Re: Raspberry Pi goes to war

John, you really don't have to confirm that you are brain-dead. We've all noticed already.

"The Mouse that Roared" was a comedy, not a documentary. It did star Peter Sellers.

We've been sitting on our south-facing deck in our panties, soaking up a bit of Vitamin D every morning.

Even the occasional earthquake has not interrupted our power, although a couple of power pole replacements are scheduled on our block.

Well, don't buy transistors or ICs or LEDs. Or tubes even.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Well, I did use one, writing a program for an original Data General Nova for an undergrad physics lab, circa 1978

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

What language?

None of the minicomputer companies survived.

I had a PDP-8 (4K words of 12-bit core memory) that ran Focal, an intrepretive language. I used it to simulate the throttle control and propulsion system, including hull dynamics, of the 32,000 horsepower LASH ships. I plotted the step responses on the Teletype. We showed it to the owners and got the job.

Other engineers said that I couldn't use simple rectangular integration, that I had to use some runga-kuta math or something. But the elements of the control system were mostly unilateral, and simple integration will even work in a circuit if the steps are small.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Fortran, iirc. To save machine time, Wolf Breuer The Lab Guy set it up to run split core, so that we could run two or maybe four people’s programs at once, and I expect that having multiple copies of the Basic interpreter probably wouldn’t fit in RAM.

Well, DEC became part of Compaq, and then the Fiorina HP, which if you call that survival.

SPICE uses trapezoidal, which is the same order as rectangular.

But the advice wasn’t altogether stupid. The usual fourth-order Runge-Kutta algorithm has faster convergence on smooth solutions, is pretty simple to code, and is self-starting like rectangular.

Its main warts are that it’s slower than predictor-corrector or Bulirsch-Stoer, and that it supplies no internal error estimate. Sixth and higher orders do supply that, but I’ve never coded them.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yeah. I used trapezoidal integration, which worked just as well as Runge-Kutta for this kind of problem, and much better than rectangular integration, for a reasonable step size.

.

Joe

The recent deal with India is brilliant.

And this too:

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Uh-oh, now you've done it. Mentioned the "unmentionable"! Well, I can't complain too loudly, I survived the era.

So tell us the tale of woe!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Two books to read:

The HP Way by David Packard

The Journey by Carly Fiorina

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

LEDa in boxes of all colors I have from: China My Xiaomi phone is from: China My Huawei 4G USB modem is from: China My Raspberries (not the food variant) are from: the UK ARM was invented in: the UK You may have heard about ASML: The Netherlands

Some Microchip PICs I have from: the You Ash, but there are a zillion competitors.

The You Ash Artemis is leaking hydrogen

The War House Ape is leaking intellect

We had snow, and yesterday it was -5 degrees C here Nice and warm in good insulated house with gas heating I decided not to go biking for shopping as many road accidents happen, cars sliding of the roads because of ice. So I had the cookies delivered 'What more can you want?' Only a nutter would want Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, oh and what was it? Vietnam, Korea, ..the list is endless, Canada, Greenland..

And money from Universities that were rising up against its genocide in Gaza.. Or Beep Beep See for some editing that made him look in support of violence??? VIOLENCE is all the war house ape has ,even against its own people.. All You Ash has a s export is weapons to support war using their CIA clowns to sell ever more and those F35 were polluting the silence here all afternoon and evening here above my head.Even an idiot knows that a noisy plane means: Inefficiency in the aerodynamics

What a piece of junk that F35 is.

and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on it goes

Why are you merry cans hanging on to Fahrenheit, Celsius is much easier, 0 is water freezing / melting point, Upgrade ! You even had a spacecraft crash because of using wrong units!!

Sure, China has cheap labor and can pollute all they want. Long-term prospects aren't good.

Yes, the brits still invent things. Mainland europeans don't very much. The Chinese and Japanese don't very much. That's interesting.

They bought Cymer, in San Diego, to get the EUV technology. My company designed the first gen tin droplet electronics.

The US invents things, more than any other country. There are lots of reasons for that. For example, we have lots of really smart Russian engineers here now.

The Maker thing is huge here. I go to the meetups and meet all sorts of interesting lunatics. Free food and beer too. Do you have a scene like that?

Studio45 is near here. Fun.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

He never had any intellect to leak. Plenty of low cunning, but that's a different skill set.

Nobody can. Once the air pollution in big cities is bad enough to start killing people, the Chinese, like the Indians, started doing something about it.

The Chinese have spent a lot on closing down dirty and inefficient coal-fired power stations. They invested a lot on making solar cells on a large enough scale to make them the cheapest source of electric power, and we are now on the point reducing our CO2 emissions (not that you have the sense to see that as pollutuion).

They are a lot better than they were a few years ago.

John Larkin doesn't know much about mainland Europe, and the newspapers he reads aren't all that interested in what is going on there.

Blue LED's were a Japanese invention. American tend to be unaware of this.

Phil Hobbs did the design work. You put the electronics together for him. A curious observer might wonder why Philips were the firm to buy Cymer. America had dropped the ball on semi-conductor fabrication a few years earlier, so presumably none of the local firms were interested.

And a strong culture of patenting anything that looks even faintly patentable. The country is crawling with lawyers, and lawyer love patents.

When I was working at EMI Central Research in the UK one of my colleagues in the medical ultrasound group submitted more patent queries in one year - about fifty - than anybody else in the entire research labs. None of them turned into a real patent. I got two patent out my three years there - one was for a digital hyperbolic function generator that got folded into a patent for an analog hyperbolic function generator, even though it had never stuck me as patentable, and the other one was for an idea that had struck me as obvious until I found myself explaining why it was obvious to people who were skilled in the art, and turned it into a patent query to save myself the trouble.

Trumph makes the gigantic CO2 lasers that nuke the tin droplets.

It's a very messy, dirty process. Tin splatters everywhere.

Cymer used flowing hydrogen to capture the tin before it trashed all the optics. GigaPhoton tried to use superconductive magnets somehow, but gave up.

There must be a better way to do nm lithography. Several people are trying.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

People have been working on doing lithography better since we first started making integrated circuits. There's not a lot of low-hanging fruit left to pluck, but we will keep trying.

I seem to remember EMI had a dedicated patents department which made it easy for anyone in the company to try to patent any idea, however trivial. Many other British firms didn't bother unless the idea was a really outstanding one.

I think the nature of businesses has changed, over the years.

I can recall 60's and 70's even small shops had their own waves, machine shops, paint shops, shake-n-bake, blueprint "gal", library, stock room clerks, etc. In addition to manufacturing and inspection staff, marketing, engineering, accounting, etc.

One of the early firms I worked for had maybe six engineers yet all of these things. The library was bigger than the engineering offices! I suspect only about 100 souls in the entire facility...

Since the 80's, I've put clauses in my contracts that state: "I won't knowingly infringe a patent with my design (but will make no effort to verify that to be the case) and I won't assist in the preparation of any patents you may choose to claim about my work"

Many of the largest firms used patents as a way of crippling their rivals' designs. Very occasinally this forced designers to come up with some quite brilliant and innovative solutions - but more usually it resulted in every company's product being sub-optimal.