Posts by jake

"quite small (about 30 centimetres long, with a 3cm diameter) but definitely dangerous looking lasers."

Sounds like a late '70s or early '80s design HeNe. Red beam, 632.8nm, most likely under 5mW. The power supply for these can give you quite the zap (around 2500V at 5mA), but the output is fairly benign, as long as you keep it away from the eyes. Useful at over 1000 yards/meters under ideal conditions with proper collimation. Cheep and cheerful, but bulky by today's standards.

Portability. Power cables are easy in ways that water pipes are not.

_{And portable water cooling tends to get bulky and heavy in a hurry.}

Cooling fan(s). Of the same era (maybe a trifle earlier), think Cisco AGS routers and desktop PDP-11 kit. Early 1980s to mid 1990s was peak fan noise, when processor and bus speed nearly outran the technology to be air-cooled. Lots of money went into heat transfer technology in this time period. Such tech also helped with the physical down-sizing of lasers and etc.

The King of the Road don' need no stinkin' Roomba.

Re: Marketing notwithstanding, it's not taking of from "European Soil".

Airplanes "take off". Rockets "launch".

The transport took off from Cornwall. The rocket launched somewhere over the North Atlantic.

Re: Marketing notwithstanding, it's not taking of from "European Soil".

Regardless. we were talking about Cornwall and the North Atlantic.

Re: Marketing notwithstanding, it's not taking of from "European Soil".

It's not soil amendments that the folks in charge of the RDPs live for, rather it's rule amendments. So I rather suspect that the answer would be a highly qualified "yes" ... with no actual way to meet the qualifications. But they'll spend YEARS working on it. Taxpayer money isn't going to spend itself!

Re: Stick them on a Tesla.

Here in California, Tesla drivers are taking over from the holier-than-thou Subaru drivers who think that "doing their part to save the world" means they can ignore all driving laws whenever they like. BMW drivers take a back seat to the other two in this travesty of a triumvirate.

Re: Who is the liar?

John Deere is the liar.

Re: Non-binary memory?

"Unless you have proof of the contrary."

Who needs proof ... the GreatUnwashed read it on the Internet, so it must be true.

Re: Non-binary memory?

"Since it's not inherently obvious"

Don't be disingenuous, it's unbecoming.

Dark means night, dangerous. Light means daytime, not so dangerous. It's been that way since all of humanity had dark skins and were dodging sabre-toothed cats and other similar nocturnal hazards.

Re: Jeebus, got me worried there

Hardware manufacturers have been shipping systems requiring more money to activate "dark" hardware since IBM started doing it in the 1950s.

Re: Outdated scheduling software?

Yes to both. I've even heard filk. Hard-core Trekkies are nothing if not thorough.

_{No, I'm not ... but I know quite a few. Came with the territory.}

Re: Blame the Computer

Can't fly out on another airline when everybody's grounded.

Normally, there are other aircraft in the loop being made ready to fly when a crew is rested and ready.

_{Why am I reminded of an old Nixon for President bumper sticker?}

Re: Outdated scheduling software?

The problem is that their scheduling includes multi-point loops, as opposed to most other airlines, which use use hubs. Means that the other airlines usually have an aircrew available for any given aircraft that is ready to fly, but these clowns have a miss-match between available aircraft and crews, and when many aircraft are grounded due to weather it compounds.

Re: Outdated scheduling software?

"And flight volumes were 1/10th of what they are today."

In the same time, computers have gone from thousands of instructions per second (IBM's System/360 Model 30 could do 34,500 IPS in 1964) to many billions of IPS in modern multi-core mainframes. Memory, storage and I/O have more or less kept up. Between them, they should cover the change in flight volume more than adequately.

"Crew/Aircraft scheduling systems make 3D Chess look simple."

The basic algorithm for passenger aircraft hasn't changed appreciably since it became an issue in the '50s... and 3-D chess doesn't really exist as a thing (Star Trek's famous "tri-dimensional chess" was just a prop, with no rules to go along with it).

Re: "investigate the validity of the company's patents"

If you had actually read it in the early 90s, you would have said "on Usenet", not "on NNTP".

You are Eadon, and I claim my 5p.

Re: "investigate the validity of the company's patents"

Back in the day, we had a friend who decided to try the cat/toast theory. The surprising thing is he survived ... but he now goes by the nickname of "Lefty".

VLSI and SCO were both founded in 1979. Both companies made some really awesome hacks, used all over the industry. Later in life they were sold, and then sold again. Along the way, they stopped being useful in the technology world. Both now only exist as shadows, just names on paper that are used to sue people for using technology they claim as their own.

Re: "investigate the validity of the company's patents"

"Because jurors make the very best patent examiners."

Especially jurors in Texas, apparently. The judges there must be specially trained to instruct the jurors in the fine points of each patent. I wonder how much that training costs ... and who pays, and who gets paid, and what the going rate is.

Re: "investigate the validity of the company's patents"

Actually, the USPTO refuses outright to even look at perpetual motion machines, so-called "working model" or otherwise. Most sensible thing they've ever decided.

Re: face god and walk backwards into hell

Who?

Re: Ughhh...

As I said ... all that needs to be said is the reality that the chain of custody is so tainted that not even Trump's failed lawyer (the dis-barred Giuliani) could get any traction out of it. It's not a thing to anybody but the terminally brain-washed trumpephiles.

Re: Clean Up In Aisle 3!

"I am also rather flabbergasted by the poll results so far."

It's obviously taking the piss ... but us Yanks have already been bitten by the Trump arsewipes once. Nobody wants to see that happen again, even in jest. BoJo is the next candidate on the idiocy scale.

Re: What exactly is the edge?

That's Digital Equipment Computer Users Society.

Yes, DECUS had symposiums. Yes, the late-night back rooms were where the action was. (Where do you think CES attendees got the idea?) I was one of the guys babbling about BSD on PDP-11 to anyone who was interested. Still am, come to think of it ...

Re: IBM Model F Keyboard Horrors

"I have lots of pre-IBM-PC keyboard experience"

So do I.

I also still have and use lots of pre-IBM PC keyboards. Your memory is perhaps viewed through rose tinted glasses? There is no way I would consider any of the pre-F keyboards that I own and/or have used superior to the F as shipped with the 5150. The backslash key placement never really bothered me. The wells in the keycaps just assisted with feedback for a touch-typist. IMO, of course.

And of course there were so many new keyboards appearing at that time that we were used to switching between them.

The AT version of the Model F, that one pissed me off and I had to do some serious keyboard remapping. I never did find out what idiot decided that the <esc> key belonged with the 10-key. From that point onward I just re-mapped pretty much every keyboard to suit myself. Even the Model M that eventually replaced the Model F in the AT line.

I still primarily use a (remapped) Model M. Best keybR0ad ever made for the touch-typist, IMO.