They'll just run to the courts with it and explain just how bad it is that we are still living in a free enterprise system and how they should award damages because someone else is competing.
Someone really messed up a few years ago by not patenting the idea of putting a sliver of meat between two slices of bread.
If voting were like crawling over broken glass, only those who really
really were interested would do it, and we'd get a better product.
Well, thats what we have right now as far as getting laws passed. Note how much its like "crawling over broken glass" to submit those forms they presented to contest the DMCA. See where that is getting us?
Roofs undergo massive thermal expansion ranges (for a building product) and are exposed to the
weather and physical abuse constantly. I expect a roof to last for decades with minimal maintenance.
This is the exact thing I have been watching for years on solar roofing. How to get it properly affixed to the roof, where it works "forever", won't leak, easy to install, and can pe replaced piecewise in the event of damage or building mods.
The closest thing I can think of is a making solar "tiles", which would be something like a solar cell array prefixed to a very sturdy backing which would snap in place onto rails that would be applied to the building frame. Each tile would have a locking mechanism that once it is in place, it would be held down in its place onto the tile below it. They would be staggered. Dummy tiles would used for tight spots where tiles had to be cut to make them fit, but for appearance's sake they would appear identical to a productive tile.
To install, first place the strips over the tar paper, then install the tiles in a pattern so they stagger. The tiles are shaped so they will derive mechanical support in the center from the roof. Also they can not be brittle. People will walk on them.. in roofer's shoes no less. There is no telling what may be on the roof that gets stepped on..rocks, nails, screws, etc. such accident should not mandate replacing the roof. Kids *will* hit baseballs onto the roof - believe me - no matter what you do, the roof will have more than rain to contend with. Gusts of 100MPH winds not only drive water where its not supposed to be, but can provide enough force to get under shingles and quickly peel entire roofs apart in seconds. ( I watched a neighbor's roof go during one of our famous Southern California Santa Ana winds.. he had just put on asphalt shingles, and the sun had not yet melted the adhesive on the back which was to hold the shingles down. Once the wind picked one up, they all went. I would think his shingles could be found anywhere in town.) The tiles have to be designed in such a way as to make individual replacement practical, as it is with shingles. And it should not require a MSEE to install it. These things should be as simple as Christmas lights to install.
My intention is that each rail will develop a certain voltage across the length of it due to the installed tiles mounted to it. Each rail will power a small DC-DC converter ( I know, lots of converters, but being each will handle less than 100 watts or so, cheap and small - and the failure of one would not bring down the system, nor have enough energy under it to present a serious thermal problem should it malfunction. ). I am thinking of something down the line of maybe something like 300 volts DC at whatever current the available sunlight allows coming from the switching converter. Probably in the range of a hundred milliamperes ( 30 watts ). It will take the combined energy of several dozen rail structures to feed the main inverter which will power the house.
The main inverter will combine incoming currents ( via diode gates ) onto a protected 300V buss, which can then feed an inverter synchronized to the 50/60 Hz house power. I say "protected" because by the time you integrate the total power from several dozen feeds, now you are dealing with enough power to kill you or start fires. That buss should be mechanically protected where its not easily gotten to, like inside the electrical box housing the inverter assembly, which would have to be wired into the house's power panel via another circuit breaker much as you would wire in an electric dryer ( I anticipate the current flow during operation would be comparable to a dryer, but current this time is in opposite phase to the voltage, as the energy would be flowing into, rather than from, the grid.)
This way, during the presence of sun, you could backfeed the power grid if you have excess power, if you don't you will resort to taking from the grid what you need.
With enough people using this, the power company may find they do not need near so much fuel during the day to spin their generators at the RPM needed to sustain grid frequency at 60 Hz.. but at night or on cloudy days, their generators would have to take up the slack.
There are a few problems though which will come up.
One is that by having houses backfeed the power lines, linemen won't be safe working on community power feeds because they will have no way of knowing when some house is going to backfeed the line. Its kinda the surprise we would encounter upon picking up a light bulb and getting a helluva shock out of it, because we were'nt expecting 120 volts *out* of the thing.
Another problem is accounting. There is a big difference in the cost of producing "excess" power from the cells and "demand" power from the generators. The power company has to justify having all this generation capacity on hand for when its needed.. therefore the cost of the energy supplied by the power company would have to exceed by quite some margin the cost of the energy they could credit you for should you have excess on a sunny day and pump it back into their lines.
Well, anyway, there's my hope on how we may implement solar.
We've had tools that did the job on DOS (640K limit and all) that were MORE
than adequate for better than 10 years.
I am very pleased with the gems I have.
I love my old DOS schematic editor.
Its only 100K or so.. but it does exactly what I need it to. No more. No less.
It lets me draw my schematics on the screen. It lets me use any part I put in the library. It keeps tabs on which pin of which part connects to which pin of any other part, and if that pin is an input, output, tristate, or open collector.
If I move a part on the screen, it has enough sense to keep the connections intact. If it can't visually do so on the display, it will try anyway but turn the connection red so I have a chance to go back and redo the graphical layout so the lines do not visually lay on top of each other. In no event though will it corrupt the netlist itself because it could not graphically present it on the screen.
When I get through, it will provide me a netlist of all the parts I defined/used, listing which pin(s) of cells connects to which pin(s) of other
cells. Generic as can be. In addition to "pins", any cell can have up to 255 other "attributes" assigned to it by attribute number. Most of the time, I assign attributes to things like part numbers, value, tolerance, voltage ratings, etc.. but its wide open.. I can assign anything to anything as I see fit. I can spread my design across as many pages as I want. One of my more complicated designs was something like 42 pages. I can even give several different cells spanning various pages the same name, and as long as its different pins, the program recognizes them as really being the same cell. Even if I give it the same pin, the program will make the correct connection, but flag it as a duplicate pin usage to alert me to a possible error. That makes it really handy when I am designing in a multipurpose ASIC where one physical package may be present in many drawing subsets. Sure makes way for nice clean schematics free of clutter from related, but non-involved circuitry. The program is Futurenet. Dash-2 . Unfortunately, I have not seen it for sale for ten years now.
And my screen's total area is dedicated to showing me the graphical workspace. I get so annoyed when the new Windows programs clutter up my display real estate so much with graphical gadgets that I am left working through a tiny little hole in the screen that they left for me to work in. Kinda like trying to fix the plumbing through a little 6" hole in the wall.
Only thing I can really say now is I am glad I was around to snare these as they passed. I do not see anything like these anymore.
I guess we all have a tendency to want to use what we are familiar with. I get to see the new stuff and compare it to what I already have and get to make the decision on what I use and what I pass up. I liked the new processors.. I now have all Pentiums. But I did not like the new software all that much.. I really liked my old stuff better.
Yeh, people say that by using the old stuff, I am incompatible, but let two or three years pass, did it make any difference? Given two years, who else is going to read any files they made a couple of years ago, or in two more years, will they even be able to read files they create today? I can do either. I have the utmost confidence my files can be read as long as anyone maintains the systems to do so. The software is perpetual. It was done right.
I guess I think of the software much as I think of the brick I used when I built my patio supports. I did this about 20 years ago. The patio supports are still there. They are still doing what they were designed to do. And I expect when they put me in my grave, the patio supports will still be there. Doing what I designed them to do. I feel I designed them right, because, frankly, I am too damned lazy to think of having to rip up the patio to re-do them.
You know, I think I remember that old logic analyzer you referenced. If I recall that one correctly, I had a fit with it. I always thought HP made great test oscillators and spectrum analyzers, but it seems they never got the hang of making either oscilloscopes ( they never did seem to master the art of making it sync ) or logic analyzers. I liked my old Dolch better. ( and it wasn't quite the cat's meow either ). I do not think anyone ever surpassed Tektronix in making a user-friendly scope.
Yeh, I am a bit miffed with what you so appropriately named "OS Design du Jour". That is the Microsoft paradigm that really gets to me. I've come to consider Microsoft products much as I would consider building materials.
If I am building something, say seating at the Rose parade, I really don't care if it is compatible with anything else. It only has to last a day. I want cheap. So, whatever gets the seating in place for the day at the lowest price takes it. Compatibility with what has been and what will be is the least of my worries. People need a seat. Now. To heck with tomorrow. Its all going to the trash heap tomorrow anyway. This calls for a "Seating du Jour" approach.
But if I am planning a major sports venue, I may want the seating to last for a century or so. I will use a completely different approach to my choice of seating design.
Let me relate. One example.
In the lab, we have steel shelving. Steel "Equipto". Kinda like a big "erector set".
When the shelving arrived, it came with screws. I would not let them assemble the shelves with the screws supplied, as I knew the screw slots would get buggered and the shelves would soon be hard to adjust. I purchased several dozen boxes of 1/4" hex bolt and nut sets, as well as several 5 pound boxes of 1/4" washers from Home Depot. And told them to assemble the shelves with that. So years later, whenever something needs changing, no big deal, I have a whole drawer full of the 7/16 wrenches that fit either the bolt or the nut, as well as boxes of nuts, bolts, and washers. And it fits the whole lab. If they have a lot of shelves to adjust, there is a Makita power drill in one of the drawers with a 7/16" socket already on it. Everyone knows what its for.
A little foresight saved everybody a lot of problems. If something needs changing, everyone's free to change it as they see fit. Kinda like no sense losing a nights sleep cause the cover's tangled.
The main problem we have to focus on is the problem our customer enlisted us to help him with.
Getting our infrastructure to help us do that should NOT be a problem.
You hit pretty well on the points I was trying to make. I run right now with these "ancient" programs on an array of Pentiums at present. The programs run like blazes. I have tried to catch them trying to redraw the screen, but its done by the time the next frame is to be displayed. The last time I wanted a few more computers ( six, actually ) in the lab, I just went down to Micro Center and picked them up for $29.95 apiece. Pentium 166's w/ 32MB, but for me they were way more than adequate.
Maybe I have been experiencing unusual statistical failures, but I have yet to have a computer fail on me. For that matter, I have yet to even have a disk drive fail ( although I have seen other people's fail - I think because they had something wrong with their system configurations that caused the endless seeking on the hard drive - such as paging caused by insufficient RAM. ) I have had the boards fail for analog reasons, mostly failing electrolytic capacitors, which I have elaborated on in other posts on this board, but I have yet to have the processor itself go on me. The closest thing I have had to a failure is an old video digitizer I had, which had cooling problems since the day it was out of the box, failed for thermal reasons, and I had an interface board fail because the old nickel-cadmium battery on the motherboard decided to rupture one day and eject its contents all over said interface board. All in all, even though I can get venomous at times with Microsoft, I think Intel's done a helluva job.
And yes, you mentioned Linux for running DOS. Heh, heh. This is Slashdot. Thats one of the main reasons I am having to abandon the big guys at Redmond. I know they wanna kill their old baby that put them where they are. The thing that got me started in Linux is they *are* configurable to do many things.. including supporting the old guys that Microsoft is no longer interested in. Trying to sell me a Microsoft product or Linux is to me the difference between a calculator and a computer. A calculator will provide whatever functions its maker provided it with. A computer will provide whatever functions you can dream up and teach it. Given my choice between a calculator and a computer, I'll take the computer.
You remark about the old wrench getting lost.. right on! I no longer use the original platforms the software was designed for. My PC's and XT's are long gone. Yes, Intel makes some of the neatest wrenches I ever did see. Thank goodness they made it where it would fit my legacy bolts. The neat thing about software - especially sofware written so you can open it up and fix it if you need to, is that it never breaks.. so with adequate backup ( and believe me, I am backed up "six ways from Sunday"), I should be able to use this software until I go to my grave.
I have been really impressed with the "OpenGL" graphics stuff. I did not have that luxury under DOS ( albeit I did have other luxuries such as user definable character sets and being able to play with the 6845 registers in real-time.).
I am "betting my farm" on Linux. I trust these guys to do it right and leave things open, so that the system can be programmed with what *we*, rather than some *authority* wants it to do.
Seriously though, the software tools that hardware engineers use leave a lot to be desired (I mean, the last board I worked on was in 2002 and they used a
DOS based program to do the layout for peet's sake)
I work in circuit design all the time, and I use DOS based tools for schematic, PCB layout, and circuit analysis (spice). Why?
Most of the stuff I do links to stuff I have done before. I have no trouble with my DOS tools re-opening files say 10 years old. I also know that I will be able to see my files 10 years from now if I play my cards right and do *not* "upgrade".
Processors change. Although my schematic capture program requires an 8088 or better, both the PCB layout and circuit analyzer require at least an 80386. As processors changed, I simply copied the files to a directory on the new machine and they run. No "installation" or registry entries, authorization codes, or the like. They just run.
The libraries on all of the programs are user configurable. As any new parts come out, I simply enter the configuration into the library.
No user authentication. These programs were coded in a day where there was not all this emphasis on piracy - I am free to move these programs around to any machine I get my hands on. And because the family of machines I use all run the exact same software, the files can be read/modified/written on any machine without need of version controls. It was common in those days to buy a "site license".
The programs are quite small. The schematic editor, along with all its libraries, and a good sized project's worth of files will all fit on a 1.4 Megabyte bootable floppy! The spice analyzer requires 1 floppy, and the PCB layout program requires three floppies. None of the programs require any sort of "installation", per se. Just
make a subdirectory for them, copy them over, and run the appropriate.exe file and start work.
But the part I like best is that I intimately understand what these programs are doing. If something goes amiss somewhere, I know where to look. Their file structures are pretty simple; if something goes amiss, I can usually patch it with a hexadecimal file editor.
If I want the file in another format, its usually not all that difficult to pull up the C++ compiler and code a little file converter.
The schematic editor and spice analyzer are wide open to debuggers, but the people who made the PCB editor got crafty and made theirs hard to debug- just thank goodness they coded it well and there was only one instance where their program needed debugging. ( For those of you who have ever had to use what passes for technical support, you may find the time better spent learning how to fix it yourself.) But this was five years ago.. today fixing it yourself is illegal in many cases as a result of the congresscritters foisting DMCA on us.
I know its fashionable for me to say I run the latest systems. If the later systems actually gave me better results, I would gladly switch, but all I see out there is I would be throwing away a trusted and faithful system to get more problems than I could shake my proverbial stick at.
My take on this is that my tools are precisely that: tools. It took me 12 years of education before I could even emit a coherent sentence in English. It took me 5 years in front of a keyboard before I typed halfway worth a damm. What I am trying to say is that although hardware and software complexity has grown by leaps and bounds, I have not. It still takes me a helluva long time to learn how to use this stuff. If I spent all this time learning how to play a piano fluently, I feel foolish going onto stage with a clarinet. My job is not learning new tools all the time, its applying what I know to get a job done. Would you want a seasoned old mechanic using his grandpa's wrench on your car, or somebody with the latest 200HP pneumatic tool seating the oil-drain plug? ( I use that as an example because they did it to me... that car never stopped leaking oil once they improperly used that power wrench on my car.)
If what I am doing is bad, I guess it won't matter much - as this is my last decade I think I will be in the job force. This grandpa is about ready for pasture.
"require them to use a Caller-Id function to log the phone numbers used for the dialup"
Good comeback. I am just playing devil's advocate here. I have seen enough cases where much has been invested in trying to catch the wind.
I noted a local coffee shop having some signage to the effect that they will soon become an internet "hot-spot", so that people with suitably equipped laptop computers with wireless networking will be able to access the net through the coffee-shop's server. I do not know how that's going to work...just how anonymous the connection is.
Sometimes I think trying to find out who did a P2P transfer may be as difficult as trying to find out who farted in a movie theater.
Actually, I am wondering when ISP's will sell Internet Access much like telcos sell phone cards.
Buy one of these cards in a store, call the ISP, use the user:password as shown on the card for as many hours as the card is good for.. ( Hundred hour cards retailing about $10 seem appropriate to me - using local dialups ).
That way, if they get pestered, they do not have to worry about all the privacy issues.. the ISP can easily say which card was using the service at the time, maybe even point to the retailer who sold the card. But, given all that, it never hooked onto who is using that card.
And if the user screws up and makes his password public.. no big deal, the card expires anyway once its hours are consumed.
In all seriousness though, I think this topic indicates how likely such a thing could happen.
There was a movie put out about some underground hacker group determined to take over the world using proprietary software whose ulterior motives were kept secret from the public.
If I remember right, the software links could be triggered by finding and clicking on a small pi on an affected screen.
I think the movie title was "hackers" but I am not sure.
I found this by opening up a window to Google and typing the words +"L2" +"orbit" +"space". For me, it was the first entry returned.
"Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day, but *teach* a man to fish and you have fed him forever". That is what makes sharing the 'tricks of the trade' so special.
I hate the thought of crashing too.. I do have strong tendencies to develop emotional attachment to things.. even machines - especially ones that have done what this one has.
Jupiter is a "gas giant".
I wonder if it will ever find a solid surface to "land" on, or just sink deeper and deeper into ever higher compressed gases.
Wasn't Voyager powered by a nuclear-powered thermopile generator? If so, what kind of chance is there that we may ignite Jupiter's compressed core (thermonuclearly speaking). If so, we may have another distant sun in a few months.
Yes.. but energy *is* mass.. just another form of it. What I am speculating on is that the energy *forms* mass during the decompositon, somewhat the counterpart of what happens during a nuclear detonation when mass disappears to form energy.
When the matter goes into the hole, it goes in as the complex arrangements we know as the elements, as well as any condensed matter (neutronium?). But when the hole detonates, there would really be nothing there but subatomic particles, which would rapidly coalesce to what we know as hydrogen.. firing off a whole new round of mass accretion by gravity, which would eventually end up in enough hydrogen gathering together to ignite the nuclear fusion process which powers stars.
I think the whole system is closed.. the amount of energy:mass never changes, although one can be exchanged for the other - just two faces of the same coin.
I think this thing goes into perpetuity, never running down - constantly renewing in this manner.. moving constantly much like brownian motion observed in a Petri dish. Although I may be able to fix dates where I speculate my own galaxy or observable universe subset may have been formed, I do not think I will ever see where the universe in its entirety can ever be dated. I get the strong idea it always has been and always will be. But local stuff comes and goes through these never-ending oscillations between mass and energy.
One thing I have yet to see is anybody explain to me where the apparent rotational inertia of the universe as I see it. Everything seems to be spinning around something else.
They try to get me to accept the big bang.. but the problem I see is if everything emanated from a point source, it should not have any rotational inertia, which will be required for the spin I observe.
Maybe our observable universe is the result of the explosive contraction of a black hole? Let me elaborate: A black hole forms, and begins to accrete matter. But the matter is not falling *directly* into the hole, no, it goes round and round on its way in, going ever faster as it falls inward, spinning the hole up. Consider under the rotational centrifugal forces, the singularity forms a ring. Eventually, this ring meets the event horizon. Now, as long as the ring is not spinning fast enough to meet the event horizon, the hole is stable, but once the centrifugal force of the singularity exceeds in the tiniest amount the gravitational force holding it together, it looks like it may detonate, much like a wheel would detonate if you spun it faster than the tensile strength of the steel it is made of exceeded.
This would form the local areas we see in the universe as galaxies and galaxy clusters... and as a result of the rotational inertia of the detonating black hole which formed them, they would rotate likewise, and eventually the cycle would repeat. Endlessly. Much like a pendulum - free of friction, constantly exchanges kinetic energy for potential energy.
I'll toss this idea up the pole... comments invited.
Radar is really neat for checking velocity because the motion of the object causes a doppler shift in the reflected microwave energy... at traffic speeds it will be in the mid audio range.
It is very precise, as not only are the microwave oscillators very stable, and the speed of light itself is very constant.
If you find yourself near a microwave doppler supermarket-type door opener that has the mixer-out indicator visible, you can see the indicator dim and brighten as you cross wavefronts in the microwave beam, meaning the phase of the waves reflected from you arrive back in time to either aid or oppose the oscillator transmitting the microwave energy.
There is a lot of cool stuff you can do with microwaves. They are really bouncy things.. they bounce off of darned near anything conductive.. and deriving the doppler is as simple as using a plain junction diode which is exposed to both the transmit and receive side of the microwave beam.. the multiplication of "local oscillator" and "RF" occurs at the diode itself and the resulting "IF" will be in the low audio region ( for human velocities anyway ) and quite easily processed by simple amplifiers.
They will bait you to their site, and when you go onto their site to retrieve some file they say they have and attempt to download it, they will log where their server is sending it to.
And a letter from their legal counsel will go out in the next day's mail.
Sorry to rain on parade..but I do not think encryption is going to do much to help mask P2P filesharing itself... but it will help a lot in the sense that if you snared some file from someone's P2P server but did not know how to unlock it, you just get a file of something you can not use at all - it may as well be digitized interstation FM hiss for all you know. Or it might be configured so that if you do not know the access codes, you won't be able to get the remote server to send the file.
I thought this 20 megabyte thing was Microsoft's version of a loader.
Being I am an old DOS guy who used to store things on 360K floppy disks ( and it took sometimes weeks of work to fill one of those with decent code )... the thought of 20 megabytes sent me through the roof. ( The DOS kernel - COMMAND COM 54,619 09-30-93 6:20a )
I've just seen so much stuff come out of that company I considered bloatware, and everyone just seemed to take it with a grain of salt and move on. To me, this one just seemed to take the cake. I work mostly with robots using assembler codes on Motorola 68K processors. I have yet to fill up a pair of 27C512 with code, and often have to use all sorts of code and hardware debuggers in tandem to isolate trouble spots at the register/interface level. There's where my alarm on file size springs from.
Slashdot Mirror
ummm.. doesn't that say something?
No longer will your viewing habits be anonymous if you have a traceable button.
The same way the printer cartridge manufacturers handled it and the garage door manufacurers handled it.
They'll just run to the courts with it and explain just how bad it is that we are still living in a free enterprise system and how they should award damages because someone else is competing.
Someone really messed up a few years ago by not patenting the idea of putting a sliver of meat between two slices of bread.
Well, thats what we have right now as far as getting laws passed. Note how much its like "crawling over broken glass" to submit those forms they presented to contest the DMCA. See where that is getting us?
This is the exact thing I have been watching for years on solar roofing. How to get it properly affixed to the roof, where it works "forever", won't leak, easy to install, and can pe replaced piecewise in the event of damage or building mods.
The closest thing I can think of is a making solar "tiles", which would be something like a solar cell array prefixed to a very sturdy backing which would snap in place onto rails that would be applied to the building frame. Each tile would have a locking mechanism that once it is in place, it would be held down in its place onto the tile below it. They would be staggered. Dummy tiles would used for tight spots where tiles had to be cut to make them fit, but for appearance's sake they would appear identical to a productive tile.
To install, first place the strips over the tar paper, then install the tiles in a pattern so they stagger. The tiles are shaped so they will derive mechanical support in the center from the roof. Also they can not be brittle. People will walk on them.. in roofer's shoes no less. There is no telling what may be on the roof that gets stepped on..rocks, nails, screws, etc. such accident should not mandate replacing the roof. Kids *will* hit baseballs onto the roof - believe me - no matter what you do, the roof will have more than rain to contend with. Gusts of 100MPH winds not only drive water where its not supposed to be, but can provide enough force to get under shingles and quickly peel entire roofs apart in seconds. ( I watched a neighbor's roof go during one of our famous Southern California Santa Ana winds.. he had just put on asphalt shingles, and the sun had not yet melted the adhesive on the back which was to hold the shingles down. Once the wind picked one up, they all went. I would think his shingles could be found anywhere in town.) The tiles have to be designed in such a way as to make individual replacement practical, as it is with shingles. And it should not require a MSEE to install it. These things should be as simple as Christmas lights to install.
My intention is that each rail will develop a certain voltage across the length of it due to the installed tiles mounted to it. Each rail will power a small DC-DC converter ( I know, lots of converters, but being each will handle less than 100 watts or so, cheap and small - and the failure of one would not bring down the system, nor have enough energy under it to present a serious thermal problem should it malfunction. ). I am thinking of something down the line of maybe something like 300 volts DC at whatever current the available sunlight allows coming from the switching converter. Probably in the range of a hundred milliamperes ( 30 watts ). It will take the combined energy of several dozen rail structures to feed the main inverter which will power the house.
The main inverter will combine incoming currents ( via diode gates ) onto a protected 300V buss, which can then feed an inverter synchronized to the 50/60 Hz house power. I say "protected" because by the time you integrate the total power from several dozen feeds, now you are dealing with enough power to kill you or start fires. That buss should be mechanically protected where its not easily gotten to, like inside the electrical box housing the inverter assembly, which would have to be wired into the house's power panel via another circuit breaker much as you would wire in an electric dryer ( I anticipate the current flow during operation would be comparable to a dryer, but current this time is in opposite phase to the voltage, as the energy would be flowing into, rather than from, the grid.) This way, during the presence of sun, you could backfeed the power grid if you have excess power, if you don't you will resort to taking from the grid what you need.
With enough people using this, the power company may find they do not need near so much fuel during the day to spin their generators at the RPM needed to sustain grid frequency at 60 Hz.. but at night or on cloudy days, their generators would have to take up the slack.
There are a few problems though which will come up.
One is that by having houses backfeed the power lines, linemen won't be safe working on community power feeds because they will have no way of knowing when some house is going to backfeed the line. Its kinda the surprise we would encounter upon picking up a light bulb and getting a helluva shock out of it, because we were'nt expecting 120 volts *out* of the thing.
Another problem is accounting. There is a big difference in the cost of producing "excess" power from the cells and "demand" power from the generators. The power company has to justify having all this generation capacity on hand for when its needed.. therefore the cost of the energy supplied by the power company would have to exceed by quite some margin the cost of the energy they could credit you for should you have excess on a sunny day and pump it back into their lines.
Well, anyway, there's my hope on how we may implement solar.
I am very pleased with the gems I have.
I love my old DOS schematic editor.
Its only 100K or so.. but it does exactly what I need it to. No more. No less.
It lets me draw my schematics on the screen. It lets me use any part I put in the library. It keeps tabs on which pin of which part connects to which pin of any other part, and if that pin is an input, output, tristate, or open collector.
If I move a part on the screen, it has enough sense to keep the connections intact. If it can't visually do so on the display, it will try anyway but turn the connection red so I have a chance to go back and redo the graphical layout so the lines do not visually lay on top of each other. In no event though will it corrupt the netlist itself because it could not graphically present it on the screen.
When I get through, it will provide me a netlist of all the parts I defined/used, listing which pin(s) of cells connects to which pin(s) of other cells. Generic as can be. In addition to "pins", any cell can have up to 255 other "attributes" assigned to it by attribute number. Most of the time, I assign attributes to things like part numbers, value, tolerance, voltage ratings, etc.. but its wide open.. I can assign anything to anything as I see fit. I can spread my design across as many pages as I want. One of my more complicated designs was something like 42 pages. I can even give several different cells spanning various pages the same name, and as long as its different pins, the program recognizes them as really being the same cell. Even if I give it the same pin, the program will make the correct connection, but flag it as a duplicate pin usage to alert me to a possible error. That makes it really handy when I am designing in a multipurpose ASIC where one physical package may be present in many drawing subsets. Sure makes way for nice clean schematics free of clutter from related, but non-involved circuitry. The program is Futurenet. Dash-2 . Unfortunately, I have not seen it for sale for ten years now.
And my screen's total area is dedicated to showing me the graphical workspace. I get so annoyed when the new Windows programs clutter up my display real estate so much with graphical gadgets that I am left working through a tiny little hole in the screen that they left for me to work in. Kinda like trying to fix the plumbing through a little 6" hole in the wall.
Only thing I can really say now is I am glad I was around to snare these as they passed. I do not see anything like these anymore.
I guess we all have a tendency to want to use what we are familiar with. I get to see the new stuff and compare it to what I already have and get to make the decision on what I use and what I pass up. I liked the new processors.. I now have all Pentiums. But I did not like the new software all that much.. I really liked my old stuff better.
Yeh, people say that by using the old stuff, I am incompatible, but let two or three years pass, did it make any difference? Given two years, who else is going to read any files they made a couple of years ago, or in two more years, will they even be able to read files they create today? I can do either. I have the utmost confidence my files can be read as long as anyone maintains the systems to do so. The software is perpetual. It was done right.
I guess I think of the software much as I think of the brick I used when I built my patio supports. I did this about 20 years ago. The patio supports are still there. They are still doing what they were designed to do. And I expect when they put me in my grave, the patio supports will still be there. Doing what I designed them to do. I feel I designed them right, because, frankly, I am too damned lazy to think of having to rip up the patio to re-do them.
You know, I think I remember that old logic analyzer you referenced. If I recall that one correctly, I had a fit with it. I always thought HP made great test oscillators and spectrum analyzers, but it seems they never got the hang of making either oscilloscopes ( they never did seem to master the art of making it sync ) or logic analyzers. I liked my old Dolch better. ( and it wasn't quite the cat's meow either ). I do not think anyone ever surpassed Tektronix in making a user-friendly scope.
Yeh, I am a bit miffed with what you so appropriately named "OS Design du Jour". That is the Microsoft paradigm that really gets to me. I've come to consider Microsoft products much as I would consider building materials.
If I am building something, say seating at the Rose parade, I really don't care if it is compatible with anything else. It only has to last a day. I want cheap. So, whatever gets the seating in place for the day at the lowest price takes it. Compatibility with what has been and what will be is the least of my worries. People need a seat. Now. To heck with tomorrow. Its all going to the trash heap tomorrow anyway. This calls for a "Seating du Jour" approach.
But if I am planning a major sports venue, I may want the seating to last for a century or so. I will use a completely different approach to my choice of seating design.
Let me relate. One example.
In the lab, we have steel shelving. Steel "Equipto". Kinda like a big "erector set".
When the shelving arrived, it came with screws. I would not let them assemble the shelves with the screws supplied, as I knew the screw slots would get buggered and the shelves would soon be hard to adjust. I purchased several dozen boxes of 1/4" hex bolt and nut sets, as well as several 5 pound boxes of 1/4" washers from Home Depot. And told them to assemble the shelves with that. So years later, whenever something needs changing, no big deal, I have a whole drawer full of the 7/16 wrenches that fit either the bolt or the nut, as well as boxes of nuts, bolts, and washers. And it fits the whole lab. If they have a lot of shelves to adjust, there is a Makita power drill in one of the drawers with a 7/16" socket already on it. Everyone knows what its for.
A little foresight saved everybody a lot of problems. If something needs changing, everyone's free to change it as they see fit. Kinda like no sense losing a nights sleep cause the cover's tangled.
The main problem we have to focus on is the problem our customer enlisted us to help him with.
Getting our infrastructure to help us do that should NOT be a problem.
Maybe I have been experiencing unusual statistical failures, but I have yet to have a computer fail on me. For that matter, I have yet to even have a disk drive fail ( although I have seen other people's fail - I think because they had something wrong with their system configurations that caused the endless seeking on the hard drive - such as paging caused by insufficient RAM. ) I have had the boards fail for analog reasons, mostly failing electrolytic capacitors, which I have elaborated on in other posts on this board, but I have yet to have the processor itself go on me. The closest thing I have had to a failure is an old video digitizer I had, which had cooling problems since the day it was out of the box, failed for thermal reasons, and I had an interface board fail because the old nickel-cadmium battery on the motherboard decided to rupture one day and eject its contents all over said interface board. All in all, even though I can get venomous at times with Microsoft, I think Intel's done a helluva job.
And yes, you mentioned Linux for running DOS. Heh, heh. This is Slashdot. Thats one of the main reasons I am having to abandon the big guys at Redmond. I know they wanna kill their old baby that put them where they are. The thing that got me started in Linux is they *are* configurable to do many things.. including supporting the old guys that Microsoft is no longer interested in. Trying to sell me a Microsoft product or Linux is to me the difference between a calculator and a computer. A calculator will provide whatever functions its maker provided it with. A computer will provide whatever functions you can dream up and teach it. Given my choice between a calculator and a computer, I'll take the computer.
You remark about the old wrench getting lost.. right on! I no longer use the original platforms the software was designed for. My PC's and XT's are long gone. Yes, Intel makes some of the neatest wrenches I ever did see. Thank goodness they made it where it would fit my legacy bolts. The neat thing about software - especially sofware written so you can open it up and fix it if you need to, is that it never breaks.. so with adequate backup ( and believe me, I am backed up "six ways from Sunday"), I should be able to use this software until I go to my grave.
I have been really impressed with the "OpenGL" graphics stuff. I did not have that luxury under DOS ( albeit I did have other luxuries such as user definable character sets and being able to play with the 6845 registers in real-time.).
I am "betting my farm" on Linux. I trust these guys to do it right and leave things open, so that the system can be programmed with what *we*, rather than some *authority* wants it to do.
Thanks for replying to my post. I appreciate it.
I work in circuit design all the time, and I use DOS based tools for schematic, PCB layout, and circuit analysis (spice). Why?
Most of the stuff I do links to stuff I have done before. I have no trouble with my DOS tools re-opening files say 10 years old. I also know that I will be able to see my files 10 years from now if I play my cards right and do *not* "upgrade".
Processors change. Although my schematic capture program requires an 8088 or better, both the PCB layout and circuit analyzer require at least an 80386. As processors changed, I simply copied the files to a directory on the new machine and they run. No "installation" or registry entries, authorization codes, or the like. They just run.
The libraries on all of the programs are user configurable. As any new parts come out, I simply enter the configuration into the library.
No user authentication. These programs were coded in a day where there was not all this emphasis on piracy - I am free to move these programs around to any machine I get my hands on. And because the family of machines I use all run the exact same software, the files can be read/modified/written on any machine without need of version controls. It was common in those days to buy a "site license".
The programs are quite small. The schematic editor, along with all its libraries, and a good sized project's worth of files will all fit on a 1.4 Megabyte bootable floppy! The spice analyzer requires 1 floppy, and the PCB layout program requires three floppies. None of the programs require any sort of "installation", per se. Just make a subdirectory for them, copy them over, and run the appropriate .exe file and start work.
But the part I like best is that I intimately understand what these programs are doing. If something goes amiss somewhere, I know where to look. Their file structures are pretty simple; if something goes amiss, I can usually patch it with a hexadecimal file editor.
If I want the file in another format, its usually not all that difficult to pull up the C++ compiler and code a little file converter.
The schematic editor and spice analyzer are wide open to debuggers, but the people who made the PCB editor got crafty and made theirs hard to debug- just thank goodness they coded it well and there was only one instance where their program needed debugging. ( For those of you who have ever had to use what passes for technical support, you may find the time better spent learning how to fix it yourself.) But this was five years ago.. today fixing it yourself is illegal in many cases as a result of the congresscritters foisting DMCA on us.
I know its fashionable for me to say I run the latest systems. If the later systems actually gave me better results, I would gladly switch, but all I see out there is I would be throwing away a trusted and faithful system to get more problems than I could shake my proverbial stick at.
My take on this is that my tools are precisely that: tools. It took me 12 years of education before I could even emit a coherent sentence in English. It took me 5 years in front of a keyboard before I typed halfway worth a damm. What I am trying to say is that although hardware and software complexity has grown by leaps and bounds, I have not. It still takes me a helluva long time to learn how to use this stuff. If I spent all this time learning how to play a piano fluently, I feel foolish going onto stage with a clarinet. My job is not learning new tools all the time, its applying what I know to get a job done. Would you want a seasoned old mechanic using his grandpa's wrench on your car, or somebody with the latest 200HP pneumatic tool seating the oil-drain plug? ( I use that as an example because they did it to me... that car never stopped leaking oil once they improperly used that power wrench on my car.)
If what I am doing is bad, I guess it won't matter much - as this is my last decade I think I will be in the job force. This grandpa is about ready for pasture.
Good comeback. I am just playing devil's advocate here. I have seen enough cases where much has been invested in trying to catch the wind.
I noted a local coffee shop having some signage to the effect that they will soon become an internet "hot-spot", so that people with suitably equipped laptop computers with wireless networking will be able to access the net through the coffee-shop's server. I do not know how that's going to work...just how anonymous the connection is.
Sometimes I think trying to find out who did a P2P transfer may be as difficult as trying to find out who farted in a movie theater.
Buy one of these cards in a store, call the ISP, use the user:password as shown on the card for as many hours as the card is good for.. ( Hundred hour cards retailing about $10 seem appropriate to me - using local dialups ).
That way, if they get pestered, they do not have to worry about all the privacy issues.. the ISP can easily say which card was using the service at the time, maybe even point to the retailer who sold the card. But, given all that, it never hooked onto who is using that card.
And if the user screws up and makes his password public.. no big deal, the card expires anyway once its hours are consumed.
In all seriousness though, I think this topic indicates how likely such a thing could happen.
There was a movie put out about some underground hacker group determined to take over the world using proprietary software whose ulterior motives were kept secret from the public.
If I remember right, the software links could be triggered by finding and clicking on a small pi on an affected screen.
I think the movie title was "hackers" but I am not sure.
But, given this, let me add a little nota bene...
I found this by opening up a window to Google and typing the words +"L2" +"orbit" +"space". For me, it was the first entry returned.
"Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day, but *teach* a man to fish and you have fed him forever". That is what makes sharing the 'tricks of the trade' so special.
Jupiter is a "gas giant".
I wonder if it will ever find a solid surface to "land" on, or just sink deeper and deeper into ever higher compressed gases.
Wasn't Voyager powered by a nuclear-powered thermopile generator? If so, what kind of chance is there that we may ignite Jupiter's compressed core (thermonuclearly speaking). If so, we may have another distant sun in a few months.
If they pee, do they get credit?
Microsoft is the entity that got most of the PC launched into the mainstream anyway- and until lately I darn near considered them gods.
But lately, they seem to be like the kid at recess who runs to the playground, grabs the ball, and won't let anyone else play.
Yes... I think this was the "big bang" that started our area of the observable universe.
When the matter goes into the hole, it goes in as the complex arrangements we know as the elements, as well as any condensed matter (neutronium?). But when the hole detonates, there would really be nothing there but subatomic particles, which would rapidly coalesce to what we know as hydrogen.. firing off a whole new round of mass accretion by gravity, which would eventually end up in enough hydrogen gathering together to ignite the nuclear fusion process which powers stars.
I think the whole system is closed.. the amount of energy:mass never changes, although one can be exchanged for the other - just two faces of the same coin.
I think this thing goes into perpetuity, never running down - constantly renewing in this manner.. moving constantly much like brownian motion observed in a Petri dish. Although I may be able to fix dates where I speculate my own galaxy or observable universe subset may have been formed, I do not think I will ever see where the universe in its entirety can ever be dated. I get the strong idea it always has been and always will be. But local stuff comes and goes through these never-ending oscillations between mass and energy.
They try to get me to accept the big bang.. but the problem I see is if everything emanated from a point source, it should not have any rotational inertia, which will be required for the spin I observe.
Maybe our observable universe is the result of the explosive contraction of a black hole? Let me elaborate: A black hole forms, and begins to accrete matter. But the matter is not falling *directly* into the hole, no, it goes round and round on its way in, going ever faster as it falls inward, spinning the hole up. Consider under the rotational centrifugal forces, the singularity forms a ring. Eventually, this ring meets the event horizon. Now, as long as the ring is not spinning fast enough to meet the event horizon, the hole is stable, but once the centrifugal force of the singularity exceeds in the tiniest amount the gravitational force holding it together, it looks like it may detonate, much like a wheel would detonate if you spun it faster than the tensile strength of the steel it is made of exceeded.
This would form the local areas we see in the universe as galaxies and galaxy clusters... and as a result of the rotational inertia of the detonating black hole which formed them, they would rotate likewise, and eventually the cycle would repeat. Endlessly. Much like a pendulum - free of friction, constantly exchanges kinetic energy for potential energy.
I'll toss this idea up the pole... comments invited.
It is very precise, as not only are the microwave oscillators very stable, and the speed of light itself is very constant.
If you find yourself near a microwave doppler supermarket-type door opener that has the mixer-out indicator visible, you can see the indicator dim and brighten as you cross wavefronts in the microwave beam, meaning the phase of the waves reflected from you arrive back in time to either aid or oppose the oscillator transmitting the microwave energy.
There is a lot of cool stuff you can do with microwaves. They are really bouncy things.. they bounce off of darned near anything conductive.. and deriving the doppler is as simple as using a plain junction diode which is exposed to both the transmit and receive side of the microwave beam.. the multiplication of "local oscillator" and "RF" occurs at the diode itself and the resulting "IF" will be in the low audio region ( for human velocities anyway ) and quite easily processed by simple amplifiers.
I seem to recall they were using female cops posing as prostitutes to nail the johns.
They will bait you to their site, and when you go onto their site to retrieve some file they say they have and attempt to download it, they will log where their server is sending it to.
And a letter from their legal counsel will go out in the next day's mail.
Sorry to rain on parade..but I do not think encryption is going to do much to help mask P2P filesharing itself... but it will help a lot in the sense that if you snared some file from someone's P2P server but did not know how to unlock it, you just get a file of something you can not use at all - it may as well be digitized interstation FM hiss for all you know. Or it might be configured so that if you do not know the access codes, you won't be able to get the remote server to send the file.
I stand corrected. I plead ignorance.
I thought this 20 megabyte thing was Microsoft's version of a loader.
Being I am an old DOS guy who used to store things on 360K floppy disks ( and it took sometimes weeks of work to fill one of those with decent code )... the thought of 20 megabytes sent me through the roof. ( The DOS kernel - COMMAND COM 54,619 09-30-93 6:20a )
I've just seen so much stuff come out of that company I considered bloatware, and everyone just seemed to take it with a grain of salt and move on. To me, this one just seemed to take the cake. I work mostly with robots using assembler codes on Motorola 68K processors. I have yet to fill up a pair of 27C512 with code, and often have to use all sorts of code and hardware debuggers in tandem to isolate trouble spots at the register/interface level. There's where my alarm on file size springs from.