The auction should be on fanfiction.net, where the folks who would really get some use out of this machine congregate. Except that they're all living at home still. Oh, well...
One of our telescopes had computers named after German beers, since it was installed by German engineers. The main control computer was called kronen.
The other telescope was set up by a Tucson guy, so it uses Mexican beer names. The main fileserver is named corona, for instance.
I had their collection agency call me earlier this year asking if I really was the person who ordered service in my name in a house on the other side of town and failed to pay the bill for three months. No, it was an SSN thief who took out service in my name, using my fine credit rating. It turns out that DirecTV doesn't check your bona fides such as your address - they only run a credit check on the name and SSN you provide, without verifying that you belong to either that name or SSN!
Re:The true first portable modern computer...
on
The Laptop, Circa 1968
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· Score: 2, Informative
Tee hee. My dad used one of these for astronomy computations - they gave a bunch of them to universities in the early seventies, as they were hopelessly obsolete by then. And he used a teletype. Here's a photo of another common computer he used, the Nova.
and I have a box of it in my workshop. It's all on paper tape. You'd print out the tape on the teletype and a picture of a naked lady would appear after several minutes. Google TTY art and you'll see what it looks like.
Sounds to me like you could have used a different antenna with a wider beam for your short haul application. Or better mounts.
By the way, the parallel plane thing is nonsense - the polarization makes the signal drop off as the cosine of the angle, so a 10 degree misalignment will give about 1dB of loss.
[Disclaimer: Where I work, 60 GHz is the lowest frequency we use. 700 GHz is the high end of our operating range.]
was a bit of a curiosity. They did indeed use them in Sun engine analyzers. My brother has one of those if you'd like to see what a real National IMP 16 processor card looks like.
...but you've only paid for the parts, not the labor or the engineering or the rent etc.
The point that the packaging of solar panels is expensive is not lost on me. There's a local firm (Tucson) making thin-film cells which ought to be packaged as plastic-laminated roof shingles to keep the final cost down.
But I admire his fortitude in building a panel. I have a stack of cells in my workshop that I don't see how I'll ever turn into a panel, since it requires lots of glass and care and sticky tape.
it's just that Sennheiser includes those quality control steps that the Chinese factories skimp on. They also take more than 0.85 seconds to solder the wires, and they use solder of reasonable quality.
The cost of installation is high because there is no incentive to lower it when the panels cost so much. The solution is to make cheap panels (a local company is doing that with roll-to-roll processing) then design the installed panels to have as little added material and labor as possible. My thought was to sell them in the same form factor as asphalt shingles or roll roofing, with simple interconnect bus bars. Whatever packaging is used, it wants to be as low cost as a regular asphalt roof.
Actually, broadcast FM is nearly always circularly polarized using a multi-bay antenna with a bunch of 3/4 circle center-fed elements, each with one end pointing up and the other down.
If you weren't aware of this, go look atop an FM tower with binoculars some day.
Good luck finding the published theory on these antennas, since they're all proprietary designs!
Our 10 meter telescope was a joint German/American collaboration, so the Germans who assembled the control system used German beer names. Was that Heffelweitzen or Heffelweisen?
The 12 meter telescope's control system was rebuilt by Americans, so the computers are named Modelo and Corona etc. since we're in Arizona.
I found a couple hundred big 8x8 matrix LED displays on ebay for way too little money last year, and I'm working on a low-resolution but huge flat TV for video fun at Burning Man this summer.
But I'm going with a standard video signal such as your DVD player makes, so it will display shades of gray for realistic reproduction of video images.
It's a bit tricky to make a TV display out of LEDs, but I found that using a couple dozen FPGAs makes the job a lot easier. Pulse width modulation provides the brightness control per pixel.
It should be a lot of fun when completed. I';ll post photos.
I just received an amusing outside-contact reply-all storm from a private company (the company's customer/vendor contact list was accessible from outside), but it only made 200 messages. So I'd say that the government can make much better reply-all storms than private enterprise, based on a sample size of one.
I agree that they last a long time when installed in a functional fixture.
The problem is that the extra-fat white ballast housing sometimes prevents you from screwing the bulb in all the way, causing a bad connection on the center contact. This results in the ballast overheating due to the voltage drop on the bad connection. I had one in my bedroom actually emit smoke while failing due to this problem. A new socket in the light fixture cured the problem and the replacement CFL bulb has been running many thousands of hours.
The first item is how to know what frequency the material emits. We have a laboratory that contains radioastronomy equipment of the same type that is used to detect the signals from space, but it operates on samples in a vacuum chamber in the lab. So the Doppler shift on these samples is zero. We then take a spectrum of the material, noting the main spectral line frequencies.
The frequency shift to be expected (a function of the object's distance from Earth) is usually known at this point by other observations performed in the visible or infrared. Its a lot easier to measure the visible spectrum than the radio spectrum.
I don't think there are many, but I have one as a staff engineer at a university. I got hired based on a recommendation of a former coworker who works at the new place.
I was hired first as a contractor, then I asked for a part-time salaried position. They created a job opening to match my skills and their requirements, and curiously I was the only person who qualified for the job.
It is rather cushy, getting full benefits for my family and working a flexible schedule of 20-30 hours/week as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The auction should be on fanfiction.net, where the folks who would really get some use out of this machine congregate. Except that they're all living at home still. Oh, well...
You wouldn't say that if you've ever tried to understand or repair an item for which all that documentation is not available.
There has also been open source software for decades, but it wasn't called open source either. It was called a user library.
One of our telescopes had computers named after German beers, since it was installed by German engineers. The main control computer was called kronen. The other telescope was set up by a Tucson guy, so it uses Mexican beer names. The main fileserver is named corona, for instance.
I had their collection agency call me earlier this year asking if I really was the person who ordered service in my name in a house on the other side of town and failed to pay the bill for three months. No, it was an SSN thief who took out service in my name, using my fine credit rating. It turns out that DirecTV doesn't check your bona fides such as your address - they only run a credit check on the name and SSN you provide, without verifying that you belong to either that name or SSN!
Tee hee. My dad used one of these for astronomy computations - they gave a bunch of them to universities in the early seventies, as they were hopelessly obsolete by then. And he used a teletype. Here's a photo of another common computer he used, the Nova.
and I have a box of it in my workshop. It's all on paper tape. You'd print out the tape on the teletype and a picture of a naked lady would appear after several minutes. Google TTY art and you'll see what it looks like.
Sounds to me like you could have used a different antenna with a wider beam for your short haul application. Or better mounts. By the way, the parallel plane thing is nonsense - the polarization makes the signal drop off as the cosine of the angle, so a 10 degree misalignment will give about 1dB of loss. [Disclaimer: Where I work, 60 GHz is the lowest frequency we use. 700 GHz is the high end of our operating range.]
was a bit of a curiosity. They did indeed use them in Sun engine analyzers. My brother has one of those if you'd like to see what a real National IMP 16 processor card looks like.
If you're going to talk about old school, you gotta mention Mel.
I'm assuming Wolverine is a movie not a music album, so that would be our overlords at the MPAA, not the RIAA.
Here's the original story in German and a blog entry in English.
...but you've only paid for the parts, not the labor or the engineering or the rent etc.
The point that the packaging of solar panels is expensive is not lost on me. There's a local firm (Tucson) making thin-film cells which ought to be packaged as plastic-laminated roof shingles to keep the final cost down.
But I admire his fortitude in building a panel. I have a stack of cells in my workshop that I don't see how I'll ever turn into a panel, since it requires lots of glass and care and sticky tape.
They don't appear to have enough wherewithal in that little shop to produce an actual production automobile in a year.
But I may be wrong.
it's just that Sennheiser includes those quality control steps that the Chinese factories skimp on. They also take more than 0.85 seconds to solder the wires, and they use solder of reasonable quality.
The cost of installation is high because there is no incentive to lower it when the panels cost so much. The solution is to make cheap panels (a local company is doing that with roll-to-roll processing) then design the installed panels to have as little added material and labor as possible. My thought was to sell them in the same form factor as asphalt shingles or roll roofing, with simple interconnect bus bars. Whatever packaging is used, it wants to be as low cost as a regular asphalt roof.
Actually, broadcast FM is nearly always circularly polarized using a multi-bay antenna with a bunch of 3/4 circle center-fed elements, each with one end pointing up and the other down.
If you weren't aware of this, go look atop an FM tower with binoculars some day.
Good luck finding the published theory on these antennas, since they're all proprietary designs!
Our 10 meter telescope was a joint German/American collaboration, so the Germans who assembled the control system used German beer names. Was that Heffelweitzen or Heffelweisen? The 12 meter telescope's control system was rebuilt by Americans, so the computers are named Modelo and Corona etc. since we're in Arizona.
fanfic is the craigslist of the publishing world.
I found a couple hundred big 8x8 matrix LED displays on ebay for way too little money last year, and I'm working on a low-resolution but huge flat TV for video fun at Burning Man this summer.
But I'm going with a standard video signal such as your DVD player makes, so it will display shades of gray for realistic reproduction of video images.
It's a bit tricky to make a TV display out of LEDs, but I found that using a couple dozen FPGAs makes the job a lot easier. Pulse width modulation provides the brightness control per pixel.
It should be a lot of fun when completed. I';ll post photos.
I just received an amusing outside-contact reply-all storm from a private company (the company's customer/vendor contact list was accessible from outside), but it only made 200 messages. So I'd say that the government can make much better reply-all storms than private enterprise, based on a sample size of one.
Because the health of the economy is dependent on people watching TV and wanting to buy stuff. Didn't they teach you that in Economics 101?
I agree that they last a long time when installed in a functional fixture. The problem is that the extra-fat white ballast housing sometimes prevents you from screwing the bulb in all the way, causing a bad connection on the center contact. This results in the ballast overheating due to the voltage drop on the bad connection. I had one in my bedroom actually emit smoke while failing due to this problem. A new socket in the light fixture cured the problem and the replacement CFL bulb has been running many thousands of hours.
It's also difficult to make such a dish that's suitably strong; the American one built in the 1950s collapsed in 1988. Here's a photo.
I work in this field, so I can answer.
The first item is how to know what frequency the material emits. We have a laboratory that contains radioastronomy equipment of the same type that is used to detect the signals from space, but it operates on samples in a vacuum chamber in the lab. So the Doppler shift on these samples is zero. We then take a spectrum of the material, noting the main spectral line frequencies.
The frequency shift to be expected (a function of the object's distance from Earth) is usually known at this point by other observations performed in the visible or infrared. Its a lot easier to measure the visible spectrum than the radio spectrum.
I was hired first as a contractor, then I asked for a part-time salaried position. They created a job opening to match my skills and their requirements, and curiously I was the only person who qualified for the job.
It is rather cushy, getting full benefits for my family and working a flexible schedule of 20-30 hours/week as needed.