The collected works of skywriter - Page 12

guardian452 wrote: I assume the roof comes off?

yeah, it does. it rolls off. much more acceptable by the neighbors. did you have something else in mind for an observatory, unless if for astrology.

pentium wrote: You need to hook up a music box that plays the Thunderbirds theme as the roof rolls away. :lol:

I snarfed my dad's old Bose, maybe the count be arranged? However, weren't you waaaaay to young for the for the thunderbird's, but the the Smurf's theme song would have been worse say worse ?@???? >0)

jan-jaap wrote: The woodwork reminds me of a Finnish sauna. I like it.

Looks like you can spend some quality time there.

I expect the spent quantity * time in the too :-) unfortunately the 'gear-ist' in me had been whiling many an hour; preferably at night when even the insulated room gets hot too. Even in the speediest futesdt an AC in my immediate future!


* - has the italicist returned?

fu wrote: did you give up the music-box for the eye-box sky?

hope you're having fun with both, sweet setup, looks spacious :)

quite a few nekochanners have a thing for wood and i like it

Heavens no fu-man-chu! I try to spend equal time in either endevor. they're both endless fun; not to forget the Volvo, its got just a ton more improvements lined for this coming week; rear struct tower braces, front * and back undercarriage. plus a progressive water/methane injection system for the twin-turbo. then a bunch of cracked plastic cosmetics for next years grand paint job :-) What I really need is a competent tuner who can do custom tuners for the ME7 ECU. If they exist at all, they'e on the west coast or in sweden.


* - lost a ton of typingt here

hamei wrote:

skywriter wrote: We used to be friends hamei, but you just turned into a jerk to me and treated me like everyone else you treat unfairly. I felt it had to be said after so many mail in requests for me to come back.

Hey Sky - why don't you stay, and I can go ? You're a lot more of a computer person than me and you were here first anyhow. I do not have a problem with that. The fact is, my world is gone anyhow so what's the point of dragging it out forever ?

chasta luego, muchacho :D

]

you do whatever you like, I have plenty of other pass times.

there are so many classic volvo bodies i would so rather have; the low slung 60's-70's wagon verision is what i liked the bes. Instead I have a car the is conformable and has the enhanced road performance I can safely. It's the only twin-turb fielded, nad the seriously underestimated torque the tranny would need. the need to pop early; but that's ok, there are GM Tranny rebuilders that can put this 4T65EV-GT tranny together in strip condition. The S80 might have been an exec class car, but when these things hit +10 years, they become interesting to work on. Th is not my Dad's Volvo, shit it ain't my Son's Volvo!

My three headed, three OS and top of the line Macbook Air 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz), 8GB 256GB Flash; with Parallels; Running OSX Mountain Lion, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 64.



I wished it all folded up and stuff; but nope nuts. I only need the power warts I combined into a single 'bump in the wire'; plus the two usb cables. The monitors each have a nice zipped leatherette case.

This 'pictured' at my at 'confab table' in my office during setup. MMT makes a pretty cool USB Monitor 1366x768, the Air is 1440x900 with a smaller dot pitch.

It's tough to find a multi-monitor that portable much less good looking :-)

well since the moderators are in abstention; I deem this thread locked.
any further posting will be regarded as non-productive and subjected to discussion with the administrator.

Fellow Emeritus for EMC Corp. Retired at 53 after 26 years. Work mostly on Symmetrix/DMX/VMX the last 5 years. HW design, System Architect, Chip/board designer, 48 patents. Even got my picture in the lobby, heh!

I liked the ASIC design stuff the best. I did the first ASIC for Symmetrix, a Dual port BUS and TAG controller. My favorite design was a 3 ASIC chipset that totally 256 chips on the largest sized system. It was a fault tolerant shared memory controller for 1st gen synch DRAM with chip kill. Although the basic control logic and datapath wasn't that complicated, trying to design chip level systems with a 'pair and spare' architecture with 'totally self checking' check logic, using logic synthesis and a layout tool with logic resynthesis that loved to remove all the redundancy was a lotta fun. I never worked on a chip 'as a team'. I did everything soup to nutz. As long as they threw everyone else on simulation I was happy.

I didn't want to retire late in life with my hearing and vision impaired. I planned on working on music and astronomy in my retirement. At 53, I'm in pretty good shape for that :-)

Greg Douglas is still alive and kicking! I've kept up with the old codger all these years :-) There is life after SGI.

@sgifanatic, you bet I will! :-)

kramlq wrote: Some heavy duty stuff there :-) Did you worry you might eventually miss working on complex stuff like that... the challenges?

So, well.... no. Maybe it's just me, but anything gets old after a while. I went right into computer engieering and manufacturing right out of highschool; got a job at DEC in 79 working on DECsystem-10's and 20's - test and debug in mfg, then engineering with VAX. I worked at DEC for 6 years, then a couple of years or undergraduate work on a Physics degree at WPI, then joined EMC in 88. So I've spent nearly all of my working years working on the largest systems* short of the top500 class size. Made it to the lofty heights of engineering (no management for me) where the only really complicated stuff left is the interdepartmental politics. Which I had no stomach for. So, I'm done with it. Now it's 'me and my family' time :-)

*- Reverse engineering IBM 3090 memory systems for a plug compatible memory system product(s) was fun :-)

Yup, now comes the best part; say goodbye to that paycheck!

sgifanatic wrote: Now, once more, there is massive interest in Artificial Intelligence. Call it ML, Cognitive, Deep Learning... whatever. It's AI. Who here thinks it might actually be for real this time?

As long as it can surpass an indian call center, it's a huge improvement.

R-ten-K wrote: Yes Stallman may be a weirdo, but unlike some of the weirdos in this site, he has a fairly extensive technical track record and has substantially influenced (in a positive way) the field; at the very least he helped large amounts of people (like me) have access to tools like EMACS and gcc. And for that I'd buy him a drink anytime, even if our approaches regarding personal hygiene disagree significantly.

I would agree with that. Having Emacs early in 1982 at DEC made it my #1 goto editor, although EDT was still hella-good at the time.

We had him in give his 'speech/views' at EMC in, idk, late 80's sometime? He initially went on, and on about a printer some company had given them (MIT Lab I think) for free for some reason, and he found it so morally offending that they weren't also given access to the source code to make some integration changes or arbitrary improvements, that he made some kind of eternal-vow-to-forsake-software-of-the-non-open-variety-forevermore-so-help-me-RP05-disk-platter-on-my-head-cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die. I sat in the front row, dead center, and made skeptical faces at him. Nobody was changed in any significant way from his visit; except we lost a couple hours of work. Alan Cox on the other hand was a pleasure to meet with some years later.

The problem with RMS and his ilk is that they stand in the way of progress. We should be working with paradigms and a systems unrecognizable to anyone from the early age of computation; ENIAC say, but with that being faster, bigger and cheaper, those folks woud easily recognize. In fact, they would probably laugh at our rules against self modifying code; weaklings they would chide us. It's still basically fixed width serially exected binary word/vectors. iPad's way cool though. I can't believe how bad all the WinCE/Windows Mobile 6.1 hardware/software I had was when I dragged it all out for recycle lasst weekend.

Are you claiming to an Aerospace Engineer Donald?

Donald_ET3 wrote:

skywriter wrote: when does a perfectly good adjective like 'low voltage' get replaced by techno-colloquial slang-verb garbage like 'undervolt'?

skywriter wrote: i know what they mean. they're not words knowledgeable engineers I know use.

When Apollo 13 had its mishap, the astronauts described it as an "undervolt"

astronaut: "We've had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT."
Houston: "Roger. MAIN B UNDERVOLT."
...one and a half minutes later...
astronaut: "We got a MAIN BUS A UNDERVOLT now, too, showing."
Houston: "MAIN A UNDERVOLT."

Apparently the term "undervolt" has been used by NASA since 1970.

ha!

If you liked old DEC gear, this is a great read. Part II, and the PDP-10 chapter is particularily a brilliant nostalgic read. I worked on KL10's and 20's in manufacturing, so I got a TON of equipment to play/work with. Next door, on the manufacturing floor was the FA&T (Final Assembly and Test) area, where the customers complete configuration was floorplanned, built and tested. There were quite a few complex configurations; some multiprocessor KL10's, AMPEX shared memory configs, IBM FIPS channel systems with dual spindle RP20's. This was all before Ethernet or VaxCluster came to town, although towards the end, there were some wonky looking adapters for both NI and CI - yes, there were 576-bit block formatted versions of the HSC50 and SDI disks for TOPS-20. So cooooooool a place to work, and the engineering was awesome. I got to see Jupiter before it was cancelled. What a shame... but we were not doing so well at that point. Anyway, the book:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/Computer_Engineering/contents.html

I really loved working on 36-bit gear, it was just HUGE! And working in-house; access to all the software was fantastic! The only thing to surpass that was playing Multiplayer VAXTrek on VT100's with the games creators up in Nashua, while 'we' were in Marlboro, using their bugs against them :-) There was nothing like a a Dreadnaught with tractor beams. Yum!

I've loved every iPad I've had (still have). Really looking forward to the Pro! Going from a mini now - it's gonna be HUGE when it gets here.

They had a good chunk of the TX-0 in the computer museum in Marlboro. Plus a bunch of other cool exhibits. It was kind of cool to be able to walk between buildings at lunch to go to the museum while at work.

I have four iPad gen 1's - got one for each of the family. A gen 3 - now my wifes, a gen 4 - used in the studio, and a mini retina with a Zagg BT keyboard - my all around favorite.

The Pro won't be here until early December, and the keyboard and pen will arrive first week in January - so expect some delay :-) I got the pen so my son (and daughter) could gauge it's drawing capability. They don't like drawing with their fingers. I'm not much for drawing. I also got the Pro to see if the extra 3 inch diagonal would help my mom read. Her sight is so far gone giant font's on a mid size iPad is so large you can only fit 7-8 words on the screen. Reading is difficult under those conditions, perhaps this could help her. So, besides wanting an upgrade for myself - which isn't that big a deal - there are other reasons for me to get one.

OMG! It's so huge! I love it!!!!!!

Yes, it does sound familiar. I saw a three processor KL10 at FA&T. They must have built the 5 processor in the field, since as a shared memory configuration extra processors were simply attached to memory cab's. All you needed was KBUS cables. And extra interface cards for the memory cab connectors.

Sorry to be a party pooper, but there was was far too much unsubstantiated China and US bashing from him. I surely was not a favorite, but the only reason I came back was that he left. His parting shot wasn't a kudos for the board either.

The pen and keyboard are due late December - eraly January. But I have my hopes up, the iPad came a week early :-) It's friggen awesome! Just finished watching Kaisha Monogatari: Memories of You on Hulu. Such a switch from my little mini iPad - wich I still love/use because of the BT keyboard. The soft keybaord has some bugs in it, like can't start a post with @ sign. Weird!

Bitsavers is awesome for dec stuff. DEC engineering was very compartmentalized. We were KL and diag and TOPS only, until VAX came along. The 780 and 750 were done at westminister or franklin - i forget - the 8600 (venus and jupiter) was done in marlboro. I left after that, so I don't know where all the 8500 & 8800 (Nautilus) and 8200 & 8300 (BI), and 6000 (XMI) machines were done. By then I was reverse engineering them at EMC for plug compatible, memory and disk products. That was a lot of fun!

blah, blah, blah hammy. give us a rest.

Reverse engineering is a great way to see how the best stuff is done, and DEC was putting out some fantastic engineering during those times. Although a lot of KL engineering was terribly hacked, VAX did some amazing this at the time. You could almost feel the way it was put together because it all made sense. Most of my work was on DEC Standard Disk Format, HSC50 utilities, and STI disk controllers for disk products. For memories, I ran the gamut in one way shape or another. What was weird was I was the only one that actually knew how to run the machines using SYSGEN, for instance, or setting up DECNET, foramatting and copying disks, and writing system exercisers that were effective and understood, rather than contracting it out as they did before. Also worked on plug compatible central store and expanded store for IBM 3090's; designed chipsets for them in BiCMOS. Then EMC cancelled everything and put everyone on Symmetrix. Which a whole nother story ;)

@vishu, LOL! we were still using a PDP-12 in KL manufacturing around 1979 with a paper tape reader to test cables. They had the wackiest gimicks in module test. The worst was the XOR machines, which was a minimal KL CPU and IO set that would compare the operation of a complete module card (under test) with one (known good board) running in parallel. Of course the module were at the end of a six foot bundle of coax, so the machine clock (base freq 66mhz IIRC) was cranked down a bit to make the whole thing run. They had four of these beasts set up, in addition to other monstrosities on the manufacturing floor. It was nutz the all the testors and special purpose stuff they made back then. Now everything is one board and you practically toss it if it doesn't work.

Back then, If you couldn't climb inside the machine on a cold winter day and warm up, it wasn't a computer. :-)

Bummer, I love //

btw is this just for fun, or are you getting paid to do this? the stuff you listed only needs a parser to kick out errors, so why the interpreter too? maybe I missed something.

robespierre wrote: Ada is rather verbose with many "noise chars" that seem redundant. It does have a nicer type system that can explicitly define upper and lower bounds. VHDL was based on Ada.

VHDL was hell to write anything in. Verilog was much easier.

1) OK, those are beyond a parser.
2) It really is spelled 'paid'.
3) I've seen worse organizations. But, if you can laugh about it, then you're out of harms way. :-)

You need a project manager that can say NO to changes.

I've had to work with a lot of in-house tools in my days, they were the worst (no offense), because stuff was added willy-nilly, nothing looked or acted the same between tools, lots on incompatibility problems due to incomplete specifications, and lastly arrogant developers that thought they were right. Don't go there, you won't earn any respect. Sorry if I'm preaching I don't know how long you've been in the business.