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Ah a new author to explore - thanks for the link. Slurped up the first book into my library.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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In the books, did they really inject 'highly oxygenated' blood, or something, to save the reporter who was in the shipping container in space? I reached that part of the Amazon series and just couldn't get over it, and didn't make it much further. The lady was basically at 0 atmospheres, so pumping such a liquid into her bloodstream would have basically killed her when it expanded to a gas and gave her localized bends (or whatever such a condition is called).
The previous years were great! But what I saw of last season left me eye-rolling too much.
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I'd read that the series had deviated somewhat from the books, so I don't know. I haven't seen season 5(*), so...
(*) waiting on the Blu-Ray
Software Zen: delete this;
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Watch season 5 before 6: they are connected (and that's all the spoiler I'll give).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There does seem to be a weird hint of Laconia at the end of the video. No clue how they're going to fit that, plus the end of Marco into 6 episodes.
Or maybe they're setting up for a new non-Rocinante series vs Laconia?
TTFN - Kent
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Gary Wheeler wrote: I've had a pre-order in for it since July .
You're a bit late to the party. My pre-order went in on 30th October...
... last year.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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President of the Naomi Nagata fan club, are we?
Software Zen: delete this;
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I created a reminder in my phone for Dec 10th I also re-watched the whole show this summer, so I'm pretty awake on the intrigue.
I bought the books while I was on recovery, but since I do not read so often I'm still on Leviathan Wakes. Hours of reading in perspective, I'll have to take some vacations to advance significantly (sadly, I seldom read novels, except on vacation).
"Five fruits and vegetables a day? What a joke!
Personally, after the third watermelon, I'm full."
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That reminds me, I still haven't watched the fifth season...
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it is weird that I have duplicate icon for SSD drive in Windows Explorer.
I bought a 2TB SSD hard drive from eBay and plug in my laptop. I see two icons named as such SSD-2TB(D .
not sure why it has two icons for the same drive.
diligent hands rule....
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Stereo icon?
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The second one allows you to read and write in reverse.
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LSB / MSB, or bit order?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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you made my day! I learned something new...
diligent hands rule....
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If this is an external SSD, some of the interfaces create two drives for some reason. One drive is accessible, the other isn't.
I've seen this mostly with the enclosures you can buy and populate with your own drive.
Software Zen: delete this;
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yes, it is external SSD. I think the vendor designed their own enclosures and snap in SSD.
diligent hands rule....
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it is more weird: on my laptop these two icons are the same drive such as \D:.
but on my desktop, they are different icons for different drives such as D: and E:.
diligent hands rule....
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Modernizing an old computer design is a weird thing. First you strip away all anachronisms and look what's left.
In the case of the original Elf from 1976 that was the processor itself. By pure chance, I got hands on a CDP1802B, which also already existed in 1976, but it was the faster version which used to cost more. It hums along at 6MHz without breaking a sweat, giving me almost four times the performance of the original Elf. I don't have any means on the breadboard to carefully monitor the processor's core voltage and temperature, but overclocking the processor is possible and I may yet squeeze considerably more out of very old silicon.
Toggle switches (or hex keypads) and LED address and data displays are gone, but there is still an interesting aspect about them. The original Elf had no ROM to boot it. Instead, the switches and displays acted as DMA devices and allowed to enter the program manually before letting the processor start executing anything. A modern Elf can have an all RAM configuration, like the original. Why not copy the contents from a ROM to RAM using the same DMA mechanism after a reset? It's still the same old Elf and no typing involved to get that thing running. Plus keeping the advantage of not having a ROM awkwardly floating around in your 64k memory map.
Now, we still need some I/O. For the time being that is a serial port and a VT52 or VT100 terminal (actually an old PC running TeraTerm). That was not part of the old Elf concept, because hooking up a 80$ computer to a terminal that costs at least ten times as much seemed a bit silly. However, that option was added later for those who somehow got their hands on a terminal. The cool thing was, that the Elf never required a UART for serial communication. Serial data was sent and received by the processor itself with carefully timed software routines at 300 baud. Well, Zwölf does it the same way, but I rewrote these routines a little so that they now send and receive at 19200 baud. 38400 baud are possible, but the little processor can't keep up yet when the terminal sends packets of data during a XMODEM upload. The problem is, that there is only very little time to actually do anything with the received data before the UART on the other side already sends the next byte. Still, even at 19200 baud I can load a program faster than with an old C64 floppy drive. Indeed, I'm comfortably in the mid range of the C64's floppy accelerators. Not so bad for a crutch that only has to be sufficient until I have something better.
Up to here we have mostly taken stuff away from the old Elf. Now let's finally add something. RAM. Lot's of it. In 1976 RAM chips were slow, had only a tiny capacity and cost more than their weight in gold. That's why the original Elf only had 256 bytes of RAM. Barely sufficient for the simple trainer it originally was, but it kept the price for your own computer under 100$.
With only a very modest amount of simple logic chips I can access fairly modern SRAMs with a capacity of 512 kb each and up to a total of 16 Mb. Of course the processor can't access so much memory without banking, but a little speciality of the processor (which is often seen as a disadvantage) allows me to do the bank switching without the processor noticing it. I can call code anywhere at any time without having to fear any problems. The code loaded to each memory page now is something similar to a DLL. And this opens up a lot of possibilities for a serious operating system, something also unheard of for the original Elf.
Turns out that modernizing the old ELF is more about taking things away than adding things and about the only thing that was not available in 1976 was fast enough RAM at an affordable price. I was looking for the schematics of the original Elf in archived issues of Popular Electronics magazine. The old magazines were full of ads for computers like the Altair. In one ad for the Imsai 8080, they proudly announced that this computer was expandable up to one megabyte of banked memory. For that, the Zwölf needs only two memory chips for about 11 bucks.
The Imsai needed 16 S-100 cards at only 3900 Dollars each, assembled and tested or a bit cheaper as kits. Plus a truly huge power supply. That's about 63000 Dollars, just for the RAM and the power supply, 306,240.90 Dollars today, adjusted for inflation. I don't know how fast they used to run their 8080, but the Zwölf can outperform the old monster and even run on batteries, despite being mostly made of components from the same time. And it even costs less than the original Elf without adjusting for inflation.
I'm really having fun here.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Tl;dr
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Awesome, you're really making progress.
I was looking at some old Popular Electronics last week and astounded at the price of memory, only the rich could afford it. (That definitely wasn't me)
I'm getting on with my Z80 stuff and really enjoying it.
Created a 24 key keypad board using cherry keys.
Cheated though using a 328P to scan and debounce.
Created a 7-segment display board...6 segment.
Also cheated using a MM7219.
Well into writing a monitor program for it.
Waiting on parts to create an EEPROM emulator, got the idea from the guy I bought the CPU board from.
Have a lot of plans.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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I remember an ad for a 64K S-100 bus memory board for $1495. I couldn't imagine needing that much RAM.
Crap, I use icons now bigger than that...
Software Zen: delete this;
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I hear ya...and could you image surfing on a 1200 baud modem. Take 24 hours to load a page.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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Mike Hankey wrote: a 1200 baud modem
Back in 1991/2 that's what I had to use to connect between my PC in the London office, and the system in Louisville, CO. Made customer support quite a challenge.
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I can imagine that was a challenge.
I tried to do the old BBS's with a 1200 and I remember that being enough of a challenge that I didn't do it long.
The less you need, the more you have.
Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally.
JaxCoder.com
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I remember paying a fortune just to upgrade my 8k PET to 16k!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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