At the last general meeting, members were encouraged to put into Google from Internet Explorer the words windows live scanner to get to a location that would do an automated scan and review of your computer. Microsoft changed the page the next day making my key words close but not as accurate or as helpful. The replacement words are full service scan, and use Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky", or click the link and follow the instructions.
Two actions have helped define what SPAUG is going to do during the rebuilding of the Lodge:
• the official announcement that the Lodge is accepting obligations to rent facilitates through December (not just October) and
• finding a possible "home" for SPAUG for the next two years. No contracts have been signed yet, but one indication will be where we have the 25th SPAUG Reunion in December.
Yes, assuming all goes well, we are proposing to have our 25th Reunion Dinner at our new facility as a prelude to our regular meeting. Again there are details to be worked out.
We had a very instructional session with the new SPAUG laptop and we need some more. Rather than setting the SPAUG laptop to my liking, we have been taking the route of including all interested persons with its assembly. Generally, it is intended to have XP as its default OS, Vista as the next in a different partition, the data in a third, some sort of Linux in a fourth and a partition for backups.
We are about ready to start in again.
The old SPAUG laptop will be sold. The Planning Committee essentially rejected an outside bid for $100 saying that SPAUG members should have the opportunity to bid on it.
How to do it? That was not stated by the Planning Committee. We could try to do the auction on-line but that means a lot of emails and setup.
Probably the best way is to send out the Belarc inventory of what is on the laptop to all members and then have an auction at the next SPAUG meeting, after the speaker with a start of $100 and increments of $10. What do you think is fair? Whatever I send out, I will endeavor to make it all-inclusive but there may be attachments for clarity of presentation. This handles those who do not receive attachments at all because of the ISP.
Two Microsoft Service Packs are in the offing, both late in 2007 — SP3 for XP and SP1 for Vista. The Vista one has to cover a whole lot of sins to get me to purchase Vista. The manufacturers still have not been able to catch up enough. That the service packs are coming out at all are as a result of part of the Consent Degree on Antitrust. Researching this item could provide hours of entertainment.
The argument between Blu-Ray at 35 GB vs. HD-DVD at 25 GB seems to be going for the increased capacity and darn the DRM, full speed ahead. Note the Blockbuster decision recently.
Fred Pfost talked about some engineering aspects of video recording that he was personally involved in. For his efforts, he received several Emmys: for the world's first commercially successful video tape recorder, for the Instant Replay-Stop Action Dics Recorder, and one for lifetime achievement. His work led eventually to the VCRs, TiVos and other digital recorders we enjoy today.
When one compares the information content requirements for video recording versus audio recording the ratio is about 1000 to 1. Pulling tape at high speeds is not practical when one considers tape speeds of 10 to 100 feet per second. RCA first tried 360 inches per second (30 feet per second) on 2 track recording and later lowered that to 240 ips (20 fps.) Crosby ran 100 ips (8.3 fps) using a 10 track multiplexed signal. England developed VERA that ran at 840 ips (70 fps) for 15 minutes of recording on a 21 inch diameter reel. Ampex using a rotating head approach and frequency modulation ran the tape at 15 ips but the head to tape speed was 1500 ips (85 mph!) (when spinning at 14,400 rpm). This gave a video bandwidth of about 4 mHz which the industry wanted and needed. This also allowed 1 hour recording time on a 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch wide tape by almost a mile long.
All of these developments were done in the early 1950s. We originally used amplitude modulation but later changed to frequency modulation. The original FM circuitry used a high RF carrier frequency with subsequent heterodyning down to a frequency compatible with recording onto tape. This circuitry was followed by a simpler system directly modulating a multivibrator circuit running at a carrier frequency compatible with recording on tape (5 mHz).
The original rotary head orientation wrote arcuate traces across the tape. In playback we saw a scalloped output as the head crossed the tape. It took us quite a while to deduce the cause of this scalloping. We finally decided the cause was due to the fact that the tape was longitudinally oriented and there was some longitudinal motion as well as transverse motion in the passage of the head across the tape in the arcuate sweep. Thus higher output near the tape edge and lower output near the middle of the head pass. This would require a large amount of automatic gain control. While I was developing this AGC circuit we decided to just change the head orientation to produce transverse paths across the entire tape thus eliminating the variations in the output signal off tape. We also changed to unoriented tape. This was the configuration used by the entire industry until the advent of the helical scan configuration some 20 years later. I was put in charge of the transducer design and video head assembly design.
Here's a bio of Fred Pfost., and for more awards and activities, google "fred pfost"
Ever get an error message and want to write it down? Or google it? You can't google the message if you can't get the text, and particularly long ones, or ones with an obscure error number like 0x80040e09, are cumbersome and prone to error to transcribe. Starting with Windows 2000, you can copy the entire contents of a message box to the clipboard by pressing Ctrl+c. Then use Ctrl+v to paste into your Google search bar, or into a document, such as Word or Wordpad. You can read the whole article (and thanks from grateful readers for the information here: weblogs.asp.net/chuckop/archive/2004/04/08/110153.aspx
And here's the link to the lifehacker item, which has a nice illustration -- www.lifehacker.com/index.php?refId=268602