morcheeba

The Magic Window word processor would display uppercase letters in inverse (black-on-white, instead of white-on-black)

A friend of mine worked at this company, and the bane of his existence was one popular Arizona green tea bottle. The plastic and glass versions looked identical[1], so no way to sort it visually. Great for brand identity, bad downstream.

[1] https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/arizona-beverages-sw...

I read it as not a clearance problem, but that the lawyer didn't know who Lou Reed and Debbie Harry were and didn't want to release music from some randos the developers had found.

Yep. Apple came out with their own connector because USB Mini (where everyone else wanted to go) sucked. We got a robust, flippable connector. All in all, using only two kinds of connectors over 14 years (so far) seems far better than the industry average (proprietary, mini, micro, C)

Let's test it at the NREL National Wind Technology Center!

I went to a small show, and literally every single person there had earplugs.

What are your other ways?

Besides the wiping, these connectors are missing two other features: ESD protection and connection-sequencing.

Most user-facing connectors have a metal shield around them connected to frame ground. The idea is that any ESD shock goes safely through this first instead of to a sensitive data line.

Connection-sequencing ensures that the ground and power is connected before data lines are. If you look inside a cable-side USB connector, you'll see that the inner two wires (data) are recessed a little so that the power connectors go first. A device that is connected without power can (through its ESD protection circuit) attempt to draw power from data lines... this can cause damage because most data lines can't supply the current to power the entire device.

Flying is far cheaper than Amtrak.

I'm echoing a couple of replies before me, but I'll give concrete examples - MP3, JPEG, and H.264 are all lossy task-specific compressions. Lossless compression includes FLAC and TIFF.

For genetic data, HapZipper beats general-purpose compression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3488212/

So, yes, actively researched, but you've got to pick a specific task that makes sense. Even small niches are viable; I made a task-specific compressor to strip the essential numbers out of a remote sensor report to make it small enough to squirt to a satellite.

One of the earlier iPhone jailbreaks was a tiff image... complicated decompression/rendering algorithms leave room for implementation errors, which can be taken advantage of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe#JailbreakMe_1.0_(i...

I worked for a medical company that did RF tumor ablation. In Japan we sold a machine that cooked small tumors as an out-patient procedure, because their easy MRIs would spot them early. In the US, we sell more complicated machines that work on bigger tumors because we find them later here - when they get too big, you have to be very careful not to damage surrounding tissue.

At least you can find the W221 button by feel (as one does when they don't want to take their eyes off the road). The w205 one doesn't stick out at all. https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/2021-mercedes-benz-c-...

What's in the video? A one-sentence summary would save everyone a lot of time.

I've done carbon fiber boat repair, and removal is pretty easy - lots of cutting and sanding. Applying a patch works pretty well - mechanical bonding to the roughed-up surface is pretty good, and even if the patch uses 2x the material of the original, it doesn't affect overall weight too much.

There are two major complication to repair.

First, carbon fiber items are made in a mold. Repair doesn't have access to that mold, so you've got to build your own. You can get a good approximation from casting an adjacent part, or the opposite side - otherwise you have to improvise and sand it to match. Catastrophic failure, like when the bow is broken more than a few degrees, requires an alignment jig to keep the boat straight.

Second, carbon fiber works best when it's a laminate - e.g. a carbon/foam/carbon sandwich. So most designs are tubular or involve a stackup. This is tricky if the inside layer isn't accessible. Or a high-performance inner layer is used, like delicate honeycomb aluminum. Rebuilding something that was custom-made to tight tolerances is difficult.

I'd think that a degradable epoxy would be best for recycling applications; repair has a lot of other challenges.

Sure! Printers were slow and paper not an unlimited resource, so you can hide stuff that you don't need printed. For example, commonly-used macro definitions, SINE tables, or hardware drivers. It was just a tool to print only the stuff you were debugging at the time.

Of course it can be abused if the only thing being delivered is a hard copy. I'm a bit surprised that the original source code wasn't delivered and the customer built it themselves. But assemblers often ran on mainframes, and that wasn't cheap.

That sounds like the old days, when game cartridges needed to have code that would cause a Sega or Nintendo trademark to appear. The courts did not provide trademark/copyright protection for access control codes.

From Sega v. Accolade - https://openjurist.org/977/f2d/1510

>We hold that when there is no other method of access to the computer that is known or readily available to rival cartridge manufacturers, the use of the initialization code by a rival does not violate the [Lanham Trademark] Act even though that use triggers a misleading trademark display.

I seem to remember a similar case for the Gameboy ROM that needed to contain an image of the Nintendo trademark to boot, but couldn't find a good online reference. Lexmark tried to pull a similar stunt by claiming the ROM code in their cartridge chips was executable code in a secret language, but courts again said it was an access control code first, and thus functional not creative.

There are different kinds of training - it sounds like you got a good one, but it's not fully simulating a blown-door situation. There's a difference between less oxygen @12,000ft and the actual low pressure of 33,000ft: The higher altitude has about 1/3rd the pressure of the lower altitude, so it actively removes oxygen from your body (lungs, blood) faster. But simulating with an abrupt 33,000 feet would cause ear pressure problems, and it's a lot safer (and quickly reversible) to just play with the oxygen concentration.

Also, in this thread, I think you all know this, but wanted to make sure - a chemical oxygen generator "burns" to produce oxygen. The exothermic reaction is started with a small explosive; burning means its producing oxygen. Of course, in the 592 crash, they weren't properly packed with heat shielding, so catching other things on fire (plus the excess oxygen) was the cause of the crash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_oxygen_generator

I think it's a step in the direction of personal freedom, because addictive substances are kinda the opposite of free will.

>Even my robovac can detect when something is chocking the suction intake and shut down

I'm not sure I want my plane to just shut down if it ingests something.

Ah, cool, that makes sense!

If you need more power, I'd suggest a module like this one: https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ptn78000a.pdf Switched capacitors are great for low currents, but inductors work better for higher currents.

The theory on this is correct, but the ICL7660 is not designed to provide the kind of current you'd need to run a 12W audio amplifier. It maxes out around 50mA - see figure 7 of the datasheet[1]. 50mA*17v = only 0.85W.

Because I can't see the datasheet of the audio amplifier, it may be wired in a way that it doesn't use significant current from this supply (for example, in the pre-amp part of the circuit). But then we wouldn't be getting the advantage of 17v supply to make it louder than other games.

When overloaded, simple switching power supplies like this lose their regulation. In this case, the switcher operates at 10kHZ, so it might introduce a high-pitched sound to the output.

You can probably get away with connecting the -5v input to GND to make the circuit run at 12v instead of 17v. Or, look for a more capable negative power supply.

[1] https://www.renesas.com/us/en/document/dst/icl7660-datasheet

That's a reference to clean room design - you don't want to be accused of stealing a competitor's design, so anyone with knowledge of that design is considered "tainted" and not allowed to work on your core systems ("kernel").

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

Mighty neighborly of you to share the link!

Yeah! There is a lot of processing to do the disparity calculation... it's basically doing lots of correlations with a different amount of x shift and finding the delta-x that has the highest correlation. This delta-x disparity gets calculated in to a z distance.

So, intel made a custom processor for this that's really good at the correlations. The original one was the D4, and later they used their movidius chip. Both have lots of multiplier-accumulate silicon, so it can do the computations in parallel. Their architectures are also set up for convolution (which re-uses a lot of data) rather than random-processing (like a CPU does), so they could feed these math engines without a lot of data transfer -- this makes it more power efficient. You could do something similar in an FPGA, but dedicated silicon is going to be faster, cheaper, and use less power.

The sad thing is that Intel had a real advantage in RealSense... they had good processors in there (especially with the Movidius chips) that were well integrated (e.g. they didn't have to support a fancy SDK for all users - just the internal Realsense group). Doing the same 3d processing with ARM or Intel is 1/10th the frame rate at much more power.

PRN (Pseudorandom noise) in the context of GPS is just a coding standard - it's just CDMA (aka Spread Spectrum) and it allows all satellite to use the same frequency. A side benefit is that the signals can be below the noise floor, and when you apply the gain from decoding, it rises the signal above the noise floor (exactly like how you can pick out a voice in a crowded bar if you know what that voice sounds like).

Yep, that bring-your-own-tv is the model the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800 all used -- good to see that reuse is still alive.

I had the opposite experience. My macbook air battery was dying, so I paid the $129 to replace it. When I got the computer back, it wouldn't charge. So, they replaced the motherboard. I got it back and it still wouldn't charge - so they handed me a brand-new next-gen macbook air. Inconvenient, sure, but exceeded my expectations. I've found they've been generous with battery replacements.

My coach was saying she preferred the tell-it-like-it-is British commentary ("That's a devastating defeat for the xxx who has been improving and really expected to place") to the candied-up American commentary ("all that work paid off for yyy")