Morris Dovey said:
...
I understand how that works - but early in the game (before Windows
arrived on the scene) I made the decision to specialize in "mission
critical" systems where failures would result in loss of life or incur
costs larger than some national economies. Firms who insisted on Windows
platforms automatically disqualified themselves and their projects from
any possibility of success in the mission-critical category, and I've
never had any interest in producing unreliable stuff.
I saw the same thing in high-performance hardware. The user console might be
Microsoft (or Apple) but the central processor was more likely a DSP running
RTOS. A standout exception was the HP Infinium oscilloscope that used Win98.
They're probably available, but unix folk tend to be a lot more interested
in reliability of result than in the cheapest possible solution, which is
exactly what winmodems are.
That's my home setup, though, recycled office machines saved from the
scrapyard. I bought a Broadband2Go prepaid air card to get them on line to
download large programs and updates.
On your previous post: If you really want to learn C, I'll be glad to
help - but I think e-mail would work better than alt.energy.homepower
Since you've written both assembly code and Pascal, C should be easy and
fun for you.
Morris Dovey
Scientific/engineering computing is very different from business
applications, much more intensive and less extensive. I'm looking for a
little guidance to select a development system optimized for driving and
debugging attached hardware rather than writing Web browsers, networking or
database management. QBasic would be fine if it was updated for modern
hardware. I have Visual Basic 5 that I bought on a work+home license on the
drive of a crashed laptop, and the Visual Studio 6 free demo version. The
trouble with them is that they and Windows doesn't allow me unobstructed
access to the I/O ports. That's why I switched from VB5 to DOS + QB and use
them like a massive self-contained microcomputer development system, with
the three LPT1 registers providing the programmable digital I/O pins, and
external A/D converters on the serial ports.
Did you notice the comment at the end of this article?
http://www.chem.hope.edu/~polik/Chem345-2000/bombcalorimetry.htm
"Calorimeter design is very tricky, especially for processes involving very
small energy changes, e.g., protein folding, or energy changes on top of a
large background, e.g., excess heat from "cold fusion". Heat leaks must be
minimized, and all other heat generating processes must be accounted for."
The cheap substitute for a Dewar is a wide-mouth vacuum Thermos bottle.
jsw