Borland: I've been using your products on and off since Turbo Pascal 1.0. You've had some real winners in there, and a few dogs. For the last decade or so, more woofers than winners. Please take these suggestions in the spirit that they're given:
I've seen hundreds of web sites, and yours is way down there around the bottom in terms of usability. I don't think it's changed much in the last ten years. Lots of fancy menus that reflect your corporate structure, not what we're interested in. Your download pages have been mostly unintelligible for almost a decade. Youre delphi download page is complete chaos. To download a trial copy you have to jump thru several hoops, fill out some useless marketing info forms, then separately login to get a key e-mailed to you. It's all too easy to get stuck going around in loops, again and again. Nothing seems to make sense or is integrated with anything else.
Your pzatch methodology is the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen Sun's. Patches are supplied in some strange file format, not clearly labeled as being a patch to fix what in what. I've tried several times to patch Delphi 6 and finally gave up, it's just too difficult, somewhat harder than cross-compiling gcc for RISC on a Palm Pilot.
Announcing you're "just about sold" is really unprofessional. It might make you feel a little better, but it doesnt reassure the customers. Half the time a company is sold is not for its products, but for its customers. There's a 50% chance we're not going to see great new Borland products, but instead coerced to be herded over to some other more-horrible toolset, like the resurrection of Symantec C.
We had some really great times together, but yuou've had a far-away look in your eye for ove a decade now. How about we just call it quits?
The story is scanty on details, but it seems there's nothing particularly new or efficient here.
Intercoolers have been used for well over 50 years on all kinds of engines.
And every jet plane has some "air packs", which take some hot compressed bleeed air from the engines and thru intercooling and expansion provide heat and cooling for the cabin. Again been done for 50+ years.
And condensing water out of the exhaust is EXTREMELY inefficient--You've got really hot gases, 1000 degrees Celcius and up, which you have to cool down to below 100C, and whose humidity is at best 8%. You'd be many times more efficient taking ambient air, if the ambient humidity is about 3% or so.
And there's darn little need for very small quantities of non-potable water gatrhered at very high cost.
While I agree these guys should get more recognition, this is a mighty weird way to do it.
Here's some ways they might appreciate:
(1) Build a 20 times size working HP 200 Audio Oscillator (HP's first product)-- Tubes the size of phone booths. Variable capcitors that could slice a whole cow... 20-ton transformers. 5Kw pilot light.
(2) Take up a collection to shoot their ashes into space.
(3) Start a really good HP museum.
So if a device is physically hung onto an iPod, but with no electrical or wireless or telepathic connections, are you really watching HDTV "on" an iPod ?
Singh may be really good at the newer stuff, but the old stuff he obviously did NOT dig into the hardware or software first hand. There ARE LOTS of of errors, half-truths, and very important omissions in this chapter!
Let's list a few:
The 6502 had an alleged crystal-control capability, but in every 6502 board I've seen (almost a dozen), every one of them uses a separate clock oscillator.
You can only get 16 addressing "modes" if you count each register as a different mode. And the indirect Y mode I don't think anybody ever found a use for. More like 6 usable modes.
Dunno where he got the 65 cycles reserved for refresh stuff. The CPU had no refresh mode built in.
The Apple ][ came with a DC power cord?
The Lisa could not have a on-chip MMU, as there was no MMU available for the original 68000.
The discussion of memory management on the Lisa is all wrong. The Lisa used a 68000 CPU, which had a major flaw-- memory faults were not restartable, plus there was no virtual memory management unit on the CPU or available. SO virtual memory was extremely constrained:: Apple had to design their own (slow and very limited) MMU, AND page faults were completely disallowed! A program had to obey a certain page-touching protocol to succesfully run. All stack expansion had to be first pre-flighted by touching a lower stack location, otherwise the system would hang. Not a pretty state of affairs.
The writer obviously has never tried using or programming the Lisa Office System. Some tidbits:
It took about 30 seconds for the calculator to pop up. Then when you typed "1+2", it took about another 30 seconds of disk-whirring for the system to load the SANE numeric library and cough up "3".
Any system API call took nearly forever. You dared not poll for input very often as that would chew up a lot of time and slow down the whole system. But you couldnt try polling every so often, because just the call to get the system tick count took forever. Catch-22 ala big-time.
The UCSD p-system was not command-line driven, it used top-line menus and single keystrokes.
The UCSD editor was "modal", as it did have insert nad delete moes, but perhaps more importantly it was perhaps the first FULL SCREEN EDITOR accessible to the masses. Speedy too, as long as your file would fit in RAM.
The Mac did not have a four-voice audio synthesizer. there was only one 8-bit audio D/A. Any multiple voicing had to be faked in software.
Very cursory and obviously second-hand discussion of the Mac Toolbox API's. Not a mention of the revolutionary concepts introduced, such as the memory manager, memory ptrs, memory handles, resource forks, system hooks, drivers, etc...
Multifinder was an outgrowth of Andy Hertzfield's "Switcher", and very very slick for a cooperative multitasking non-memory protectred system enhancement.
Opinions may differ, but to many many people, System 7 was in no way a gigantic leap forward. Some of its "features":
Roughly a doubling of the basic API's, all of them implemented as RAM-hungry patches.
A Color QuickDraw, which was SEVENTEEN times slower at drawing text than the previous QuickDraw in ROM. Andy Hertzfeld eventually released a recoding of this to speed it up considerably.
A completely redone and completely unusable sound management API.
A basically unsable virtual memory system, trying to squeeze memory through a slow 8-bit SCSI port.
Proprietary "publish" and "subscribe" info sharing API's, which nobody ever used.
A rewritten Finder, with many many faked features, such as font and system resources presented as fake folders of "files".
Poor support for TCP/IP, threading. No support for SLIP or PPP.
A completely redone networking stack, based on all new, slow, and lousy code.
Much higher memory usage, very slow in places.
Many of us stayed with system 6 as long as possible, even Apple re
>It looks cheaper and likely more efficent than current pump designs.
There's not a smidgen of numerical evidence for this, and plenty of indications otherwise: Heating and cooling that chamber is going to cost a lot, especially since it has to get first dibs on the hottest water.
Let us know when the system can pay back its interest costs. Not likely to be anytime soon.
>When the pressure in the heat exchanger reaches 65PSI....... you have a boiler. Which:
Has to be at a slightly higher pressure and temperature than the downstream "boiler".
Which means it has to siphon off the hot water FIRST before the second boiler gets it.
Which means you've jsut moved the pressure problem back a stage.
And the second boiler is running at even lower temp and worse efficiency.
And you lose lots of heat heating up the first boiler from scratch every cycle.
This Carnot thing has been extensively studied for over 130 years. Is it likely some Joe-Schmoe can improve it without the slightest math or even graphical analysis? Nope.
If he gave us a few hints, like the actual temps and pressures and volumes, we could begin to calculate its efficiency
To heat the liquid so it will flow into the boiler requires you to use slightly hotter source water than that you feed to the boiler. So you have just LOWERED the efficiency of the boiler even more, in an attempt to get rid of the pump. Not a good tradeoff.
The Carnot cycle has been studied intensively for over 140 years. Is it likely soime Joe-schmoe is going to come up with a breakthrough, without using even a smidgen of engineering math?
The diagram shows 10 PSI gas being condensed. Then somehow, without a pump, the 10PSI liquid "flows" into a 65 PSI boiler. No way, Jose. And no, you can't use the height of the condenser to supply "gravity" pressure. There is no free lunch.
Then there's this dang thing called the Carnot Cycle, which is impossible to violate, and dooms all these low-temp difference heat engines to extremely low efficiencies. So low, in most cases, you can't even keep up with paying the interest on the investment.
I didnt see a single numeric calculation for the loop efficiency, a really bad sign. These calculations have been basic, simple, and mandatory for upwards of a century and a third.
It was called a "Gibson Girl" because of its mandatory shape. You see you needed one hand to operate the morse code key, the other hand to crank the generator, which left nothing obvious to hold the transmitter with. You HAD to have somethign to hold it as you're probably in a flimsy rubber life rafs, so you can't set it down, and all that cranking requires some way of holding the transmitter to keep it from spinning on you. Some bright enginner figure you could hold it between your legs if it was shaped just right. So it got an hourglass-shaped case. Ergo "Gibson Girl".
Scientifically ok, economically, very unlikely
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Er, no. It's unlikely to be much cheaper. For several reasons:
The cost of insulin is likely to be dominated by the costs of research, marketing, distribution, insurance, and the other ingredients that go into the bottle, which control the speed of the insulin release.
This new technique is likely to be patented, which ups the production costs. The patents on the current kind of grown insulin will run out soon and then that price will drop, while this new one will stay up.
Products are priced to be competitive, not to greatly undercut the competition.
I think you all forgot that 000 and 255 are reserved for broadcasts, so they're not really "addresses", in the "sense" of all the "other " "ones". So subtract 1/128'th of that large number.
Oh, and about 22% of the people that have static IP addresses as defined in the RFC are now deader than DECnet, so subtract those too.
It's not all that hard to bounce photons off the Moon. The US Army Signal Corps did it in 1947, using very mediocre WWII radar sets. Radio amateurs have been doing it since around 1960, with limited equipment, skills, and very limited transmitter power.
What's difficult is doing it with nanosecond resolution. That requires very wide bandwith antennas and receivers, which also let in a lot of wide band background noise.
Whew, that is small. But there isnt a clue in that article, or others like it, whether these small domains are stable, easily settable, reliable, or how much ancillary circuitry is needed to control them, or how much space you need around each domain to prevent neighboring cells to bleed into each other.
By contrast, the dram cells are known to work well, require only miniscule cell walls,
require only ONE small and simple transistor to read/write/refresh. And the basic patents have run out so royalty costs are low.
I'd love to see them work, but still IMHO there's LOTS of hurdles for these magneto-thingies to be practical.
I'm still somewhat puzzled as to how one could make a usable spacecraft with the required precision of symmetry.
You'd probably need better than one part per thousand precision, which would rule out anything tha wasnt very very homogenous. Consumables, like reaction fuel would be a problem.
IIRC there's a certain minimum size for magnetic domains, a whole lot larger than a typical DRAM well. Seeing as the current magnetic memories are *much* larger than dram cells, and have been under development since way back in the middle of the last century, , one might hazard a guess they're not going to get a lot smaller anytime soon, if ever.
> says it the net gravitational field inside is zero.
I can see this happening at the exact center, but is it true everywhere inside the sphere? If you're closer to one side, doesnt that side extert more force on you than the side farther away?
>Since it's not explicitly stated in the article or these replies, gravitational effects precisely cancel inside a uniform shell. So if the spacecraft's mass was evenly distributed on a spherical shell there would be zero effect on items inside the shell, even when those items are close to the shell's interior surface.
Um, I don't think so.
The effects cancel very nicely at the exact center, and nowhere else. As you get off-center, the attraction of the nearest wall exceeds the attraction of the opposite wall.
If you're going to power an airplane, you need a Reliable, High-efficiency energy to motion converter. You can't just choose any old motor, especially a totally unproven one. Piezoelectric transducers are not very high efficiency. Then there's cellophane, which is NOT particularly piezoelectric. Even if it was, piezo transducers need hundreds to thousands of volts to really flap-- not something that's readily made from low voltage batteries. And you have the problem that a lot of the bending force is going to be dissipated as friction in bending the material.
Bottom line is, this material isnt a particularly good for this application.
Ah, Mary's memory may be a bit off. The official reports and crew debreifing do not agree with her memory. Then there's somebody elses research:
The John Young quote comes from a book called "Space Shuttle The First 20 Years", page 29. I was quoting from memory,.. the actual quote reads,
"It was a pretty good test flight, and we discovered a lot of things. For example, coming into the atmosphere at mach 25 we got a really bad sideslip that we didnt expect, where the orbiter slipped sideways four degrees and dropped in attitude. Fortunately the software cancelled it out. If it hadn't, we wouldnt be here."
>John Young had to fly part of Columbia's first re-entry manually because the real aerodynamics at hypersonic speed turned out to differ enough from the models that the shuttle would probably have been destroyed if there were no people on board.
Do you have a reference for this? Sounds mighty mighty fishy. Managing re-entry is trivial for a computerized autopilot.
>you're still dead if the computer has a brain-fart and lowers the gear in space.
There are many well-known ways to make this kind of thing impossible, used for over 50 years for really critical things like nuke bomb triggers:
Have no code in the fly program for actuating the landing gear (the old computers dont have enough memory to hold the code for all flight phases at once, the landing program is loaded only just before re-entry).
Have the landing gear command be not just one bit in one output register, but several disparate bits in different output registers. Better yet, have the signal be a particular analog value, say between 2.2 and 2.4 volts, lasting for 5 seconds, then followed by 3.3 to 3.4 volts to do the actual triggering of the landing gear. The hardware to decode this is simple and relatively fail safe, especially if dupl or quadruplicated in series-parallel fashion.
Have the landing gear signal go through one to several interlocks (already done in all passenger planes), serially, so no signal can ever get through unless (a) There's at least 10PSI air pressure, (b) A little $1 thermostat shows at least 500 degrees temp on the landing-gear tiles. (c) At least one APU is ON. (d) { Add any number of already-existing "near landing" switch closures already available }. BTW how can the gear "fall" in space? if powered, how can it get actuated with no APU's on?
All those well-known systems have much better reliability, than say, having several people, somewhat disoriented by space nausea and changing time-zones, pushing elbows all around the cabin, and being instructed to flip many switches, many of them identical looking.
There have been many many cases of pilots feathering the wrong engine, or even worse, stopping the oil going to a good engine. People are fallible no matter how much of the "right stuff" they profess to have.
Similarly, the Apollo command module had a switch to completely disable the system that opened the parachutes until just before landing.
I seem to recall the original shuttle design had everything computer controlled so totally automatic landings were possible, in fact strongly recommended.
But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required. Flying the landing just right by hand was not feasible, so they settled on flipping the landing gear switch as a paltry validation of the need of humans on the shuttle.
They also asked to control the brakes, and this was tried a few times, but the humans couldnt use the brakes efficiently enough, leading to some near brake failures, so braking was returned to computer control.
Apparently the engineeers ripped out ALL automatic control of the landing-gear, so now they have to run new wires from the computers to the landing gear switch!
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Intercoolers have been used for well over 50 years on all kinds of engines.
And every jet plane has some "air packs", which take some hot compressed bleeed air from the engines and thru intercooling and expansion provide heat and cooling for the cabin. Again been done for 50+ years.
And condensing water out of the exhaust is EXTREMELY inefficient--You've got really hot gases, 1000 degrees Celcius and up, which you have to cool down to below 100C, and whose humidity is at best 8%. You'd be many times more efficient taking ambient air, if the ambient humidity is about 3% or so.
And there's darn little need for very small quantities of non-potable water gatrhered at very high cost.
While I agree these guys should get more recognition, this is a mighty weird way to do it. Here's some ways they might appreciate: (1) Build a 20 times size working HP 200 Audio Oscillator (HP's first product)-- Tubes the size of phone booths. Variable capcitors that could slice a whole cow... 20-ton transformers. 5Kw pilot light. (2) Take up a collection to shoot their ashes into space. (3) Start a really good HP museum.
The mind boggles.
There's not a smidgen of numerical evidence for this, and plenty of indications otherwise: Heating and cooling that chamber is going to cost a lot, especially since it has to get first dibs on the hottest water.
Let us know when the system can pay back its interest costs. Not likely to be anytime soon.
This Carnot thing has been extensively studied for over 130 years. Is it likely some Joe-Schmoe can improve it without the slightest math or even graphical analysis? Nope.
If he gave us a few hints, like the actual temps and pressures and volumes, we could begin to calculate its efficiency
To heat the liquid so it will flow into the boiler requires you to use slightly hotter source water than that you feed to the boiler. So you have just LOWERED the efficiency of the boiler even more, in an attempt to get rid of the pump. Not a good tradeoff.
The Carnot cycle has been studied intensively for over 140 years. Is it likely soime Joe-schmoe is going to come up with a breakthrough, without using even a smidgen of engineering math?
The diagram shows 10 PSI gas being condensed. Then somehow, without a pump, the 10PSI liquid "flows" into a 65 PSI boiler. No way, Jose. And no, you can't use the height of the condenser to supply "gravity" pressure. There is no free lunch.
Then there's this dang thing called the Carnot Cycle, which is impossible to violate, and dooms all these low-temp difference heat engines to extremely low efficiencies. So low, in most cases, you can't even keep up with paying the interest on the investment.
I didnt see a single numeric calculation for the loop efficiency, a really bad sign. These calculations have been basic, simple, and mandatory for upwards of a century and a third.
Sheesh!
It was called a "Gibson Girl" because of its mandatory shape. You see you needed one hand to operate the morse code key, the other hand to crank the generator, which left nothing obvious to hold the transmitter with. You HAD to have somethign to hold it as you're probably in a flimsy rubber life rafs, so you can't set it down, and all that cranking requires some way of holding the transmitter to keep it from spinning on you. Some bright enginner figure you could hold it between your legs if it was shaped just right. So it got an hourglass-shaped case. Ergo "Gibson Girl".
Oh, and about 22% of the people that have static IP addresses as defined in the RFC are now deader than DECnet, so subtract those too.
What's difficult is doing it with nanosecond resolution. That requires very wide bandwith antennas and receivers, which also let in a lot of wide band background noise.
By contrast, the dram cells are known to work well, require only miniscule cell walls, require only ONE small and simple transistor to read/write/refresh. And the basic patents have run out so royalty costs are low.
I'd love to see them work, but still IMHO there's LOTS of hurdles for these magneto-thingies to be practical.
I'm still somewhat puzzled as to how one could make a usable spacecraft with the required precision of symmetry. You'd probably need better than one part per thousand precision, which would rule out anything tha wasnt very very homogenous. Consumables, like reaction fuel would be a problem.
IIRC there's a certain minimum size for magnetic domains, a whole lot larger than a typical DRAM well. Seeing as the current magnetic memories are *much* larger than dram cells, and have been under development since way back in the middle of the last century, , one might hazard a guess they're not going to get a lot smaller anytime soon, if ever.
I can see this happening at the exact center, but is it true everywhere inside the sphere? If you're closer to one side, doesnt that side extert more force on you than the side farther away?
Um, I don't think so.
The effects cancel very nicely at the exact center, and nowhere else. As you get off-center, the attraction of the nearest wall exceeds the attraction of the opposite wall.
This sounds mighty dubious. The gravitational attaction of the spacecraft is likely to be much larger than the effect looked for.
a chunk of foam, or felt, leather, or a small hole,
or just use a lubricant that evaporates at the right rate without needing any porous impediments.
If you're going to power an airplane, you need a Reliable, High-efficiency energy to motion converter. You can't just choose any old motor, especially a totally unproven one. Piezoelectric transducers are not very high efficiency. Then there's cellophane, which is NOT particularly piezoelectric. Even if it was, piezo transducers need hundreds to thousands of volts to really flap-- not something that's readily made from low voltage batteries. And you have the problem that a lot of the bending force is going to be dissipated as friction in bending the material.
Bottom line is, this material isnt a particularly good for this application.
Ah, Mary's memory may be a bit off. The official reports and crew debreifing do not agree with her memory. Then there's somebody elses research: The John Young quote comes from a book called "Space Shuttle The First 20 Years", page 29. I was quoting from memory,.. the actual quote reads, "It was a pretty good test flight, and we discovered a lot of things. For example, coming into the atmosphere at mach 25 we got a really bad sideslip that we didnt expect, where the orbiter slipped sideways four degrees and dropped in attitude. Fortunately the software cancelled it out. If it hadn't, we wouldnt be here."
Do you have a reference for this? Sounds mighty mighty fishy. Managing re-entry is trivial for a computerized autopilot.
>you're still dead if the computer has a brain-fart and lowers the gear in space.
There are many well-known ways to make this kind of thing impossible, used for over 50 years for really critical things like nuke bomb triggers:
- Have no code in the fly program for actuating the landing gear (the old computers dont have enough memory to hold the code for all flight phases at once, the landing program is loaded only just before re-entry).
- Have the landing gear command be not just one bit in one output register, but several disparate bits in different output registers. Better yet, have the signal be a particular analog value, say between 2.2 and 2.4 volts, lasting for 5 seconds, then followed by 3.3 to 3.4 volts to do the actual triggering of the landing gear. The hardware to decode this is simple and relatively fail safe, especially if dupl or quadruplicated in series-parallel fashion.
- Have the landing gear signal go through one to several interlocks (already done in all passenger planes), serially, so no signal can ever get through unless (a) There's at least 10PSI air pressure, (b) A little $1 thermostat shows at least 500 degrees temp on the landing-gear tiles. (c) At least one APU is ON. (d) { Add any number of already-existing "near landing" switch closures already available }. BTW how can the gear "fall" in space? if powered, how can it get actuated with no APU's on?
All those well-known systems have much better reliability, than say, having several people, somewhat disoriented by space nausea and changing time-zones, pushing elbows all around the cabin, and being instructed to flip many switches, many of them identical looking.There have been many many cases of pilots feathering the wrong engine, or even worse, stopping the oil going to a good engine. People are fallible no matter how much of the "right stuff" they profess to have.
Similarly, the Apollo command module had a switch to completely disable the system that opened the parachutes until just before landing.
But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required. Flying the landing just right by hand was not feasible, so they settled on flipping the landing gear switch as a paltry validation of the need of humans on the shuttle.
They also asked to control the brakes, and this was tried a few times, but the humans couldnt use the brakes efficiently enough, leading to some near brake failures, so braking was returned to computer control.
Apparently the engineeers ripped out ALL automatic control of the landing-gear, so now they have to run new wires from the computers to the landing gear switch!
Ohhhhhh, what a kloooooodge!