Posts by swm 1018 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2015
A friend had a car (1960's?) with an automatic headlight dimmer. So two cars are approaching with their bright lights on. The automatic dimmer dims the headlights in his car. The oncoming car does the same. So the automatic dimmer immediately turns on the bright lights again.
This goes on until the automatic dimmer is overridden.
There are different types of radiation. High-energy protons generally don't affect electronics as much as secondary radiation like electrons etc. It is actually safer (in space) to be in a thin-shelled vehicle as a thicker steel wall will produce a particle shower.
I believe that radiation hardened ICs are available. They are made by over doping the transistors. You won't get the density of a modern CPU but it will survive much more radiation.
Employment law in the US states that you cannot be compelled to work no matter what the work contract says (13th amendment to the US constitution - no involuntary servitude). You can just walk out the door. You may lose severance pay or a good recommendation but you don't have to give any notice at all. It is a courtesy to give notice but not necessary.
On the other hand, the company is bound by the terms of the employment contract.
On my bluehost hosted website I noticed that https suddenly started working. So you can access my pages either with http or https without any effort on my part. There is no redirection from one to the other but all of my links on the website are relative so will inherit the prefix.
I remember the first Jovian satellite designed by JPL. They said that the radiation was 10 times what they expected and that the radiation kept flipping bits in the active registers in the computers. This caused the computers to be slower. They did not fail because of robust design!
When I taught "history of computing" I made everyone use log tables and slide rules. I only posed simple problems (What is 2 X 3) but everyone got a working slide rule (courtesy of xeroxing a circular slide rule image on a transparency and a piece of paper and a push pin so the two could rotate). I also handed out complete 5-place log tables (generated by a C++ program).
It was really an easy class - I just wanted people to get a feel about how things were done 60-70 years ago.
There was an approach in Lebanon, NH, (near Dartmouth College) that used a VORTAC approach (in the late '60s). The approach guaranteed no mountains within 10 miles of the VORTAC station. A NE airlines plane was 12 miles from the VORTAC and clipped a mountain. Everyone aboard died.
Very sad. We lost several good professors.
Anyone who has owned a dog knows they are self-aware. I've seen dogs happy, sad, contrite, in fact, just about all the emotions that a person has.
Watch a dog dreaming and you will understand.
The issue might be: how aware are they? My personal belief is that they are quite aware of themselves.
Actually, Xerox had a better way to copy and paste.
1. Select the insertion point
2. With the shift key held down - select the text to paste (cntrl shift also deleted the source text)
One advantage was you could copy many things to the insertion point (even though it wasn't visible).
The copy/paste idiom requires scrolling back and forth and continually reselecting the insertion point.
This idiom was used for most development tools. They worked well. The STAR system was written for users and was very slow etc. because the development team never used the customer system.
Web site developers should also be required to debug on a slow internet connection etc.
When my father was base commander in Australia they had an electrical fire in the main power switchboard before breakers etc. They could put out the fire with a CO2 extinguisher but they couldn't stop the arcing. So my father called the electric company and asked them to shut off power to the base (and neighboring town) but they didn't want to. So my father said that when they ran out of CO2 they would throw a rope around the wires leading into the building.
They shut off the power.
At MIT MULTICS project they had a "fire hose drum" for swapping. One day a plasterer working near the drum totally clogged up the filters and the drum shut down on over temp. "No problem," said the field engineer and removed the filters and went to get replacement filters. By the time he got back the drum was full of plaster dust and never worked again.
In the old days there was a write permit ring that had to be inserted to write the tape. Removing the write permit ring protected the contents of the tape. But operators faced with the error "no write permit ring" would just insert one thereby overwriting the master tape or worse.
So there was a special slotted ring that could be bolted on the tape reel to prevent the insertion of the write permit ring. Still some enterprising operators would find some tool to remove this ring and insert a write permit ring.
It did make the error go away and was simpler than mounting the correct tape.
At Xerox they had a "clean desk protocol" which I ignored. My office had stacks of paper everywhere. When the security gum shoes inspected my office they left a form (which I found a week later) with every box checked including "passed". I guess they were so flustered that they just checked all of the boxes.
My boss said my office was secure - nobody could find anything there (except me).
My father had a salesman who would always get a stack of $2 bills before going out on a sales trip. He would use these bills to tip etc. on the theory that he would be remembered.
Well, the local police found he was passing "counterfeit" $2 bills and collected him from his hotel where he was staying and interrogated him and left him in a room without door knobs. Eventually, an expert from a bank came and declared all of the bills were legitimate.
The police did profusely apologize though.
Where I worked, the building power transformer blew up in the middle of the night. It was in a room across from the guard station. When queried, the guard said, "Yeah, there was a hell of a noise."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"No, I thought it was someone else's responsibility.
When they replaced the transformer (live) two guys held 2x4's and braced themselves to pull backwards. A third person reached over the 2x4's to attach the power leads. Everyone was very serious. If anything had happened the 2 2x4 guys were ready to pull as hard so they could to pull the third person back.
Not a job I would want.
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