omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Conair Firecat. The Conair Firecat is a fire-fighting aircraft developed in Canada in the 1970s by modifying military surplus Grumman S-2 Trackers. The modifications were developed by the maintenance arm of the Conair Group, which became a separate company called Cascade Aerospace.

Development
The Firecats are retrofitted Grumman S-2 Trackers. Conair bought a large number of Trackers formerly operated by the Canadian Navy and a small number of ex-United States Navy aircraft as well. The Trackers are modified for aerial firefighting as Firecats by raising the cabin floor by 20 cm (8 in) and fitting a 3,296-litre (870 U.S. gal) retardant tank where the torpedo bay is normally located. All superfluous military equipment is removed and the empty weight is almost 1,500 kg lower than a Tracker's. The first aircraft was modified in 1978. Some examples have been re-engined with turboprop engines and are known as Turbo Firecats, these feature a larger tank and extra underwing fuel tanks; the Maximum Take Off Weight (MTOW) is increased by 680 kg (1,500 lb) to 12,480 kg (27,500 lb), while the lighter turbine engines also reduce the empty weight. The first Turbo Firecat was produced in 1988.

Operational history

Conair commenced Firecat operations in 1978. Firecats and Turbo Firecats were previously in service with Conair and the Government of Saskatchewan in Canada and were also used by the Government of Ontario. The Sécurité Civile organisation in France took delivery of 14 Firecats over a period of five years commencing in May 1982. It has had its examples further converted and is now standardized on the Turbo Firecat. A total of 35 Firecat and Turbo Firecat conversions have been performed; four Firecats and three Turbo Firecats have crashed in France. In 2020 Turbo Firecats were retired for Sécurité Civile in France.

Similar conversions are performed by another company Marsh Aviation in the United States. These are known as Marsh Turbo Trackers and feature Garrett AiResearch TPE-331 turboprop engines.

Variants
Firecat Original version, fitted with Wright R-1820 radial piston engines as fitted to standard Grumman Trackers

Turbo Firecat Version fitted with two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-67AF turboprop engines

Aircraft on display

Specifications (Turbo Firecat)

See also

References

 
 
 Manufacturer's website

External links

Tracker, Firecat and Turbo Firecat History and Photos (in French) 

1970s Canadian special-purpose aircraft
Firecat
Grumman aircraft
Aerial firefighting aircraft
Twin piston-engined tractor aircraft
High-wing aircraft
Twin-turboprop tractor aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1978
Aircraft first flown in 1988
János Csonka. János Csonka (22 January 1852 in Szeged – 27 October 1939 in Budapest) was a Hungarian engineer, the co-inventor of the carburetor for the stationary engine with Donát Bánki, patented on 13 February 1893.

Life 
Csonka, self-educated in many fields, had no university degree, but became one of the greatest figures of Hungarian engineering industry, and with the carburetor he has heavily contributed to technical development in the world.  He studied the Lenoir motor in Paris in 1874 and there he recognized the prospects of the internal combustion engine.
He became head of the training workshop at the Technical University of Budapest at the age of 25 where he employed skilled workers at his own expense, which allowed him to use the workshop for his experiments.
Csonka retired at the age of 73 and filed his last patent application at the age of 84.

Inventions 
As the head of the workshop in 1879, Csonka invented the first Hungarian gas engine, several other engines and vehicles, including the first motor tricycle and postal automobile of the Hungarian Post, which were used for decades. In the 1890s, together with Donát Bánki, they produced the Bánki-Csonka engine and the first Hungarian motorcycle and motor-boat.

References

External links
JÁNOS CSONKA (1852 - 1939) at www.hungarianhistory.com

1852 births
1939 deaths
Engineers from Austria-Hungary
Inventors from Austria-Hungary
Hungarian inventors
Hungarian automotive engineers
Hungarian automotive pioneers
People from Szeged
Hungarian industrialists
Burials at Farkasréti Cemetery
Studebaker Transtar. Transtar was the model name given to the line of trucks produced by the Studebaker Corporation of South Bend, Indiana, from 1956-1958 and 1960-1963 (although the last vehicles were sold as 1964 models). The name was used on most trucks in the Studebaker E-series, but not all. The Transtar name was first introduced for the 1956 (2E series) model year in 1/2-ton, 3/4-ton, 1-ton, 2-ton, and 2-ton heavy duty capacities. The three smaller models were available with factory-built pick-up bodies. The basic styling of these trucks dated back to the 1949 models, though they had received some styling and engineering changes in 1954 and 55. The Transtar name continued to be used on most of the 1957-58 3E series trucks, though a stripped-down Studebaker Scotsman model without the Transtar name was introduced in the 1958 model year. The 57-58 Transtars received an aggressive new fiberglass grille that attempted (largely successfully) to make Studebaker's outdated cab design look fresh and new. For unknown reasons, the Transtar name was dropped for the 1959 4E series Studebaker trucks and changed to Deluxe.

For 1960, Studebaker introduced a new line of 1/2-ton and 3/4-ton trucks under the name Studebaker Champ. The Champs used front-end and cab sheetmetal from the 1959-60 Lark passenger cars, mated to their existing light-duty truck chassis and drive trains. The Champs were created in response to the Ford Ranchero (introduced in 1957) and Chevrolet El Camino (introduced in 1959), which used passenger car styling and features in a light-duty pickup truck. The Transtar name reappeared on Studebaker's medium- and heavy-duty trucks (1- and 2-ton) for 1960, and continued to be used on these trucks up through its 1964 models. Studebaker suspended production of all of its truck models when it closed its United States factory in December 1963.

External links
Studebaker Trucks link w/ images

Transtar
Pickup trucks
1960s cars
Cars introduced in 1956
Cars discontinued in 1963
David Kirk (scientist). David Blair Kirk (born 1960) is a computer scientist and former chief scientist and vice president of architecture at NVIDIA. As of 2019, he is a Venture Partner at DigitalDx Ventures, and an independent consultant and advisor.

Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 1991, Kirk was an engineer for Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard. From 1993 to 1996, Kirk was Chief Scientist and Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game manufacturing company. From 1997 to 2009 he was NVIDIA's chief scientist and he is an NVIDIA Fellow.

In 2002, Kirk received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his significant contributions to bringing high performance graphics hardware to the mass market. In 2006, Kirk was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his role in bringing high-performance graphics to personal computers. 

Kirk is the inventor of 50 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and underlying graphics algorithms.

Books

References

External links
NVIDIA Corporate Biography

1960 births
Living people
Nvidia people
Computer graphics professionals
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Infoware. Infoware is a term that was coined by Tim O'Reilly and is defined as a website that use commoditized server software such as LAMP to enable data (e.g. book comments and ratings) to be shared via a website, and create a value as a result (e.g. other people's opinions of a particular book that you want to buy). The term infoware was first used in O'Reilly's talk on the subject at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997, and later in talks such as one at ISPCON 98. It was written up and published as his chapter Hardware, Software, and Infoware in the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.

The term Infoware was in fact coined much earlier in 1981 by Hugh Gillespie and registered in Canada in 1982 as the name of a Software development and consulting company focused on the delivery of simple information glue tools.

See also
 Web 2.0

External links
Hardware, Software, and Infoware chapter by Tim O'Reilly from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution 
Question regarding O'Reilly's "infoware" talk at ISPCON 98
Applying Distributed XML to The Open Source Paradigm Shift by Steve Mallett

Websites
Ansaldo A.300. The Ansaldo A.300 was an Italian general-purpose biplane aircraft built by the Ansaldo company (now part of FIAT) of Turin from 1920 to 1929.  It also served as a light bomber, transport, fighter and reconnaissance aircraft, and finally as an advanced trainer, with examples in service as late as 1940. 50 examples were also license-built in Poland at ZM E. Plage & T. Laśkiewicz, but were not a success due to poor quality.

Development
Based on Ansaldo's highly successful World War I Balilla and S.V.A scouts, the A.300 was a conventional single-engined two-bay open cockpit biplane of mixed metal and wood-and-fabric construction, powered usually by a water-cooled Fiat A.12bis V12 engine.  Most variants had two fixed Vickers guns and one mobile gun mounted in the rear cockpit. It first flew in 1919.

Early examples were two seaters, but the A.300/3 was a three-seater intended for reconnaissance use, of which around 90 were delivered.  The  most significant variant was the A.300/4, again mostly three-seaters, which started full production in 1923, just as Ansaldo was absorbed into FIAT.  This became the standard multi-role aircraft in the newly formed Regia Aeronautica and served in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corfu, Libya and Eritrea.

Operational history
The A.300 was one of the most numerous aircraft of its time, with the production run of the A.300/4 alone, at 700 units, exceeding the total production of any other type of the 1920s except the Breguet XIX and Potez 25.  Despite this, and possibly because it was Italian rather than French or British, it remains one of the least documented contemporary types, certainly the most obscure produced in anything like these numbers.

Variants
A.300/2initial production version
A.300/3three-seat version, also exported to Spain, Belgium, and Poland
A.300/4definitive production version with improved cooling
A.300/5prototype with Lorraine engine
A.300/6improved A.300/4, also in service
A.300C Four passenger airliner. Several built 1921-'26 and operated by the Belgian airline SNETA, French airlines SABENA and 1925 operated by the Romanian airlines SNNA, as regular flights with 5 aircraft.
A.300T Eight passenger airliner. At least one built 1921.
A.400prototype

Operators

Belgian Air Force

Corpo Aeronautico Militare

Polish Air Force

Soviet Air Force

Türk Hava Kurumu (THK)

Specifications (A.300/4)

Notes

Bibliography

 
 
 
 
  (p. 53 for 300/3, p. 55 for 300C)

Ansaldo A.300
Biplanes
Single-engined tractor aircraft
1910s Italian military reconnaissance aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1919
Aircraft with fixed conventional landing gear
Single-engined piston aircraft
Scout (aircraft). The term scout, as a description of a class of military aircraft, came into use shortly before the First World War, and initially referred to a fast (for its time), light (usually single-seated) unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. "Scout" types were generally adaptations of pre-war racing aircraft – although at least one (the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.2) was specifically designed for the role. At this stage the possibility of air-to-air combat was considered highly speculative, and the speed of these aircraft relative to their contemporaries was seen as an advantage in gaining immunity from ground fire and in the ability to deliver timely reconnaissance reports.

Almost from the beginning of the war, various experiments were carried out in the fitting of armament to scouts to enable them to engage in air-to-air combat – by early 1916 several types of scout could fire a machine gun forwards, in the line of flight, thus becoming the first effective single-seat fighter aircraft – in effect, an entirely new class of aircraft. In French and German usage these types were termed "hunters" (chasseur, Jäger), but in the Royal Flying Corps and early Royal Air Force parlance "scout" remained the usual term for a single-seat fighter into the early 1920s. The term "fighter", or "fighting aircraft" was already current, but in this period referred specifically to a two-seater fighter such as the Sopwith 1½ Strutter or the Bristol Fighter.

This usage "scout" (or sometimes "fighting scout") for "single-seat fighter" can be found in many contemporary accounts, including fictional depictions of First World War air combat such as the Biggles books. These often refer to French or German "scouts" as well as British ones.

The usage also survives in some much later non-fictional writing on First World War aviation.

Examples of scouts 
The Royal Aircraft Factory identified some of the designs as "Scout Experimental"

 Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5
 Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.6
 Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.7

References

Military aircraft
Reconnaissance aircraft
1910s fighter aircraft
1920s fighter aircraft
Robotman. Robotman may refer to:

 Robotman (Cliff Steele), a DC Comics superhero and member of the Doom Patrol
 Robotman (Robert Crane), a Golden Age DC Comics superhero and a member of the All-Star Squadron
 Robotman, original name of Monty, an American syndicated comic strip by Jim Meddick
 "Robot Man" song, a 1960 song by Connie Francis
 "Robot Man", a 1981 song from the Rick Wakeman album 1984 featuring Chaka Khan
 "Robot Man", a 1975 song by Scorpions from the album In Trance

See also

 
 
 
 
 Mr. Robot (disambiguation)
 Man (disambiguation)
 Robot (disambiguation)
 Roboman (disambiguation)
 Android (disambiguation)
 Metalman (disambiguation)
Steven Muchnick. Steven Stanley Muchnick  (1945-2020) was a noted computer science researcher, best known as author of the 1997 treatise on compilers, "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation."

Background
In 1974, Muchnick was awarded a PhD in computer science from Cornell University. After graduation, he became a professor at the University of Kansas, located in Lawrence, Kansas. During his tenure at that institution, he wrote several research papers, many of which were published in the Journal of the ACM.

Muchnick eventually departed from his teaching profession. He then went on to apply his knowledge of compilers as a vital member of the teams that developed two computer architectures — PA-RISC at Hewlett-Packard and SPARC at Sun Microsystems.

Upon completion of the initial work on each architecture, he served as the leader of the advanced compiler design and implementation groups for these systems.

Later Muchnick became involved in the prevention of HIV infections. In 2010 he was a member of the San Francisco HIV Prevention Planning Center.

References

Cornell University alumni
University of Kansas faculty
American computer scientists
Living people
Hewlett-Packard people
Sun Microsystems people
1945 births
The Automatic Proofreader. The Automatic Proofreader is a series of checksum utilities published by COMPUTE! Publications for its COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazines and various books. These programs allow home computer users to detect errors when entering BASIC type-in programs. They display a checksum for each line which can be compared against the one printed in the magazine; if they are the same then the line was typed correctly.

The program was initially published for use with the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 in 1983. The Automatic Proofreader was later made available for the Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, IBM PC, and PCjr.

Commodore versions

The Automatic Proofreader was first introduced in October 1983 for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20.  This first version had separate versions for the VIC and 64; the following month, they were combined into a single listing designed to work on both systems.  This version of the Proofreader would display a byte-sized numeric value at the top left corner of the screen whenever a program line was entered.

The initial version of the Proofreader, however, had several drawbacks.  It was loaded into the cassette buffer (memory area), which was overwritten whenever a program was loaded or saved using the Datassette.  This caused difficulties if a cassette user had to resume work on a partially completed listing.  A complicated method had to be used to get both the Proofreader and the program listing in memory at the same time.  Also, the checksum method used was relatively rudimentary, and did not catch transposition errors, nor did it take whitespace into account.

Because of this, the New Automatic Proofreader was introduced in February 1986.  This version used a more sophisticated checksum algorithm that could catch transposition errors.  It also took spaces into account if they were within quotes (where they were generally significant to the program's operation), while ignoring them outside of quotes (where they were not relevant).  Also, the decimal display of the checksum was replaced by two letters.

The New Automatic Proofreader was designed to run on any Commodore 8-bit home computer (including the C16/Plus/4 and C128), automatically relocating itself to the bottom of BASIC RAM and moving pointers to hide its presence. It was continuously published until COMPUTE!'s Gazette switched over to a disk-only format after the December 1993 issue.

References

Apple II software
Atari 8-bit computer software
VIC-20 software
Commodore 64 software
Commodore 128 software
Reich Technologies. Reich Technologies was one of the UML Partners, a consortium that was instrumental to the development of standards for the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The CEO for the company (Georges-Pierre Reich) represented Reich Technologies on the committee, and was involved in the development of the proposal. The proposal was submitted to the Object Management Group (OMG), which approved the proposal, circa late 1997.

Profile
Reich Technologies is an international group of companies, providing a coordinated suite of products and services to support object-oriented (OO) software development in large corporations. With a presence throughout Europe and North America, Reich Technologies occupies leading positions in the world markets for integrated OO CASE tools, fine-grained object repositories and OO team programming environments.

The Intelligent Software Factory (ISF) offers an integrated object-oriented CASE tool suite. It is built on the concept of model-driven development in which the work done at the beginning of a project creates an environment for configuration management and cost containment for software maintenance. ISF has been originally built by Franck Barbier, a French researcher on OO modeling.

The Intelligent Artifact Repository (IAR) provides an enterprise-wide resource for the management and reuse of Information System assets. This concept is so powerful that the development team uses ISF and IAR for production, making ISF the first CASE tool to be self-generated. Recognizing the impact of introducing tools, Reich Technologies offers success oriented services including training, consulting and tool customizations. Corporations combine tools, services and processes with their own organizations to implement a Corporate Software Ecology.

Reich Technologies worked with Alistair Cockburn (special advisor to the Central Bank of Norway) and Ralph Hodgson (founder of TopQuadrant) to flesh out the concept of Use Case and integrate it in the context of Responsibility-Driven Design. Several large companies have built systems upon these constructs since 1992. Structured Use Cases and detailed Responsibility models proved to be a relevant answer to the challenge of gathering and organizing thousands of requirements, defining the scope of the system, and designing an architecture for objects. A methodology with processes and identified deliverables has been created in a joint effort. 

As tool builders, Reich Technologies adds the knowledge of implementing lifecycle management for the meta-model objects. Reich Technologies has also extensive experience designing the meta-models that implement in ISF the modeling notations of diverse methodologists.

Reich Technologies sells off-the-shelf and tailored versions of their CASE tools.

References

External links
Official Site
UML Partners List
Creator of Intelligent Software Factory

Unified Modeling Language
Companies with year of establishment missing
ROTR. ROTR can refer to:

 Rules of the road (disambiguation), in any of that term's senses (eg, transportation, entertainment)
 ROTR (video game), a shoot'em up video game for the Nintendo DS and Wii from Nibris
 The Return of the Regulator, a 2001 album by rapper Warren G
 Reviews on the Run, a video game review TV show
 Rise of the Robots, a 1994 video game
 Rise of the Tomb Raider, a 2015 video game
 Robots on the Road, a traveling robotics program for middle school students, operated by NASA's Aerospace Education Services Project
 Rock on the Range, an annual music festival held in Columbus, Ohio and Winnipeg, Canada
 Rumble on the Rock: a mixed martial arts tournament
 Run-of-the-river hydroelectricity, a type of power generation
 Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, a Star Wars themed attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World and Disneyland
Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card. The generically named Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card (code named STP) is a central processing unit upgrade card sold by Apple Computer, designed for many Motorola 68040-powered Macintosh LC, Quadra and Performa models. The card contains a PowerPC 601 CPU and plugs into the 68040 CPU socket of the upgraded machine. The Processor upgrade card required the original CPU be plugged back into the card itself, and gave the machine the ability to run in its original 68040 configuration, or through the use of a software configuration utility allowed booting as a PowerPC 601 computer running at twice the original speed in MHz (50 MHz or 66 MHz) with 32 KB of L1 Cache, 256 KB of L2 Cache and a PowerPC Floating Point Unit available to software. The Macintosh Processor Upgrade requires and shipped with System 7.5.

Development of the card started in July 1993. The upgrade card was announced in January 1994 at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. Apple described the Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card as giving a performance increase of "two to four times" for general purposes, or "up to 10 times" for floating point intensive programs.

While the Macintosh Processor Upgrade did not plug into the LC Processor Direct Slot, due to power used and the space taken by the upgrade, LC PDS cards could not be fitted while the card was installed. This limited the usefulness of the Processor Upgrade Card, as internal ethernet, Apple IIe compatibility, video cards and other LC PDS expansion options must be removed.

The Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card can bring a 68k Mac, that can normally only go up to Mac OS 8.1, to be upgraded to Mac OS 8.6 or newer as long as the card is always in use. If the user turns off or disconnect the card, the machine will display a Sad Mac as newer versions of Mac OS aren't compatible with 68k processors. The Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card can only run up to Mac OS 9.1 as 9.2 onwards require a G3 Processor as a minimum.

DayStar Digital manufactured the Macintosh Processor Upgrade Card for Apple, sold the same card as their Daystar PowerCard 601-50/66 and also manufactured a Daystar PowerCard 601/100 which reached 100 MHz. After Daystar went out of business the 100 MHz model was manufactured and sold by Sonnet Technologies as their Sonnet Presto PPC 605.

Footnotes 

Macintosh internals
Compatibility cards
Computer-related introductions in 1994