In the MBA world mature means the industry has stopped growing in sales volume (read $$$$), it has nothing to do with technology. It also means whoever is left is just slugging it out for market share. Think laundry soap or soda crackers for examples of mature industries.
There are a number of printer/plotter formats out there, but most modern units will be able to accept HPGL or Gerber (photoplotter). Plotters work by moving a pen around, while photoplotters work by moving a shaped beam of light over a negative.
Many graphics programs will output HPGL. As an odd suggestion, you might want ot look at PCB layout programs for programs that will generate Gerber plots. Also, I seem to recall several HPGL to Gerber tools.
Armadillo Aerospace News Archive
Lander modifications, Man in the air!, misc
September 24 and 28, 2002 meeting notes
Lander modifications
I made a separate aluminum plate to bolt the CPU board to, and mounted it to the electronics box with PVC grommets. This should keep the board from flexing, and provide some vibration and shock isolation. The memory SIMM is probably still a weak point for us, but there isn't much we can do with this board.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/sho ckMount.jpg
We now run power and ground to the CPU/PC104 stack through three independent routes: two separate lines at the power connector, and also through the PC104 pins at the top of the stack.
We built a manual cutoff box for the manned flights. The box has a switch and a self-contained 27 volt power supply, so if it is switched, no matter what the electronics box is doing, the main engine valve will close in under a half second.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/kil lSwitch.jpg
When it is in auto-land mode, the flight control software now goes to full down throttle as soon as it detects a 2.5G acceleration, which seems to be a reliable hit-the-ground determination. Previously, the bouncing accelerations would cause the computer to hunt the throttle around trying to maintain a steady rate of descent, which would cause it to bounce back up in the air a little bit. Forcing the throttle down as soon as impact is detected reduced this quite a bit.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/pre pFlights.mpg
There is a related effect that happens at liftoff, where the accelerations induced as the vehicle leaves the ground slightly unevenly make it look like it is accelerating faster than it is, causing the computer to throttle down earlier than it should, making it waste a bit of time bobbing on the ground before finally lifting off. I will probably do something to address this in the future.
Man in the air!
We were finally ready to let someone get on the vehicle. We were at this point a year ago with the previous generation (single tank, red tubes) vehicle, but development always seemed to be pushing us to change and improve the lander in some way, when we weren't working on the other propulsion research. Our criteria was always that we had to have two absolutely perfect ballasted flights with zero changes before a person could ride. Usually, after two flights we would either find a problem, or find something that we wanted to improve. We finally reached a point where everything is operating to our satisfaction. I was tempted to do something about the liftoff throttling, but we decided that it is good enough as is.
Another factor that has kept us cautious is that Anna, my wife, was our designated first passenger. This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety. It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident, it would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna's legs! Although she had been suited up and ready to fly on several past occasions that we canceled, Anna was scheduled to be out of town this weekend. Since we seemed to be operating responsibly, she ceded her position to Russ for the first flight, rather than make us wait until she got back.
Anna prepping for the canceled flight last weekend:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/Ann aPrep.mpg
We had an ambulance on site, just in case. This is surprisingly inexpensive, and should be considered by anyone doing something potentially dangerous.
The vehicle is chained securely to the ground, with chain wrapped around the main frame in two places, and connected to two big eye bolts sunk in the concrete. Nylon rope is wound through most of the chain links to act as a shock absorber, rather than let the chain come up hard.
Russ wore goggles, ear plugs, and a filter mask underneath the helmet, and had a hazmat suit on to protect against any peroxide spray. We have a 3" energy absorbing foam pad on the seat, and a 1" pad on the back.
Dry weight was 525 pounds, and we loaded 50 pounds of peroxide. The flight was perfect. Auto-land was initiated six seconds after throttle up. There was one bad sample from the altimeter recorded, but it didn't have any impact. We could have had a couple more seconds of air time at this load, but it was best to keep everything very conservative.
Russ reported that the flight was smooth, but the landing thud was noticeable. I have been trying to get a quote from Enidine for custom wound wire rope isolators to give us a more cushy landing. If I had a cleaner signal from the altimeter, I could have the flight control software touch down almost arbitrarily softly, but right now there is enough uncertainty that asking for a slower rate of descent would leave the total speed basically in the noise margin.
A few seconds in the air a few feet off the ground is not very significant by itself, but the point is that most of the systems necessary for much more significant flights are demonstrated. Looked at in the best light, it is a reusable, four axis stabilized, liquid fueled, manned rocket. Our single man suborbital space shot vehicle is expected to only be about twice the dry mass of this vehicle (but with a LOT more propellant, including kerosene), and will not be all that much more complex.
It was tempting to fly more, but we are starting to hoard our peroxide because we are down to our last three drums, and we don't have the supply resolved yet. We will learn a lot more flying the tube vehicle to a couple thousand feet than doing yet another lander hop. When we get a good supply in, we will do some full-load lander flights with the pilot doing the joystick control.
The video:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/fir stMannedFlight.mpg
The telemetry:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/man nedTelemetry.gif
Group photo, from left to right: Neil Milburn, Phil Eaton, Russ Blink, Joseph LaGrave, John Carmack, Matt Ross
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/gro upShot.jpg
Misc
We finished all the plumbing and wiring for the high flow regulated system that we will be testing with the 1,000 lbf regen biprop soon.
We got the new fiberglass nose and tail cones for the tube vehicle, and mounted the rocket tower to the top, which will pull the parachute out.
We got seven new 6" engine shells in. These have a slightly larger (2") throat, and have a full 2" radius of curvature on the throat, instead of our previous fairly sharp angle. We will be building the next vehicle frame to use four large differentially throttled engines instead of a single large engine with four pulsed attitude engines.
Our cavitating venturis from Fox Valve finally arrived, after we had wrapped up most of our testing on the 2" motors. Sigh. We may go ahead and do some tests with them on one of the remaining aluminum chambers that need to be flood cooled.
IANApL, but I have several grafted to my butt at work.
1) Write it down. Date it. Sign it.
2) File a preliminary patent application. It's only $60 apx? Beware that whe nyour patent issues this preliminary patent can be viewed by the public.
3) Have two people you trust AND who will understand it read it and sign & date the document
4) Existing patent are a good thing. Yu will need to demonstrate to the PTO that you idea is close, but not the same. Do not hide any prior art or close to prior art. The reason is that should these other patent holders see your work they will say, "hey, this looks close we'd better go after them." If you patent lists these their patent you can say, "hey, the PTO looked at you patents and said they are different." The more "close, but no cigar" that you can find the better.
5) Go ahead and do the leg work. Look at patents from IBM, etc for good examples, but beware even IBM files some stinkers. Even write it. Remember you pay by the claim.
6) At least pay for a couple of hours of a patent lawer's time to "proof-read it." You shouold be able to find a solo patent lawer who will be flexable.
Just a thought, cMicrosoft wanted cSimonyi very bad at the time they hired him. They may have cut him a deal in his hiring contract on the IP. Especially as he brought alot in when he hired on.
Near field (H) radiation is a bit more complex than far field (E) radiation and simple shielding is less likely to be effective. Also, as was pointed out, the phones average power when not talking is very low. One detail that further complicates is that the phones will boost their signal output if they can't get through, so simple shielding may have some unexpected results.
Is just me or does moving the phone closer to your gonads seem like a very bad idea?
An electric system can be an aid for paper voting. For example, consider a ATM like interface. That system prints out a card in a font that is both human and computer readable. For example:
President: Sally Smith
Congress: Dave Dogood
The voter can review the printout and return to the computer to changer their vote if they made a mistake and if there is a problem withthe OCR humans can easily count the vote with little chance of confusion.
As peripherals become locked unless you have MS's DRM Linux or Apple becomes even less of an option. And by peripherals I mean every peripheral: CR-ROM/DVD, Floppy, monitor, video card, printer, the works. What hapens when you can't buy a printer or monitor that won't work with out MS's DRM. THey have the market dominance to make this happen. This is more dangerous than it first looks.
To blow that out into more detail:
50TB / 320 GB = 156 / 4 IDE drives per box = 40 Boxes
Add to that switches, routers, T1s, building, cooling, etc. Now if you need that to be robust you would build RAID units and that could double the cost.
In many ways HP is no longer the HP we grew-up with. HP was test equipment such as frequency generators and oscilliscopes. They were calculators and ECG (heart monitors) and semiconductors (e.g., LEDs). It used to be nobody outside of engineers and maybe a accountants with biz calculators knew the HP name. In the 90's they dropped all of the "real" business units alot of it went into Agilent Technologies. Sure, HP did interesting computers with their 2000/3000 series. I don't believe that the real HP exists any more. The computer and printer biz was just too rich to allow HP to remain HP.
I guess the next thing we are going to see is HP become a Zenith and fire all of their engieers and just market cheap off shore junk.
In an unrelated story, the price of Cu falls on world markets.
Re:copyright and IP are not constitutional.
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
Hey Bozo, patents ARE in the constitution. Franklin and Jefferson put them there. I'm not talking the amdendment, but original constitution. Stop spouting off about right if you have not even read the basic governing document of where you live.
Now do as I say. Push back from the comuter and run to a library and READ somthing besides coding for bozos or slashdot.
Sure, it's the company's system, but any smart manager knows that allowing employees to take an occasional personal phone call or email is going to make for more productive worker. Someone stewing about a sick child because they can't get a call from a caregiver is far less productive than a worker getting a quick email every hour with the childs temp.
There are two types of workers, those who WLL get the work done regardless of distractions and those who will NOT get the workdone even if placed in a locked room. Hire and trust good people! Big brother tactics just makes the productive people less productive and won't fix the duds.
I love climbing 10,000 ft. mountains in Oregon and pulling out my 2 meter ham rig and hitting repeaters in Oregon, Washington, California, and Nevada. It's fun watching people pull out their cell phones and not get service. I tell them to step down a few feet off the summit and then they always get service. I assume that on top you hit so many cells that the systems just can't handle hitting cells over 100 sq miles.
Sure, current cip sets are massive, but why? Lots of legacy support and feature bloat. slim down your target specs and a chip set becomes much more manageable. Want a new feature, just get the HDL, add the code, simulate, test and ship. More like adding a driver that developing a new chip set.
Slashdot Mirror
Could someone explain how trademark could be used to control an article of expired copyright, E.G., Stram Boat Willie?
Morning Edition
Also John Nance wrote a book where lasers are used to blind airline pilots
In the MBA world mature means the industry has stopped growing in sales volume (read $$$$), it has nothing to do with technology. It also means whoever is left is just slugging it out for market share. Think laundry soap or soda crackers for examples of mature industries.
Many graphics programs will output HPGL. As an odd suggestion, you might want ot look at PCB layout programs for programs that will generate Gerber plots. Also, I seem to recall several HPGL to Gerber tools.
That's a fair comment, except I didn't even need to use Perl to do the job!
More On The Go details can be found at the USB association's web site
Armadillo Aerospace News Archive Lander modifications, Man in the air!, misc September 24 and 28, 2002 meeting notes Lander modifications I made a separate aluminum plate to bolt the CPU board to, and mounted it to the electronics box with PVC grommets. This should keep the board from flexing, and provide some vibration and shock isolation. The memory SIMM is probably still a weak point for us, but there isn't much we can do with this board. http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/sho ckMount.jpg
We now run power and ground to the CPU/PC104 stack through three independent routes: two separate lines at the power connector, and also through the PC104 pins at the top of the stack.
We built a manual cutoff box for the manned flights. The box has a switch and a self-contained 27 volt power supply, so if it is switched, no matter what the electronics box is doing, the main engine valve will close in under a half second.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/kil lSwitch.jpg
When it is in auto-land mode, the flight control software now goes to full down throttle as soon as it detects a 2.5G acceleration, which seems to be a reliable hit-the-ground determination. Previously, the bouncing accelerations would cause the computer to hunt the throttle around trying to maintain a steady rate of descent, which would cause it to bounce back up in the air a little bit. Forcing the throttle down as soon as impact is detected reduced this quite a bit.
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/pre pFlights.mpg
There is a related effect that happens at liftoff, where the accelerations induced as the vehicle leaves the ground slightly unevenly make it look like it is accelerating faster than it is, causing the computer to throttle down earlier than it should, making it waste a bit of time bobbing on the ground before finally lifting off. I will probably do something to address this in the future.
Man in the air!
We were finally ready to let someone get on the vehicle. We were at this point a year ago with the previous generation (single tank, red tubes) vehicle, but development always seemed to be pushing us to change and improve the lander in some way, when we weren't working on the other propulsion research. Our criteria was always that we had to have two absolutely perfect ballasted flights with zero changes before a person could ride. Usually, after two flights we would either find a problem, or find something that we wanted to improve. We finally reached a point where everything is operating to our satisfaction. I was tempted to do something about the liftoff throttling, but we decided that it is good enough as is.
Another factor that has kept us cautious is that Anna, my wife, was our designated first passenger. This was her rather crafty ploy to make sure that we pay a whole lot of attention to safety. It would be one thing for Russ to break a leg in an accident, it would be a completely different thing to break one of Anna's legs! Although she had been suited up and ready to fly on several past occasions that we canceled, Anna was scheduled to be out of town this weekend. Since we seemed to be operating responsibly, she ceded her position to Russ for the first flight, rather than make us wait until she got back.
Anna prepping for the canceled flight last weekend:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/Ann aPrep.mpg
We had an ambulance on site, just in case. This is surprisingly inexpensive, and should be considered by anyone doing something potentially dangerous.
The vehicle is chained securely to the ground, with chain wrapped around the main frame in two places, and connected to two big eye bolts sunk in the concrete. Nylon rope is wound through most of the chain links to act as a shock absorber, rather than let the chain come up hard.
Russ wore goggles, ear plugs, and a filter mask underneath the helmet, and had a hazmat suit on to protect against any peroxide spray. We have a 3" energy absorbing foam pad on the seat, and a 1" pad on the back.
Dry weight was 525 pounds, and we loaded 50 pounds of peroxide. The flight was perfect. Auto-land was initiated six seconds after throttle up. There was one bad sample from the altimeter recorded, but it didn't have any impact. We could have had a couple more seconds of air time at this load, but it was best to keep everything very conservative.
Russ reported that the flight was smooth, but the landing thud was noticeable. I have been trying to get a quote from Enidine for custom wound wire rope isolators to give us a more cushy landing. If I had a cleaner signal from the altimeter, I could have the flight control software touch down almost arbitrarily softly, but right now there is enough uncertainty that asking for a slower rate of descent would leave the total speed basically in the noise margin.
A few seconds in the air a few feet off the ground is not very significant by itself, but the point is that most of the systems necessary for much more significant flights are demonstrated. Looked at in the best light, it is a reusable, four axis stabilized, liquid fueled, manned rocket. Our single man suborbital space shot vehicle is expected to only be about twice the dry mass of this vehicle (but with a LOT more propellant, including kerosene), and will not be all that much more complex.
It was tempting to fly more, but we are starting to hoard our peroxide because we are down to our last three drums, and we don't have the supply resolved yet. We will learn a lot more flying the tube vehicle to a couple thousand feet than doing yet another lander hop. When we get a good supply in, we will do some full-load lander flights with the pilot doing the joystick control.
The video:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/fir stMannedFlight.mpg
The telemetry:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/man nedTelemetry.gif
Group photo, from left to right: Neil Milburn, Phil Eaton, Russ Blink, Joseph LaGrave, John Carmack, Matt Ross
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_09_28/gro upShot.jpg
Misc
We finished all the plumbing and wiring for the high flow regulated system that we will be testing with the 1,000 lbf regen biprop soon.
We got the new fiberglass nose and tail cones for the tube vehicle, and mounted the rocket tower to the top, which will pull the parachute out.
We got seven new 6" engine shells in. These have a slightly larger (2") throat, and have a full 2" radius of curvature on the throat, instead of our previous fairly sharp angle. We will be building the next vehicle frame to use four large differentially throttled engines instead of a single large engine with four pulsed attitude engines.
Our cavitating venturis from Fox Valve finally arrived, after we had wrapped up most of our testing on the 2" motors. Sigh. We may go ahead and do some tests with them on one of the remaining aluminum chambers that need to be flood cooled.
1) Write it down. Date it. Sign it.
2) File a preliminary patent application. It's only $60 apx? Beware that whe nyour patent issues this preliminary patent can be viewed by the public. 3) Have two people you trust AND who will understand it read it and sign & date the document
4) Existing patent are a good thing. Yu will need to demonstrate to the PTO that you idea is close, but not the same. Do not hide any prior art or close to prior art. The reason is that should these other patent holders see your work they will say, "hey, this looks close we'd better go after them." If you patent lists these their patent you can say, "hey, the PTO looked at you patents and said they are different." The more "close, but no cigar" that you can find the better.
5) Go ahead and do the leg work. Look at patents from IBM, etc for good examples, but beware even IBM files some stinkers. Even write it. Remember you pay by the claim.
6) At least pay for a couple of hours of a patent lawer's time to "proof-read it." You shouold be able to find a solo patent lawer who will be flexable.
7) Are you sure that you need a patent?
Of course. Today it's called work for hire .
Just a thought, cMicrosoft wanted cSimonyi very bad at the time they hired him. They may have cut him a deal in his hiring contract on the IP. Especially as he brought alot in when he hired on.
Is just me or does moving the phone closer to your gonads seem like a very bad idea?
That explains the glowing hot pink elephants I saw walking home from the bar last night. I thought it was time to stop drinking.
President: Sally Smith
Congress: Dave Dogood
The voter can review the printout and return to the computer to changer their vote if they made a mistake and if there is a problem withthe OCR humans can easily count the vote with little chance of confusion.
Or for that matter a shipping container on a ship works just fine and leaves no return address.
As peripherals become locked unless you have MS's DRM Linux or Apple becomes even less of an option. And by peripherals I mean every peripheral: CR-ROM/DVD, Floppy, monitor, video card, printer, the works. What hapens when you can't buy a printer or monitor that won't work with out MS's DRM. THey have the market dominance to make this happen. This is more dangerous than it first looks.
Add to that switches, routers, T1s, building, cooling, etc. Now if you need that to be robust you would build RAID units and that could double the cost.
I guess the next thing we are going to see is HP become a Zenith and fire all of their engieers and just market cheap off shore junk.
In an unrelated story, the price of Cu falls on world markets.
Now do as I say. Push back from the comuter and run to a library and READ somthing besides coding for bozos or slashdot.
We're still living with the 8088. Intel just bolted on all sorts of bloat to it.
There are two types of workers, those who WLL get the work done regardless of distractions and those who will NOT get the workdone even if placed in a locked room. Hire and trust good people! Big brother tactics just makes the productive people less productive and won't fix the duds.
I love climbing 10,000 ft. mountains in Oregon and pulling out my 2 meter ham rig and hitting repeaters in Oregon, Washington, California, and Nevada. It's fun watching people pull out their cell phones and not get service. I tell them to step down a few feet off the summit and then they always get service. I assume that on top you hit so many cells that the systems just can't handle hitting cells over 100 sq miles.
Didn't Apple include some form of carbonization in Mac OS X ??
Sure, current cip sets are massive, but why? Lots of legacy support and feature bloat. slim down your target specs and a chip set becomes much more manageable. Want a new feature, just get the HDL, add the code, simulate, test and ship. More like adding a driver that developing a new chip set.