Looking at the photos of the backplane, it looks like S100 era technology. Where is the trendy stuff? I want to see hermetically sealed illuminated glass-like blocks, changing color and sliding out automatically on detection of failure, a high-bandwidth optical interface on each edge, power inductively coupled to avoid metal connectors, an eerie surround sound voice saying "Dave... Stop"..
I'll always remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson creations with huge fondness. The first program I can remember watching is Fireball XL5, and I've always managed to marry blondes all my life in deference to Venus.
Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Mandriva, brief parallel running of yellowdog on PowerPC, Fedora, Ubuntu, and last but not least Mint. Not to mention AIX, which as I used to tell my customers is IBMs version of Linux. Oh, how my colleagues from Austin, TX used to laugh.
And Neil was a giant of Mankind. Thank you for being there, to lift us up and show us a view beyond our horizons. You will always be remembered, and admired along with all those who worked as part of the biggest and most successful team ever assembled, to take that one, small step for all of us.
This sounds like an ideal medium for PACS - medical imaging. PACS generates large quantities of data, which may be required to be retained for a very long time to be available for medico-legal reasons. For clinical purposes, 97% of the data over three years old is never referenced, but trying to get anyone to agree to an ILM policy that isn't at least 30 years is a real problem. Given the average acute hospital is generating 20TB of image data per year, this service from Amazon might be quite popular. DICOM copes very well with offline data that takes many hours to retrieve - and medico-legal requests can take days to honour, so this could be very successful. The only outstanding requirement is that for EU citizens, the archive would need to be located in the European Economic Area...
By the by: other managers were in the same situation as I was; one solved the problem by telling his newly-promoted staff working for him that it was HR policy to give people a 3 rating for the first appraisal after promotion..! Another happened to have a couple of people on a one-year placement as part of their degree course - they got a 3 to make the numbers up. I decided that in the future, I would always ensure that I had a doofus or two working for me to perform menial tasks and to take the hit.
First-line managers who have to deliver against HR policies like this have my every sympathy. I was made a manager in a certain very large IT company. I managed a team of mixed fixed-term contractors, contractors and permanent staff. My manager came to me at the start of the new year to tell me that during the upcoming staff performance review, I had to make 15% of my permanent staff a 1 performer, 75% a 2 performer, and 10% a three performer. When I complained that I didn't have enough permanent staff of a low caliber (c'mon now, I was doing the hiring!), I was quite neatly told that if I couldn't make up the numbers from my workforce, then it would be OK as from his level he would meet his overall target for 3 performers by making ME one.
Actually, that's what ended up happening, not that any of my workforce found out about that 'deal'. I lasted a further four years of management in increasingly Kafka-esque circumstances until I decided that I should stop trying to rise up the ranks of management, give up and go back to being a techie. I've never regretted the decision, and I can sleep at night.
Of course, now I have RTFA I know there ARE applications out there that can give me some serious benefits for travelling.. so I am now downloading Waze to my Android phone.. oh my.
"easily driven by an AVR or PIC type microcontroller"... Hmmmm... the main feature of the HD44780-type alpha LCD is that it is a static device, containing its own memory. The content is scanned by the hardware on the interface board.
If you want similar functionality with a mono or color big size LCD, you have to have something in the way between the AVR and the LCD itself that is going to retain a display memory so that the LCD can be continually refreshed (and don't try to do that with an AVR). You could do worse than putting an FPGA board in the way with a VGA interface on it - that way you could drive any number of LCD monitors.. talk to the FPGA via a serial protocol of some sort and have it maintain a color alphanumeric, or alpha + limited graphic display, or with enough memory a full graphics display. Boards like a papilio (http://papilio.cc/) with a VGA wing would do the job.
In what way was the breakup reversed? Thinking of Toshiba - LCDs, Lenovo - Thinkpads, Hitachi - Storage, Cisco - Networking Hardware, AT&T (WAN), Lexmark (printers)..all companies that took over product lines. Thinking of the manufacturing plants that were sold off.
Half of my 27 years with IBM was with free, unpaid overtime. Expected and delivered; early days I did it freely, but it became duty, then an irritation, then the weak-willed, lily-livered so-called management taking the piss. They are most definitely not the company I joined in 1977. I've been fortunate enough since then to work in a series of engagements with companies who value the greying hair and thousand yard stare. I try not to bore them with old school anecdotes, but I do try to deliver a work ethic and core values that I once learned at IBM.
Heaven forfend that I should try to *walk* to a petrol station with my fit for purpose container to refuel my car that just ran out a mile down the road. Can I still buy a gallon of fuel? Should I take the licence plates off the vehicle and take them with me as well?
I don't mind modern cinema amps.. I use sony STR-DB830, DB930 and so on around the house (all recovered from *Bay as faulty, not working). I have a pair of KEF Concerto and a pair of KEF104ABs and a pair of Mission 700s. With modern program material, delivered digitally to the cinema amp they sound so good it is scary. I just know I would have been successful pulling girls in my youth if I had this setup then.
There are so many assumptions in your question, it is scary. Why assume that a nuclear reactor be damaged by a tsunami or earthquake? What if it were small enough to put on a floating barge? Why not use Thorium?
We as a planet have no real practical alternative to nuclear fission in the short term, while we develop nuclear fusion for the long term. The only alternative is the return to the austerity of the 18th Century. Please can we all just recognise what is staring us in the face; nuclear power is the least worst option for all of humanity.
One of the confirming factors of the hiding place of a certain recently deceased was that the compound had no telephone and no internet. Do you think in the future if you tried to live 'off the net' by not having a facebook account, twitter, gmail and whatever else, you might come under more scrutiny by DHS, FBI and so on?
I already get strange looks if I pay cash for anything over a ten in the shops (but then this is the UK, competing for the title of the most-surveilled population on the planet)
I guess that the 6800 and 8051 families have won the race for the most chips ever shipped now - they get used in smartcards- but I don't know what the estimates are for how many of each processor family have ever been shipped. Anyone know? I've tried googling for obvious search terms.. thought I would ask/.
I recall back in the 80s, when we were developing graphics displays that some bunch of lawyers in California bought up some IP, and turned up a patent for use of XOR function to put a cursor on a graphics screen, and use XOR to restore the graphics again when it moved. The patent predated IBM, HP and Sun's use on unix workstations by a few years. It sounded obvious to me at the time, but they got money out of it. What they didn't realise was that they should not have accepted the first offer from the three companies of $300,000 each - since all three companies had gone to the meeting with permission to spend $30M each.
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Looking at the photos of the backplane, it looks like S100 era technology. Where is the trendy stuff? I want to see hermetically sealed illuminated glass-like blocks, changing color and sliding out automatically on detection of failure, a high-bandwidth optical interface on each edge, power inductively coupled to avoid metal connectors, an eerie surround sound voice saying "Dave ... Stop" ..
Was that Gabrielle Drake? Oh yummie ..
I'll always remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson creations with huge fondness. The first program I can remember watching is Fireball XL5, and I've always managed to marry blondes all my life in deference to Venus.
Facebook launches a new 'Dislike' button, complete with audio of boos and cries of 'shame, shame' recorded from the House of Commons.
Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Mandriva, brief parallel running of yellowdog on PowerPC, Fedora, Ubuntu, and last but not least Mint. Not to mention AIX, which as I used to tell my customers is IBMs version of Linux. Oh, how my colleagues from Austin, TX used to laugh.
And Neil was a giant of Mankind. Thank you for being there, to lift us up and show us a view beyond our horizons. You will always be remembered, and admired along with all those who worked as part of the biggest and most successful team ever assembled, to take that one, small step for all of us.
This sounds like an ideal medium for PACS - medical imaging. PACS generates large quantities of data, which may be required to be retained for a very long time to be available for medico-legal reasons. For clinical purposes, 97% of the data over three years old is never referenced, but trying to get anyone to agree to an ILM policy that isn't at least 30 years is a real problem. Given the average acute hospital is generating 20TB of image data per year, this service from Amazon might be quite popular. DICOM copes very well with offline data that takes many hours to retrieve - and medico-legal requests can take days to honour, so this could be very successful. The only outstanding requirement is that for EU citizens, the archive would need to be located in the European Economic Area ...
Sometimes you have to manage your manager out of the organisation you are in .. sometimes you have to vote with your feet and leave. Not enough do.
By the by: other managers were in the same situation as I was; one solved the problem by telling his newly-promoted staff working for him that it was HR policy to give people a 3 rating for the first appraisal after promotion ..! Another happened to have a couple of people on a one-year placement as part of their degree course - they got a 3 to make the numbers up. I decided that in the future, I would always ensure that I had a doofus or two working for me to perform menial tasks and to take the hit.
First-line managers who have to deliver against HR policies like this have my every sympathy. I was made a manager in a certain very large IT company. I managed a team of mixed fixed-term contractors, contractors and permanent staff. My manager came to me at the start of the new year to tell me that during the upcoming staff performance review, I had to make 15% of my permanent staff a 1 performer, 75% a 2 performer, and 10% a three performer. When I complained that I didn't have enough permanent staff of a low caliber (c'mon now, I was doing the hiring!), I was quite neatly told that if I couldn't make up the numbers from my workforce, then it would be OK as from his level he would meet his overall target for 3 performers by making ME one.
Actually, that's what ended up happening, not that any of my workforce found out about that 'deal'. I lasted a further four years of management in increasingly Kafka-esque circumstances until I decided that I should stop trying to rise up the ranks of management, give up and go back to being a techie. I've never regretted the decision, and I can sleep at night.
Did such an arrangement save MegaUpload? I think not, baby puppy.
Of course, now I have RTFA I know there ARE applications out there that can give me some serious benefits for travelling .. so I am now downloading Waze to my Android phone .. oh my.
"easily driven by an AVR or PIC type microcontroller" ... Hmmmm ... the main feature of the HD44780-type alpha LCD is that it is a static device, containing its own memory. The content is scanned by the hardware on the interface board.
.. talk to the FPGA via a serial protocol of some sort and have it maintain a color alphanumeric, or alpha + limited graphic display, or with enough memory a full graphics display. Boards like a papilio (http://papilio.cc/) with a VGA wing would do the job.
If you want similar functionality with a mono or color big size LCD, you have to have something in the way between the AVR and the LCD itself that is going to retain a display memory so that the LCD can be continually refreshed (and don't try to do that with an AVR). You could do worse than putting an FPGA board in the way with a VGA interface on it - that way you could drive any number of LCD monitors
In what way was the breakup reversed? Thinking of Toshiba - LCDs, Lenovo - Thinkpads, Hitachi - Storage, Cisco - Networking Hardware, AT&T (WAN), Lexmark (printers) ..all companies that took over product lines. Thinking of the manufacturing plants that were sold off.
Half of my 27 years with IBM was with free, unpaid overtime. Expected and delivered; early days I did it freely, but it became duty, then an irritation, then the weak-willed, lily-livered so-called management taking the piss. They are most definitely not the company I joined in 1977. I've been fortunate enough since then to work in a series of engagements with companies who value the greying hair and thousand yard stare. I try not to bore them with old school anecdotes, but I do try to deliver a work ethic and core values that I once learned at IBM.
When they rebranded Norwich Union, I always wondered how the marketing guys came up with Aviva.
... dunno ... what was the make of your first car? A Viva. Well, there you go.
How are we going to come up with a new name? uh
Just think, it could have been AnEscort, or AFiat.
Heaven forfend that I should try to *walk* to a petrol station with my fit for purpose container to refuel my car that just ran out a mile down the road. Can I still buy a gallon of fuel? Should I take the licence plates off the vehicle and take them with me as well?
Those blast points are too accurate for sand people ..
I don't mind modern cinema amps .. I use sony STR-DB830, DB930 and so on around the house (all recovered from *Bay as faulty, not working). I have a pair of KEF Concerto and a pair of KEF104ABs and a pair of Mission 700s. With modern program material, delivered digitally to the cinema amp they sound so good it is scary. I just know I would have been successful pulling girls in my youth if I had this setup then.
There are so many assumptions in your question, it is scary. Why assume that a nuclear reactor be damaged by a tsunami or earthquake? What if it were small enough to put on a floating barge? Why not use Thorium?
We as a planet have no real practical alternative to nuclear fission in the short term, while we develop nuclear fusion for the long term. The only alternative is the return to the austerity of the 18th Century. Please can we all just recognise what is staring us in the face; nuclear power is the least worst option for all of humanity.
One of the confirming factors of the hiding place of a certain recently deceased was that the compound had no telephone and no internet. Do you think in the future if you tried to live 'off the net' by not having a facebook account, twitter, gmail and whatever else, you might come under more scrutiny by DHS, FBI and so on?
I already get strange looks if I pay cash for anything over a ten in the shops (but then this is the UK, competing for the title of the most-surveilled population on the planet)
I guess that the 6800 and 8051 families have won the race for the most chips ever shipped now - they get used in smartcards- but I don't know what the estimates are for how many of each processor family have ever been shipped. Anyone know? I've tried googling for obvious search terms .. thought I would ask /.
I recall back in the 80s, when we were developing graphics displays that some bunch of lawyers in California bought up some IP, and turned up a patent for use of XOR function to put a cursor on a graphics screen, and use XOR to restore the graphics again when it moved. The patent predated IBM, HP and Sun's use on unix workstations by a few years. It sounded obvious to me at the time, but they got money out of it. What they didn't realise was that they should not have accepted the first offer from the three companies of $300,000 each - since all three companies had gone to the meeting with permission to spend $30M each.
... hmmmm ... suspicious ..
Apricot were mildly offended by the threat of legal action, since at the time they were purchasing the motherboards for their systems FROM IBM.