The collected works of skywriter - Page 13

LOL!

I'm not surprised. All the 'tool' costs bought from vendors were .... Exorbitant. The exception was logic simulators, those were fairly cheap compared to logic synthesis tools or formal verification tools. The worst was Goldfire http://his.com , so called 'innovation' tools.

arg! damn you auto-correct!!!!

oh no, it's actually a product with a lot of capabilities. But to really be effective you have to allow it access to EVERYTHING in your business. NOBODY cooperates with projects like that. By the time you get that much data, it's every group for themselves, so nobody shares anything. The other problem with the tool is patent searching - absolutely no good for an engineering organization that requires plausible deniability concerning competitor, or prior art when being deposed during patent litigation.

So, it's a lot of money for a huge tool that you can never seem to get implemented unless it's specific types of businesses. Not a universal solution by any means, although a lot of their results are suprising.

Next to TOPS-20, VMS was my favorite OS. It took forever for we diehard TOPS-20 guys to excuse the loss of continuing program execution after ^C. ;-)

I like how the guys are completely different whilest the girls are nearly identical.

Merry Christmas and a Happy-hardware New Year!

A vacation from hamie is a great idea.

Vishnu, I respectfully disagree. Hamie was pulling the last straw nearly every post. Right at the top of nearly every page it says "NO POLITICS PLEASE". Hamie was practically nothing BUT politics - and not well reasoned politics, but frothy rabid politics. He made Trump look like a moderate. I took a Hamei vacation for a couple of years, and returned just before this happened - and to me nothing has changed in the way that Hamei posts and agitates the crowd.

If he confined himself to technical matters and contributing software, it would be a completely different situation. However, he would interject China vs US politics into many threads that had nothing to do with politics.

The worst thing than putting up with Hamei in the first place, is posting memorial threads about him afterward - especially when you can tell he's still lurking; there is no 'last visit' entry in his profile, which indicates he's masking his logins. This is just another 'play the crowd' ploy for him, sowing dissension, and enjoying with all the agitation he's stirring up.

I suggest locking these threads - they will come to no good, and hurt feelings all around.

And I think that was very disrespectful of our moderators @guardian452. Without them, we wouldn't have a board at all.

Sat on top of an 18KW DEC H760 to stay warm during the winters on the manufacturing floor:

The standard DEC power supply configuration uses three-phase power. The H760 power supply uses three ferroresonant transformers with their primaries wired in a three-phase delta arrangement. The secondaries are are each wired to a half-wave bridge rectifier, and the rectifiers are paralleled to provide -12V DC at 490A .

It only blew up once! I still had to fix it though...

Actually, the AC mains shorted first; o I only had to replace the wiring harness to the 3-phase breakers on the top panel. It was pretty pretty close though...

kshuff wrote: As jan-jaap says, been there done that...

Times three!



Yu're gonna shoot your eye out with that thing!

Trippynet wrote:

skywriter wrote: Times three!

Yu're gonna shoot your eye out with that thing!

You need to update your sig some time :)

The SGI's I've owned would never fit the sig space

@vishnu, within the confines of the limited scope of this single thread; yeah you're right there's no need to the lock thread for one wayward post. My point, is all the lockeding all the goodbye hamie threads. He had a long term repeated violation of this rule concerning the politics of China vs America across the years of posts. Being a member of many years, I'm sure you read some of them. I thought they were a joke at first, but after a series of PM's with him over the years, it became obvious he believes deeply in this. Are you party to this? Is anyone? Do you throw a party for the office racist? I won't.

So:
1) the 'politics' reference refers to the some total of posts he's made over the years. This last derogatory posts are just the tip of the ice-burg.
2) The lock refers to all the 'goodbye hamie', and 'please stay hamie' threads, which are silly because he's not really gone, he's been skimming the board with his presence masked, just to watch to term termoil he's causing.
3) clearly, the mods can do whatever they like to do, I only suggested one course of action based on over 10+ years of reading his put downs, and white washing.
4) of course, the easiest thing do do in the face of his supports on of his posts.
Hamie:

Since this forum is apparently restricted to twelve-year-olds, it must be time to leave. I'm too old to restrict my discussion to what to wear to the school dance while the world is burning down. I wish you a happy Thanksgiving at the children's table.

and you can all decide for yourself again - he clearly meant the for very whole of us.

I left my several year after he ruined one of my thread with his China rant, and it wasn't obvious how different his is from all the rest of you until I took thhe leave of absense. I though he was one of my friends up until thread point, but I diidn't realize how wrong I was until after a stepped back all looked at all that went on. You can choose to put up with him - it's your board too - but I won't; the second he's back I'n gone - not that that matters. He not worth my time.

@uunix, fine by me as long there is no repeat of @gardian452's post; an apology to the offended party is is still in order.

Thank you

It isn't genuine if it's forced, naturally.

@VenomousPinecone, I had a similar run in with the Man, around Boston I had been traveling from RT495 to RT128 via the MassPike, for a weekly appointment for 6 months in the evening after rush hour. Each night I would end up going faster and faster on the inbound and outbound route as I got more and more tired of the trip. About 4 months into it, I was regularly clocking 90-100mph in bursts throughout the straight bits when there was little or no traffic. It was just such a night that as I was overtaking a sedan in the middle lane, that I became uneasy with its sillouette. As I drifted up to the vehicle I caught the markings in my headlights and came abreast of the car with the front of my car and headlights parallel to the front door of the state police car. I had timed it such that we were going the same speed as I reached this point, but I had come up behind the statie at considerable speed, and refused to pass him at any speed. So as I slowed down to pull I behind him he slowed down to, blocking me out of the middle lane, so I slowed down more, and he slowed down. Pretty soon we were going less than 20mph and the normal traffic was rapidly approaching us. After this the statie finally gave up and sped away as I slipped in behind him into the middle lane. I learned my lesson for about a week, and I was back to speeding again; except for this one stretch of road and I took seriously from now on.

Rarely has playing chicken with the state police ended up at a stalemate!

4 iMac's 24"/17"/21.5"/21.5"
1 MacBook Pro 13"
2 MacBook 13"
2 MacBook Air 11"/13"
4 iPad 1 w/Alesis IODock 1 w/2 Eventide H9
1 iPad 3 w/Alesis IODock 2 w/3 Eventide H9
1 iPad 4 w/Zagg portfolio
1 iPad Air
1 iPad Air 2
1 iPad mini retina w/Zagg Prortfolio BT Keyboard & Pen
1 iPad Pro w/keyboard and pen
2 PowerMac
2 MacPro w/Protools w/Drobo & Drobo B800i iSCSI 16TB RAID 6 TimeMachine server & 12TB RAID6 NetReady
1 32" Cinema Display
1 iPhone 3GS
1 iPhone 4
2 iPhone 4s
2 iPhone 5
2 iPhone 5s
1 iPhone 6
1 iPhone 6+
2 iPhone 6s
1 Time Capsule
1 AirPort Express
2 AirPort Extreme

Apple keyboard on a iPad is just as bad as Microsoft surface with keyboard. Neither of them should have been invented. And the stylus/pen thing is a train wreck. What didn't we learn about styluses in the last 15 years that Microsoft fumbled around with the idea that we thought another one (called a pen this time) was going to fix? They're both a waste of money.

VenomousPinecone wrote:

skywriter wrote: I learned my lesson for about a week[...]

It sure is hard to stop speeding after you start. Habits work that way I guess. :lol:

When you build a car to go fast, it's hard not to drive it that way :-)

Nope, gave them away. It was a billion years ago.

ivelegacy wrote: the real problem is: what do you run on them ?

For Crimson - I would have said "how do you deal with the Y2K problem" - the only product that had one. As long as you don't expect to run a web browser, if you like programming, there's a lot to keep you busy with one.

ivelegacy wrote:

skywriter wrote: if you like programming, there's a lot to keep you busy with one

I am already too busy with my woody box, but i'd like to have a time machine in order to go back and observe engineers in SGI while they were developing Lord Crimson. I am interested in knowing their best practices, something never told in my university, never written in books, probably lost for ever. How the Hell they debugged the hardware they were developing when PC, ASIC (can't say FPGA) and equipment were far away from the definition of "comfortable" we have today.

I did a couple of ASCI's with LSI - the major ASIC vendor that SGI worked with - around the time the SGI was doing tons of ASIC's with them. Things were better than you might imagine. Oddly, the discipline to work on an ASIC created an environment that ensured less bugs than you might find in each 'turn' of an FPGA; which was a lot more sloppy back then than ASIC designs - not to mention the designers themselves.

So, and reported in another thread:

1) I'm not happy with the apple keyboard - at least the way I use iPad's; reclined in bed, typing in my lap. I have used Brydge and Zagg keyboards with iPad's before and find they're much easier to deploy and are just as effective in protecting the screen. I don't like the mystery-folding keyboards that Apple implemented - although the zero latency on first use is OK. I hardly ever use a table.

2) the pen thing though is a bit more harder to decide on. Firstly, I much prefer using my fingers for everything. And the thing that Apple got right and Jobs insisted on is no stylus/pen/stick. I've put up with years, and years of wonky pocket PC's and tablet PC's running Microsoft Windows Tablet edition, WinCE, or Windows PocketPC (whatever their branding was. And they consistently got it wrong, they were err idle, and just another reason I will not willingly buy another Microsoft product if there is an alternative. However, Apple Pen, and a drawing device - depending on the software - has more in common with Bamboo tablet's, for instance. Beyond just pointing, drawing, and clicking there is a lot of context sensitivity dependent on how you hold the pen that is advantageous. Unfortunately, my dance park is completely punched when it comes to learning a new skill, and spending time just drawing for the fun of it. Microsofts pens were mostly dead plastic sticks, with the exception of some of the HP/compaq tablets which had smarter sticks, but they were clumsy with the resistive screen tech they had back then.

So in summary: I like the Apple version on the Pen, but not the keyboard - so much. And I've no time to use the Pen with applications that would benefit from them. I would prefer a Brydge or Zagg over the Apple keyboard; which benefits most from being easy to detach when you don't want it.

I also have to say, the size and quality of the Pro is fantastic for watching movies and doing music/synth/mixing work, etc... The quad speakers are very nice too. This is one of the best iPads besides the mini w/retina for different reasons, of course. And I got the 128gb w/cellular - sweet!

I made a RAM disk* with a bandsaw and a Prime computer board. Just cut out the size of array I needed, sanded the power plane burrs, and wired it up to a simple bread boarded controller. Of course that was back in the early 80's when stuff was expensive, unless it was scrapped, and scrapped only meant some idiot couldn't fix it. That was all to augment a Radio Shack COCO III at the time.

*-essentially a page space for OS9, since it had no virtual memory at the time.

At the time I built out my network, everyone was dumping FDDI. I could get FDDI adapters for everything {Sun and SGI}. I got 3 SMC FDDI station with switch plug cards supporting 10baset, and FDDI-SC. I also got a Cisco FDDI station that had 100baseT,and 1000baseT hookups. I could connect everything demo 4D's Indy's, Indigo's, O2, Octanes and origin & Onyx's to at least 100baseT next works. Plus the old MooTron, and Sunstations is anyone remembers. Those were fun days - cable and wires everywhere :-)

I would kill for a working KL-1090, or a one of the multiprocessors from the 70 and 80's; anything without an Intel or modern CPU.

One thing I really like to do with a Apple MacBook Air with ad-on 3rd party is the same I was able to do with Sun gear - although I can use three full color monitors instead an individual color, grey scale and monochrome. Pictured here was a 13 inch MaxcBook Air.

It was a USB attached display system. There was no video degradation playing movies, or running programs like Blender3D. Although the pictured system was a 13 inch 4GB MacBook, the 11 inch 2GB MacBook only supported a single attached display. No visibility into the particular limitation.

At the time though, the ability to partition OSX, Windows, and Linux onto three different monitors was a plus. The fact I had to deal with all three at the same time was a drag.

I remember trying to run post script on a Linux system with a 386 with no FP coprocessor - dog slow. Once I popped the FP in, it literally flew.

Yeah, I agree. AUI in 10mhz, I doubt theres any buffing in your transceiver', so you're slowing your FDDI ring down to abizmal. Now I'm now sure you're running FDDI at all. There are ST-ST cables with a centralized FDDI 'concentrator' of source, or you can string into a ring without a 'concentrator', depending on the connector types you have.

uunix wrote:

skywriter wrote: I like how the guys are completely different whilest the girls are nearly identical.

You're not looking hard enough chap ;)

Move your eyes away from the breasts!

Regardless, I'm sure they will all regret it in the morning..

The demon on the right had the right attitude; have a burger!

The girls really don't have any other characteristics other than their breasts.

Oberon was interesting in that Xilinx actually had a version of reprogramable hardware that used Oberon as a Hardware Description Language. One could conceive of not just self-modifying code, but self-modifying hardware. I worked on some ideas that utilized this aspect to create self repairing logic systems. It also yielded some other interesting ideas in just massively reprogramable logic when considered of systems with 1,000s of such chips. In the end it just sort of died off... Too bad.

@vishnu, uunix, you guys could not be responded to safely. :-)

Yeah LOLA, and Spartan-4! Very cool! Stil, it wasl too expensive for one person.

ivelegacy wrote: sooner or later I will put Oberon on fpga, in order to have fun-redemption

I feared that the evil-C would attempt to seize my dimension, I decided to strike first
and I resurrected the following board, to be programmed in 80s assembly :D :D :D

Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number in assembly - and apparently I can -
while unfortunately most calculators and MPUs programmed in C cannot X__________X

While I learned a lot has changed in the field of calculator design researching my response to this post, none of it brought any weight to the comment

Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number in assembly - and apparently I can -
while unfortunately most calculators and MPUs programmed in C cannot X__________X

perhaps it lies in ones interpretation of "cannot X__________X"?

vishnu wrote: You hardware guys are weird... :lol:

we're the ones that makes software guys even weirder!! :-)

look for "bozon" :-)

Binge-watching BSG reboot (who in their right mind could watch the 1st one?) for the 4th time. I discovered this gem late in life.