Some are glass plate Daguerreotypes. Somehow, I am not too confident that my digital pictures will be legible 150 years from now, unless I make a good quality print on archival paper. Digital files are too easily corrupted and made totally useless. Media formats will change. 8" floppies anyone?
I occasionally have to interface with Square-D SyMax PLCs from the early 80s. We still have equipment at customer sites that's using it. The software we have to do the programming uses software timing loops so I have to use a 386 or early 486 laptop to run it. I have this very old 386 laptop with an 80 Meg hard drive that still hangs on and boots. I've warned my boss that someday it won't boot and we'll be done.
In contrast to typical land-line phones, cell phones have no "side-tone". Side-tone is the portion of the audio signal from the microphone routed to the receiver (earpiece). By having side-tone we have feedback relating to how loud we're talking and the signal going to the other end. Without the side-tone, there is a natural tendency to talk louder. I don't know why cell phone designers have not incorporated side-tone. The amount of power it would consume is very small.
It was my first date with the woman who is now my wife. We went to it for several years when we were involved with the organization that sponsors it. This year we're staying home by the fireplace watching some TV and just generally goofing off. Not a bad way to see the new year in.
Yes, pre-microprocessor, relay logic elevator controllers. I see lots of them that were put in 40+ years ago still working and doing their job after all these years.
Those that do, are usually set at around 75% of rated capacity. When load weighting is activated, the car should ignore hall calls, but, obviously, cannot ignore car calls.
single floor runs and for multi-floor runs. Yes, the faster the car is running, the longer the slowdown distance since smooth acceleration and deceleration are desirable.
You will most commonly find it in large urban areas like NY and Chicago. In the Midwest where I worked in the elevator business, it's rarely a requested feature because folks aren't in such a rush in general.
I designed the hardware and wrote the code for a much smaller elevator company for 25 years... All written in assembly language running on an 8085 CPU with 256 bytes (Yes, bytes) if RAM and 8K bytes of EPROM. It doesn't take much to handle the basics when you're using assembly language. I've done up to 26 stops in a multi-car group with that setup. Each elevator is independent and can run on its own, but they communicate with each other to handle dispatching so multiple cars coordinate their activity.
Optimizing is worthwhile, but adds a lot of complexity. You have to take into account for car locations, direction, speed, where car and hall calls are locatedand have to figure in such things as door times to calculate which car can service a hall call soonest.
As the author says, it's a set of interesting problems and I've had fun with it. Yes, the equipment I designed and wrote the software for is obsolete now, but there's a lot of it out there so I'm anticipating writing updates for a while longer as I head toward eventual retirement.
I work for a company with 30,000 employees world wide. I got a nice new HP i5 laptop about a year ago. It came with XP Pro and Office 2003. I'm seeing no move to "upgrade", but I'll admit that I'm not in IT so I am not privy to plans before they are announced to the world.
Friends are asking me if they should be upgrading to a Win 7 machine while they still can. I tell them, Yes.
I'll take a look at 8 in a couple of years when the dust has settled.
I work in the elevator business as an Engineer. One day I was working on software in a new installation when the service man with me got a call to service an elevator in a mansion nearby. He suggested I come with him as it was an interesting installation. It was indeed. This was a three stop elevator installed in 1917 and all original and working just like it did almost 100 years ago. The controller resembled a cast iron bathtub with a lid having the relays mounted suspended from it. When the lid was lowered the relays were suspended in oil. I've seen some very old elevators still in use, but never one like that.
I have their "Batupo" model that I use for EPROMS in my work and have found it very easy to use and it works well. The only gripe I've got is that their software is Windows only and uses.NET, but other than that they're solid. See http://www.batronix.com/shop/programmer/eprom-programmer.html
"Major League" spectator sports are nothing more than big business. Time to tone them down if they're leading to all this mayhem. Remember the origin of "fan" is fanatic.
With the 8 tabs I normally have open in FF, eventually the CPU usage will spike when I'm switching from one tab to another and it will lock up for several seconds. Looking at it with the task manager, it says Firefox (Not Responding). WTF is with that? I close it, reopen it, restoring the same tabs, and I'm OK for a while. Annoying. I tend to simultaneously use FF, Chrome and Opera on XP. FF is the only one with this problem.
My Amazon Affiliate account was terminated the day it took effect. If you're an Amazon affiliate, think of moving your business address to a more friendly state. In my case, I wasn't making enough for it to make sense to incorporate elsewhere. "The power to tax is the power to destroy".
My wife and I both have dual monitor setups. She's a writer and uses one screen for the article she's working on and the other for her research. I had dual monitors first and she kept looking over my shoulder an saw how convenient it was, so she asked me to get the same thing for her.
One of my hobbies is genealogy so having my genealogy database program open on one screen and research on the other. When I've got my web design hat on, it's my editor on one screen and a browser on the other to keep checking my work.
I definitely feel like I've got blinders on if I only have one monitor.
I used to be one of those folks that had a hanging folder for each category, electric bill, gas bill, phone bill. etc. It dawned on me that a rarely had to find one of those documents so I simplified my system. It has worked well for me, but your mileage may vary.
I get a plastic box found at various stores called a sweater box. It's a convenient size roughly 9X12X6 Inches. On January 1 of each year, I place receipts, bills that are paid and other documents that I want to save in it, not organized other than chronologically. If I need to retrieve an original document, I know that the oldest ones are on the bottom and the most recent are on the top. On December 31, I write the year on the end of the plastic box with a sharpie and put it away in the closet for at least 3 years before shredding the contents and recycling the box for new use. It's just not that hard.
What about the lamps in my ovens? Are there little CFLs or LEDs that work at 500 F?
I live in the Midwest so outdoor lights in the Winter present a problem. My work-around for the outdoor light by our back door is to just turn it on in the Fall and leave it on. So far so good. My front outdoor lights are the candelabra base bulbs shaped like a flame. I haven't seen anything suitable as a replacement for those so I bought a case of them and hope the supply outlasts me or that the technology improves.
We have a number of recessed lights in our home office, kitchen, hallways and bathroom. I've tried a number of different flood lamp shaped CFLs and have had uniformly bad luck with very slow start-up times. Particularly in hallways and the bathroom it's unacceptable. I've experimented with some LED flood lamps in the back hallway leading to the garage and they start OK with about a second of delay versus a minute or two for the CFLs, but they produce harsh bluish light that is not acceptable in an actual living area. Sooo... I've stocked up on incandescent flood lamps, too.
I definitely like the idea of more efficient lighting, especially in the Summer when the extra heat is even less desirable, but it's got to be affordable and look good. We seem to have a way to go on both counts. I would prefer to let the market decide rather than have non-technical legislators shove this down our throats, but why should this be different than other legislation?
Slashdot Mirror
Some are glass plate Daguerreotypes. Somehow, I am not too confident that my digital pictures will be legible 150 years from now, unless I make a good quality print on archival paper. Digital files are too easily corrupted and made totally useless. Media formats will change. 8" floppies anyone?
I occasionally have to interface with Square-D SyMax PLCs from the early 80s. We still have equipment at customer sites that's using it. The software we have to do the programming uses software timing loops so I have to use a 386 or early 486 laptop to run it. I have this very old 386 laptop with an 80 Meg hard drive that still hangs on and boots. I've warned my boss that someday it won't boot and we'll be done.
In contrast to typical land-line phones, cell phones have no "side-tone". Side-tone is the portion of the audio signal from the microphone routed to the receiver (earpiece). By having side-tone we have feedback relating to how loud we're talking and the signal going to the other end. Without the side-tone, there is a natural tendency to talk louder. I don't know why cell phone designers have not incorporated side-tone. The amount of power it would consume is very small.
Minority Report references in 3..2..1
It was my first date with the woman who is now my wife. We went to it for several years when we were involved with the organization that sponsors it. This year we're staying home by the fireplace watching some TV and just generally goofing off. Not a bad way to see the new year in.
Yes, pre-microprocessor, relay logic elevator controllers. I see lots of them that were put in 40+ years ago still working and doing their job after all these years.
Those that do, are usually set at around 75% of rated capacity. When load weighting is activated, the car should ignore hall calls, but, obviously, cannot ignore car calls.
I did all my elevator in assembly language, Sonny. (Seriously) Now get off my grass.
We don't use the term "crash" when talking about elevators.
We rate elevator speeds in feet per minute. A typical small hydraulic elevator will run 100 FPM. A high-rise express car may get up to 1,500 FPM.
single floor runs and for multi-floor runs. Yes, the faster the car is running, the longer the slowdown distance since smooth acceleration and deceleration are desirable.
You will most commonly find it in large urban areas like NY and Chicago. In the Midwest where I worked in the elevator business, it's rarely a requested feature because folks aren't in such a rush in general.
I designed the hardware and wrote the code for a much smaller elevator company for 25 years... All written in assembly language running on an 8085 CPU with 256 bytes (Yes, bytes) if RAM and 8K bytes of EPROM. It doesn't take much to handle the basics when you're using assembly language. I've done up to 26 stops in a multi-car group with that setup. Each elevator is independent and can run on its own, but they communicate with each other to handle dispatching so multiple cars coordinate their activity.
Optimizing is worthwhile, but adds a lot of complexity. You have to take into account for car locations, direction, speed, where car and hall calls are locatedand have to figure in such things as door times to calculate which car can service a hall call soonest.
As the author says, it's a set of interesting problems and I've had fun with it. Yes, the equipment I designed and wrote the software for is obsolete now, but there's a lot of it out there so I'm anticipating writing updates for a while longer as I head toward eventual retirement.
I've got a Collins 75A-2 receiver that was made in 1952. It still works fine.
I work for a company with 30,000 employees world wide. I got a nice new HP i5 laptop about a year ago. It came with XP Pro and Office 2003. I'm seeing no move to "upgrade", but I'll admit that I'm not in IT so I am not privy to plans before they are announced to the world. Friends are asking me if they should be upgrading to a Win 7 machine while they still can. I tell them, Yes. I'll take a look at 8 in a couple of years when the dust has settled.
I work in the elevator business as an Engineer. One day I was working on software in a new installation when the service man with me got a call to service an elevator in a mansion nearby. He suggested I come with him as it was an interesting installation. It was indeed. This was a three stop elevator installed in 1917 and all original and working just like it did almost 100 years ago. The controller resembled a cast iron bathtub with a lid having the relays mounted suspended from it. When the lid was lowered the relays were suspended in oil. I've seen some very old elevators still in use, but never one like that.
I have their "Batupo" model that I use for EPROMS in my work and have found it very easy to use and it works well. The only gripe I've got is that their software is Windows only and uses .NET, but other than that they're solid. See http://www.batronix.com/shop/programmer/eprom-programmer.html
This makes a good case for IPV6 so every site/device will have their own IP instead of sharing one IP for a million blogs.
"Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral,"... Is it abundant, or is it rare?
Internet Explorer as a viable browser. Thank you, Microsoft.
"Major League" spectator sports are nothing more than big business. Time to tone them down if they're leading to all this mayhem. Remember the origin of "fan" is fanatic.
With the 8 tabs I normally have open in FF, eventually the CPU usage will spike when I'm switching from one tab to another and it will lock up for several seconds. Looking at it with the task manager, it says Firefox (Not Responding). WTF is with that? I close it, reopen it, restoring the same tabs, and I'm OK for a while. Annoying. I tend to simultaneously use FF, Chrome and Opera on XP. FF is the only one with this problem.
My Amazon Affiliate account was terminated the day it took effect. If you're an Amazon affiliate, think of moving your business address to a more friendly state. In my case, I wasn't making enough for it to make sense to incorporate elsewhere. "The power to tax is the power to destroy".
My wife and I both have dual monitor setups. She's a writer and uses one screen for the article she's working on and the other for her research. I had dual monitors first and she kept looking over my shoulder an saw how convenient it was, so she asked me to get the same thing for her.
One of my hobbies is genealogy so having my genealogy database program open on one screen and research on the other. When I've got my web design hat on, it's my editor on one screen and a browser on the other to keep checking my work.
I definitely feel like I've got blinders on if I only have one monitor.
I used to be one of those folks that had a hanging folder for each category, electric bill, gas bill, phone bill. etc. It dawned on me that a rarely had to find one of those documents so I simplified my system. It has worked well for me, but your mileage may vary.
I get a plastic box found at various stores called a sweater box. It's a convenient size roughly 9X12X6 Inches. On January 1 of each year, I place receipts, bills that are paid and other documents that I want to save in it, not organized other than chronologically. If I need to retrieve an original document, I know that the oldest ones are on the bottom and the most recent are on the top. On December 31, I write the year on the end of the plastic box with a sharpie and put it away in the closet for at least 3 years before shredding the contents and recycling the box for new use. It's just not that hard.
What about the lamps in my ovens? Are there little CFLs or LEDs that work at 500 F?
I live in the Midwest so outdoor lights in the Winter present a problem. My work-around for the outdoor light by our back door is to just turn it on in the Fall and leave it on. So far so good. My front outdoor lights are the candelabra base bulbs shaped like a flame. I haven't seen anything suitable as a replacement for those so I bought a case of them and hope the supply outlasts me or that the technology improves.
We have a number of recessed lights in our home office, kitchen, hallways and bathroom. I've tried a number of different flood lamp shaped CFLs and have had uniformly bad luck with very slow start-up times. Particularly in hallways and the bathroom it's unacceptable. I've experimented with some LED flood lamps in the back hallway leading to the garage and they start OK with about a second of delay versus a minute or two for the CFLs, but they produce harsh bluish light that is not acceptable in an actual living area. Sooo... I've stocked up on incandescent flood lamps, too.
I definitely like the idea of more efficient lighting, especially in the Summer when the extra heat is even less desirable, but it's got to be affordable and look good. We seem to have a way to go on both counts. I would prefer to let the market decide rather than have non-technical legislators shove this down our throats, but why should this be different than other legislation?