination with the very latest in technology is producing piles of junk. This is the reason I have been so frustrated at the Big Corporations which drive the market when they cease supporting the older stuff in order to force us to buy the later stuff, which is often incompatible with the earlier hardware, thus forcing junkage.
Example: Win 95 runs on 486 and earlier Pentiums just fine. It was designed for them. But try to license a copy of Win95. You either violate copyright or pollute the landfills with yet another operable, but obsolete machine, often rendered obsolete by something as simple as lack of a method of licensing the software.
Or what am I going to do with my old Panasonic "Laser Partner" printer? Its about 50 pounds of high quality steel frame that still works just great - problem is the toner is getting really hard to find. This machine has run for about 10 years now - and its gonna see end of life for lack of a consumable? I can probably still keep that old KSR-33 (TeleType) going... although it doesn't do graphics worth a shit and is only good for uppercase. Yes, the new stuff is a heckuva lot better, but why does it have to be so expendable?
This is why I get so furious when I see things like that Lexmark lawsuit against the company making aftermarket replacement toner cartridges. Enabling a manufacturer to mandate single-source consumables means you have empowered that manufacturer to render the whole fleet of machines in the field obsolete by merely denying access to their consumables. This crap was signed into law by the U.S. Congresscritters - people who *should* know better.
My take is it that when I order a PPV, I typically know in advance what I am going to get. A fight. A porn show. Whatever. Its a one-time thing. Its not like something I intend to keep for quite some time. I might even time-shift such a thing. But I feel I have incurred obligation to pay for the service rendered, and have no problem doing so.
With music, I have no idea what I like until I sample some of it. I collect particular types of music that mean something to me. I do keep music I like around for a long time. There is a helluva lot of music out there - and I think I can say I consider 99 % of it as not worth the time to listen through. Its stuff I hear the first 15 seconds of it, and that's it. Delete. And mark not to retrieve any more by that artist if it is really bad ( probably 90% ). Music to me is really a very subjective very personal thing I must sample. Its kinda like trying to buy shoes if everybody had really different shaped feet, and shoes were non-returnable yet the merchant insisted you had to buy the shoes before you could see if they fit.
The music stores run this mousetrap style purchasing paradigm whereas there are no refunds if I make an incorrect purchasing decision, and the amount at stake is not trivial... usually in the $20 range. So it behooves me to know what I am getting before the money changes hands.
I see filesharing as only a technique used by the consumers trying to protect the interests of the merchant by educating themselves before purchase so the sale is final. This is no different than people doing research onto real estate before the parcel is auctioned. I really can not see why all the fuss, as people are only trying to arrange things so that the merchant's need for a final irrevokable sale can be met.
I have many purchased CD's I like, but I went through a lot of crap to find them. But I am also aware that the music industry really frowns on my sampling the music, so I have abandoned it - and I have correspondingly went the longest time now not buying any either. I used to buy about 1 CD a week, but I have not bought one in 6 months now, because I go into the store and have no idea what it is I want. I might as well go into an auto parts store not having the slightest idea what part I need. The probability of them playing anything I find of interest on the store's system is less than 0.01 .
But seriously, I've always wanted something like this for work. A simple status indicator whether the cluster of machines I'm responsible for is Working Fine (green), Having Issues (yellow), or Completely B0rked (red).
These are very common in the manufacturing industry.
Yes, I queried www.walmart.com. It got me Microsoft IIS 5.0. under Solaris 8. (?!!?!)
Then I clicked the FAQ as you suggested. Thanks for the nudge. There was the snake in the grass you alluded to!
From that FAQ (emphasis mine):
Why do you report impossible operating system/server combinations ?
Webservers that operate behind a caching system, load balancer, reverse proxy server or a firewall may sometimes report the operating system of the intermediate machine. Hence reports of 'Microsoft/IIS on Linux' may indicate that either the web server is behind a Linux server that is acting as a reverse proxy, or has configured the Akamai caching system such that the first request to the site goes to one of Akamai's servers [which run Linux], or as in the case of www.walmart.com has been configured to send a
misleading signature.
I'm not going to bite your head off for that comment, but I'm in linguistics and that's pretty insulting. On that plane of logic, computer code is nothing more than sequences of on and off(one and zero). Just string them together and you get programs. String them together carefully, and the program begins looking
like it does something interesting, instead of causing the machine to freeze up. And I suppose Robotics is as simple as putting parts together and wiring them with motors. Wow, I could do that! Seriously though, truly natural speech is dependent on Semantics, Syntax, prosody, and whole host of intricately connected facets of language that people have devoted their lives to. Don't cheapen it for them.
Sorry if I cheapened it.
Life is nothing more than sequences of (G-C)/(C-A) or (A-T)/(T-A) sequences on a sugar ladder too. But the exact placement is everything.
So is code. Just ones and zeros. These are fundamental parts. But the placement and usage is where whether or not you coded something useful or junk is where the art is.
I tried phonetic synthesis too. It was a nightmare to make anything other than a pre-scripted phrase come out sounding anything like what I wanted. Hence I indicated if one was very careful in how he arranged it, it would come out sounding natural. Mine didn't. Never did. I knew what the machine was trying to tell me, but I would not expect the man on the street would be able to. It would have been better for me to select from a series of pre-encoded.WAV's - professionally spoken - if I were to design such a machine for public usage.
I highly respect your art when you say you are coming from the Linguistics viewpoint. I had played with this thing for years and never got it right. The problems were not in the code or hardware - the machine always did exactly what it was told to do - but due to the almost infinite amounts of human inflection we subconsciously use in our speech, the machine always sounded like, er, a machine.
My apologies for any insult. It was not intended.
My first thought was that people streaming into the field might think this whole thing was something new. There is a lot of past work on this and I wanted to point it out. Like you say, its very complex to implement properly.
I was doing some more tracing on what I reported in the parent
Votrax made the SC-01 chip.
General Instruments made the SP0256 chip
I do not remember if the chip I had was dual marked - so I do not know if they were the same chip but under different numbers, and quite frankly I do not wanna tear into the old machine right now to verify.
And it was in the early 1980's , which was about
20 years ago. Not 30.
About 30 years ago, I built a voice synthesizer for my IMSAI-8080 based on the General Instruments SC-01 Phoneme Synthesizer chip, which was available at that time from Radio Shack.
I googled for +"General Instrument" +"SC-01" and got links shown here.
I think Votrax was in bed with General Instruments, as they have another chip by the same name, that apparently does the same thing, but I do remember mine was a GI part.
It turns out all speech is nothing but sequences of utterances ( vowels and syllabic ). Just string them together and you get speech. String them together very carefully and the speech begins sounding like it came from a human instead of a machine.
I know IBM is refining this, but the concept is really old hat.
Yeh - everybody is doing something that someone else doesn't like much.
But, so far, its just been that we used technological measures to try to stop what it is we did not like, or if we could only all co-operate, not buy at all from spammers to kill the profit motive.
Yeh, spammers spam, I don't like it much, but I don't see some "SpammerJon" spending so much time in trials because he is determined to get around mechanisms put in place to stop spamming.
It just seems equitable to mete out correctional force proportional to what happened. Ok - a spammer tied up so much of my time to download his crap - or other businesspeople pester me ringing my phone during my dinner hour and interrupting my meal. Yes, its a pesterance, but I consider it down in the noise - similar to sharing a song.
It seems futile to make a federal case out of it.
If someone wants to consider their song as that level of theft as they want the federal government to protect it for them, then I would think a property tax is in order. I own property and have to pay tax - and I don't even make money from it - its just a place to live. But that's part of living in society - if I want my Government to recognize my claim to it, I have to pay my tax to the Government, and in return, I expect them to defend my rights to my property.
My own feeling is that if they want the federal government involved - then they should be taxed on the worth of that property just as all of us are taxed on it. Being its kinda hard to assess the value of it, let the owner set the value. But then the owner can't sue for more than its worth.
Sublime illustrates a good use of this technology.
"They can insert wireless cards in rental cars, then the people driving around the city could listen to the music in the car. Good way to get the night life broadcasted all over."
I betcha its not going to be far off when our cellphones can pick up this data and retransmit it, via bluetooth, to the car's standard bluetooth-enabled sound system.
Note I did not say all cars would have a fullbore computer system, but I do predict its not that big of a step to have their sound systems accessible to bluetooth systems so that any bluetooth-enabled phones, laptops, PDA's, or anything else that could use external speakers could use it. Seems like it should be about as common as earphone jacks.
Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
To me, any time we start developing a technology which can be freely used by all without worry of the letter in the mail, its cause for celebration.
They are testing it, and the better the tools we have in the box, the better we can do a job. And thats the end result isn't it? Getting from here to there with a minimum of effort.
I use the efforts of others daily, and it is my hope that before I leave this planet, I can leave something for others.
You get no choice on what food goes on which plate. If you want fries, you get nine more food items as well, whether you want them or not, and pay full price for all.
So you want a burger, fries, and a coke. That's three plates. Fries come on one, the other has a burger on it, and a coke comes with a third. You get a shitload of asparagus, beans, corn, some sort of goo claimed to be edible, along with other unwanted items.
"Our attack is particularly relevant against smart cards or tamper-resistant computers, where the user has physical access (to the outside of the computer) and can use various means to induce faults; we have successfully used heat."
I would imagine that nasty EMI spikes you may couple to the inside of the box, or medical radioactive sources would work too.
Just a guess, but I have sure had my share of EMI and radiation induced problems.
Get the congress to slap a rider on this bill to the effect that passage of this bill effectively reverses the DMCA.
It should make quite a display as the enormous financial interests of Microsoft and RIAA tangle. I'll buy golden retirements for a lot of lawyers, feed our legislators with all sorts of lobbyist lunches, and give the Recording Industry a lot more to think about than giving DVD Jon a hard time or nipping a kid downloading a song.
To my knowledge, no new units have been leased (they lease, never sell) to consumers...
My guess is theat they leased the cars, and would not sell them, because they knew all along they were experimental and did not want to be confined to any laws that mandated them to provide support with replacement parts for...eh.. how many years?
By leasing, they could guarantee their ownership of the vehicles, and they could neatly recall all the product clean their house after the experiment.
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Find the biggest ugliest old battleship printer at the swap meet. Its apt to be brimming over with usable mechanical parts. You may have to haul the thing away in a truck, but you can probably pick one up cheaper than the gas it takes you to get it home. I've seen sellers get so frustrated trying to rid themselves of an old line printer that they gave it away rather than try to pack it up for the next meet. And the older, bigger, heavier, and uglier it is, the more apt it is to have salvageable parts and powerful motors - because they were made from standard parts before everything was mass-produced for a specific use. As well as being over-designed.
A lot of those old 5 inch floppy drives had a quite decent stepper motor for head positioning that had a standard 1/4" dia shaft. And most had a standard driver chip for the motor too.. those quad-darlington on a chip things. A little inspection on the circuit board usually confirmed how to hook it up.
A side note - if you luck out and get one of those "pancake" spindle motors, some have one helluva disklike planar magnet in them - already mounted in a steel cup. It has a really unique magnetization pattern to it - where it has alternating patterns of North-South on the face that faces the windings. Once removed, it has an extremely powerful attraction. Do not remove it from its cup. Do not even try. You will ruin it if you do. The cup not only mechanically supports the magnet, it also assists in focusing its field. It makes one helluva "refrigerator magnet"! I would advise gluing a piece of felt to it. This magnet will stay where you put it.
Arethan has a post on this forum about some software his dad coded. . I looked at it and it really looks promising. Note it used the standard CNC G-code language and had a really nice port setup so you could drive the interfaces from a pair of standard run-of-the-mill parallel ports. I cite his post because if you are considering rolling your own, you will probably need something like this. This looks like good practical software.
I use PADS PCB ver 7.0 for DOS to generate the Gerber photoplot, aperture, and excellon drill files. Once I have the fileset intact, I zip them and email my rep ( in my case, Anthony Estes ) over at Advanced Circuits with my zipfile package as an attachment, and about a week later I get a large padded envelope in my mailbox with my boards in it. Every one has been exactly what was ordered. Excellent workmanship. And on time.
Getting started is the hardest part. They know that too, and thats why they have the reps. There is a little hand-holding to be done to make sure you are sending the right stuff, as you do not want a botched job, and they do not want unhappy customers either. When I started off, I first talked via email to my rep, sent him my filesets, and had him review them to make sure they made sense to him too, and were complete and manufacturable. I was impressed with my rep, as he knew just by looking at my files in his viewer if I had screwed up the aperture files or had a bad excellon file. ( The gerber photoplot files shows how the lines are routed, the aperture files show how wide the traces or pads are, and the excellon files show where and what size drill for the holes. You get one photoplot file and one aperture file per layer, and one excellon file per board. ) Once I had confirmed I had a producible fileset, I called him on the phone to set up an account and get the boards made. Since then, every time I need a board, I email him my fileset, and he sends my boards back.
They have quite a sophisticated system to track the progress of manufacturing the boards. You note that little window on their opening page. When you place your order, they will give you a key number to find your order in their database. They know minute to minute where your order is in the manufacturing process - and you can verify at any time where it is. It looks as if they have some very sophisticated PCB manufacturing automation going on over there. My guess is that its like a giant one-hour photo machine. Files go in, boards come out.
No, I do not work there. I am just a pleased customer. I feel I have spewed enough venom at those who did not come through that I feel I must give equal time commending those who did.
I could not agree more with what you said.
I would bet you in five years time, that DOS system will *still* be chugging along just fine.
I work with systems like this all the time in the robotics world. You do not have to be a gigahertz machine to spin steppers! There is *nothing* to be gained once you can process faster than the physics of mass and energy will allow.
Now, *most* (not all) of my clients are in business to make money. They want to set up a machine to crank out something, and do it for years. I often work with multi-millionaires who have quite "obsolete" machines toiling 24 hours a day making product. The machines, long since paid for, are working far better than the day they came out of the box, as by now, we have found the bugs and have the system tuned to repeatedly make perfect product.
I mentioned not all of my clients thought this way - there are some who just have to have the absolute cutting-edge stuff. Yes, they are the same guys who spend money they don't have, drive really fancy cars, live in fancy homes, and we spend our days raising money and debugging, then after a while, we have to explain why the money is gone and there is no product. Its not a skill I care to develop.
With one paradigm, continuous reliable production supports an almost perpetual research effort into making more product lines and the company tends to grow exponentially. With the other paradigm, our length of employment tends to approximate the total amount of funding received divided by the "burn rate".
Maybe this is flamebait - but I have been involved in both. And I have developed an intense distaste for the latter. There is something in me that writhes in acid when I have to face investors with nothing to show. I know the business books are full of advice on using "other people's money", but I would rather lose my own than take down all those other people with me.
My concern is that right now, we seem to be in the same place in the grand scheme of things as when my grandpa first got electricity. One or two bulbs in the house. I forsee in the future *many* things in the house will be networkable. Just as hooking each light bulb in your house to the power mains through its individual meter and account, or hooking each tub, toilet, and sink to their respective utilities through individual connections and accounting is absurd, so I also see legislation, if it disallows use of NAT, as also patently absurd.
The internet was not designed to have its address space used so frivolously.
Since they apparently passed such an absurd law, it only seems reasonable to pass funding to the internet community to upgrade to ipV6 which will have enough raw address space to accomodate this immense wastage of addressing space. It only seems logical to me that one must pay the piper - if you are going to legislate something so expensive to implement, it should have a rider attached to fund the implementation of the legislated mandate.
On a side note, I addressed in my parent post mostly implementation of NAT. I knew about VPN but was a little fuzzy on its implementation. Some fellow shlashdotters posted some much better references to VPN.
Say, you had a family. Wife, four kids, and a couple of mutts.. etc. You have a computer you do a lot of serious work on, a computer you tinker around with, your kids each have one. There may be another in the den you use to play games on and maybe use in conjunction with the TV and stereo.
But you have one internet connection.
By use of Network Address Translation (NAT), you can set your system up so that all the computers can access the internet through a router/switch. You can dedicate a clunker machine for this, or just use a router/switch designed for this.
The ISP gives you so much bandwidth for so much money. If only one machine is using the connection, it gets all the bandwidth. If more machines start using it, the switch shares the available bandwidth amongst the machines requesting it.
Using NAT, your machines can be configured so they can talk to each other privately without involving the internet - even though they are communicating through the network card - because the switch can be configured to keep local chatter off the net. Certain IP numbers do not route, such as the 10.xxx.xxx.xxx subnet. So you have an entire class A subnet to play around with for your home or business. Everybody has it. All yours. It won't route. But if you want the internet, the switch will recognize a routable number and gate you onto your internet connection, and provide the necessary address translation so the connection is routed between the appropriate machines.
Personally, I can not determine any difference between whether or not multiple *machines* are using the bandwidth, or multiple instances of browser windows on one machine is using it, as far a paying for bandwidth delivered goes. What puzzles me is how anyone could consider a NAT box illegal, as every packet going through still has completely valid source and destination fields - it won't route through your ISP without them. At the ISP level, its completely traceable as to who's getting what.
So I am puzzled.. I am completely failing to see the logic of this legislation. It makes just about as much sense to me as some sort of legislation mandating each child gets his own mailbox in front of the house.
I was in Wal-Mart last week, talking with an old engineer who presently works in their Automotive Goods department - discussing a Group 24F battery I needed. And why my Japanese Toyota car took the same battery as my neighbor's Dodge Monaco. He told me about the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) standards and how - by law - automakers standardized specs for batteries, fluids, tires, lamps, etc. Something to do with antitrust, I suppose. What scares me is to think of the day that every make and model of car will require its own unique consumables - who will be able to stock all of it? I would hate to think of tossing the car to the scrap heap because I could not find the headlamps for it, yet be categorized a criminal if I took something else and adapted it.
Its a shame all this crap is happening in the computer industry. Even something as common as the power supply is routinely botched up. We deliberately seem to make everything unique - and if necessary, buy a congresscritter to pass some law to give us the protection to make sure no one else can make compatible parts. And we can always seem to make room in the landfills for yet more and more junk. There are only so many square miles of earth - where are we gonna end up putting all this crap we make?
Send it to China???
I was later told it was it was one of the least expensive films ever made. No name stars. No expensive props. Which made me even more admiring of those who produced it. It was just so damm funny. I rent it once a year or so. I will probably buy a DVD of it if I find it.
You are absolutely right, I do prefer to download music. But I don't. Anymore. Since they made it clear to me that they considered it illegal ( even though I still see nothing wrong with it.) For example, I have purchased all of Enya's disks ( I have four of them - but not the compilation disk )- and I had "met" her on the net. She is the last purchase I made. I no longer have any idea of what the artists sound like, hence, no motivation to buy.
There is also no way I am loading an untrusted (by me) piece of software in my machine required to play music - if its ogg vorbis or mp3, fine, those are public. I know all sorts of knowledgeable people have fished through those and they are not marketing trojans. I already show a tremendous amount of packets coming to me ( which I ignore ) which I have no idea what they are designed to do. All I need is to have some piece of untrusted software foul up my system. If I load their stuff in, will *they* take responsibility if it fouls up my system and reimburse me for the business I lost while redoing my system? I think not. That's "business thinking". They want payments assured, but no liability for results of doing what they demanded to be done to comply with their methods of corraling their customers.
I am not going to buy yet another radio that is usable on only one system. Did you see the article here on what the civilized world is going to do with all the e-junk? I have an old system (P-166) that runs just fine, but won't support a lot of the new stuff they insist on. It plays MP3 / Ogg Vorbis / MPEG's just fine though. I see no logic in tossing my existing hardware just to be compatible with someone's new whiz-bang marketing software.
If the shoe store makes me jump through all sorts of hoops to buy shoes, I'll just learn to make thongs. Their shoes can stay in their pretty little store and my cash will stay in my wallet.
That way both sides are happy.
Look at almost any big business these days... the most expendable part of the business is the customer base. Efforts are not made to please the customer, instead they want to confine them.
Tried to listen to radio lately? They drive me nuts with all that jabber and playlist stuff - and no matter where I turn, its "clear channel".
Like I posted, I removed the stuff from my system when they made it clear to me that they considered it stealing if I tried before I buyed. But they have also made it clear to me that once I buy and find I don't like, no returns.
I simply can not accept those terms. I decline purchase.
I would like to quote from my own post you replied to:
I did *not* steal. When I became aware that it was bugging them so much that I was researching which products to buy, I simply abandoned my efforts *and* my interest in purchasing any more product. I do not even have Kazaa on my system anymore. Its gone. Could you please read my whole post before calling me a thief?The only reason I posted is I would hope that people doing market research might be interested in what would motivate the market ( such as me ) to buy their product. And if there is problems brewing, what they are.
Me, as well as many others on Slashdot, are repeatedly telling the Labels we are really getting miffed with the way they want to control everything.
But, then, I am also seeing a complete paradigm shift in business - to the point that everything that happens must have a price tag. As salaries soar, the old simple things get swept under the rug. Trying to tell a person "earning" $100,000 a year to be frugal and cost-conscious seems like telling someone who owns a large lake that he needs to conserve water. As long as that salary is in place and his signature directs millions of dollars, he has to spend a lot of money so his salary looks small by comparison.
Here is a forum where people openly discuss their buying habits and what would persuade them to buy or reject a service. It would behoove a small company that does not have enormous financial resources to use this forum full of raw data for marketing research. More affluent firms, however, would probably feel better if they hired - at considerable expense - consultants to fish through lots of research and statistical massaging until they get the data that those hiring them want to see. Professionally presented by affluent folks wearing suits and ties to give the illusion that their advice is sound. Kinda like how some stockbrokers and investment advisors work. You know, the ones who don't know what they are doing, but they do make a really good presentation.
My guess is this is how small companies become big companies, and how big companies become bankrupt. While the big companies make war against their enemies, proposing all sorts of multi pronged legal maneuvers, legislation, and technological means of coercing the enemy into the corrals, the small business is trying to see what the customer wanted and provide it. In the end, the stakeholders of the big company end up spending millions of dollars of salary money to hear the words emating from the oral orifices and pens of the executives as they declare the losses of the company as customers flock to alternatives.
Thank you for that link to crra. That is quite informative - exactly what I have been fearing.
Our fascination with the very latest in technology is producing piles of junk. This is the reason I have been so frustrated at the Big Corporations which drive the market when they cease supporting the older stuff in order to force us to buy the later stuff, which is often incompatible with the earlier hardware, thus forcing junkage.
Example: Win 95 runs on 486 and earlier Pentiums just fine. It was designed for them. But try to license a copy of Win95. You either violate copyright or pollute the landfills with yet another operable, but obsolete machine, often rendered obsolete by something as simple as lack of a method of licensing the software.
Or what am I going to do with my old Panasonic "Laser Partner" printer? Its about 50 pounds of high quality steel frame that still works just great - problem is the toner is getting really hard to find. This machine has run for about 10 years now - and its gonna see end of life for lack of a consumable? I can probably still keep that old KSR-33 (TeleType) going... although it doesn't do graphics worth a shit and is only good for uppercase. Yes, the new stuff is a heckuva lot better, but why does it have to be so expendable?
This is why I get so furious when I see things like that Lexmark lawsuit against the company making aftermarket replacement toner cartridges. Enabling a manufacturer to mandate single-source consumables means you have empowered that manufacturer to render the whole fleet of machines in the field obsolete by merely denying access to their consumables. This crap was signed into law by the U.S. Congresscritters - people who *should* know better.
My take is it that when I order a PPV, I typically know in advance what I am going to get. A fight. A porn show. Whatever. Its a one-time thing. Its not like something I intend to keep for quite some time. I might even time-shift such a thing. But I feel I have incurred obligation to pay for the service rendered, and have no problem doing so.
With music, I have no idea what I like until I sample some of it. I collect particular types of music that mean something to me. I do keep music I like around for a long time. There is a helluva lot of music out there - and I think I can say I consider 99 % of it as not worth the time to listen through. Its stuff I hear the first 15 seconds of it, and that's it. Delete. And mark not to retrieve any more by that artist if it is really bad ( probably 90% ). Music to me is really a very subjective very personal thing I must sample. Its kinda like trying to buy shoes if everybody had really different shaped feet, and shoes were non-returnable yet the merchant insisted you had to buy the shoes before you could see if they fit.
The music stores run this mousetrap style purchasing paradigm whereas there are no refunds if I make an incorrect purchasing decision, and the amount at stake is not trivial... usually in the $20 range. So it behooves me to know what I am getting before the money changes hands.
I see filesharing as only a technique used by the consumers trying to protect the interests of the merchant by educating themselves before purchase so the sale is final. This is no different than people doing research onto real estate before the parcel is auctioned. I really can not see why all the fuss, as people are only trying to arrange things so that the merchant's need for a final irrevokable sale can be met. I have many purchased CD's I like, but I went through a lot of crap to find them. But I am also aware that the music industry really frowns on my sampling the music, so I have abandoned it - and I have correspondingly went the longest time now not buying any either. I used to buy about 1 CD a week, but I have not bought one in 6 months now, because I go into the store and have no idea what it is I want. I might as well go into an auto parts store not having the slightest idea what part I need. The probability of them playing anything I find of interest on the store's system is less than 0.01 .
Here's a link to one made by Patlite.
We use these on the robots.
Then I clicked the FAQ as you suggested. Thanks for the nudge. There was the snake in the grass you alluded to!
From that FAQ (emphasis mine):
Sneeee-Kay!Life is nothing more than sequences of (G-C)/(C-A) or (A-T)/(T-A) sequences on a sugar ladder too. But the exact placement is everything. So is code. Just ones and zeros. These are fundamental parts. But the placement and usage is where whether or not you coded something useful or junk is where the art is.
I tried phonetic synthesis too. It was a nightmare to make anything other than a pre-scripted phrase come out sounding anything like what I wanted. Hence I indicated if one was very careful in how he arranged it, it would come out sounding natural. Mine didn't. Never did. I knew what the machine was trying to tell me, but I would not expect the man on the street would be able to. It would have been better for me to select from a series of pre-encoded .WAV's - professionally spoken - if I were to design such a machine for public usage.
I highly respect your art when you say you are coming from the Linguistics viewpoint. I had played with this thing for years and never got it right. The problems were not in the code or hardware - the machine always did exactly what it was told to do - but due to the almost infinite amounts of human inflection we subconsciously use in our speech, the machine always sounded like, er, a machine.
My apologies for any insult. It was not intended.
My first thought was that people streaming into the field might think this whole thing was something new. There is a lot of past work on this and I wanted to point it out. Like you say, its very complex to implement properly.
Votrax made the SC-01 chip.
General Instruments made the SP0256 chip
I do not remember if the chip I had was dual marked - so I do not know if they were the same chip but under different numbers, and quite frankly I do not wanna tear into the old machine right now to verify.
And it was in the early 1980's , which was about 20 years ago. Not 30.
You can read more about it here .
The Google General Instruments SC-01 Links .
Sorry for the botched post.
I googled for +"General Instrument" +"SC-01" and got links shown here .
I think Votrax was in bed with General Instruments, as they have another chip by the same name, that apparently does the same thing, but I do remember mine was a GI part.
It turns out all speech is nothing but sequences of utterances ( vowels and syllabic ). Just string them together and you get speech. String them together very carefully and the speech begins sounding like it came from a human instead of a machine.
I know IBM is refining this, but the concept is really old hat.
But, so far, its just been that we used technological measures to try to stop what it is we did not like, or if we could only all co-operate, not buy at all from spammers to kill the profit motive.
Yeh, spammers spam, I don't like it much, but I don't see some "SpammerJon" spending so much time in trials because he is determined to get around mechanisms put in place to stop spamming.
It just seems equitable to mete out correctional force proportional to what happened. Ok - a spammer tied up so much of my time to download his crap - or other businesspeople pester me ringing my phone during my dinner hour and interrupting my meal. Yes, its a pesterance, but I consider it down in the noise - similar to sharing a song.
It seems futile to make a federal case out of it.
If someone wants to consider their song as that level of theft as they want the federal government to protect it for them, then I would think a property tax is in order. I own property and have to pay tax - and I don't even make money from it - its just a place to live. But that's part of living in society - if I want my Government to recognize my claim to it, I have to pay my tax to the Government, and in return, I expect them to defend my rights to my property.
My own feeling is that if they want the federal government involved - then they should be taxed on the worth of that property just as all of us are taxed on it. Being its kinda hard to assess the value of it, let the owner set the value. But then the owner can't sue for more than its worth.
I betcha its not going to be far off when our cellphones can pick up this data and retransmit it, via bluetooth, to the car's standard bluetooth-enabled sound system.
Note I did not say all cars would have a fullbore computer system, but I do predict its not that big of a step to have their sound systems accessible to bluetooth systems so that any bluetooth-enabled phones, laptops, PDA's, or anything else that could use external speakers could use it. Seems like it should be about as common as earphone jacks.
To me, any time we start developing a technology which can be freely used by all without worry of the letter in the mail, its cause for celebration.
They are testing it, and the better the tools we have in the box, the better we can do a job. And thats the end result isn't it? Getting from here to there with a minimum of effort.
I use the efforts of others daily, and it is my hope that before I leave this planet, I can leave something for others.
They serve plates with ten things on it.
You get no choice on what food goes on which plate. If you want fries, you get nine more food items as well, whether you want them or not, and pay full price for all.
So you want a burger, fries, and a coke. That's three plates. Fries come on one, the other has a burger on it, and a coke comes with a third. You get a shitload of asparagus, beans, corn, some sort of goo claimed to be edible, along with other unwanted items.
Tell me, honestly, would you eat there?
Just a guess, but I have sure had my share of EMI and radiation induced problems.
It should make quite a display as the enormous financial interests of Microsoft and RIAA tangle. I'll buy golden retirements for a lot of lawyers, feed our legislators with all sorts of lobbyist lunches, and give the Recording Industry a lot more to think about than giving DVD Jon a hard time or nipping a kid downloading a song.
By leasing, they could guarantee their ownership of the vehicles, and they could neatly recall all the product clean their house after the experiment.