Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht sent a YouTube pointer to some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can’t have flying cars here in the 21st century, well, this is better than nothing.
- Linux Mint 11 does not handle the integrated graphics on the Dell Optiplex SX270. Even the liveCD version doesn’t detect video correctly and is basically unusable. Kubuntu 11.10, by contrast, works correctly on this admittedly creaky machine. (Xubuntu is up next.) What is Mint doing wrong on the video side?
- Cyanogen will have an Ice Cream Sandwich version of their bootable Android distro in January.
- Back when I built telescopes, I used black spray paint for the inside of the tube. NASA now has something maybe a little bit better. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I have been unable to figure out what the active devices are on this audio power amp, but they’d better be good ones: It’ll cost you $650,000. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Nothing makes you feel old better than recalling that when the world’s first commercial microprocessor was released 40 years ago, I was already a sophomore in college. Hey you kids! Get off my accumulator!
- I inherited about a microgram of St. Francis of Assisi from my godmother, all mounted in a cool little monstrance. Alas, under the microscope it looks like dirt. If you want a bigger (and more self-evidential) piece of a saint, you can have St. Vitalis’ skull for as little as 800 euros. (Then again, considering his specialty, they probably got more for his pelvis.)
- Yes, death is nearly always fatal, poor guy.
- And if he was taking Avandia, he should call his lawyer, (very) long distance.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: humor · linux · software · tablets · telescopes · weirdness
"
The Pivetta Opera One looks like it was made from a spare Starfleet warp core from the 24th century. And I say, for that price, it better damn well be. 😀
Oh, and I’m told that ICS will require 16 Gb of RAM to compile. Now you know why I jacked my RAM and upgraded to a hex-core Phenom II processor. (Unfortunately, my Windows drive appears to be on its last legs…I have a replacement, but I won’t have time to do a reinstall until next Friday at earliest, as I’m at the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium this weekend…)
I’m a little boggled by those ICS compile-time requirements. WTH are they doing in there that it takes 16GB to do the build?
Not sure but I’m planning on setting up to do Gingerbread builds soon (requires 8 Gb RAM, or so I’ve heard), so I guess I’ll find out. It may just be to avoid excessive swapping and thus make the build take even longer than it already does. (I presume that this means to build everything, kernel, utilities, installed apps, the whole enchilada. And a Linux kernel build can take quite some time, I know from experience.)
The Pivetta Opera appears to have a couple dozen TO-3 transistors on each of those red heatsinks. My guess is that it’s a classic linear class-A audio amp. They can have very low distortion, but also very low efficiency (thus the huge heatsinks).
In the “winners get to write the history” department: I wouldn’t give Intel credit for the first micro. TI’s TMS1000 was a far better example. It was a *complete* microcomputer, not just a piece of a CPU like Intel’s 4004. We used (or tried to use) the 4004 when I worked at Kodak. It was a hopeless kluge. We had to add so many support chips to get it to work that we were better off without it; just building the CPU ourselves out of TTL.
Bummer on the TO3s. I was sorta hoping that they had one of those Eimac power amp tubes that they used to advertise so much in Ham Radio magazine back in the 70s. Given the popularity of tube amps these days, it would be appropriate, but don’t be holding the speaker wires on the downbeat.
Xerox almost introduced a high-end copier with an all-TTL microcontroller in the late 1970s, but couldn’t get the unit cost down and canceled the project only months before manufacturing was to begin.
My view? They shoulda had an 1802.
And here I thought McIntosh power amps were expensive.
Here is a video of the RoboKopter and the operator and controls – interesting.
http://youtu.be/rD3oeLNFYtE?t=1m5s
Also look at more videos from that channel – a lot of flights over Warsaw
http://www.youtube.com/user/latajacakamera
looks like the power supply is in the center – a pair of large toroid transformers in a figure 8 mount with rectifiers and filters in the center, and the amplifier stages on the outside.
Specs say:
The class AB Opera One provides 12 channels of 1600 watts each into 8Ω, for a total of 19,200W with a THD of 0.05% from 20Hz to 20kHz. It can also drive 4Ω loads with even higher power levels.
Jack
I installed Xubuntu 10.10 (too lazy to d/l the most recent) on an old P4 3.2GHz box last weekend. Zero problems.
It recognized the integrated graphics. It even recognized the Dlink 1340 USB Wifi adapter without any problems.
So far, clean and snappy performance.
If you want Java (3D plotting in SAGE) you’ll need to add the partners repository in Synaptic.
some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can’t have flying cars here in the 21st century…
There have been riots in Warsaw in this century? It seems the football hooligans were out in force. (British football fans seem to have quieted down in recent years. Last year I read of a “road game” in Spain, where about 25,000 British fans came down, drank about 250,000 liters of beer, and went home with only a handful having been arrested.)
“Cyanogen” (Steve Kondik) has been hired by Samsung (per Eric S Raymond).
he should call his lawyer, (very) long distance.
Calling that sort of lawyer could be a local call (IYKWIMAITYD).