Showing results for "patrick stakem"

This is a book on energy storage. Most electrical energy is AC, and is used when generated. Direct current is stored in battery, but there is no such things as an AC battery. There are other ways to store the energy. Solar cells only produce electricity during the day, and we might need the energy at night. Hydro power system generate power when there is a sufficient amount of water flow. Nuclear plants generate power as needed. Power from geothermal wells is generally available 24x7.

This book is intended as an introduction to the topics of computer virtualization and the cloud. We will see how the topics come together.The book includes extensive reference and background material. It will not teach you to be an expert in virtualization or cloud technologies. It will teach you to understand and appreciate these topics, and how they fit into the big picture of computing. The best way to learn these technologies is to use them.

This book is about the Personal Robots from the 1980's that inspired hopes for the future. This was triggered, in part, by the robots of the Star War series. R2D2 was based on the three service droids of the early Science Fiction movie, Silent Running. They were named Huey, Louie, and Dewey. At the same time, personal computers were emerging as affordable and easier to use. The excitement and the technology reached a tipping point. Before this time, robotics mainly meant large hydraulic un...

This book documents the development of missile and spacecraft guidance computers from the earliest efforts to the current Space Station and satellite onboard systems. This book developed from the author's presentation at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in 2009 for the Workshop on Flight Software. The second and third editions were expanded with new material and references. The fourth edition updated the material to the state of the art in 2014, with discussions of...

Apollo was built in the era of “big iron” computer mainframes. The concept of an onboard computer for space missions was radically new. There was only one place in the world that could design the Apollo Guidance Computers, and that was MIT. It took most of the U.S.’s production of integrated circuits, another radical idea replacing individual vacuum tubes, to build the AGC’s. It took 2,000 person-years of independent code review and validation to ensure that they would operate properly.

In the last 11 years, a lot has changed in this field. That's to be expected in a technology that is driven by Moore's Law, where complexity doubles every 18 months or so. So we have a factor of 7 or so, but actually the rate of change is increasing.Where we are today is machines built with multiple cores on one chip, each core being a complete computer. The same communication schemes discussed in this book are used, with the same trade-off's, shared memory or communication channel....

In 1983, the British company Acorn Computers Ltd. was shopping for a new 16-bit processor to replace the 8-bit Mostek 6502 that they were then using. Some say that Acorn was rejected by Intel, others say that Acorn didn’t like either the Intel 80286 or the Motorola MC 68000. In any case, the company decided to develop its own processor called the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM. The company had been started in Cambridge, UK, in 1978. The name Acorn was supposed to suggest expandability and grow...

This book covers the topics of the existence of planets around others stars. We think now we are unique in the Universe, but the Universe is very large. This book just touches the surface of this very exciting field. With better telescopes and data processing methods, more planets in our galaxy have been found. Dedicated planet-finding facilities on the ground and in space have been deployed. We now see that planets are rather common in our galaxy. The next big question is, do any of them ...

This book is an update to an earlier book on x86 computer architecture, hardware and software. The x86 describes not only a line of microprocessor chips dating back to 1978, but also an instruction set architecture (ISA) that the chips implement. The chip families are built by Intel and other manufacturers, and execute the same instructions, but in different ways. The results are the same, arithmetically and logically, but may differ in their timing.Why the focus on the Intel x86? ...

There is a brief review of computer architecture, binary math, and digital logic that you can skip, if you are familiar with these topics.The evolution of the 8-bit processors is a history of the advance of semiconductor technology from the first transistors, to the breakthrough of multiple transistors on a chip, the integrated circuit. A lot of this happened when the “Silicon Valley” of northern California was mostly known for its citrus crops. The tools that made all this happen ...

It can be argued that all failures are human failures. We make errors in judgment, we use the wrong model, we solve the wrong problem, we don't verify our solution. There are, of course, natural disasters. These are not our fault, but it can be argued that we need to foresee these and plan an approach. Could the dinosaurs have foreseen the meteor that created the Gulf of Mexico? Not likely. Could the Romans have foreseen the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii? Maybe, with a better...

This book traces the history and technology of several Irons works in pre-colonial Maryland, starting with the Colony of Maryland. The collected information is the result of a long chain of research by tireless researchers in dingy colonial era archives, and in dismal swamps.It tell the story of Richard Snowden, coming to the Colony of Maryland as an endentured servant, and eventually building a mansion for himself and all of his daughters.