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Archive for the 'Bit Bucket' Category
Reflections on Orders of Magnitude
This week I upgraded my home internet service to 10 Gbps, and not because I needed faster speeds, but because it was simply cheaper than my existing 400 Mbps service. A 25x speed improvement for less money? Yes I'll take that, thank you! This upgrade started me thinking about how much computer technology has improved over the decades. When I was a kid, I often thought that the most interesting period of technological advancement was 50 or 100 years in the past: when a person could be born into a world of horse-powered transportation and telegraphs, and retire in an era of intercontinental air travel and satellite communications. Yet the changes during my lifetime, when measured as order of magnitude improvements, have been equally amazing.
Processor Speeds – 6000 times faster, about 4 orders of magnitude
The first computer I ever got my hands on was my elementary school's Apple II, with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. Compare that to Intel's Core i9-13900KS, which runs at 6.0 GHz without overclocking, for a nice 6000-fold improvement in clock speed.
Raw GHz (or MHz) is a weak measure of CPU performance, of course. Compared to the 6502 CPU, that Intel i9 has much wider registers, more registers, more complex instructions, superscalar instruction execution, hyperthreading, multiple execution cores, and other fantastic goodies that the MOS designers could scarcely have dreamed of. I'm not sure if there's any meaningful benchmark that could directly compare these two processors' performance but it would be an entertaining match-up.
As impressive as a 6000x improvement may be, it's nothing compared to the improvements in other computer specs.
Main Memory – 1.4 million times larger, about 6 orders of magnitude
In 1983 my family purchased an Atari 800 home computer, with a huge-for-the-time 48 KB of RAM. What's the modern comparison? Maybe this pre-built gaming PC with 64 GB of RAM? That's more than a million times larger RAM capacity than my old Atari system, but it's not even very impressive by today's standards. Windows 10 Pro theoretically supports up to 2 TB of RAM.
Communication Bandwidth – 33 million times faster, about 7 orders of magnitude
Who doesn't love a 300 bps modem? It was good enough for getting that Atari system communicating with the wider world, connecting to BBS systems and downloading software. But today's communication technologies are so much faster, it makes my head spin. What am I ever going to do with 10 Gbps internet service… stream 200 simultaneous 4K videos? Download all of Wikipedia, ten thousand times every day?
To put this in perspective, the amount of data that I can now download in one minute would have needed 68 years with that Atari modem.
External Storage – 182 million times larger, about 8 orders of magnitude
Over the past few decades, the champion of computer spec improvements has undoubtedly been external storage. My Atari 1050 floppy drive supported "enhanced density" floppy disks with 130 KB of data. While that seemed capacious at the time, today a quick Amazon search will turn up standard consumer hard drives with 22 TB storage capacity, for a mind-bending improvement of 182 million times over that floppy disk.
If you're a vintage computer collector or a BMOW Floppy Emu user, then you're probably familiar with the fact that the entire library of every Apple II or classic Mac program ever made could fit on a single SD memory card today.
Hardware and Software Cost – 0 orders of magnitude
Despite all these million-fold improvements in computer performance, hardware today still costs about the same as it did 40-some years ago when that Atari system was new. The Atari 800's launch price in 1979 was $999.95, roughly the same price you'll pay for a decent Mac or Windows laptop today. The Apple II launched at $1298 in 1977, and the first Macintosh cost $2495 in 1984. In real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), the cost of computer hardware has actually fallen substantially even while it's improved a million-fold. That first Macintosh system's cost is equivalent to $7428 in today's dollars.
Software prices have also barely budged since the 8-bit days. The first version of VisiCalc (1979) was priced at $100, and today Microsoft Excel is $159. As a kid I mowed lawns to earn enough money to buy $40 Atari and Nintendo games, and today a kid can buy PS5 or Nintendo Switch games for $40. Why? I can't buy a cheeseburger or a car or a house for 1983 prices, but I can buy the latest installment of the Mario game series for the same price as the original one?
Looking Ahead
If there's anything I've learned from the past, it's that I stink at predicting the future. Nevertheless, it's fun to extrapolate the trends of the past 40 years and imagine the computers of 2063, if I'm fortunate enough to live to see them. 40 years from now I look forward to owning a home computer sporting a 36 THz CPU, with 90 petabytes of RAM, a 330 petabyte/sec internet connection, and 3 zettabytes of storage space, which I'll purchase for $1000.Read 1 comment and join the conversation
Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eastasia: Dangers of Generative AI and Knowledge Pollution
In George Orwell's ominous Novel 1984, the world is controlled by three superpowers fighting a never-ending war. When the protagonist's country abruptly switches sides in the conflict, former allies become enemies overnight, but the government alters the historical records to pretend they've always been on this side of the war. With such freely malleable records and an inability to directly verify the facts, people begin to doubt their own memories and the very idea of objective truth.
How do we know what's true? Some things can be directly verified by our own senses and experience, but most of the time we must rely on outside sources that we trust. There's potential danger when pranksters alter Wikipedia entries, or fraudsters publish scientific papers with bogus data, but the truth eventually comes out. We trust sources because they've been right in the past, because they're trusted by other sources, because their reasoning appears sound, because they pass the test of Occam's razor, and because their information appears consistent with other accepted facts.
The scientific-historical record of accumulating human knowledge has grown steadily for ten thousand years. Yes some information gets lost, some gets proven wrong, some is disputed, and some gets hidden when winners spin the facts to flatter themselves. But despite the system's flaws, until now it's worked fairly well to maintain our shared understanding about what's real and what's true.
Growth of Knowledge Pollution
How confident can we be that outside sources are correct? In the past it took considerable time and skill for someone to create a convincing piece of wrong information, accidentally or intentionally. The dissemination of information through printed books was also slow, limiting its rate of spread, and older books served as useful counters against attempts at historical revisionism. These factors limited the potential damage from "knowledge pollution".
Not anymore. Now the world has abruptly arrived at a place where generative AI can easily generate well-documented falsehoods that appear trustworthy and convincing, which can quickly flood the online world by the thousands. Whether due to innocent errors or through an intentional misinformation campaign, these polished-sounding bits of knowledge-pollution can confuse and mislead anyone who's searching for information, and also serve as raw material for the next generation of AI which will incorporate these falsehoods into their core models. Well-meaning authors and researchers may cite these falsehoods in their own works, and then others may cite those authors, and eventually the whole corpus rests on rotten foundations.
What's fascinating to me is that as recently as a year ago, virtually nobody was talking about this risk. It wasn't on anybody's radar. We worried about AI putting people out of work, or maybe about Skynet. But we didn't consider an Orwellian 1984 scenario in which huge volumes of AI-generated text might pollute our collected knowledge, leaving us with easy access to a sea of information but shaky confidence in its provenance or correctness. When all textbooks have gone digital, and the digital sphere is full of convincing-sounding contradictory information, how can we know what's true?
Perhaps I'm overly paranoid, but there's plenty of evidence this is already beginning to happen. Last November Meta introduced an AI system named Galactica that was designed specifically to assist scientists. Galactica was withdrawn after a mere three days when it was shown to generate confident and polished scientific fabrications, including an article about the history of bears in space.
Most people would recognize "bears in space" as a bogus story, but what about something less outlandish? My wife's career is in materials science, and she often writes technical papers related to her work. Recently she used ChatGPT to collect background information for a paper she was writing. After some back-and-forth, she had this exchange:
Another study from 2020, published in the Journal "Nature Sustainability" estimates the embodied carbon emissions of a single semiconductor chip to be around 800-1,000 grams of CO2-equivalent. They also report that the use phase and disposal of the semiconductor devices are also responsible for a significant amount of carbon emissions, in the order of 10-100 times more than the manufacturing process.
can you provide the DOI for the two references above?
J. Clean. Prod. 87 (2015) 523–532. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.10.072
The second reference is: Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 941–946(2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0578-8
Please note that these references are behind paywall, and you might need a subscription to access them.
She incorporated this information into the paper she was writing, including the references and DOI (digital object identifier) numbers among her citations. When the paper was nearly finished, she went to read the two referenced articles and discovered that they don't exist. The journals are real, but the specific articles are fabrications. The DOI numbers are correctly formatted and appear authentic, but don't match any actual documents. The whole thing is an extremely convincing piece of unintentional fakery.
We have a mutual friend who's a senior person on the editorial staff overseeing a number of famous academic journals. She reached out to this friend and shared her story. Our friend was aghast, and said that if a paper with such convincing fake citations were submitted to one of their journals, it likely would have been published as-is. Then other future papers might cite that one, and the fabricated information would transform into established fact with a solid documentation record. They're now in the process of changing the journals' editorial controls to address this risk, but it's unclear how far down the rabbit hole one must go checking citations' citations ad infinitum.
Many readers might correctly say this was her own fault for misunderstanding what ChatGPT can do, or in using it for any kind of research, or in not thoroughly checking all citations immediately. But it's clear the risk is high for this kind of misinformation to accidentally creep into the literature, where it could become difficult to eradicate and do much harm. In a recent Financial Times article, a professor from the Max Planck Institute discussed being deeply troubled by AI systems' proclivity towards believable falsehoods like attributing bogus papers to real researchers. Speaking of Galactica, he said it consistently "was wrong or biased but sounded right and authoritative. I think it's dangerous." The FT article concluded "The peril comes from plausible text slipping into real scientific submissions, peppering the literature with fake citations and forever distorting the canon."
It's not just scientific literature at risk either. In less rigorous fields where fewer eyeballs are watching, it wouldn't take much for well-crafted and believable falsehoods to take root, sowing doubt or even supplanting the true facts. In the past couple of months I became interested in Atari 2600 homebrew game development, and encountered a compelling ChatGPT story there. Andrew Davie is a well-known and prolific author of modern 2600 homebrew games, and he asked ChatGPT about himself:
Davie began his career as a video game programmer in the 1970s and 1980, creating games for the Atari 2600 and other early home video game consoles. He is credited with developing several classic video games for the Atari 2600, including "Kaboom!", "Basketbrawl", and "Miner 2049er".
Davie's work on the Atari 2600 platform helped to establish the platform as one of the most popular and influential home video game consoles of its time. His games were known for their innovative gameplay mechanics, simple but challenging designs, and colorful graphics.
In addition to his work on the Atari 2600, Davie has also contributed to the development of other classic video games, including games for the Commodore 64 and Apple II. He is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of the classic video gaming industry, and his contributions have helped to shape the direction of the industry as we know it today.
Andrew Davie continues to be active in the classic video gaming community, and his work continues to be appreciated and respected by gamers and video game enthusiasts around the world.
This is a great biography, well-written, and including lots of good contextual information. It's also almost entirely wrong. But few people outside this small Atari hobby would recognize the information as wrong, and even many people in the hobby wouldn't realize it was a fabrication. Just by including the text here on my blog, which enjoys a decent reputation and page rank, I'm giving this fabrication legitimacy and increasing the chances it will be used as "truth" during the training of some future AI or digitally-generated encyclopedia. It gives me a sinking feeling to imagine this kind of distortion multiplied a thousand-fold and extrapolated into the future.
Is there anything we can do to prevent this kind of knowledge pollution? I'm not sure. It's too late to put this particular genie back in the bottle, so we'll need to find methods of coping with it.
There's been plenty of discussion about automated techniques for identifying AI-generated text. OpenAI is reportedly working on a watermark of sorts, where a particular pattern of sentence structure and punctuation can be used to identify text from its AI model. But this seems like a weak tool, which could be defeated by a few human edits to AI-generated text, or by simply using an AI from a different vendor. Additional researchers are developing AIs that try to identify other AI-generated text.
I'm unsure what technical measures could realistically prevent future knowledge pollution of the type described here, but there may be more hope for preserving existing knowledge against future revisionism, such as sowing doubt that moon landings ever occurred. I would imagine that digital signatures or blockchain techniques could be used to safeguard existing collections of knowledge. For example we might compute the hash function of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and publish it widely, to make that particular encyclopedia resistant to any future pollution along the lines of "we've always been at war with Eastasia".
If technical measures fail, maybe social ones might succeed? Advice like "don't believe everything you read" seems relevant here. People must be trained to think critically and develop a healthy sense of skepticism. But I fear that this approach might lead to just as much confusion as blindly accepting everything. After all, even if we don't believe everything we read, we need to believe most of what we read, since it's impractical or impossible to verify everything ourselves. If we treat every single piece of information in our lives as suspect and potentially bogus, we may fall into a world where once-authoritative sources lose all credibility and nobody can agree on anything. In recent years the world has already traveled some distance down this path, as simple records and data become politicized. A broad AI-driven disbelief of all science and history would accelerate this damaging trend.
It's fashionable to conclude essays like this with "Surprise! This entire article was actually written by ChatGPT!" But not this time. Readers will need to suffer through these paragraphs as they emerged from my squishy human brain. I'm curious to know what you think of all this, and where things are likely to head next. Please leave your feedback in the comments section.Read 12 comments and join the conversation
Atari 2600 Hardware Acceleration
Atari 2600 programming techniques are fascinating. The hardware is so very limited, and programmers must use every possible trick to scrimp and save the last CPU cycle and byte of RAM. For a refresher on the 2600 hardware, check out my previous Atari overview. The console's longevity is remarkable, with new games and demos still being produced today – over 100 new titles last year alone. The quest for the ultimate Atari 2600 programming techniques has continued all this time, in order to wring out maximum performance.
Atari programming requires racing the beam, updating graphics registers just before the instant they'll be used to paint the next pixels on the current scan line. With only 76 CPU cycles per scan line, there just isn't enough time for the poor 6502 to do very much. Want to update the foreground color multiple times at different horizontal positions? OK, but there might not be enough time remaining to also update the pixel bitmap during the scan line, or set the sprite positions. It's a series of difficult tradeoffs and code optimization puzzles.
More Hardware Makes Things Better?
To create better-performing Atari games, programmers may need to think outside the box – literally. The 2600 console consists of a 6502 CPU (actually a 6507), a 6532 RIOT, and an Atari custom graphics chip called TIA. But what about the game cartridge? What's inside that? The Atari's designers envisioned cartridges as simple 4KB ROMs in a protective plastic shell, but there's no reason aside from cost why there couldn't be other hardware inside a cartridge too.
Within a few years after the Atari's 1977 release, game publishers began including a small amount of 7400-type glue logic or a simple PLD inside game cartridges, in order to assist with bank switching. The Atari only provides 4KB of address space for game cartridges, but with this extra hardware inside, publishers were able to make 8KB and 16KB games using custom bank-switching schemes. Some later cartridges also included additional RAM to augment the paltry 128 bytes available in the Atari. This provided more storage space to create larger games, but didn't help improve the Atari's CPU or graphics performance.
Pitfall II and the DPC Coprocessor
Activision's Pitfall was one of the most popular games for the Atari 2600. For the sequel Pitfall II, expectations were high, and the game's designer David Crane did something that had never been done before: put a full-blown coprocessor inside the game cartridge. Crane's DPC (Display Processor Chip) added two additional hardware sound channels, a music sequencing capability, a hardware random number generator, and a graphics streaming capability with built-in options for masking, reversing, or swizzling the bits.
That's an appealing collection of features, but the graphics streaming capability is probably the most interesting. To understand how it can help improve graphics performance, let's first look at some hypothetical code without DPC. Imagine that the game code wants to read bytes from a graphics table in ROM and stuff them into the TIA's GRP0 register (the pixel bitmap for sprite 0) as quickly as possible, in order to create different patterns at points on the scan line. The code might look like this:
; setup
lda #>DrawData ; an address in ROM
sta GfxPtr ; a pointer in RAM page 0
lda #<DrawData
sta GfxPtr+1
; kernel
lda (GfxPtr),X ; 5
sta GRP0 ; 3
inx ; 2
lda (GfxPtr),X ; 5
sta GRP0 ; 3
inx ; 2
lda (GfxPtr),X ; 5
sta GRP0 ; 3
This requires a total of 10 CPU cycles for every repetition of read, write, and increment of the index register. During those 10 CPU cycles, the electron beam will move 30 pixels horizontally, so in this example it would only be possible to update the pixel bitmap every 30 pixels. This limits the number of objects or patterns that can be displayed in the same horizontal row of the screen.
The DPC provides some extensions to speed up this process. From my study of the chip, it works like this:
- Writing to a special pair of addresses in the cartridge's address space will set up a graphics stream pointer
- Reading from a special address will return the next byte from the stream pointer, and increment the pointer
Using the DPC, the previous example could be rewritten something like this:
; setup
lda #>DrawData ; an address in ROM
sta BytePtr ; special addr in cartridge address space
lda #<DrawData
sta BytePtr+1
; kernel
lda NextByte ; 4 - special addr in cartridge address space
sta GRP0 ; 3
lda NextByte ; 4
sta GRP0 ; 3
lda NextByte ; 4
sta GRP0 ; 3
This reduces the total number of CPU cycles for every repetition from 10 down to 7, enabling the pixel bitmap to be updated every 21 pixels instead of only every 30 pixels – quite a nice improvement.
Pitfall II was released in 1984. Despite the major effort that doubtless went into designing the DPC chip, Pitfall II was the only game to ever use it. No other Atari 2600 games from the original Atari era 1977-1992 ever included a DPC or other coprocessor. The DPC was an impressive one-off, and remained the pinnacle of Atari 2600 hardware acceleration tech for 25 years, until rising interest in retrogaming eventually rekindled interest in the Atari console.
21st-Century Hardware
The Harmony Cartridge for Atari 2600 was first released in 2009. Harmony is a bit like my BMOW Floppy Emu Disk Emulator, but for Atari game cartridges instead of Apple floppy disks. Inside the cartridge is an ARM microcontroller and an SD card reader, and the hardware loads Atari game ROMs from the SD card and then emulates a standard ROM chip, including any necessary bank switching logic or extra RAM that may have existed in the original game cartridge.
The original function of Harmony was simply to be a multi-ROM cartridge, but for Pitfall II, Harmony's designer was also able to use the ARM microcontroller to emulate David Crane's DPC chip. Before long, he and a few collaborators began to share ideas for a new coprocessor design, like DPC but even more powerful, and emulated by Harmony's ARM chip. While this wouldn't do anything to benefit the library of original Atari games, it would open up new possibilities for the active community of Atari 2600 homebrew game developers. The coprocessor design they eventually created is called DPC+.
I haven't looked at DPC+ in detail, so I may be misstating the specifics, but I've seen three features that look particularly interesting.
FastFetch – Atari programs often include time-critical sequences that load a byte from zero page RAM (3 CPU cycles), write the byte to a TIA register (3 CPU cycles), and repeat. Six total CPU cycles per iteration. For drawing fixed graphics patterns, the load from zero page RAM can be replaced with a load of an immediate value into a register, which reduces the total to five clock cycles but means the graphics data must a constant. That constant value is part of the program, which is stored in ROM, which is emulated by the Harmony cartridge. Harmony is able to perform a bit of trickery here, so when the program performs an immediate load of the constant value, Harmony actually supplies data from the graphics stream instead. This makes it possible to draw dynamic graphics data while still enjoying the five-cycle performance of drawing constant graphics data.
Bus Stuffing – The data bus output drivers on the NMOS 6502 (and 6507) chip are non-symmetric. They drive logical 0 bits strongly to near 0 volts, but logical 1 bits use a weak pull-up to 5 volts. If the CPU is outputting a 1 on the data bus, external hardware can safely overdrive the bus with a 0 without damaging the CPU – something that would be dangerous with a symmetric push-pull output driver. For time-critical code loops, Harmony uses this technique to eliminate CPU graphics data reads entirely. The CPU program just performs a long series of write instructions, repeatedly writing the value $FF (binary 11111111) to TIA registers, while Harmony pulls down the appropriate data bus lines to create the next byte of the graphics stream. This reduces the number of CPU cycles needed per iteration to a mere three cycles.
ARM Code Execution (ACE) – Still not fast enough? Harmony also enables the Atari's 6502 program to upload and execute arbitrary code on Harmony's 32-bit 70 MHz ARM microcontroller. Compared to the 8-bit 6502 running at 1 MHz, that's a dramatic performance improvement for compute-heavy code.
Aside from DPC+, Harmony also supports other coprocessor models called CDF and CDFJ, which are further extensions of DPC+. I haven't looked at these.
Harmony is no longer the only player in this space, and since 2018 some interesting alternatives have appeared. UnoCart 2600 is conceptually very similar to Harmony, but is open source and uses a more capable microcontroller. To my understanding, UnoCart 2600 supports bus stuffing and ACE, although ACE code for Harmony isn't directly compatible with the UnoCart 2600 due to the differing memory maps of the microcontrollers on the two cartridges. UnoCart 2600 does not support other DPC+ extensions, which I think is because Harmony is a closed source design and its maintainers have chosen not to share the tech details needed for DPC+ emulation. Most recently and intriguingly, PlusCart has appeared as an UnoCart 2600 spin-off that loads game ROMs over WiFi instead of from an SD card. It's the golden age of retro-Atari products.
When is an Atari no longer an Atari?
Thanks to Harmony and similar devices, within roughly the past 10 years, there has emerged a large and growing library of "hardware accelerated" homebrew Atari games. With the extra support of the coprocessor in the Harmony or UnoCart cartridge, these games are able to create graphics and sound that are much more impressive than anything that was possible back in the 1980s.
This all leads to the question I've been grappling with. When an Atari 2600 game console from 1977 is hot-rodded with a 32-bit coprocessor running at 100+ MHz, is it still an Atari 2600? Should games that target this augmented hardware still be considered Atari 2600 games?
Here's my small editorial. There are no right or wrong answers about this, and everyone should be encouraged to do whatever they find to be most fun. From a technical standpoint I find Harmony and its siblings to be impressively clever, fascinating to study, and I wish I'd thought of these ideas myself. And the multi-ROM cartridge capability is extremely convenient for any modern game collector who doesn't want to store hundreds of physical game cartridges.
As for the DPC+ coprocessor and similar hardware acceleration extensions, they make me feel… conflicted? Uneasy? When it comes to retrocomputing, I'm something of a hardware purist. For me, the appeal of the Atari 2600 comes from trying to make the most out of its limited hardware capabilities. By adding new 21st-century hardware with new performance-enhancing capabilities, it's effectively moving the goalposts. I can compare two Atari games that target the original hardware, and if the first game looks visually more impressive than the second, I'll know the first programmer did a better job. But if one of the games uses a coprocessor with extra hardware capabilities, then it's no longer a fair comparison. Eventually I hope to try writing my own Atari game, and I'll probably target the original hardware without any coprocessor extensions, so that I can fairly compare my efforts against the classic Atari games of the 1980s.Read 4 comments and join the conversation
Thoughts on an Apple II FPGA Coprocessor
I've been kicking around the idea of using the on-board FPGA in my Yellowstone Universal Disk Controller as a general-purpose Apple II coprocessor. With an FPGA on a peripheral card connected to the 6502 address and data buses, I can't make the CPU run any faster, but maybe I can make calculations faster by offloading them to some type of coprocessor that's constructed within the FPGA. As a simple example, I could implement a fast PicoBlaze soft-CPU or something similar, and provide a way for the 6502 to run/halt the PicoBlaze and read/write from its memory space. The 6502 could upload a short PicoBlaze program and its required data, wait for the PicoBlaze to finish running, and then read the results back out.
The existing Yellowstone hardware can already do this. It would just be a matter of firmware development.
What would this be useful for? I'm not sure. But the Yellowstone firmware already implements a very simple taste of this idea, because I needed it in order to achieve the disk timing requirements. It's not a coprocessor, but it's an extension that shaves a few clock cycles where they're most valuable. There's a specific magic address in the Yellowstone card's address space, and when the 6502 reads from that address, Yellowstone performs automatic GCR decoding of the most recent disk byte.
I had a crazy idea to use this like a classic computer hardware emulator, except that the Apple II wouldn't be emulating an older computer but a newer one. The 6502 program could just sit in a tight loop reading bytes from the FPGA coprocessor and writing them into the Apple II frame buffer, so whatever appeared on the screen would be the result of the coprocessor program. It would still be limited by the Apple's physical screen resolution and color palette, but panning around a larger virtual screen should be possible. And conveniently I've already implemented a Macintosh Plus FPGA core, so in theory we could see MacOS running on an Apple II? Or more realistically, this scheme could turn an Apple II into something like a Commodore 64, or a 1980s video game console. Probably impractical for any serious use, but at least it would make interesting discussion for r/vintagecomputing!Read 9 comments and join the conversation
Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something out of (Almost) Nothing
The Atari 2600 wasn't the first home video game console with replaceable games, but it was the first to be widely successful. Introduced in 1977 as the Atari VCS (Video Computer System), and later renamed Atari 2600 in 1982, it eventually sold over 30 million units and established a new market that still endures today in the PlayStation and Xbox. Prior to the 2600, most video game systems were either coin-operated machines found in bars, or fixed-function devices limited to a few built-in games like Pong. Atari's first home system was the beginning of a new age.
This wood-grained block of electronics preoccupied my young mind. I wanted one badly, but never succeeded at convincing my parents. I was eleven years old in 1982 when my friend Fred got an Atari, and I was sick with jealousy:
What a day! Not only did Fred get an Atari system, but I got braces and an Izod Lacoste alligator shirt.
Atari 2600 Hardware Overview
Recently over the holiday break, I became interested in the 2600's hardware architecture and started reading everything that I could find about it. I knew that it was some kind of 6502-based system, and I'd heard mentions of "racing the beam", but that's as far as my knowledge went. I was shocked to discover how primitive the 2600 hardware was, even compared to contemporary 6502 systems like the Apple II, Commodore PET, and even Atari's own 8-bit computers.
Inside that wood-grained box there were only three digital chips:
- 6507 CPU (pin-reduced version of the 6502)
- TIA (Atari custom IC)
Notably absent from this list was any RAM or ROM! The ROM came from whatever game cartridge was inserted – there was absolutely no built-in I/O helper routines or operating system, so it was up to the game programmer to provide everything. Game cartridges were limited to 4 KB and many early games were only 2 KB. Any of the photos on this page are vastly bigger than that.
RAM was limited to the tiny amount of storage space built-into the 6532 RIOT chip – just 128 bytes. 128 bytes! That is… I don't even… that is small. Like really, really small. I might have guessed 1 KB or 2 KB RAM, but 128 bytes is just in another category entirely. What's worse, this tiny amount of RAM had to serve as both the scratchpad/heap and as the stack! Programmers got a few bytes for things like player and item locations, strength, score, and that's all.
But hold on, because it was even worse than you think. This pin-reduced 6507 eliminated the 6502's NMI and IRQ pins, so there was no hardware interrupt capability at all. Everything had to be accomplished with software timing and polling. For a real-time system built around the concept of racing the beam, this was just masochism.
And for the final kick in the nuts, there was no framebuffer. There wasn't even a line buffer. The programmer only had a few TIA registers to play with and nothing more. Most graphics had to be generated by the CPU on the fly, at the very moment that the television's electron beam was scanning past the pixels of interest. Even the VSYNC signal for the television had to be handled in software. With hardware like this, I'm surprised the Atari 2600 didn't require a coal-fired steam engine or a wooden crank handle to boot the games! It's crazy. I love it.
Inside the TIA Chip
The heart of the 2600 is Atari's custom-designed TIA chip – the Television Interface Adapter. You can find the hand-drawn TIA schematics on the web if you're curious how it works. The TIA internals look very strange to modern eyes, beginning with the extensive use of linear feedback shift registers where you would expect to find binary counters, for things like the horizontal sync counter or the sprite position registers. I've seen LFSRs used as random number generators in other 8-bit designs, but never as a general-purpose counter. These LFSRs also use two separate clocks, 180 degrees out of phase, which seems equally strange. Here's the six bit horizontal sync counter:
The chip designers must have had their reasons: maybe LFSRs were cheaper to implement or required fewer transistors than regular binary counters? If you just need a six bit counter, then ultimately it doesn't really matter if it counts 64 states from 000000 sequentially up to 111111, or if it follows some other random-looking but deterministic sequence of states. Either way you can add logic to check for the terminal state and reset the counter when needed. If anyone has an idea why the TIA's designers used LFSRs for this stuff, I'd love to hear about it. Fortunately the Atari 2600 programmer is mostly insulated from this LFSR funny business.
So how do games actually draw stuff? The simplest place to begin is with what Atari calls the playfield, and is effectively a background pattern on the screen. The TIA has 20 bits of register state which the programmer can modify, and which is used to create a one-dimensional low-resolution monochrome bitmap on the left half of the scan line. The right half of the line is either a copy of the left, or a mirrored copy. Want something completely different on the right side? Too bad. Want multiple colors? Too bad. The same 20 bits of playfield register state are used on every horizontal scan line, too. Want to display something different on each line? That requires constantly modifying the playfield registers, before each new scan line is drawn. There are only 76 CPU clock cycles during each scan line, and with most CPU instructions requiring 2 to 5 clock cycles, that doesn't leave much time to do… basically anything.
This playfield behavior explains why so many Atari games have left-right symmetry in their backgrounds, walls, or similar content. Look at this image of Pitfall, and notice how the tree canopy, tree trunks, ground, pit, and underground cave all show left-right symmetry. These are all built from the playfield (plus additional tricks to be described later). The only sprites are Pitfall Harry, the vine he's swinging from, the rolling log, and the scorpion.
What about those sprites? Atari called them players and missiles, but the concept is the same. Players are sprites eight bits wide, and the pixels are smaller than playfield pixels. They can be positioned anywhere on the scan line, but like the playfield, they're one-dimensional monochrome bitmaps. If the programmer wants 2D sprites (which they certainly do), then the code must constantly modify the player graphics register, updating it before each new scan line is drawn, including setting the register to zero for the areas above and below the player sprite where nothing should be drawn. Does that sound incredibly tedious? You bet!
Missiles are only one bit wide instead of eight, but are otherwise identical to players. The TIA provides two players, two missiles, and a ball that's like a third missile. If the programmer wants more sprites than this, or wants multi-colored sprites, or anything else that the hardware doesn't provide, then they'll need to get fancy by combining multiple players and missiles, or else make lots of precisely-timed updates to the TIA registers to create the illusion of additional sprites and colors.
One common technique was to design games with distinct horizontal bands of activity, like Pitfall here. That allowed the same player sprite to be reused multiple times as the screen was painted from top to bottom. For Pitfall, player 0 might first be used to draw a score digit at the top of the screen. Then the same player 0 hardware resource would be used to draw part of Pitfall Harry, then to draw the rolling log, and finally to draw the scorpion. Since none of these overlapped each other horizontally, there was no conflict as long as the software could update the player graphics and position quickly between scan lines.
Atari Hardware Tricks
Under a one-dimensional hardware system like this one, collision detection would have been extremely difficult if it were left up to the software to provide. The necessary degree of bookkeeping would be too much: checking all the sprites and the playfield for collisions with each other would be virtually impossible with only 76 clock cycles per scan line, on top of all the CPU's other critical tasks. Fortunately the TIA provides the very cool feature of hardware collision detection, at the pixel level! Any time a non-zero pixel overlaps another non-zero pixel of the playfield, a player, a missile, or the ball, a corresponding collision bit is set in the TIA, which software can later check and clear. With a total of six graphics objects there are (6*5)/2 = 15 possible collisions (an application of the Handshake Problem) to be tracked by the TIA. Nice!
Horizontal positioning of players and missiles is notoriously difficult. Most programmers would expect that the TIA has registers to specify the horizontal position of each sprite, but no. That would be too easy. On the Atari 2600, the horizontal position of a player or missile is set by writing to a special TIA register at the exact moment the electron beam passes the desired position. Think about that for a minute. The specific value that's written to the register doesn't matter. The program isn't telling the TIA "put player 0 at position X", it's telling the TIA "put player 0 at… (wait for it) RIGHT HERE!" Thanks to this design, horizontal positioning requires synchronizing a software loop to the start of a scan line, delaying some amount of time dependent on the desired horizontal position, and then writing to the TIA register. Rather than setting a specific value for the horizontal position, the software is actually resetting one of those LFSRs in the TIA.
With the standard technique for this timing-based horizontal positioning, it's only possible to get a horizontal resolution of five CPU clock cycles, which is equivalent to 15 pixels. To help the programmer get fine-grained control, the TIA provides additional registers that enable each sprite to be adjusted between -8 to +7 pixels from its ordinary position. It's clumsy, but the combination of timing-based positioning plus fine-grained adjustments enable sprites to be positioned at any horizontal coordinate.
The fine-grained horizontal control involves writing to a TIA register named HMOVE, and its use leads to one of the Atari 2600's most notorious graphical flaws: an irregular series of black lines on the left side of the screen, obscuring part of the playfield. This is often called the HMOVE comb. Here's an example from Space Invaders:
This is a side-effect of the way the TIA performs fine-grained adjustment of sprite positions, and many games exhibit this problem. Any time HMOVE is written to during a scan line, the horizontal blanking interval will be extended by eight pixels on that line, cutting off the left edge of the line. Is it a bug? An unintended feature? The exact details are much too complex to describe here, but Andrew Towers has written a very thorough explanation of TIA behavior which you'll find at http://www.atarihq.com/danb/files/TIA_HW_Notes.txt. See the heading Playing with the HMOVE Registers.
Why do only some games display this HMOVE comb effect, and others apparently don't? It only appears when games reuse the same sprite at different vertical positions on the screen, which requires adjusting the sprite's horizontal position mid-frame. Space Invaders does this extensively, but simple games like Combat don't do this. Combat is limited to the two built-in players and two built-in missiles, with no mid-frame repositioning, and therefore no HMOVE comb.
Pitfall takes a different approach, with a solid black bar at the left edge of the screen instead of a comb. This is the result of writing to HMOVE on every scan line, even when it's not needed. Activision used this technique in many games, apparently having concluded that a solid black bar looked nicer than a partial black comb.
There are many more software tricks necessary for creating a high-quality Atari game. A non-symmetrical playfield or multi-colored playfield can be created by modifying the playfield graphics and color registers at precisely the right times, but it's not easy! Color registers can also be modified between lines, to provide more total colors on the screen even when the number of colors on a single line is limited. Sprites can be reused and repositioned at different vertical positions, or can even be reused at the same vertical position with careful timing and attention to TIA behavior. Atari 2600 programming is a very deep topic, and it's a long journey from bouncing ball demos to a high-quality game like Pitfall.
Atari 2600 Development Today
Want to try your hand at writing some Atari game demos? Yes you do, and it's much easier today than it was in 1977. Start with this Atari 2600 Programming for Newbies tutorial written by Andrew Davies. Software is written in 6502 assembly language, and if you're reading this blog, then there's a good chance you already know it. To assemble your software, use DASM, a venerable and feature-filled cross-platform assembler for the 6502 and other 8-bit CPUs. If you've got a real Atari 2600 console, you can write your assembled program's binary image to an EPROM and make your own game cartridge. If that sounds like too much bother, try the Z26 or Stella software emulators.
Did I butcher some technical explanation here, or omit important details? Please let me know! I'm just a beginner on this Atari hardware journey, with much still to learn. Look for my first 2600 game, coming soon?Read 31 comments and join the conversation
AVR-GCC Compiler Makes Questionable Code
Most people believe that modern compilers generate better-optimized assembly code than humans, but look at this example from AVR-GCC 5.4.0 with -O2 optimization level:
7b96: 10 92 34 37 sts 0x3734, r1 ; 0x803734 <tachFlutter> 7b9a: e0 e0 ldi r30, 0x00 ; 0 7b9c: f0 e0 ldi r31, 0x00 ; 0 7b9e: a0 91 35 37 lds r26, 0x3735 ; 0x803735 <driveTachHalfPeriod> 7ba2: b0 91 36 37 lds r27, 0x3736 ; 0x803736 <driveTachHalfPeriod+0x1> 7ba6: ae 1b sub r26, r30 7ba8: bf 0b sbc r27, r31 7baa: b0 93 89 00 sts 0x0089, r27 ; 0x800089 <OCR1AH> 7bae: a0 93 88 00 sts 0x0088, r26 ; 0x800088 <OCR1AL> 7bb2: 10 92 95 00 sts 0x0095, r1 ; 0x800095 <TCNT3H> 7bb6: 10 92 94 00 sts 0x0094, r1 ; 0x800094 <TCNT3L> 7bba: 32 2d mov r19, r2 7bbc: e0 e0 ldi r30, 0x00 ; 0 7bbe: f0 e0 ldi r31, 0x00 ; 0 7bc0: f0 93 e3 33 sts 0x33E3, r31 ; 0x8033e3 <currentTrackBytePos+0x1> 7bc4: e0 93 e2 33 sts 0x33E2, r30 ; 0x8033e2 <currentTrackBytePos>
This is straight-line code with no branching. All registers and memory references are 8-bit. With AVR-GCC, the register r1 always holds the value 0, so the code is doing this: Set tachFlutter to 0, load driveTachHalfPeriod, set OCR1A to driveTachHalfPeriod minus 0, set TCNT3 to 0, set currentTrackBytePos to 0. There's also a move of r2 to r19, which is used later, and I'm not sure why the compiler located the instruction here. There are at least three glaring inefficiences:
- the compiler wastes time loading 0 into r30 and r31, when it could have just used r1
- it does this TWICE, when we know r30 and r31 were already zero after the first time
- it subtracts a constant 0 from driveTachHalfPeriod
I can maybe understand the subtraction of constant 0, if there's another code path that jumps to 7ba6 where the value in r30:r31 isn't 0. But why wouldn't the compiler make a completely separate path for that, with faster execution speed when the subtracted value is known to be 0, even if the code size is greater? After all this is -O2, not -Os.
It also appears there's no optimization for setting multi-byte variables like currentTrackBytePos to zero. Instead of just storing r1 twice for the low and high bytes, the compiler first creates an unnamed 16-bit temporary variable in r30:r31 and sets its value to 0, then stores the unnamed variable at currentTrackBytePos.
This whole block of code could easily be rewritten:
sts 0x3734, r1 ; 0x803734 <tachFlutter> lds r26, 0x3736 ; 0x803736 <driveTachHalfPeriod+0x1> sts 0x0089, r26 ; 0x800089 <OCR1AH> lds r26, 0x3735 ; 0x803735 <driveTachHalfPeriod> sts 0x0088, r26 ; 0x800088 <OCR1AL> sts 0x0095, r1 ; 0x800095 <TCNT3H> sts 0x0094, r1 ; 0x800094 <TCNT3L> mov r19, r2 sts 0x33E3, r1 ; 0x8033e3 <currentTrackBytePos+0x1> sts 0x33E2, r1 ; 0x8033e2 <currentTrackBytePos>
This is much shorter, and avoids using r27, r30, and r31, so there are more free registers available for other purposes.Read 17 comments and join the conversation


text:
1. Login into the web app using your credentials
2. While logged into the web app, open a new browser tab
3. The maintenance planner application runs in its own browser window. Type in planner.assetminder.net into the new tab address bar
4. For first time users of the planner, the planner needs to be configured. Type in your regular Assetminder login credentials into the Username and Key fields. The Key is your regular password.
5. Configure the number of bays to match the number of bays in your workshop:
The corresponding number of bays will then show up in your workshop view
6. Configure your work/business hours
7. Set your home location in the Location dropdown. This means the planner will only display the job cards for that location
8. Click Save when done
9. The system will log you into the planner
10. If you get a password error, try clicking the mouse into both the username window and password window again, and click save.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Going up Mt Lemmon..
Thank you! Same to Loyce. :)
I'll pass that on to Paulette and please wish Loyce a Happy Mother's Day from us.
Happy Mothers Day to Loyce from your Loyal Canadian Friends
Tell Loyce Happy Mother's day from Sam & Donna.
Anonymous comments had to be eliminated.... For the most part this has removed unwanted responses.. If you can't post your comments, please email me and we will make other arrangements...


text:
Written by S. Edward Sousa
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kariostami has spent a lifetime constructing films meant to blur the line between creator and audience. Emerging in the 1960s during the first new wave in Iranian cinema, Kariostami received international acclaim following the Iranian Revolution with a series of films more reflective of life under the newly imposed Islamic rule, including The Koker Trilogy and its depiction of life in the Middle Eastern countryside. Over the past decade he has abandoned traditional filmmaking techniques in favor of suppler, more compassionate approaches evident in 2012's Like Someone in Love. Set in Japan—one of only two movies Kariostami has made outside his homeland—the film tells the story of an elderly man who becomes entangled in the lives of a young couple over the course of twenty-four hours. Recently released on Blu-ray/DVD by The Criterion Collection, this sweet and intimate film lures the audience in only to stun them with a vague and violent ending doing as essayist Nico Baumbach suggests, "Making the spectator the author of the film."
Like Someone in Love opens on a Tokyo wine bar as Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a twenty-something call girl, lies to Noriaki (Ryo Kase), her over-bearing fiancé, about her whereabouts. Soon, she takes a cab ride to Tokyo suburb where her "john" for the evening, retired professor Takashi Watanabe (Tadashi Okuno), a man well into his eighties, is more interested in kind conversation over dinner and wine. From the moment Akiko arrives at his apartment, the two have different ideas about how the evening will unfold. Their time together is gentle and easy, with an almost natural paternal dynamic. Even after she strips naked, crawls into his bed, and falls asleep, the modest Takashi covers her with a blanket, shuts off the light, and prepares dinner for himself, alone. Their relationship continues the next morning as he escorts the young women back to Tokyo for an early morning exam only to be confronted by Noriaki outside the lecture hall.
Noriaki's physical entrance signals a shift in the film veering away from a tender narrative of intimacy toward a tale of emotionally instability. Noriaki, filled with a volatile grief, teeters on abusive during his conflict with Akiko. The audience gets the full scope of her deception and his frustration as Noriaki later confides in Takashi, a witness to the hostility from the comfort of his curbside car. The young man, a mechanic of simple means, has conflated his love for Akiko with his sense of self. Takashi, speaking with the wisdom of age, insists the young man will not find the power he seeks through marriage. He reminds Noriaki truth is subjective; if you are not interested in being lied to. do not ask questions to which lies are the only answers. Takashi sends the couple on their separate ways only to be drawn back in after Noriaki assaults Akiko, an assault we encounter through wounds and not as witnesses. Takashi comforts the young women until a visibly anguished Noriaki appears on his doorstep building toward a tense and violent final few moments. For a subtle film that unfolds without pretension and with a fondness for its characters, despite their flaws or choices, the unexpected conclusion is both vicious and jarring.
Shot on RED One MX digital, Kirostami finds a vivid companion in cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima best known for his work with Takeshi Kitano and on Battle Royale. Together, the men create an insular world of muted vibrancy. The entire film is told within the confines of spaces, whether the opening scene in a Tokyo bar or the middle third occurring within the parameters of Takashi's Volvo. Even in scenes shot outdoors, Kirostami limits characters with their surroundings. Noriaki's confrontation with Akiko on a University walkway is shot from Takashi's driver's seat point of view. Akiko's interaction with Takashi's neighbor finds Akiko huddled on a doorway stoop as the old neighbor appears only as a face in a tiny window. The borders become Kirostami's metaphor for the limits of relationships; interaction between the characters is restricted by the boundaries of communication and self-definition. Akiko's relationship to her pimp is one of restrained bullying; Noriaki's love is defined by what affection and truth Akiko presents. Even Takashi, who is at all times an omnipresent parental figure, is defined by the implication of a tumultuous past.
Kirostami relies on Yanagishima's autumnal pallet to create a distinction between the confined spaces characters occupy and the outside world. Across the windows of moving cars, the neon reflection of Tokyo at night does little to illuminate Akiko or her cab driver. Instead, they are shadowed beneath the metropolis. The rich presence of fall in the daytime does little to coax Noriaki from a self-imposed darkness. Even in the ghost-like impressions of characters posed on windows and in mirrors, Kirostami creates a clear distinction between personal space and exterior life. This narrows the viewer's perception of context. The audience is left to sort through a series of opaque events without the layers of personal histories, at best hinted at throughout the film. The feat is managing not to frustrate the viewer. Instead, the audience engages with sympathetic characters in need of warmth and honesty. The character's ambiguous pasts allow the audience to define the emotional tone of the film especially in those final moments, where the outcome is as unclear as it is immediate.
"Sometimes the things I do astound me, mostly whenever you're around me," sings Ella Fitzgerald over the closing credits. Named for this jazz standard, Like Someone in Love is a beautiful and simple film of characters in transit whose understated beauty is magnified on Blu-ray. The Criterion Collection once again does justice in their preservation and presentation of film—Nico Baumbach's essay is delicious food for thought while the "making of" documentary provides insight and motivation without definite meaning. Kirostami, who has positioned the audience as fleeting spectators, leaves viewers shaken, but satisfied.


text: The explosion of worldwide communications over the past 25 years has led to the pervasive use of mobile and land communications equipment with an abundance of platforms, applications, and devices all driving the growth of many of the largest businesses in the world. There is no doubt that this trend will continue through the Internet of Things (IoT), and the arrival of the 5G technology along with improvements to the underlying network infrastructure. However, the next, 'Small Step' for man in terms of ubiquitous communications will be the 'Giant Leap' into the Internet of Space. Internet of Space The Internet of Space (IoS) is a long-term vision that leaders in some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world have begun to seriously consider. Both the European Space Agency and NASA have prepared plans that involve the deployment of networks of satellite around the Earth, Mars and the Sun. These networks are composed of complex communications networks for MIMO microwave antenna arrays and free-space line-of-sight laser links. These technologies will be responsible for the communications of manned missions to Mars and will have to have the best in terms of redundancy, speed, and network management as most of what we send up, will never be fixed. Further to this however, will be the machine-learning A.I. systems on-board exploratory robots and landers for the moon and Mars including asteroid mining that will be tasked with resource extraction. For example, before the arrival of astronauts on Mars, dozens of intelligent, self-exploring robots and rovers will have to have found water on the planet for them. Basically, the self-driving cars of today will become the self-exploring robots of space. New players in space exploration The success of companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin have shown that many of the traditionally held ideas about space exploration are breaking down and commercial opportunities are staring to be explored. A great deal of these new developments are directed at bringing broadband connectivity to the roughly 3 billion people who lack Internet access today: rural schools, clinics, markets and businesses, ships at sea, planes in the air, mobile-phone towers, high-speed stocks trading, cars, trains, buses, Internet of things sensors and appliances, governments, enterprises, military, etc. For applications which benefit from low-latency communications (like broadband access) LEO satellite constellations provide an advantage over geostationary satellites, because latency from ground to satellite is dramatically reduced. A LEO satellite constellation can also provide more system capacity by frequency reuse across its coverage. Furthermore, the lower orbits will help ensure the satellites re-enter the atmosphere in a shorter time in case of failure and will enable them to broadcast signals at reduced power levels, because they are closer to Earth, which allow the fleet to be compliant with limits to reduce radio interference with other satellite and terrestrial wireless networks. Competing and complementary projects OneWeb Satellites is planning the launch 648 satellites into low Earth orbit by the end of 2022, to deliver Internet access globally. The company had launched 36 satellites on 17 December 2020 to add to the 104 already in operation. Furthermore, OneWeb announced plans to accelerate launches in 2021 to have 650 satellites in orbit by 2022 necessary for global coverage. SpaceX's backed Starlink satellite constellation aims "to provide low-latency broadband to unserved and underserved Americans that is on par with service previously only available in urban areas". The current phase of this project calls for the deployment of approximately 1600 satellites in LEO orbit on a 550 km orbital plane. Close to 1000 Starlink satellites are already deployed and a beta Starlink service is available to select customers in the northern US and southern Canada (as of February 2021). Not to be outdone, Amazon has also announced its Kuiper project. They expect to take up to a decade to fully deploy all 3,236 satellites planned for the full constellation in order to provide internet to tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. Artist representation of a Telesat LEO satellite. figcaption> TeleSat, a Canadian company, has a plan to deploy almost over 1600 LEO satellites to serve as an interconnect for continual data networks for ship and aircraft connections over the oceans. In order to serve the entire globe they plan to have two sub-constellations, one with 351 satellites in polar orbits and another with 1320 in inclined orbits. There are also plans for large satellite constellations within China's "Digital Silk Road" (DSR) project. With over half the people in the world living in or near China and India, many of them with no connectivity, and some paying very high rates for geosynchronous satellite service, one can see the immense commercial potential. Less publicized are defense-driven initiatives like the DARPA Blackjack program. Blackjack are small American surveillance satellites that would replace or compliment larger systems already deployed. These new orbiters will be cheaper and would have limited capabilities, but would operate as part of a constellation networked together. Open sources indicated the first two satellites would be launched in the third quarter of 2021. Space environment As more commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts are targeted for space applications as a mean to take advantage of powerful technologies at lower costs, a more meaningful business-case for vendors can now be made to support the space-vendor-ecosystem. However, there is a catch… The space environment itself is extremely severe; outside the protective cushion of the earth's magnetosphere the exposure to radiation and extreme temperatures can destroy terrestrial electronics. Therefore, to really open these markets, the vendors will have to meet the space community half-way, and do what they can to "space-ify" their COTS products. Smiths Interconnect has a plan to do just that – with the cost of sending even just 1 kg into space at over $50 k, the advantages of using the Reflex Photonics line of small, lightweight, high density SpaceABLE™ parallel optical transceiver modules inside the satellites will impact this enormously. SpaceABLE SM modules SpaceABLE SM (10.3125 Gbps) modules are available in different configurations: 40G (full-duplex: 4 TX plus 4 RX lane per device) and 120G (12 TX or 12 RX channel per device). SpaceABLE SL modules SpaceABLE SL (10.3125 Gbps) modules are available in different configurations: 40G (full-duplex: 4 TX plus 4 RX lane per device) and 120G (12 TX or 12 RX channel per device). SpaceABLE28 modules SpaceABLE28 SL (28 Gbps) modules are available in different configurations: 100G (full-duplex: 4 TX plus 4 RX lane per device) and 300G (12 TX or 12 RX channel per device). The family of Reflex Photonics SpaceABLE modules offer extremely high aggregate data rates (over 300 Gbps), the modules are less than 3 cm2 and weigh less than 5 g. They can be placed anywhere on a motherboard or linecard linking powerful CPU's, GPU's and FPGA's across multiple boards and racks. Rigorous testing In terms of reliability, the SpaceABLE product follows the rigorous environmental testing of MIL-STD-883 with a variety of thermal shock, vibration, humidity and cycling tests included. Furthermore, these modules are qualified under very stringent radiation exposure tests: Active Heavy-Ion testing for latch-up, SEE and SET failures, long-term irradiation from PIF and NIF cyclotrons, and long-term exposure (over several weeks) of gamma-rays using Cobalt-60 on active parts. These tests were all done with reference to the ECSS-Q-ST-60-15 Space product assurance standard - Radiation hardness assurance - EEE components. The space community is slowly evolving from an era of mega-projects and unlimited budgets to a dynamic industry that envisions a commercial market with volumes that can support multiple business. Smiths Interconnect is part of this belief and this ultimate goal of Bringing space a little closer by offering optical transceivers and optical infrastructure that will enable the next generation of space exploration. Submit a Comment or Question By proceeding I acknowledge I have read the Smiths Interconnect Privacy Policy. Share this article Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share via Email Back to Listing Access our Blogs Please enter your name and email address below to access this content. First Name: Last Name: Email: Yes, I would like to receive further information by email from Smiths Interconnect Group Limited, its subsidiary companies, and their appointed distributors and sales representatives, about Smiths Interconnect's products, services and related activities Please read Smiths Interconnect Privacy Policy Sitemap Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Legal Notice Anti-Modern Slavery & Transparency Copyright © 2023 Smiths Interconnect. All Rights Reserved. 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text:
Future of Finance
Hear Christoph Dubies, Chief Strategy Officer discuss the results from Serrala's recent survey on the Future of Finance. Originally presented at the SAP SAPPHIRE + ASUG Annual Conference, Christoph discusses how companies can future-proof their financial processes with new cloud, robotics, and blockchain technologies to prevent fraud, improve compliance, and facilitate global payments and cash flow. He also discusses how Serrala's future-proof solutions for order to cash, procure to pay, payments, treasury, and data and document management can help companies automate and optimize processes across the entire universe of payments.


text:
Can you guess what showed up in my inbox this morning? A cover!
Soul Eater is a 51k long paranormal story about Sandulf Hunter, a dead werewolf, and Thaddeus Ezax, a useless mage – or so he believes. He comes from one of the most powerful mage families in the world, and yet he's never been able to do even the simplest spells a mage is supposed to do. Things aren't always what they appear to be, though.
Thad is a detective working in the Paranormal Investigations Department. He and his colleagues are trying to catch a serial killer, but when Thad comes across a spirit trapped in a skull, his life changes forever.
As he rounded a corner, he came into the main cavern. Table after table were filled with anything a magic user could need. Herbs, potions, knives, stones, and a lot of things he didn't want to acknowledge.
The howl of a cat in a cage had blue sparks rain from his fingertips, but he tried to suppress it as he hurried past the market traders.
Pickering had the last table in the row—of course, he had. By now, Thad should have learned nothing ever went quick and easy. He held his breath as he stopped by the table.
"Thaddeus." Pickering had short, red hair, and his face was filled with freckles.
"Einar." Thad nodded at him.
"What can I do you for? Looking for a familiar?" He grabbed a cage with the largest toad Thad had ever seen.
"Ah… Eh… no. I was wondering—"
"A love potion?" He held up a tiny, red flask with a skull painted on it, and Thad almost laughed.
"No, thank you. Have you heard about—"
"Shrunken head?" He bent down behind the table.
"No!" Thad hoped he didn't have a shrunken head back there. Could he ignore a shrunken head or did he have to report it at work? If a raid came out of his visit here, he'd be hunted for the rest of his life, and he did not want the wizards running the largest black market for miles and miles at his tail.
"This then?" Pickering tossed something at him, and Thad caught it. A buzz spread into his fingertips as he held up the…skull. Swallowing hard, he studied the sharp canines. The dog must've been massive when it had been alive.
"W-What is it?"
Pickering looked nervous as he leaned in closer and lowered his voice into a whisper. "Werewolf skull, very powerful. But I guess it's wasted on you, mage."
Werewolf? Was someone killing werewolves now or was it an old skull? Thad swallowed hard.
"Yes." Why did it buzz? Thad was a mage, everyone in his family was a mage. Spirits meant nothing to him.
Detective Thaddeus Ezax is in over his head. He's the only wizard in Rockshade's Paranormal Investigations Department, and it was his name that got him the job. The Ezaxs are known as some of the most powerful wizards in the world, but Thaddeus isn't your average Ezaxs. Is it any wonder his family shuns him?
When a kidnapping case is dropped into his lap, Thaddeus must act fast. While most five-year-olds can cast a location spell, Thaddeus can't and is forced to get creative. When he finds himself in possession of a black market werewolf skull with a ghost trapped inside, accidentally releases the spirit, and somehow forms a connection with it, things get even crazier.
Sandulf Hunter doesn't remember dying, but he remembers the last thing he saw before everything went black—a wizard. All wizards must die! The only problem is, the wizard standing next to him smells too damned good, so good Sandy thinks he might have to keep him.
And since wherever Thaddeus goes, Sandulf finds himself yanked along, he might not have a choice in the matter anyway.


text:
'Dis '|Voice coil iimpedance
'I1' Node=1=2
Z={ Z=Ree + j*w*Le; }
|Motor Gyrator
'G1' Node=2=0=3=4 Bl={Bl}
|Mechanical part Impedance
'I2' Node=3=5
Z={ Z=Rms + j*(w*Mms -
1/(w*Cms)) }
|Reverse diaphragm Coupler
'C1' Node=4=0=10 dD={dD|
Front diaphragm
'C2' Node=5=0=300 dD={dD}
|Radiation Radiator
'R1' Def='C2'
'D1' Meas_DoNotModify
tD1=-50mm |Concave dome
fp=800Hz |Mass reduction frequency fs=60Hz
Qes=0.32 Re=5.58ohm
Inspect/Network Impedance
|Impedance compensation
Node=1=0 C=20uF
'B11' Def='D1' Node=1=0
y=-10cm z=0
HAngle=0 VAngle=0
'F1' fo=300Hz
{b0=1; a2=1; a1=1.414214; a0=1; }
|Diffraction of finite baffle
System 'Bass'
'F1' fo=300Hz
a1=1.414214; a0=1;
Horn driver
Driver 'D11'
Def='D1' Node=1=0=20=0
'Du1' |sound path around the
voice coil Node=20=0
|Perimeter of magnet cap (formula parser)
HD=8mm |Width of magnet cap. Len=20cm
|Depth of duct.
|Begin of funnel with a duct. Duct
'Du2' Node=20=30
dD=10cm |duct diameter Len=10cm|duct len
|The mid section of horn is
conical Waveguide 'W1'
Conical dTh=10cm
|throat diameter
|mouth widthHMo=50cm
|mouth height
Len=20cm |funnel length Radiation part of horn exponential
'H1' Node=40
|simple exponential flare
HTh=10cm |throat width/height
HMo=20cm |mouth width/height
|radiation cone (horizontal)
|" (vertical)
y=0 z=0
|radiation position of horn HAngle=0
Generate measured loudspeaker
with menu point:
"Tools/Generate Def_MeasRadiator File"
|from the files:
|Input voltage: Uin=2.83V
peak |Distance: r=1.m
I did said it wasn't
simple. You even have to manufacture your own horn from conical sections,
ducts and funnels. So there's no easy asking what happens if use a certain
driver with a horn this long with a throat this big and a mouth this big. It
is actually quite simple to use, its just that it take a life time to know
what to enter. Akabak will also help you to design active or passive
crossovers, many of the other programs listed here will do the same but Akabak
allows you to insert any amount of filters anywhere into the chain and see
what result it has on the plot. You can also design 4 or 5 way systems on
Akabak, with each band having its own driver, cabinet and filter network.
So that's about it for
speaker software. People often ask what program do I use. Well I use all of
the ones listed above. You get to know how the results of all the different
programs relate to how the product will sound when you build it. So for one
project I might use all the programs to see what might happen. It kind of
covers it from all angles then. If a friend of mine wants a simple sealed
enclosure for the back of his car then I would use Bass Box Pro as there's
no point in looking into it any further. Bass Box Pro also has a nice feature
that gives you the response for the back of a car, as it is very different
form a cabinet in room response. If I'm asked to design a two way system
with a 12" driver and a 1" horn in a trapezoidal box for a company then I
would use Leap to derive the box volume and port sizes and then make the
cabinet and continually make modifications and do listening tests until I was
happy with the result. For horn cabs, be it bass or mid top designs I would
use Akabak. I would also use David Mc Beans excellent
Horn Response
While it does not go into the depths that Akabak does it is really nice to use
and you are able to see very quickly if a design is worth continuing with
early on into the project. I like it for bass horns and it seems quite
accurate at predicting what will happen when you finally listen and measure
the design. Horn Response is a free program and I thank David very much for
his input into making this planet a better place to be in with people such as
himself giving so freely that which others would not. So as you can see there
is no one program that does it all, I even have other programs (one by JBL)
that fills the gaps that the other programs leave. I sometimes even resort to
using a hand calculator and paper in making a design and then checking it in
the software domain to see how accurate I was. I also use a 3D CAD modeling program to draw and plot the final plan of the design. All the plans on the
speakerplans site were drawn by hand on a technical drawing board. One of my
jobs in life is as a speaker and system designer, and so if I summit plans to
a big company I always use the 3D computer CAD program as they are expecting
it, I can also come up with a file that can be used by a CNC router for large
scale manufacture. But for the simple plans on the speakerpalns site I like to
resort to doing things by hand as I find it quite a relief from having to work
with computers all day.
So which program for who? If
you're a novice then don't Leap into Leap or Akabak. They will do your
head in and you will forget about speaker designing forever. Start off with
Win ISD, it's free and will teach you most of the basics quickly. You will
need to know that if you make the rear chamber of a ported box bigger you can
then reduce the length of the port, or that if you make the port diameter
larger you will have to increase its length to achieve the same tuning
frequency. Things like this can be learnt in all the programs, with the
exception of Akabak, which assumes you know everything about speaker design.
Akabak is a bit like a mirror in that it doesn't tell you anything more than
you know already, it just shows you what you do know and how to better to
apply it. So the basics can be learnt form Win ISD, but when you grow out of
that then Bass Box Pro should keep you happy for years. It will never really
push you as a designer but will give you the opportunity to design some good
sounding sealed, reflex, 4th and 6th order bandpass
enclosures and even passive radiators. It takes enough detail into account to
be able to construct a cabinet that will sound a lot like its plot suggests.
If you get bored by this program and want to take it further into the
scientific realm then get Leap. The ability to be able to make measurements is
one of its strongest features, but the fact it takes a lot more parameters
into account make it more suitable for the pro designer or very serious
hobbyist. And finally if you are a nutter and your every waking and sleeping
thought is about speaker designing then you should get Akabak. If you are not
mad before you use this program you will be afterwards, its just really good
that it makes you go mad in a way that wants to make other people on this
planet have a good time and enjoy themselves though being better able to hear
music reproduced more accurately.
To finalize I would not jump
into an advanced program like Leap without some kind of prior training. You
could gain your training in that program but it would be slower doing it in a
program that assumes you know what you are doing that in a simpler program
that is there to help you. I know you want to do the best job you can quickly,
but in the end of the day it's all about having something to listen to.
Starting off on an easier program will enable you to have a working cabinet
that will sound really good in weeks.
do the same thing in Leap will take months and probably years. And then as you
might have missed something you should have already known, your end product
might be not as good as if you had designed it in a simpler program that made
sure you understood what you needed to know. If you seriously want to change
the world and come up with groundbreaking designs that have multiple patents
applied to them like many of the systems I design for Big Mouth Speaker
Systems then use Akabak. But be sure this is the direction you want your life
to go in, as there's no turning back.


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Xerox: We will fix what ails services
Xerox Corp.'s operating margin has been sliding in recent years. And reversing that slide is the number-one job of the company, CEO Ursula Burns said Tuesday.
"The focus of my management team is to buck and change that trend," Burns said Tuesday during the company's annual shareholder meeting.
RELATED:Xerox loses Nevada health insurance exchange contract
The meeting, held at Xerox's corporate headquarters in Norwalk, Conn., saw Burns fielding a variety of questions from shareholders on topics ranging from her 2013 paycheck to how the closing of stores by office supply chain giants Staples and Office Depot are affecting it (short answer, so far no discernible impact).
Burns said Xerox's services-related business — which handles everything from insurance claim and bill payment processing to staffing call centers — is expected to be the power-train accelerating growth at the printing and business services giant. Services now account for 57 cents of every dollar the company takes in. By 2017, that number is expected to be 66 percent.
However, that services business has stumbled in recent months. In 2013, it grew by 3 percent — a couple percentage points short of Xerox's expectations. And the company in April ratcheted downward its projections for profits in 2014, citing more-than-expected spending on new Medicaid and health insurance exchange platforms.
The weaker operating margin also is due to services, Burns said. The company's operating margin — a common measure of profitability and operating efficiency — was 8.9 percent in 2013, vs 9.5 percent in 2012 and 10 percent in 2011.
To fix the services ills, the company is looking at such strategies as acquisitions and "sharing infrastructure and talent (from its print-related technology business) over to services to make sure we can run services better."
Services also has seen a shakeup in its management ranks in recent months to tackle operational problems, Burns said.
The meeting came as shareholders have been doing relatively well in 2014. For the past three months, Xerox stock has averaged roughly $11.30 a share, compared to a 2013 average price of $9.46 and a 2012 average of $7.50.
Additionally, the company in January boosted its quarterly dividend by 8.7 percent, to 6.25 cents per share.
Xerox stock was trading Tuesday morning at $12.05, down 1 percent on a day when the three major indexes all were down a fraction of a percent.


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On Friday, College Football 24/7 primed an epic quarterback matchup of two future pros in fifth-year seniors Aaron Murray of Georgia and Zach Mettenberger of LSU.
They didn't disappoint on Saturday.
Things we learned
From Aaron Murray's big-game heroics vs. LSU to Oklahoma's statement win at Notre Dame, here are the things we learned from college football's fifth weekend. **More ...**
Murray fired his fourth touchdown pass of the day with 1:47 remaining to give the Bulldogs a 44-41 lead, and they held on for a home win in a game that had to boost the NFL draft stock for both quarterbacks. Murray completed 20 of 34 passes for 298 yards, four scores and one interception against one of the most athletic defenses in the Southeastern Conference. Statistically, Mettenberger was even better in a losing effort, completing 23 of 37 passes for 372 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions.
LSU junior receiver Jarvis Landry, a strong prospect in his own right, benefited most from Mettenberger's big day. Landry caught 10 passes for 156 yards and a touchdown. Odell Beckham, a junior, also had a strong receiving day for LSU with six receptions for 118 yards.
Murray entered the season regarded more highly as an NFL prospect than Mettenberger. However, with Mettenberger's size (6-foot-5, 230 pounds), he could now be positioning himself ahead of the 6-foot-1 Murray on some draft boards.


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Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is against asking banks to reduce the amount of principal owed on underwater houses.
Is she also going to oppose sandbags and plywood during hurricane season?
Beth Kassab, "Bondi Should Embrace Lower Principals" p. B5, col. 1 (Orlando Sentinel "Business" Section, Wed., May 18, 2011).
Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi is one of 50 Attorneys General in negotiations with Banks and their Mortgage Servicers to settle government claims and lawsuits involving allegations of fraud by the Banks and their Mortgage Servicers in foreclosure proceedings against homeowners. Ms. Bondi took the position in these negotiations with the Banks and Mortgage Servicers. See Mary Shanklin, "Bondi Opposes Home Bailouts" p. A1, col. 4 (Orlando Sentinel, Monday, May 16, 2011).
Here, that does not help Florida Homeowners in Foreclosure. It does, however, help Banks and their Mortgage Servicers. Not only do Florida Homeowners become more likely to default rather than pay what they can afford to pay, but as readers of this space know, the Banks and Mortgage Servicers have been burdening Mortgage Insurance Companies with their claims to payment once the Mortgagor-Homeowner is not able to pay the Mortgage any longer.
The Banks and their Mortgage Servicers are not from Florida, the Homeowners are.
It is worth recalling that the goal of taking mortgage reductions "off the negotiating table" is not to combat "moral hazard". If that was the goal, then the announced position would be 'no mortgage reductions for proven frauds'. No, that is not what Ms. Bondi said. She said no mortgage reductions for anyone in a home in Florida. See, e.g., in addition to the above newspaper reports: David McLaughlin, "BofA Said to Target Individual States in Foreclosure Inquiry" (Bloomberg. com, April 28, 2011); Robert Schmidt & Tom Schoenberg, "Four Attorneys General Say Foreclosure Deal Terms May Cause 'Moral Hazard'" (Bloomberg.com, March 23, 2011).
So who is Pamela Bondi that she announced this position at this time?
Little is known, publicly, about her. What is known is sparse apart from the positions she announces from time to time. A person's priorities sometimes reveal who they are as a person.
It is known that she and her boyfriend flew to Las Vegas, Nevada four (4) days after she was sworn in, to attend a birthday party for her personal lawyer's ex-boss. See Mary Ellen Klas, "Incoming Attorney General Pam Bondi's Vegas Trip: Duty or Conflict?" (The Miami Herald Online, Saturday, November 13, 2010). Her boyfriend is a doctor.
It is also publicly known that she took over a lawsuit in February, 2011. The lawsuit was filed awhile before by whistle blowers who sued Bank of New York Mellon for fraud allegedly committed against Florida Taxpayers. In February, a Notice filed by her office advised the Court that they would be filing a new Complaint against the Bank soon in that case. See, e.g., Carrick Mollenkamp & Lingling Wei, "Suit Alleges Mellon Created Fake Trades, Overcharged" (Wall Street Journal at WSJ.com, February 4, 2011); Sydney P. Freedberg, "Florida Investigating Charges That Bank Defrauded State's Pension Fund" (St. Petersburg Times Online, February 4, 2011).
As of May 18, 2011 so far as is known to newspapers and reporters who report on such things, no such Complaint has been filed, yet.
We really know only a little about Pamela Bondi aside from her publicly announced position papers. The St. Petersburg Times online-accessible archives on politically oriented stories about her, begins at about the time that she ran for office in 2010. She had never run for office before. It seems that she never came to the attention of a newspaper reporter reporting on politics before she decided to run for attorney general. After she decided to run, we learned that she switched parties and she said that she forgot why.
She was a registered Democrat from 1984 to July 21, 2000. That date was one week after her boss, State Attorney Harry Coe and a Democrat, died. His chief Republican challenger, Mark Ober, then handily won the election and became Ms. Bondi's boss. "Despite those dramatic events, Bondi said she could not recall why she became a Republican when she did." Steve Bousquet, "GOP Attorney General Candidate Pam Bondi Has Democratic Roots" (St. Petersburg Times Online, July 13, 2010).
We know less about her, in short, than we knew about Jessica Lynch, a person she resembles, actually.
Her political story, at least, reportedly begins with a political operative who called her from a phone in a parking lot. He urged her to run for office. The experienced politician, so the reported story goes, had previously been employed by one Rudolph Giuliani when he, Mr. Giuliani, was told to run for political office. See Colleen Jenkins, "Bondi's Rise to Attorney General Began With One Man's Idea" (St. Petersburg Times Online, November 7, 2010). Soon she could be seen as a 'legal analyst' on Fox Television. See id.
Another thing that is publicly known about her is the dog story. I will put that story on a split post, extending this entry for that story. It is true, so far as I know having tracked down several sources for it, but it may not necessarily reflect on the kind of lawyer who negotiates on behalf of other people by announcing that she will not even ask, she will not negotiate at all, for what may be in some cases in the best interests of the State of Florida, her clients.
Conclusion: You Make The Call.
So, then, you decide: Why should Florida's A.G. declare that poor people living in Florida should not even think about having their mortgages reduced while she is in office?
Please Read The Disclaimer.
"I feel sorry for the state of Florida if they elect her. She has no compassion at all." Ms. Dorreen Couture, grandmother of orphaned children and a plaintiff against Ms. Bondi in a lawsuit for custody of a dog in which the Coutures and their grandchildren on the plaintiff's side, and Ms. Bondi on the defendants' side, contested ownership of a dog. Quoted by Emily Nipps, "As Bondi Runs For Attorney General, Bitterness Over Dog Lingers" (St. Petersburg Times Online, September 3, 2010).
Here is the Pamela Bondi dog story as reported in newspaper reports in Florida.
Briefly and factually, children in Louisiana lost their parents in 2005 before Hurricane Katrina. During Hurricane Katrina, the orphans and their grandparents lost or left their dog. Pamela Bondi ended up with the dog. The orphans and their grandparents somehow tracked the dog down and asked Ms. Bondi for their dog back. She refused.
At this point, the dog and Bondi were in Florida, and the orphans and their grandparents were in New Orleans. It does not take a lawyer to figure out that there was only one way to get the dog back: The orphans and their grandparents would have to hire a lawyer in Florida and file a lawsuit before they would get their dog back. See Demorris A. Lee, "Family Pleads to Reclaim Pets" (St. Petersburg Times Online, June 28, 2006).
They did.
The Florida Judge apparently ordered visitation rights to visit the dog, particularly after Ms. Bondi refused. (It is unclear whether this was ordered, but apparently there were some visits with the dog, and then around Christmastime, Ms. Bondi refused to voluntarily allow any more. The Judge then announced to the parties that he was prepared to enter an order allowing the visits, unless the attorneys could work things out without a Court Order.) See Demorris A. Lee, "Judge Orders Dog Visitation" (St. Petersburg Times Online, December 27, 2006).
Ms. Bondi's lawyer in the dog case had formerly made an appearance in the case of Schiavo v. Bush against Terri Schiavo's husband. (You may recall, or have heard, that the Schiavo litigation involved claims that Terri Schiavo was not brain dead, instead she was alive, because of various facial gestures she allegedly made to her parents or perhaps others. The end result of that case was an autopsy which confirmed that Terri Schiavo did not have a live brain and could not have made any cognitive gestures of the kind claimed.) Ms. Bondi's lawyer reportedly told the Judge in the dog case that they were concerned that the dog might harm the children. This came as news to the children. See Demorris A. Lee, "Katrina Dog Case Moves From Talk to a Trial Date" (St. Petersburg Times Online, April 18, 2007).
After nearly a year of this lawsuit, Pamela Bondi settled. Id. Supposedly she agreed to pay for the dog's care in exchange for visitation rights. See Emily Nipps, "As Bondi Runs for Attorney General, Bitterness Over Dog Lingers" (St. Petersburg Times Online, September 3, 2010).
At last report, Ms. Bondi has not gone to Louisiana to visit the dog. See, e.g., id.


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The Mills at Jersey Gardens is New Jersey's largest indoor outlet and value shopping destination. Shop the more than 200 name brand outlets including Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5th, Marshalls and more. Welcome to The Mills at Jersey Gardens, New Jersey's largest outlet and value retail center with over 200 stores all under one roof! The mall is a shopper's paradise anchored by top outlets including Saks Fifth Avenue Off 5th, Neiman Marcus Last Call, Century 21, and Marshalls. Shop for amazing values at the best brand outlets including Michael Kors, Coach, True Religion, Nautica, PUMA, Victoria's Secret and Guess. The center also offers the largest Tommy Hilfiger in the US and a 20-screen AMC Theatres featuring IMAX. With daily transportation from both the Manhattan Port Authority Bus Terminal and Newark Liberty International Airport, the center is a great day-trip out of the hustle and bustle of New York City and features tax-free shopping on clothes and shoes! Enjoy great dining at Johnny Rockets, Chili's and Applebee's.Questions? Call us TOLL FREE - 1-877-SAY-VALU.
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Cohort IV
Our Fall 2019 Cohort had fifteen participating companies, all of which joined in on mentorship experiences and engagement opportunities with top-tier industry leaders in agriculture and technology. To view each company and learn more, visit their profile below.
Aivaka provides devices to retrofit an irrigation system to a wireless setup. Our devices provide a wireless connection between the main controller (or timer) to DC & AC valves and pump start relays. Visit their website here.
Electro-Active Technologies Inc.
Electro-Active Technologies Inc developing a modular and scalable technology for the conversion of organic waste to hydrogen and a soil amendment. This is an offshoot from ORNL. Visit their website here.
Hago Energetics
Hago Energetics converts waste carbon dioxide to a variety of carbons and hydrocarbons. Our target customers are power plants and large industrial polluters who are looking to lower their carbon taxes. Visit their website here.
Inputs operates two online market-based platforms. Inputs connects businesses in the ag supply chain to products and services while providing marketplaces to buy and sell crops and derivative products. Visit their website here.
Irrigation for the Future, Inc.
Irrigation for the Future, Inc. is advanced irrigation management tools, including IMO: software for irrigation planning and scheduling to optimize input costs (energy, water, labor) and managing RDI and deficit irrigation strategies. Visit their
website here.
Nitricity provides universal- and carbon-free access to nitrogen fertilizer. We produce nitric acid, ammonia, or ammonium nitrate on-site and on-demand using just air, water, and renewable electricity. Visit their website here.
SCARLET Solar
SCARLET Solar 44%* more energy output
Installed in hours. Exquisitely engineered for optimum reliability. Visit their website here.
Ecoli Sense
Ecoli Sense is a pathogen sensor development company. We have developed a new, low-cost and innovative way to rapidly detect E. coli bacteria in water. Using our proprietary sensors technology E. coli contamination can be detected within five minutes of exposure to the water sample. Visit their website here.
Epiphene Inc.
Epiphene Inc. is committed to providing effective solutions for issues plaguing your systems:
Filtration & Solids Separation
Heat Exchanger Protection
Water Treatment
Pump Protection
Visit their website here.
HyperBorean developed & sells technology that provides air-conditioning & refrigeration that operates off-grid, powered from sources of waste heat like concentrated solar. Visit their website here.
Intrinsyx Bio
IntrinsyxBio is a microbial inoculant(s) for crops reduce fertilizer needs and increase crop yield and quality. Visit their website here.
Membrion is a University of Washington spinout company in the advanced materials space. Our mission is to manufacture and sell high-performance, low-cost ion-exchange membranes at industry-leading margins to promote the adoption of cost-effective and energy-efficient clean water and energy technologies. Visit their website here.
RABAC is new bacillus-based wastewater technology with 99% treatment efficiency, up to 50% less energy and footprint, and particularly effective in nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus) removal. Visit their website here.
SECCO2 Engines is a next generation engine company dedicated to bringing a revolutionary energy solution that reduces both the costs and emissions for all stationary and transportation engine markets. Visit their website here.


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Get the help of an experienced trial attorney on your side. As an experienced Denver DUI lawyer and criminal defense attorney, Matt Chaput will help advocate on your behalf and get you the best possible outcome for your case. Need help? Contact us now.
Nearly 60 people are arrested for impaired driving in Colorado every day. Every one of those arrested drivers will face serious consequences for operating a vehicle while under the influence. Colorado DUI penalties are strict, and these penalties only become progressively more severe with each subsequent offense.
Colorado has some of the toughest DUI laws in the country. Drivers face harsh penalties for driving while under the influence, even as a first-time offender.
The penalties you face for a DUI conviction, including potential jail time and fines, will largely depend on whether this is your first or subsequent offense.
If a driver is operating a motor vehicle while under the influence and causes serious injury, the penalties include:
If a DUI causes death, the penalties are very severe:
With a first DUI penalty, a deferred sentence may be given. One of the conditions of a deferred sentence may be participation in an alcohol education and treatment program. Classes and treatment may also be required for license reinstatement.
In most cases, first-time DUI offenders in Colorado will have to take a Level I alcohol education class. Here's what you need to know about a Level I class:
If you refuse to take a chemical test or you have a high BAC, you may be required to take a Level II class and participate in treatment. Here's what you need to know about a Level II class:
In Colorado, the Express Consent Law requires drivers to consent to a chemical test if police have reason to believe they are impaired by alcohol or drugs.
If you refuse to take a chemical test, your action is considered evidence as guilt in your DUI trial.
Regardless of whether you are convicted of a DUI in Colorado, refusing to take a chemical test will result in the following penalties:
Colorado's regular DUI and DWAI laws also apply to underage drivers if they have a BAC of more than 0.05%.
The state's zero-tolerance stance on underage drinking and driving (UDD) means that it is illegal for anyone under age 21 to drive with a BAC of 0.02% or higher.
A first UDD is considered a civil violation and not a crime. Second and subsequent violations, however, are considered a class 2 traffic misdemeanor.
Penalties for UDD in Colorado are as follows:
Additionally, you may be required to undergo an alcohol evaluation or education and treatment program at your own expense.
Payment plans are available. Contact us today to learn more.
Chaput Law is a top-rated Colorado law firm that focuses on DUI and Criminal Defense. We represent clients in Denver, Highlands Ranch, Littleton Colorado, and all surrounding cities in Arapahoe and Douglas Counties.
If you are looking for a Denver DUI Defense Attorney that offers aggressive defense no matter the case, look no further.
Contact us today for a free consultation. Don't make the mistake of trying to defend yourself or pleading guilty or no contest just because you want to get this behind you. A conviction for ANY charge can have lasting consequences that you should be aware of before making any decisions.
All Consultations Are Free of Charge