Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
 
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As a courtesy to our old-fashioned (to put it politely) FRIAM list members who are still reading email on their TRS-80 ascii terminals, I will supply a synopses of the material contained in that new-fangled url thingie below: the article discusses a massive, indifferent, brooding silence.
You're welcome. Doug Roberts
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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Doug -
You may think they are ignoring you, but I think they are just going through internal review on whether to let the ICBM division or the quadcopter swarm division of Google have first crack at solving the problem. If you notice all your neighbors evacuating abruptly and the local chapter of the SPCA sweeping in to grab up all the peacocks in your yard, you should probably dive down that bolt-hole you have under your desk to the end-of-the-world bunker! Google is, after all, sworn to do no evil (thus the neighbors and the peacocks). - Steve this was written on my Tektronix 4013 (APL keyboard) storage vector graphics terminal with ASCII and EBCIDIC emulators and an awesome version of Battlezone running from my CP/M machine. Shall I typeset a complex equation and take a polaroid of it for you?
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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Steve,
I'm silently, yet somewhat massively indifferently brooding over your comments. Further, *+^&%%$^&*# [carrier lost] On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
On 2/4/13 4:11 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Now don't freak out, but you may have to upgrade to MS-DOS to use http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvgtk but otherwise just print it out on your 4631.. http://w140.com/kurt/tek_new_products_mar-apr_1975.pdf Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
That was a good one ;-) If you see a group of people with fancy glasses approaching your house, then it is indeed time to grab up your belongings and run. Although as you know - resistance is futile.. -J. Sent from Android Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote: Doug -
You may think they are ignoring you, but I think they are just going through internal review on whether to let the ICBM division or the quadcopter swarm division of Google have first crack at solving the problem. If you notice all your neighbors evacuating abruptly and the local chapter of the SPCA sweeping in to grab up all the peacocks in your yard, you should probably dive down that bolt-hole you have under your desk to the end-of-the-world bunker! Google is, after all, sworn to do no evil (thus the neighbors and the peacocks). - Steve this was written on my Tektronix 4013 (APL keyboard) storage vector graphics terminal with ASCII and EBCIDIC emulators and an awesome version of Battlezone running from my CP/M machine. Shall I typeset a complex equation and take a polaroid of it for you?
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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Well, the Parrot Farm is recovering nicely from the small neutron bomb detonation that temporarily knocked us off the air yesterday, mid-email. Fortunately, the WiFi on the GNB (Google Neutron Bomb) was defective, and so we only received a short burst. Oh, and thanks to the Android Police (and not The Google), we received the answer as to when the WiFi and bluetooth problems with the Nexus 4 will be fixed: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-is-evil.html
--Doug On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
Just to update fellow FRIAMers.
The most common standard display device in the world today is the 16x2 character LCD display. The vast majority of installations use it in 4 bit mode.
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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I prefer the sundial, myself. On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote: Just to update fellow FRIAMers.
Doug Roberts
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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A sundial only works consistently (sort of) between the tropics.
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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I'm usually happy with a close approximation of the current time. Such as: the current time is Wednesday. On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote: A sundial only works consistently (sort of) between the tropics.
Doug Roberts
[hidden email] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Sarbajit Roy (testing)
Sarbajit -
Can you elaborate? I think this one just flew past me... 2 lines of 16 characters with only 4 bit indexing (alphabet of 16 characters?)... This sounds like (much) more than a digital watch (do those even exist anymore?) or even a calculator (only 1 line?). I feel like you handed us a riddle like the sphynx! I tried a massive, brooding, indifferent posture to Dougs posts on this one, but I could only hold the pose for a few seconds before breaking into a belly laugh appropriate only for the Buddha or Santa Claus. - Steve Just to update fellow FRIAMers. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus -
Sadly, and this may make you choke on whatever you are drinking at the moment, so put it down, what prompted me to think of this (aside from Doug's reference to the Trash80 era) was that I recently found some curled faded sheets of dry-silver process paper (most likely FROM a 4631) in one of my stashes of nostalgic documents which I *think* were originally printouts of my junior project in computer graphics where I "invented" a cursive alphabet (stroke) which required a hash table (straight out of Knuth) to look up appropriate "joinery" between various Cap and lower case letters. I was so excited when Knuth (himself) came out (several years later) with Metafont... Does the new generation even *know* of Knuth's work before TeX? I never hear reference even to Metafont, much less his seminal work in algorithms and data structures. - Steve
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
The interface to the bog standard LCD display can use either 8 or 4 bits parallel, which only changes the number of outs you need to do to fill the line buffer, which has an 8 bit byte for each character The 8 bit character ROM often has fascinating character sets in the high half depending on where the surplus came from. -- rec -- On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:16 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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You see, this is the kind of material that keeps me on FRIAM. --Doug On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:29 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
<snicker> I just ordered another Google Nexus 4. LG is gearing up to produce a new batch, for which the estimated shipping date of 2 - 3 weeks matches the now-estimated release date of Android4.2.2, which is purported to contain a less-buggy Qualcomm wifi driver, and patches to the buggy 4.2.1 wifi and bluetooth code. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me if LG hasn't tweaked a manufacturing issue or two that I believe existed in their first production run.
Hey, what have I got to lose? Google pays the return shipping if the phone is broken. At the very least I get some more writing material. --Doug
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
[hidden email] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
Steve
Being a devotee of ancient computing devices myself, I was responding to Doug's TRS-80 ascii comment here's what a 16x2 LCD module looks like http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hN2n9HggfCw/T2TOHEMIAsI/AAAAAAAAAAc/LrJ6uy2cNrs/s1600/lcd162b-yhy.jpg These critters are so ubiquitous that you fail to see them. These modules have an 8 bit data bus to communicate with Z-80s, 8085 etc (nowadays though PICS, AVRs and ATMELs). They also have a facility to split the 8 bit data into 2 successive nibbles of 4 bits (ie 4 pins + 2 control pins= 6 pins). This allows for instance a 12 or 14 PIC (with 8 - 10 I/O lines) to be used to implement very small devices. The design advantage ot using these standard displays versus dedicated/custom displays is that they have no end-of-life problems. They were available 20 years ago and still seem to be going very strong with prices falling to @ US$1 per unit Sarbajit On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:46 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
Another mystery of these displays was solved for me the other day when Bunnie took his Media Lab visitors to a direct chip bonding shop in Shenzhen. On the back of the bog standard LCD display there will often be a dome of black epoxy in place of a chip. I thought they were hiding the chip, but in fact the dome covers a piece of raw silicon integrated circuit glued to the board and wired to the board with tiny wires. -- rec -- freaklabs.org is off-line at the moment, but that looks like the right posting. Lady Ada's tutorial gets to the 8/4 bit bus after several pages of prelims.
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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We call it chip-on-glass, and it actually improves the reliability of the device. When thiese devices first came out they used a Hitachi processor/IC. Then some Koreans made a clone (shifted around some control words), then the Chinese made their clone ICs (more control word shifts and incompatibilities). Sanity descended, now everything is hidden under the epoxy bond, and compatibility has returned.
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
Steve wrote:
"I recently found some curled faded sheets of dry-silver process paper (most likely FROM a 4631) in one of my stashes of nostalgic documents which I *think* were originally printouts of my junior project in computer graphics where I "invented" a cursive alphabet (stroke) which required a hash table (straight out of Knuth) to look up appropriate "joinery" between various Cap and lower case letters." It's heartbreaking to browse through those old catalogs and technical manuals. Full circuit diagrams -- machines crafted by hackers for hackers. Marcus P.S. Brush with greatness: I have a copy of Knuth's seminumerical algorithms which was once owned by Brosl Hasslacher. -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: Massive, Indifferent, Brooding Silence
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
Roger/Sarbajit-
Doug's comment that "this" is what keeps him on the FRIAM ist was probably only partially "tongue-in-cheek". This level of geekery is surely near and dear to half of our hearts if the other half naturally sit and puzzle at our arcane mumblings... but in defense of the other forms of geekery (including philosophical maunderings), it's all good. I really appreciate the level of engagement and interest across a broad range of topics that can be found here. I *do* have at least 3 of these devices (or nearly) in my collection of "stuff", the more obvious being the digital readouts on my Sony Amp and my Sony CD changer as well as a (longer version?) on a rack-mount USB keyboard/trackball system designed for use with rackmount clusters. I was expecting Sarbajit to remind me about some really obvious digital readout that is *even* more ubiquitous that I hadn't thought of. Like the car odometer or radio tuner... but they all seem to be of a species of semi-special displays.. probably not custom per model or even manufacturer, but clearly evolving and changing often. On the other hand, their interface might very well *BE* a superset or variant of what you describe here! - Steve Steve Being a devotee of ancient computing devices myself, I was responding to Doug's TRS-80 ascii comment here's what a 16x2 LCD module looks like http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hN2n9HggfCw/T2TOHEMIAsI/AAAAAAAAAAc/LrJ6uy2cNrs/s1600/lcd162b-yhy.jpg These critters are so ubiquitous that you fail to see them. These modules have an 8 bit data bus to communicate with Z-80s, 8085 etc (nowadays though PICS, AVRs and ATMELs). They also have a facility to split the 8 bit data into 2 successive nibbles of 4 bits (ie 4 pins + 2 control pins= 6 pins). This allows for instance a 12 or 14 PIC (with 8 - 10 I/O lines) to be used to implement very small devices. The design advantage ot using these standard displays versus dedicated/custom displays is that they have no end-of-life problems. They were available 20 years ago and still seem to be going very strong with prices falling to @ US$1 per unit Sarbajit
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