jhallenworld

I think these old arguments are moot: all of these entry methods are from having to write equations linearly for the 1950s / 1960s teletype era (including "algebraic"). They all require you to keep a stack in your head.

Newer calculators have "natural textbook entry", where they show the equation in mathematical notation as you enter it, so no stack required in your head. The entry method (shown linearly) for division is: <divide> numerator <down> denominator <right>. The keystroke count is lower than it would appear because you can leave out all of the right-most cursor keystrokes.

The method could be further generalized to eliminate the need to know about precedence on entry. For example ab(c+d+e)*f could be: <mul> a <next> b <add> c <next> d <next> e <done> <next> f. Visually it could show the order of operations either with precedence, or in some new way (perhaps text size changes to indicate order).

It's interesting to think how programming languages could look in the post-teletype era.

Agreed, but just try even a linear ruler in most drawing tools to see how hopeless they are.

Even without that effect it's easy with Inkscape. It has working grid, snap to grid and text alignments.

I repaired a Casio fx-602p recently, by harvesting a chip from a broken one, one of the tqfp ASICs. Worth it because eBay price from Japan for a working one is $250. I'd like an fx-603p, but they are going for $350.

This is like the Casio version of HP-41- alphanumeric keystroke programmable with cassette interface.

No plastic heatstakes (unlike HP), but you're hosed if the flex cable to the LCD is broken.

One of the most impressive things recently is the guy who made replacement LCDs for the classic Radio Shack / Sharp pocket computers (they don't use flex cables). That a hobbyist can do this at reasonable price is a sign that we are living in amazing times.

https://www.tindie.com/products/halfbakedmaker/lcd-replaceme...

So here is my figure drawing exercise: draw a ruler. This is easy to do with xfig. On many tools, it's hopeless, open office draw comes to mind.

Newsday (Long Island newspaper) did this, when they were found out it killed them. Afterwards, the paper was half the size, they couldn't get advertisers..

https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/ny-based-newsday%E2...

On the other hand, for twitter's main use case, do twitter user counts even matter? It's mostly just a direct channel for famous people to the mainstream media.

I pay this to get rid of Google's inserted ads, but it's getting hurt by too many in-video sponsorship ads. I would pay for a mode where the content creator gets more money in exchange for automatically skipping their sponsorship ad.

The like/subscribe/become a Patreon is also annoying, but not as bad as actual ads.

One thing about Kermit- it used to be the gold standard for CLI usability: editing, history, ESC-completion and context sensitive ?-help. I think it was directly inspired by the TOPS-20 operating system.

For example, user types "?" after entering screen

    C-Kermit>screen ? screen action, one of the following:
     clear    cleol    move-to
    C-Kermit>screen _

Lasers have much higher "antenna" gain. How about using an IR laser to remotely heat a steam engine which runs a generator... I bet overall efficiency is at least an order of magnitude higher.

Well suppose you want your code to connect with IPI interfaces from Xilinx IP. You end up having to annotate it with magic attributes like this:

    (* X_INTERFACE_INFO = "xilinx.com:signal:clock:1.0 clk CLK" *)
    (* X_INTERFACE_PARAMETER = "ASSOCIATED_BUSIF disp1_tpg_axis:disp2_tpg_axis:ar_tpg_axis:artx0_axis:arrx0_axis:scaletx0_axis:tmrx0_axis:scaler, ASSOCIATED_RESET reset_l, FREQ_HZ 199980011" *)
    input clk;

    (* X_INTERFACE_INFO = "xilinx.com:signal:reset:1.0 reset_l RST" *)
    (* X_INTERFACE_PARAMETER = "POLARITY ACTIVE_LOW" *)
    input reset_l;

    (* X_INTERFACE_INFO = "xilinx.com:interface:rx_mipi_ppi_if:1.0 cam0_rx_dphy DL3_RXDATAHS" *)
    input [7:0] cam0_rx_dphy_dl3_rxdatahs;

It's horrible. Trust me, you will not like when things go wrong in larger block designs.

This video generator is not hard to write in Verilog (or better, System Verilog) either. Seriously, synchronous code like this is the easy part.

See where they show the block diagram in Vivado? That's the difficult part. You had to use the clock wizard to configure the PLL. You had to figure out how to convert the generated Verilog into one of those blocks. You had to choose the I/O standards, assign the pinout and set up timing constraints. You had to figure out how to get the block diagram saved into version control..

That block diagram is stored as, you guessed it, an XML file. But it can also be generated from or saved as a TCL script.. Also it has an associated Verilog wrapper... If it gets messed up, you will be editing the XML file..

If they really want to make Vivado easier to use, that block diagram would be gone.

I think this is right- I know men who have no trouble picking up women (they are "jacked"), but can't keep them due to other personality issues (they are too controlling).

I was wondering which generation was the most poisoned by the lead: well it's Gen-X:

"Researchers found that estimated lead-linked deficits were greatest for people born between 1966 and 1970, a population of about 20.8 million people, which experienced an average deficit of 5.9 IQ points per person."

https://news.fsu.edu/news/health-medicine/2022/03/08/fsu-res....

For old calculating machines I want to recommend Prof. Chris Staecker's YouTube channel, his videos are enjoyable. Here is a play-list:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCy6pQSEpk&list=PLLFpXNanTP...

Inspired me to buy a Comptometer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptometer

If all you need to do is add, Comptometers are the fastest machines so far invented. They are fast because you can enter entire numbers at once (as a "chord" with multiple fingers pressing multiple digits at once). No need to hit "+" key or pull a lever between numbers, each button press is an immediate addition.

I'm thinking of making an electronic version- it would have the same Comptometer key layout, but have more operations (for example, hold multiply "shift" key down while entering number for a multiply).

A nice casual use case for a slide rule is metric conversion:

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma....

Consider that this slide is doing two things for you: it remembers the conversion factor (for a bunch of difference conversions), and it does the multiplication or division.

Atari 800 browser emulator version:

https://archive.org/details/VisiCalc_1.74A_1980_Software_Art...

Keys:

    Ctrl-'   Left
    Ctrl-\   Right
    Ctrl-]   Down
    Ctrl-[   Up
    '        +
    [        -
    \        *

There is an interesting effect with AC distribution that leads to the statement "the amount of power produced must balance that consumed" that you sometimes hear.

On first thought this is a ridiculous statement: voltage is a measure of potential energy after all. If load is reduced, the voltage just hangs there and less power will be consumed.

But with AC distribution what you have is essentially a large rotating machine. The more power you put into it, the faster it spins. When you connect a generator to the grid, you phase match the AC waveforms, connect it, then start pushing the grid faster to inject power.

So the statement is true. If the load is too low, the frequency starts to go up. But it's also not true.. if each generator independently self limits the frequency, we would be back to the potential energy situation. But power plants want to push power into the grid- this is how they earn money.

So some plants self regulate and some do not, see:

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/ebf483/node/705

Ones that self regulate get to charge a premium for their unused capacity.

Even with DC only, you would be in the same situation. A power plant wants to make money, so it will want to push power into the grid, which for DC means pushing the voltage up.

The is an interesting related opportunity: given a existing desired protein, find its sequence- needed so that you can determine the corresponding genetic sequence so that your custom organism can synthesize the protein.

Protein sequencing is not so easy... very basically you can do it one amino acid at a time based on the fact that amino acids are "sided", meaning side A of each can only connect to side B of the next one. So you attach the end of the protein to some kind of substrate (which can only attach "A" sides), then cut off each amino acid one at a time.

There are some companies in this space:

https://www.quantum-si.com/

It's Christmas in August!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmF2lCXV8lQ

I remember the bait and switch was big with these stores. The stuff they advertised was not in stock, but they tried to sell you what they did have.

I'm surprised they didn't discover what Sir Alan Sugar had: that you could make more money on house branded stuff made in Hong Kong.

I was just in the ER in SouthWest Florida: $12K for two CT-scans and blood tests over two days, basically to check if I was having appendicitis (I did not- probably infection from prior kidney stone). No overnight stay, but two visits over two days. $12K is the initial bill to my insurance company, so not sure what they will actually receive.

I think it was the Chyron VP-1 / VP-2:

https://archive.org/details/chyron-vp-1-manual/page/n57/mode...

http://www.oldvcr.tv/collection/index.html?Mode=View&Brand=C...

But not much RAM- maybe it was Scribe, but I see both big Intel and Moto chips in it:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/265204467651?_trkparms=ispr%3D1&has...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234061007923?_trkparms=ispr%3D1&has...

I worked at a company that made video titlers in the 80s. They tried all kinds of interesting memory technology including bubble memory and CCD memory. I remember they deployed CCD shift register memory to customers, but it was pretty error prone- your text would get corrupted over time.

They made a 68000-based high resolution titler with fast SRAM for the display refresh memory. This would have been crazy expensive except that the image was stored in compressed format, and decompressed on the fly during display, so they only needed something like 64KB. It looked great, but composing the image (from annotated text) was very slow. I think Chyron just used lots of DRAM in their similar products (pretty sure they used 8086).

The LED display driver is interesting in this device. It uses 75492 (still available!) for the digit driver and DS8871 for the segment driver. Except DS8871 is open collector, so it is used to force a segment off. For on, there 100 ohm pull ups. These are just the drivers, the latches are separate.

This is a circuit you want to optimize to reduce cost...

For comparison, here is a Z-80 "membership card". It uses 74LS145 for the decoder/digit driver (driven from a counter) and 74HC273 for latch+segment driver.

http://www.sunrise-ev.com/photos/z80/zmc-manual.pdf

The famous KIM-1 uses discrete transistors:

http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/schematics/kim-1/kim....

A really modern device might use an integrated LED driver, like TM1637 or TM1638:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01D140BT6/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?ps...

Of course the details are more involved, but the refiners will modify their plants to optimize profits on their own. The time-frame involved could be an issue for sure. What kind of oil is in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? It could possibly help with the time issue.

The tweet-sized post is useful as a counter to the oil company talking points. They like banning Russian imports (eliminating a competitor), but want to link it to expanded drilling and the reinstatement of Keystone XL. Both of these also take time. Yet they say that they can immediately increase production, so I'm not sure the rush for their other requests.

And how much do they pay to extract the oil from public lands?

This is very relevant because of this new thing that just happened. There was an auction for rights to install an off-shore wind farm. The final price was $4.3 billion. This tells you the value of green energy: it's so valuable that you could convince investors and banks to pony up the money.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-...

So what are the auction prices for oil extraction?

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-...

Manchin and Murkowski were just falling over themselves in glee with this new argument for more drilling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9W0e1T8jQ

"overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude"

This is all you need to know.

If we had an oil export tariff, then we would very quickly become oil independent. Buyers in other countries are in competition with Americans for this oil, so if you really want to keep the price low in America, we should have such a tariff. Why should we give away our natural resources like this?

Additionally: in these emergency times, a reasonable argument could be made for price controls.

It has an interesting trade-off: no internal flash. But I've found that I add a SPI-flash chip to the MCU in many designs, so it's a reasonable choice.

NXP has rt1020 (Cortex-M7, no flash), or rt1024, which is same but 4 MB flash in the package- it's connected to the SPI-flash controller of the rt1020 core, so I think it's a multi-die package.

Neat tool! I like this is as a small example of SSA-based dataflow analysis.

I'll say this for the trades: there is infinite work. The population is getting older, leaning towards old ladies. Who is going to keep their oil-fired steam heat working? Maybe you..