omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Interop. Interop is an annual information technology conference organised by Informa PLC. Founded in 1986, the event takes place in the US and Tokyo (Japan) each year. Interop promotes interoperability and openness, beginning with IP networks and continuing in today's emerging cloud computing era.

Founding
In August 1986 the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held the first TCP/IP Vendors Workshop in Monterey, California. This event later became Interop. The conference was founded by Dan Lynch, an early Internet activist. From the beginning, large corporations, such as IBM and DEC, attended the meeting. The Las Vegas International Telecoms Show is called "the granddaddy of networking shows" because it was created in 1986, a decade before the technology and internet bubble that made it a success.

Internet Toaster

At the 1989 Interop show, Dan Lynch, Interop president, promised John Romkey star billing if he designed an internet interface for a toaster.

At the 1990 Interop show, John Romkey and his friend Simon Hackett debuted a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control Toaster connected to the Internet with TCP/IP networking, and controlled with a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Management Information Base (MIB). The internet interface had one remote control, to turn the power on and off, and the power duration controlled the darkness of the toast. Local control by a human being was still needed to insert the bread. 

At the 1990 Interop show, a small robotic crane, remotely controlled through the internet, picked up a slice of bread and dropped it into the toaster slot.

Dot-com bubble

In 2001, Interop attendance reached a peak with 61,000 visitors, just before the bursting of this Dot-com bubble, which resulted in a major stock market crash for this sector. The 2001 event was marked by innovation, and among the major telecom providers, the rivalry between Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems in the Terabit router market, while the so-called "alternative" operators, such as KPNQwest, Global Crossing and Carrier, launched revolutionary offerings in the enterprise market.

After the crash of 2002, the fever subsided. The 2004 edition in Las Vegas brought together less than 300 exhibitors. The following editions saw a recovery. The organizer of the 2013 edition hoped to increase the number of visitors from 18,000 in 2012 to 20,000 with the presence of 500 suppliers.

References 

Computer conferences
Las Vegas Valley conventions and trade shows
Informa brands
Argus As 292. The Argus As 292 was originally developed in 1939 as a small, remote-controlled unmanned anti-aircraft target drone. A short-range reconnaissance version was also developed. The success of the project led to the Argus Fernfeuer UAV proposal.

Development
The As 292 was designed by Dr. Ing. Fritz Gosslau at Argus Motoren GmbH. Work began on the drone in 1937 at the Argus-Flugmotorenwerke (Argus aero-engine factory) in Berlin-Reinickendorf. Apart from Argus, two other companies were involved in the production of the As 292: Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug () supplied technical assistance with the airframe construction; C. Lorenz Company with the radio-control system. At DFS the drone was referred to as Model 12.

As a target for anti-aircraft gunners, the As 292 was given the designation of Flakzielgerät 43 (Flak-Target Apparatus 43). An earlier effort in 1937 at developing an aircraft-sized target drone, the Fieseler Fi 157, ended in failure.

The first As 292 made the type's first unguided flight on 9 June 1937. The first remotely-controlled flight was made on 14 May 1939. During flight testing, cameras were fitted to a prototype As 292. Testing of this Aufklärungsgerät (reconnaissance device) version started in early 1939 and first aerial photography was made on 2 October 1939. After successful demonstrations Argus received an initial production order for 100 As 292 aircraft in late 1939. Ordered aircraft were delivered in 1942–43. The airframe was of simple tubular construction; the high dihedral wings were removable for when the As 292 was being transported.

At least one As 292 was painted in overall red with white strips.

Operators

Luftwaffe

Specifications

References
 Holsken, Dieter, V-missiles of the Third Reich the V-1 and V-2 (1994), pp. 46–49, 343. Primary source for much of the information are the personal documents of Fritz Gosslau.
 Luftfahrt international, Aufklärungsgerät "Fernfeuer" Argus As 292. Luftfahrt international, 16, 1976, pp. 2511–2519.
 Späte, Wolfgang, Test Pilots (1999). Includes section entitled Large Radio-Controlled Model Aircraft (Erich Klöckner, Trial Reports from DFS where the author narrates how regular pilots were required to observe trials of drones).

292
1930s German military reconnaissance aircraft
Target drones of Germany
Aircraft first flown in 1937
Low-wing aircraft
Single-engined tractor aircraft
Aircraft with fixed conventional landing gear
Single-engined piston aircraft
Unmanned military aircraft of Germany
Music roll. A music roll () is a storage medium used to operate a mechanical musical instrument. They are used for the player piano, mechanical organ, electronic carillon and various types of orchestrion. The vast majority of music rolls are made of paper. Other materials that have been utilized include thin card (Imhof-system), thin sheet brass (Telektra-system), composite multi-layered electro-conductive aluminium and paper roll (Triste-system) and, in the modern era, thin plastic or PET film.

The music data is stored by means of perforations.  The mechanism of the instrument reads these as the roll unwinds, using a pneumatic, mechanical or electrical sensing device called a tracker bar, and the mechanism subsequently plays the instrument.

After a roll is played, it is necessary for it to be rewound before it can be played again.  This necessitates a break in a musical performance.  To overcome this problem, some instruments were built with two player mechanisms (referred to as a duplex roll mechanism) allowing one roll to play while the other rewinds. 

A piano roll is a specific type of music roll, and is designed to operate an automatic piano like the player piano or the reproducing piano.

See also
Book music
Piano roll
Punched tape
Jacquard loom

References
 Barbara Bryner: The piano roll: a valuable recording medium of the twentieth century. Dept. of Music, University of Utah, 2002. 
 Karl Koenig Jazz in Print (1859-1929) Pendragon Press, 2002 pg. 180

Mechanical musical instruments
French musical instruments
Mechanical organ. A mechanical organ is an organ that is self-playing, rather than played by a musician. For example, the barrel organ is activated either by a person turning a crank, or by clockwork driven by weights or springs.

Usually, mechanical organs are pipe organs although some instruments were built using reeds similar to those found in a harmonium. Since the 1950s, some instruments have been built using electronics to generate the sound, though still operated by mechanical or pneumatic means. From the 1990s pipe organs have been built that are operated by MIDI rather than the earlier mechanical means.

Originally, the music for mechanical organs was stored by pins on a large barrel.  Such instruments were called barrel organs. Such organs only have a very limited repertoire, both in the number of musical selections that could be stored, and the length of tune that could be accommodated.

In the 1890s, book music was invented.  This meant that the length of music was no longer constrained. Being physically much smaller than a barrel for a similar instrument, it is much easier to manipulate the music, and so a greater variety of music could be played.

Rather than the book music, some instruments are operated by a music roll.

In popular culture
In the movie The Great Race (1965) Professor Fate, with bandaged thumbs, is shown pretending to play a mechanical organ.

References

See also
Barrel piano
Barrel organ
Componium
Dance organ
Fairground organ
Musical clock
Musical box
Orchestrion
Organ grinder
Piano roll
Player piano
Reproducing piano
Serinette
Street organ

Pipe organ
Mechanical musical instruments
French inventions
French musical instruments
Address decoder. In digital electronics, an address decoder is a binary decoder that has two or more inputs for address bits and one or more outputs for device selection signals. When the address for a particular device appears on the address inputs, the decoder asserts the selection output for that device. A dedicated, single-output address decoder may be incorporated into each device on an address bus, or a single address decoder may serve multiple devices.

A single address decoder with n address input bits can serve up to 2n devices. Several members of the 7400 series of integrated circuits can be used as address decoders. For example, when used as an address decoder, the 74154 provides four address inputs and sixteen (i.e., 24) device selector outputs. An address decoder is a particular use of a binary decoder circuit known as a "demultiplexer" or "demux" (the 74154 is commonly called a "4-to-16 demultiplexer"), which has many other uses besides address decoding.

Address decoders are fundamental building blocks for systems that use buses. They are represented in all integrated circuit families and processes and in all standard FPGA and ASIC libraries. They are discussed in introductory textbooks in digital logic design.

Address decoder selects the storage cell in a memory 
An address decoder is a commonly used component in microelectronics that is used to select memory cells in randomly addressable memory devices.

Such a memory cell consists of a fixed number of memory elements or bits. The address decoder is connected to an address bus and reads the address created there. Using a special switching logic, it uses this address to calculate which memory cell is to be accessed. It then selects that cell by selecting it via a special control line. This line is also known as the select line. In dynamic memories (DRAM), there are row and column select lines on the memory matrix, which are controlled by address decoders integrated in the chip.

Depending on the type of decoder, the logic used to select the memory cell can under certain circumstances be programmable.

Address decoder selects the appropriate memory module 
An address decoder is also used to select the appropriate one of multiple memory modules or memory chips when a particular address is provided by the processor system's address bus.

For this purpose, the memory modules or memory chips have selection inputs, usually referred to as chip select pin (CS) or chip enable pin (CE) pin. These inputs often have a negative logic function ( or ), i. H. with an adjacent logical zero (voltage level low) is selected.

The address decoder uses the different combinatorial logic to place the memory modules or chips in the address space of a processor. The memory modules often have a smaller capacity than the address space. In most cases, several modules can be used, even if they are completely identical in structure. It must be ensured that they differ in the address range.

References

Digital circuits
NCR-340. The NCR-340 was NCR's first line "High Speed" 300-line-per-minute computer printer. It used a  drum made up of 120 (later 132) hardened steel discs with the upper-case alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and a few special symbols. The discs were keyed on an armature, but could be changed if a character were damaged.

The drum sat above an  ink ribbon.  Below the ribbon the  green-bar continuous form paper was moved into and out of the printer head on four tractor assemblies.  Below the paper path were a set of 120 or 132 “hammers” that were triggered by electric solenoids.

Each line of a report was sent from the 315 to the printer and loaded into a buffer.  As the print drum spun, a glass timing disc on one end would indicate to the internal logic that a character was in position to be printed.  All of the “A” characters in the buffer would trigger the appropriate hammer to fire. The hammer would force the paper up against the ribbon, and hit the “A” character on the spinning drum for its position in the line. This would continue for one revolution of the drum printing.

The printer could print up to eight copies of a report by using carbon paper between each layer of paper.  There was a whole industry and series of auxiliary machine ( collators) that would separate the different copies of the report and remove the carbons.  Then the continuous reports were sent through a burster to separate individual pages.

References 

Impact printers
NCR Corporation products
Argus Fernfeuer. The Argus Fernfeuer (long-range fire) concept was proposed in 1939 as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for mine-laying. Later roles were planned for bombing, the dropping of torpedoes and long-range reconnaissance. Development was halted in 1941 but the project, also known as Erfurt, evolved into the V1.

Development
Arising from the Argus As 292 project, the Argus Fernfeuer was also designed by Fritz Gosslau. During the testing of the small As 292 drone, Gosslau proposed an aircraft-sized UAV capable of delivering a one tonne drop charge over long distances. Control was either by line-of-sight radio control or by radio beam direction. A crewed aircraft, flying clear of local defenses, would signal the UAV to release the drop-load. The Fernfeuer aircraft would then return to base.

Guidance expertise would have been from C. Lorenz; airframe advice and construction by Arado. A crewed variant, intended as a command aircraft, was also included in the proposal.

Presented to Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM) on November 9, 1939. Despite initial interest in the Fernfeuer concept, the RLM informed Gosslau and the Argus company that the project was to be shelved. Development abandoned by January 1941 in favor of the V-1 flying bomb.

References
 Holsken, Dieter, V-missiles of the Third Reich the V-1 and V-2 (1994), pp. 46–49, 343. Primary source for much of the information are the personal documents of Fritz Gosslau.

Fernfeuer
Abandoned military aircraft projects of Germany
Unmanned military aircraft of Germany
Basic beryllium acetate. Basic beryllium acetate is the chemical compound with the formula Be4O(O2CCH3)6. This compound adopts a distinctive structure, but  it has no applications and has been only lightly studied. It is a colourless solid that is soluble in organic solvents.

Preparation
It can be prepared by treating basic beryllium carbonate with hot acetic acid.

 

Basic beryllium acetate is insoluble in water but soluble in chloroform, consistent with it being nonpolar.  It melts and sublimes in a vacuum without decomposition.

Structure
"Basic acetates" consist of an ensemble of metal centres bound to a central oxide ion, and a collection of acetate ligands.  Basic beryllium acetate has a tetrahedral Be4O6+ core with acetates (CH3CO2−) spanning each of the pairs of Be2+ centres. It  consists of interlocking six-membered Be2O3C rings.  The structure is relevant to its considerable stability (the compound is distillable at 330 °C).

Uses
The solubility of the salt in organic solvents (chloroform) is useful to extract and purify beryllium rich fractions for many purposes.
Basic beryllium acetate single crystals can easily be grown and are helpful to align x-ray diffractometers and also as a reference in protein crystallography.

See also
 Basic zinc acetate
 Basic beryllium nitrate

References

Beryllium compounds
Acetates
Continuous spatial automaton. A continuous spatial automaton is a type of computer model studied in automata theory, a subfield of computer science. It is similar to a cellular automaton, in that it models the evolution of a set of many states over time. Unlike a cellular automaton, which has a discrete grid of states, a continuous spatial automaton has a continuum of locations in one or more dimensions. The state at each location may be chosen from a discrete set of numbers, or from a continuous interval of real numbers. The states may also vary continuously in time, and in this case the state evolves according to a differential equation.  

One important example is reaction–diffusion textures, differential equations proposed by Alan Turing to explain how chemical reactions could create the stripes on zebras and spots on leopards. When these are approximated by cellular automata, such cellular automata often yield similar patterns. Another important example is neural fields, which are the continuum limit of neural networks where average firing rates evolve based on integro-differential equations. Such models demonstrate spatiotemporal pattern formation, localized states and travelling waves. They have been used as models for cortical memory states and visual hallucinations.

Bruce MacLennan considers continuous spatial automata as a model of computation, and demonstrated that they can implement Turing-universality.

See also
Analog computer
Coupled map lattice

References

Cellular automata
Hacker's Delight. Hacker's Delight is a software algorithm book by Henry S. Warren, Jr. first published in 2002. It presents fast bit-level and low-level arithmetic algorithms for common tasks such as counting bits or improving speed of division by using multiplication.

Background 
The author, an IBM researcher working on systems ranging from the IBM 704 to the PowerPC, collected what he called "programming tricks" over the course of his career. These tricks concern efficient low-level manipulation of bit strings and numbers. According to the book's foreword by Guy L. Steele, the target audience includes compiler writers and people writing high-performance code.

Summary 
Programming examples are written in C and assembler for a RISC architecture similar, but not identical to PowerPC. Algorithms are given as formulas for any number of bits, the examples usually for 32 bits.

Apart from the introduction, chapters are independent of each other, each focusing on a particular subject. Many algorithms in the book depend on two's complement integer numbers.

The subject matter of the second edition of the book includes algorithms for
 Basic algorithms for manipulating individual bits, formulas for identities, inequalities, overflow detection for arithmetic operations and shifts
 Rounding up and down to a multiple of a known power of 2, the next power of 2 and for detecting whether an operation crossed a power-of-2 boundary
 Checking bounds
 Counting total, leading and trailing zeros
 Searching for bit strings
 Permutations of bits and bytes in a word
 Software algorithms for multiplication
 Integer division
 Efficient integer division and calculating of the remainder when the divisor is known
 Integer square and cube roots
 Unusual number systems, including base −2
 Transfer of values between floating-point and integer
 Cyclic redundancy checks, error-correcting codes and Gray codes
 Hilbert curves, including a discussion of applications

Style 
The style is that of an informal mathematical textbook.  Formulas are used extensively. Mathematical proofs are given for some non-obvious algorithms, but are not the focus of the book.

Reception 
Overall reception has been generally positive.

Publication history 
The book was published by Addison-Wesley Professional. The first edition was released in 2002 and the second in 2013.
Japanese language edition of this book was published by SIBaccess Co. Ltd., in 2004.

See also
 HAKMEM
 Popcount
 Find first set

References

Further reading

External links 
 Archive of Hacker's Delight website

2002 non-fiction books
2013 non-fiction books
Computer programming books
Addison-Wesley books
Computer science books
Vicor Corporation. Vicor Corporation is a manufacturer of power modules headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts.

History and overview 
Vicor Corporation, incorporated in 1981 in Andover, Massachusetts, designs, manufactures, and markets modular power components and complete power systems. These are used in electronic products to convert power from a primary power source (typically either alternating current from a mains outlet or direct current from a battery, rectifier or High-voltage direct current power distribution system) into the specific direct current required by electronic circuits. Vicor sells its products in North and South America, as well as internationally through independent distributors, to business-to-business (B2B) customers in computing, industrial equipment and automation, robotics, vehicles and transportation, unmanned aerial vehicles, satellites, and aerospace and defense.

Patrizio Vinciarelli is Vicor's chair of the board, president, and chief executive officer. As of 2022, Vicor had 11 subsidiaries, legally domiciled as follows: Vicor GmbH (Germany); VICR Securities Corporation (Massachusetts, USA); Vicor France SARL (France); Vicor Italy SRL (Italy); Vicor Hong Kong Ltd. (Hong Kong); Vicor U.K. Ltd. (United Kingdom); Vicor Japan Company Ltd. (Japan); Vicor KK (Japan); Vicor Trading (Shanghai) Limited (China); Vicor Development Corporation (Delaware, USA), including Freedom Power Systems, Inc. (Delaware, USA) and Northwest Power, Inc. (Delaware, USA); 560 Oakmead LLC (California, USA).

References

External links
 

Computer companies of the United States
Computer hardware companies
Manufacturing companies based in Massachusetts
Companies established in 1981
Companies listed on the Nasdaq
Power supply manufacturers
Drill tower. A drill tower is a tower and training facility for firefighters. It is usually built within a fire station facility for routine exercises and training. The drill tower is  typically a multi-level structure simulating high-rise buildings. Heights vary by location.

Towers can help firefighters deal with real-life situations, including running upstairs with heavy equipment, using rope and safety nets, and operating a fire engine in a confined space.

See also
Buford Tower
Fire lookout tower
Hose tower

References

Firefighter training
Fire stations
Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement. The Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) is the official Software Engineering Institute (SEI) method to provide benchmark-quality ratings relative to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) models. SCAMPI appraisals are used to identify strengths and weaknesses of current processes, reveal development/acquisition risks, and determine capability and maturity level ratings. They are mostly used either as part of a process improvement program or for rating prospective suppliers. The method defines the appraisal process as consisting of preparation; on-site activities; preliminary observations, findings, and ratings; final reporting; and follow-on activities.

Class A, B, and C Appraisals
The suite of documents associated with a particular version of the CMMI includes a requirements specification called the Appraisal Requirements for CMMI (ARC), which specifies three levels of formality for appraisals: Class A, B, and C. Formal (Class A) SCAMPIs are conducted by SEI-authorized Lead Appraisers who use the SCAMPI A Method Definition Document (MDD)  to conduct the appraisals.
Class A, the most formal, is required to achieve a rating (Level 1 (lowest) to Level 5 (highest)), using the Staged Representation, for public record or for response to U.S. Department of Defense requirements.

See also

 Anti-pattern
 Capability Maturity Model
 Capability Maturity Model Integration (newer)
 People Capability Maturity Model
 ISO/IEC 29110: Software Life Cycle Profiles and Guidelines for Very Small Entities (VSEs)

References 

Maturity models