Cop Car's Beat

News for Nerds led me to: Rats & Alerts

Oh, Rats!

Most of us have long known of service animals (usually of the canine variety) and work animals (horses, in my day); but there is a new variety about which I may/may not have heard in the past: Mine-Sniffing Rats. The New York Times article tells about a rat that received an award for bravery while working at a speed that humans can only envy.

Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery

Magawa, a 5-year-old African giant pouched rat, was recognized with a prestigious honor for his work detecting mines and explosives in Cambodia.

By Anna Schaverien | Sept. 25, 2020

The medal awarded on Friday lauded the “lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty” for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa.

Magawa is the first rat to receive the award — a gold medal bestowed by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the “animal’s George Cross” after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism.

....

...The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector.

He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.

In case you are interested: Magawa is two feet long.

Alert to Twitter users

According to The Verge, "Twitter says it’s working on bringing its “read the article before you retweet it” prompt to all users “soon.” The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven’t clicked through to actually read."

Tuba Bumblebee

This morning, Bluebird of Bitterness posted another video. I usually skip videos, but I eventually decided to watch this one. I enjoyed it so much that I'm passing it along. The whole video lasts just under three minutes, the Flight of the Tuba Bumblebee commencing at about the 2:01 mark. I must say that I enjoyed the fanfare of introduction as much as did I enjoy the Bumblebee.

 

What I do not enjoy is that YouTube has begun eschewing Internet Explorer, opening instead in Edge. Bah, humbug! Although I was forced to use Edge as early as 2015 or 2016 in accomplishing my volunteer work (although Edge browser did not work with the Edge database that also I had to use), I never learned to appreciate the experience.

More from Slashdot.org - Sleep, Laser Firing, Cell Phone Review

Individualized Circadian Clocks: New Research Suggests Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours of Sleep (time.com) 58

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:43PM from the beating-the-clock dept.

Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: "the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks." Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so greatly that they could form the next frontiers of personalized medicine...

Human sleep is largely a mystery. We know it's important; getting too little is linked to heightened risk for metabolic disorders, Type 2 diabetes, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration and many types of cancer. "It's probably true that bad sleep leads to increased risks of virtually every disorder," says Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco... The ideal sleep duration has long been thought to be universal. "There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don't get it," says Ptacek. "But that's as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It's just not true..."

About a decade ago, Ptacek's wife Ying-Hui Fu discovered the first human gene linked to natural short sleep; people who had a rare genetic mutation seemed to get the same benefits from six hours of sleep a night as those without the mutation got from eight hours. In 2019, Fu and Ptacek discovered two more genes connected to natural short sleep, and they'll soon submit a paper describing a fourth, providing even more evidence that functioning well on less sleep is a genetic trait...

Doctors once dismissed short sleepers as depressed or suffering from insomnia. Yet short sleepers may actually have an edge over everyone else. Research is still early, but Fu has found that besides being more efficient at sleep, they tend to be more energetic and optimistic and have a higher tolerance for pain than people who need to spend more time in bed. They also tend to live longer.

 

 

Scientists Solve a Mystery By Firing a Laser at the Moon (yahoo.com) 33

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @04:34PM from the laser-shows dept.

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

 

 

Reviewer Calls Linux-based PinePhone 'the Most Interesting Smartphone I've Tried in Years' (androidpolice.com) 41

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:39PM from the Linux-PC-in-your-palm dept.

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64's new Linux-based PinePhone "the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years," with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There's a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It's good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15...

There's a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you're worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again.... For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I'm impressed it's built as well as it is...

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts "a boat-load of cool and innovative things" being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that's 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month... I don't know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days...

While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins)...

IT roles we old times never filled

Excerpts from NETWORKWORLD

Cisco spotlights new IT roles you've never heard of

A Cisco report on IT trends says new jobs to address changing IT needs include business translator, network guardian and network detective.

By Michael Cooney

Senior Editor, Network World| May 4, 2020 10:18 am PDT

 

From the networking study, Cisco put forward a number of new or developing roles it expects to see in the future, including:

• Business translator: The business translator works to better turn the needs of business into service-level, security and compliance requirements that can be applied and monitored across the network. The translator also works to use network and network data for business value and innovation, and their knowledge of networking and application APIs will help them glue the business to the IT landscape.
• Network guardian: A network guardian works to bridge network and security architectures. They build the distributed intelligence of the network into security architecture and the SecOps process. This is where networking and security meet, and the guardian is at the center of it all, pulling in and pushing out vast amounts of data, distilling it and then taking action to identify faults or adapt to shutdown attackers.
• Network commander: Intent-based networking builds on controller-based automation and orchestration processes. The network commander takes charge of these processes and practices that ensure the health and continuous operation of the network controller and underlying network.
• Network orchestrator: This position translates business needs into network policy. It focuses on policy translation and automation, and policy alignment across network and IT domains.
• Network detective: A network detective uses and tunes network assurance tools that employadvanced analytics and AI to ensure that the network delivers on business intent. They work with IT service-management processes and SecOps teams to identify network anomalies and close potential security holes. Like the network guardian, they use data proactively to identify faults and attacks.

“These new jobs represent a growing tie between business and technology,” Clarke said. "Piece parts of these new criteria are handled by different people but what we are seeing is a need for a hybrid engineer to handle a blend of duties they don’t typically deal with today."

For example, the business intent might be high-quality video calls from a remote workspace that then might be moved from one place to another. The network doesn’t understand that but an engineer can take a multistep configuration to make that happen. How you deal with security, control bandwidth, QoS and use analytics and automation together is part of an evolving role, he said.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Disclosure: I own a few shares (fewer than 200) of Cisco; but, they know nothing about me or my blog and this posting is not, in any way, endorsed by them.

We are edging toward the user-friendly computing arena about which I dreamed 40-50 years ago.

Back in the days when, to make good use of digital computing power, one needed to program to a certain extent (More from Slashdot.org - What was your first coding language?), I lamented that "Just because we have the capability of doing something doesn't mean that we should need to do it."

One of the latest postings on Slashdot.org (below) gives me hope that we'll eventually reach the state in which the person on the street will be able to tell digital computers what to do.

Will Low-Code and No-Code Platforms Revolutionize Programming? (forbes.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 23, 2020 @03:34AM from the pondering-platforms dept.

In a new article in Forbes, a Business Technology professor at the Villanova School of Business argues that the way we build software applications is changing: If you're living in the 21st century you turn to your cloud provider for help where many of the most powerful technologies are now offered as-a-service. When your requirements cannot be completely fulfilled from cloud offerings, you build something. But what does "building" mean? What does "programming" mean...? You can program from scratch. You can go to Github (where you can find code of all flavors). Or you can — if you're a little lazier — turn to low-code or no-code programming platforms to develop your applications.

All of this falls under the umbrella of what, the Gartner Group defines as the "democratization of expertise":

"Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training...."

[T]he new repositories, platforms and tools are enabling a whole new set of what we used to call "programming." As Satya Nadella said, "Every business will become a software business, build applications, use advanced analytics and provide SAAS services," and as Sajjad Daya says so well in Hackernoon, "Coding takes too long for it to be both profitable and competitively priced. That's not the case with no-code platforms, though. The platforms do the complicated programming automatically, slashing development time..."

The technology democracy has forever changed corporate strategy. And what does this mean? It means that the technical team scales on cue. But "technical" means competencies around Github, low-code/no-code platforms and especially business domains... [A]ll of this levels the technology playing field among companies — so long as they understand the skills and competencies they need.

Today's witty remark from Slashdot.org: "16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling"

More from Slashdot.org - What was your first coding language?

The following item is taken from Slashdot.org.

Are There Generational Differences In First Coding Languages and Learning Resources? (hackerrank.com) 81

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 09, 2020 @06:34AM from the big-on-bootcamps dept.

"Under the age of 39? Odds are that most of your peers learned to code in C.

"Most Baby Boomers and Gen Xers — or, those between the ages of 40 and 74 in 2020 — learned to code in BASIC."

That's just one of the interesting conclusions from HackerRank's third annual "Developer Skills Report," which this year compiled responses from over 116,000 developers (from 162 different countries). Developed for educational use in 1964, BASIC was a popular instructional language in college classrooms. But that began to change in 1972, when Bell Labs invented C, allowing portability of the Unix operating system. Though it wasn't an instant hit, the language rose to popularity in the late 70s and early 80s alongside the growth of Unix. Today, the language is celebrated for its longevity, flexibility, and ease of use — just some of the reasons it's still popular for Gen Zers learning to code today.

Gen Z is more likely than any previous generation to utilize bootcamps. Nearly one in six say they've leveraged bootcamps to learn new skills. On the flip side, they're less likely to learn coding skills from older generations' go-tos, like books and on-the-job training. As Gen Z comes to rely more heavily on non-traditional education sources like bootcamps, they're poised to become a key talent pool.
Jaxenter also summarizes another interesting finding from the survey. "72% of hiring managers reported that bootcamp grads were equally or better equipped for their job." The I-Programmer site even noted the top reasons managers gave the surveyors for why bootcamp grads exceed:

• Ability to learn new technologies & languages quickly (71%)
• Strong practical experience (61%)
• Eager to take on new responsibilities (52%)

And they also summarizes another interesting result. "Almost of third of developers at small companies (1-49 employees) haven't obtained a Bachelor's degree -- a proportion that drops to only 9% in companies with 10,000 or more employees."

I notice that they looked at no one older than 74. That makes sense since they were looking at developers (which we oldsters called computer programmers) - active ones, who are still employed. My generation mostly cut our teeth on FORTRAN (I started coding with it in 1961), did not become developers, and are, by and large, retired or dead rather than employed. My succeeding programming codes (which we called "languages") were WAT4 (Boeing's version of FORTRAN 4), WAT5 (Boeing's version of FORTRAN 5), APT (for driving numerically controlled machines), BASIC, and who remembers anything after that? Mostly, I used apps that were put out by an aircraft manufacturer or NASA (NASTRAN Versions 16 & 68), from then on.

I'm wondering how many (computer) languages Stu has learned and/or used. In general, anything really challenging, I got a PhD like Stu to do!!

More from Slashdot.org - Google finally plans to pull the plug on tracking cookies & User-Agent Strings - and NAS report on biobots

Cookies Track You Across the Internet. Google Plans To Phase Them Out (nbcnews.com) 39

Posted by msmash on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:44PM from the how-about-that dept.

 

Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for online privacy as well as the digital economy. From a report: The company said Tuesday that it plans to phase out the use of digital tools known as tracking cookies, which other companies use to identify people online and learn more about them. The move is meant to offer users greater control over their digital footprints and enhance user privacy, according to Google. But the move could also provide Google with even greater control over the online advertising market, which the company already dominates. Google said the change will come to its Chrome web browser and be rolled out over two years. Google did not announce any changes to its own data collection methods.

Google also said that a previously announced change to make third-party cookies more secure and precise in their abilities will be rolled out in February. Justin Schuh, director of engineering for trust and safety for Google's Chrome, said the search giant needs time to enact changes because it is working with advertisers and publishers to address the need for cookies to remember sign-ins, embed third-party services such as weather widgets and deliver targeted advertising. But he did not downplay the significance of Google's announcement. "We want to change the way the web works," he said in an interview.

 

Google To Phase Out User-Agent Strings in Chrome (zdnet.com) 74

Posted by msmash on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @12:21PM from the up-next dept.

 

Google has announced plans today to phase out the usage of user-agent strings in its web browser Chrome. From a report: UA strings have been developed part of the Netscape browser in the 90s, and have been in use ever since. For decades, websites have used UA strings to fine-tune features based on a visitor's technical specifications. But now, Google says that this once-useful mechanism has become a constant source of problems, on different fronts. For starters, UA strings have been used by online advertisers as a way to track and fingerprint website visitors. "On top of those privacy issues, User-Agent sniffing is an abundant source of compatibility issues, in particular for minority browsers, resulting in browsers lying about themselves (generally or to specific sites) , and sites (including Google properties) being broken in some browsers for no good reason," said Yoav Weiss, a Google engineer working on the Chrome browser.

To address these issues, Google said it plans to phase out the importance of UA strings in Chrome by freezing the standard as a whole. Google's plan is to stop updating Chrome's UA component with new strings (the UA string text that Chrome shares with websites). The long-term plan is to unify all Chrome UA strings into generic values that don't reveal too much information about a user. This means that new Chrome browser releases on new platforms such as new smartphone models or new OS releases will use a generic UA string, rather than one that's customised for that specific platform.

 

Scientists Use Stems Cells From Frogs To Build First Living Robots (theguardian.com) 31

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:00AM from the first-of-its-kind dept.

Cy Guy writes: Having not learned the lessons of Jurassic Park and the Terminator, scientists from the University of Vermont and Tufts have created "reconfigurable organisms" using stem cells from frogs. But don't worry, the research was funded by the Department of Defense, so I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong this time. "The robots, which are less than 1mm long, are designed by an 'evolutionary algorithm' that runs on a supercomputer," reports The Guardian. "The program starts by generating random 3D configurations of 500 to 1,000 skin and heart cells. Each design is then tested in a virtual environment, to see, for example, how far it moves when the heart cells are set beating. The best performers are used to spawn more designs, which themselves are then put through their paces."

"Because heart cells spontaneously contract and relax, they behave like miniature engines that drive the robots along until their energy reserves run out," the report adds. "The cells have enough fuel inside them for the robots to survive for a week to 10 days before keeling over."

The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BTW: If you don't find that last item scary, try reading Clive Cussler's and Graham Brown's novel, The Storm, 2012, ISBN 1-4104-4821-5.

What Elder Brother Wanted

I'm sure that Elder Brother (EB) was happy to see us; but, the real reason he made the effort to drive here through treacherous weather was revealed shortly after his arrival when he said, "The laptop computer that [CC] gave me is driving me crazy! Norton keeps nagging me. I'd throw the machine away except it's the only machine that I have from which I can print!" Hunky Husband (HH) advised EB to do as he does. Said HH, "When I have a computer problem, I snivel and complain until [CC] fixes it for me." Replied EB, "That's exactly what I'm trying to do."

Image from MARZ [The nc6220 is a 14" laptop rather than, as shown in the graphic, a notebook.]

HH brought the ancient laptop, a Compaq nc6220, in and we set it up on my non-computer desk. The computer OS is Windows 7 which most of us know has only until the 14th of this month left on its "life". Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support Windows 7 after that date. That said, it is the only (of three or four) computer in EB's stable that runs anything more recent than Windows 98. You wouldn't believe what contortions EB goes through to do what he wants to get done. He still uses the single-floppy (5.25", for Pete's sake) version of Lotus 1-2-3 that I gave him when we both lived in New Mexico (Hint: I left NM 30 years ago!) The laptop that I gave EB in 2015 when I departed his Colorado home following a month of observing EB's recovery from cardiac arrest is slow and, because I had installed Norton 360 on it, it virtually choked whenever EB tried to do anything with it. [Truth be said, EB's patience is terribly thin and as is true with many of us engineers, he can't understand why anyone would design equipment/software in a manner other than the precise way in which he would have done so! Did I tell you that EB eschews use of a mouse, preferring to use keystrokes and touchpad? He also uses the DOS emulator to look at the directory, did not know how to delete a file or a folder, and did not have the first clue about several other things that we "normal" folk take for granted on computers. He worked on nuclear weaponry, of course!]

It took a while; but, by last evening, "we" had managed to uninstall all Norton files, install Firefox (which EB had been unable to accomplish), remove some stragglers of my own old files, and defrag the hard drive. At that point, EB was a happy camper who stowed his laptop in his car for cartage home. I hasten to add that EB connects to only one URL with that machine. He uses that machine, only, to access data that are available at the Wall Street Journal's website; thus, he isn't much worried about acquiring viruses online.

The end...

The end is near here! At least, that's what I'm reading on Slashdot.org.

Windows 10 Mobile Reaches End of Support (androidauthority.com) 49

Posted by msmash on Friday December 13, 2019 @11:10AM from the how-about-that dept.

We've known Windows 10 Mobile has been a dead platform for years now. Even Microsoft themselves have been telling people they need to switch to Android or iOS. But yesterday, we saw the final blow to Microsoft's mobile OS -- it officially reached its end of life and is no longer supported. From a report: There is some good news for the two of you still running Windows 10 Mobile though. The platform's office apps will receive updates and security patches until January 12, 2021. This includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. That means you still have a little more time before you absolutely need to migrate to another mobile platform if you just can')t break your Windows 10 Mobile addiction. Though we still recommend you take the leap as soon as possible.

 

I am less alarmed than, perhaps, I should be. My own smart phone still runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional. The last time I was able to update my Windows Mobile was at 9:28am on 7/18/2019 - which is more recently than I would have thought. One of the Windows 10 updates on my desktop computer wiped out the capability of syncing my Palm Treo 700WX phone to my desktop. Whenever I have gone into the local Verizon store during the past several months, whoever is helping me has called everyone over to look at my antique! They told me a few months ago that they would stop offering phone service to my TREO within about six months. Verizon doesn't make enough money off of me. I probably have the last smart phone in Kansas that doesn't require a data service. I get plain vanilla phone service, with texting capability turned "off" by Verizon. The only smart feature that I use is being able to carry/consult Microsoft Office files. That's the beauty of running a Windows OS. Too bad that no Windows-based phones have come out in the past umpteen years!

Progression in electronic calculators

A bit of family history in calculating equipment was presented in Slide Rules last year. Below is a photo showing most of my progression in electronic calculators. The photo fails to actually show my first electronic calculator, an HP-35, that I purchased in 1972 or 1973; because, that calculator went to Bogie a few years ago. I have no idea why I still have the case and booklet that went with it. Probably, I couldn't find them at the time.

Left-to-right in the photo are the (phantom) HP-35, HP-19C (circa 1978), and HP-48GX (circa 1990).

The machine that has been most-used was the HP-19C (photo, below). It was (to me!) a marvel. Unlike the HP-35, it doesn't lose its mind when it is shut off - thus the "C" for "continuous memory" in its model number. Not only is it programmable, but it has a small thermal printer built into the top of it for printing out programs, calculations, or answers. It saw use not only in calculations of aircraft structural quantities but in later calculations required in program management. It was totally useless in most of the work that I did while in Albuquerque as those programs were classified and a continuous memory machine was banned.

My latest and, undoubtedly, last electronic calculator is the HP-48GX (photo, below).

The HP-48GX owes its existence in my stable of machines to the fact that I returned to Kansas - to a job totally unrelated to what I had done in Florida and Albuquerque. In essence, I "started over" - in aircraft structures stress and fatigue analysis. There I was, back to actually doing technical calculations. The HP-48GX was well suited to the tasking. However, it didn't see much use because, within a couple of years, I started revising a rather large super-element NASTRAN model (on a Sun) that ran on The Little Airplane Factory's mainframe computer. The model had been built, sequentially, by about eight engineers over the previous two or three years; but, the latest NASTRAN guru who had been making a major modification to reflect a new option (a wide door that would allow ingress by a person on a stretcher, etc), was reassigned to work on the Citation X that was in development at the time.

The "Wide Door" model was used to certify the installation by analysis (except for the cyclic pressurization testing) rather than the theretofore standard method of using extensive testing. So large was the model that, in order to run it, I had the computer people use the "disaster pack" tape system. Not a great situation; but, it got the job done. The output was never printed out. I was able to convince the FAA engineer that he didn't really want to bring a truck to pick up the output, but would be better off with a huge book of microfiche.

Currently, the HP-48GX sees use, mostly, doing odd calculations suggested by blog postings, blog friends, or Hunky Husband - and, a couple of times each year, helping me balance my checkbook. It's a good little machine, but totally underemployed (as are many people, these days!)