Vault OS : Update #9 : PRICE WARS!

Woo-hoo! Landed another four SBCs ("single board computers") today at an average of $10.00 apiece. Check out the specs on this board, it's got Ethernet and 1024x768 VGA built-in. I think this can be called a worldwide price collapse ... considering that only three years ago, my Rabbit 2000 board for $50.00 was highly competitive with x86 based SBCs with half of the specs and features starting at $300.00+ or much more. For a while there, PC 104 boards were way more expensive than just buying a discount PC completely loaded.

So the failure of PC 104 as a standard is now resulting in a glut of PC 104 and similar x86 devices with "old hardware" flooding the markets. The world says this is junk, but at Vault-Co we call it our all-purpose high end supercomputer terminal with the right software ...

The prototype is percolating .... screenshots and downloadable alpha test version soon ...

Those of you who have wondered since the first Vault-Co site was launched in 1998, when I was working on Vault OS in Visual Basic, just when if ever this software was going to be released ... I am glad I waited and got a lot of false starts. Somehow I knew this day would come. A world where the x86-32bit-PM is a surplus device for around $20.00 a terminal installation ... that's what I'm talking about. Combined with an I2C standard for realtime sensing and control ... that's a basket I will put all my eggs into and my back into developing.

Of course, you still have to come up with the actual display hardware. I have a couple 12 volt LCDs with VGA input laying around at 640x480 resolution, so I am not worried but if you keep your eyes open I think that you will start to see barebones VGA panels at prices under $40.00 brand new or less as secondhand. The keyboard and mouse have a thousand options available, you can buy a serial mouse for $2.96 new from the bargain shop last time I checked. I saw a mini-keyboard a few weeks back for $12.95. There is also stuff like this floating around the surplus channels.

Because of this strange visual trick I am using, where I overlay one GUI layer onto the desktop transparently, I think it may be some time before I support more than 256 colors. This may entail conversions of incoming true color images into their 256 color counterparts. Basically, I am physically using color index layer zero as the transparency mask for my secondary GUI layer. This is really cool, it works and it is fast. If I try to convert it to 16 bit high color I may experience a significant slowdown on lower end machines (like this Pentium 166 SBC) because that is literally copying 4 times as many bytes with masking onto the bottom layer. So although supporting higher resolutions is a snap (up to 1024x768) I may be locked into the use of an 8 bit palette for a long time for the Vault OS. This will entail the need to convert CCD camera images on the fly, which usually is not too hard if you are using a pregenerated lookup table. I've done a lot of this stuff before in game programming with similar restrictions.

I also think I may roll back Watcom from OpenWatcom 1.4 to the original Watcom 11.5 which I was a registered owner of. My original CD disks have gone bad but it is still legacy code. These idiots maintaining OpenWatcom not only managed to crash all existing makefiles and the linker, they also lost compatibility with the STL (Standard Template Language) port for Watcom. That's a pretty big sore thumb there in terms of productivity. If you don't enjoy debugging custom linked lists for every structure in your program, you use the STL to just say things like ... "list i(INVENTORYITEM)" to replace about ten man hours of programming. Want to sort your list of inventory items and don't have a spare week to try different sort routines? Just say "i.sort()." You can probably understand why STL is so important to have for C++ coding. So anybody who said, "Yes, let's release OpenWatcom 1.4 with no more STL compatibility or working makefiles" would have had to be smoking catpoop right out of the litterbox. That's no improvement.

Where have all the sunspots gone?

Note the massive, schizophrenic disconnect pointed out by Robert Felix in his analysis of the article. The author thinks that "disruption of agriculture as a result of having no sun could be, like, serious." Yes, you could say that, if you consider billions dying from starvation and half the planet turning to cannibalism, yes, it could be serious n'stuff.

The Sun provides the energy for the entire merry-go-round that has led to population growth to six billion people. If it declines in output and stays there the way it does outside all interglacials, this party is going to stop really abruptly.

As Felix pointed out, we'll be fighting in the streets over food (and oil and water) before the next Ice Age formally begins. Nuclear war is a given, it will absolutely take place in the massive struggles between nations to control what little remaining fuel and food there is to go around.

Vault OS : Update #8 ... Am I making sense yet?

I daisychained three DS18B20 temperature sensors on some molex connectors I got out of a Victor/Sirius computer I stripped for parts. These sensors are 12C compliant and calling each one individually from a serial port is so easy it boggles the mind. I just measured temperatures inside and outside my study to test them. Not only are they accurate, they are uncannily like intelligent peripherals with this I2C protocol. I got the instructions how to do it here.

If I put these in various places around the Hive like in storage, I can do things like turning on the air conditioning/dehumidifier if it gets too warm in there above a certain temperature. I can do the same with the living area or permaculture lab - if it got too cold you'd want to run some kind of ambient heater for the hydroponics garden. I once tried running my 12 volt hair dryer inside the main living quarters and you would not believe how quickly it heats up inside a sealed insulated environment like that. You could keep the hothouse at tropical temperatures and the living quarters dry and cool on demand.

There is an I2C chip for whatever function you could imagine. If you can think of it and you know what address to call, you can do it via serial port.

All it takes is $4.00 worth of parts for the I2C-to-serial converter for the PC (I built it on a breadboard in twenty minutes) and you can have as many sensors as you want in the Vault.

So just imagine you define one Vault OS as the "Environmental Monitor" station. Then it provides a TCP-IP service where people can stream all the current environmental/control data in one binary chunk and display it on the screen.

See how easy this is? Aren't you glad I spent a little more time thinking about it and researching the technology that was available? This is better than Ethernet comms. Much better. I will still build and deploy some devices in the Vault as Ethernet equipment (battery/power management comes to mind) but you can do almost everything a lot cheaper if you want to.

Expelled : No Intelligence Required

This documentary gets the Vault-Co seal of approval.

It's good jews doing what they do best - letting the wind out of baloney by acting in opposition. This really does work when the jews are bright, unflinchingly honest and dedicated to looking at the whole truth. Their natural tendency towards critique puts value back into the entire civilization when it is expressed in this fashion.

It might be a big help, except for one little problem ...

THIS IS A CIVILIZATION IN DECLINE.

I could enumerate many previous posts over the years, but just consider this :

1. The entire culture has been pushed toward a global warming mythology when in fact we are entering a new Ice Age.

2. Adult stem cell cultivation was branded as pseudo-scientific claptrap for ten years when in fact it now appears it should have been the main thrust of research the entire time. Baby-corpse chopping (totally irrelevant) was encouraged instead. Thank God for the Japanese.

3. While our society branded nuclear energy as dangerous and to be suppressed like witchcraft for forty years, the Chinese discovered a new pebble-bed reactor design in the meantime that makes these reactors safer than running a Lister engine. Thank God for the Chinese.

4. ... and FYI ... Lister engines (invented in the West) are scarcely even manufactured anymore in the West, only in India. They're superior in every regard except portability. They break down and need maintenance every couple of centuries, as opposed to hours.

5. The Big Bang, like "nuclear winter" is simply in contradiction to all the facts we have about the universe. There is no way there could have been a big bang, ever. Fred Hoyle with his indian co-author got it right. The rest of the West was ass-backwards wrong. We found this out for a fact when orbital telescopes began to routinely transmit pictures of galaxies a hundred billion years old according to red shift. The universe never had a beginning. It will never have an end. It is possible that the entire science of particle physics can be replaced with electrical explanations of matter and energy.

6. The theory of relativity is gibberish, contrived through plagiarism by a career womanizer who was incompetent at even basic grade school mathematics and failed to complete any course of study in his entire life.

7. Neither Iraq nor Iran had anything to do with 911. It is possible there is no such thing as Al-Quada, period. There is no compelling reason to even believe it exists. No conviction for conspiracy in 911 has ever been revealed by Amerikwa.

8. According to modern petroleum companies, oil comes from dinosaur bones and ferns under millions of years of geological pressure. No reliable chemical experiment using same has ever produced natural crude oil in the laboratory, nor has the chemical formula for this reaction ever been demonstrated in peer reviewed work. Brazil ignored all this idiocy and drilled right down through the salt layer in the ocean (where no oil is supposed to be capable of existing) and instantly hit one of the largest oil fields in the history of the world.

9. History in it's essence is a museum displaying the failures of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, political belief in multiculturalism is a requirement for all modern life with strong penalties for all who dare to express different ideas.

10. Nearly every major advancement in technology by the West is now developed only by the Asians and Indians. The West has no more engineers. The West has failed to utilize almost every single important scientific discovery since the early 1950's. Instead they have concentrated their efforts on using drugs to sustain male erections and the manufacture and distribution of pet rocks. A guy was telling me the other day, "It is possible the last really big American manufacturing concern that was based inside the country was the 'pet rock' novelty industry."


OUR CIVILIZATION IS NOW A COMPLETE, CHRONIC FAILURE AT ALMOST EVERYTHING. IT'S GOING TO DIE SCREAMING, SOON. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE REPLACED BY A SOCIALIST UTOPIA. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE REPLACED BY ANYTHING.

This Is How You Start A Global Thermonuclear War

There doesn't seem to be any sane reason for Bush to do such a thing unless it is a deliberate act of provocation. If the Mexicans start a breakaway republic in California, will it be okay if Russia ships them high tech arms and declares their right to secede from the United States? How is it any different? Somebody wants World War 3 and they aren't taking "no" for an answer, either.

Vault OS : Update #7

This is why I think aiming for an x86 DOS 32 bit protected mode architecture is the smart thing to do. It's just not as costly as it once was. The world's surplus of older generation x86 boards is being decommissioned and auctioned off in bulk.

All over the world embedded installations are moving up to the "next big thing," which is .NET running under a minimal Windows XP embedded platform, usually with a touchscreen interface. It's easier to develop for, easier to install, easier to maintain assuming your platform has the required specs. It's a better choice in a world where most programmers stink and need the .NET environment with 2 gigs of RAM to wipe their nose and change their diapers. Unfortunately for them, I know this stuff runs like a dog and it generally so top-heavy that it's not a wise idea over the long term. The layers of software introduced effectively put them at the mercy of Microsoft. Industrial embedded markets are getting pressure from all sorts of people to dump their old sub 500mhz x86 stuff either for Windows XP or else Embedded Linux. There are also a couple dozen bankruptcies in the fallout of the U.S. economic collapse who will be dumping their stock of Vault-OS spec boards onto the public like so much castoff garbage. Most of the SBCs I have seen, like the one linked to, are otherwise fully loaded with nearly everything you could want.

All over Australia, boards like the one above on Ebay are being pulled out to replace them with what is touted as "what you have to get to be current."

Their loss is everybody else's gain. These boards are going to become so ubiquitous you will be able to pick them up for $5.00 apiece in another year. I've purchased 3 SBCs with Pentium 200mhz specs in the past two weeks alone - 2 of them with built-in Ethernet and SVGA chips. The thing is, although a board like this crawls with Windows and a couple dozen megs of RAM, it flies along like a bat out of hell running protected mode 32 bits under the Causeway extender in DOS, both in processing speed and graphic frames-per-second.

Big Breakthrough In Thermoelectric Efficiency!

What I've been praying for.

I've had this instinctive hunch for several years that the real potential of Peltier cooling devices has not advanced beyond the stone age yet.

With better efficiency you could start to get some really useful cooling devices that run off 12 volt systems with the BTUs of a big industrial air conditioner. The waste heat will still have to be exhausted and it will probably be hotter but the cold will be cool enough it will be an optimal method for cooling and dehumifying a large shelter on a low current.

On the flip side, there is the potential to generate electricity itself from all kinds of waste heat including the human body! So the waste heat of the shelter inhabitants (including from cooking) could be tapped on it's way out to generate electricity for the lights and to power the Peltier device itself! There is no violation of the law of thermodynamics here, it's just the more efficient capture of energy that is being released anyway. The heat energy coming from the human body representing calories of food burned by metabolism is normally a very troublesome source of heat and humidity. It takes very little energy to heat a shelter up ... what is needed is a low energy process to cool it off again.

The application of this discovery for mass market cheap 12 volt devices like beer chillers and coolers virtually guarantees the technology will be available at decent prices eventually. This discovery sounds really promising for Vault environmental management. Somebody smells money here already - let's hope we see this tech available as soon as possible.

Republics Cannot Survive An Average IQ of 97

They simply can't.

The basic assumptions in the article linked above are not accessible to people with IQs below 105, minimum. They just cannot be grasped by people that simpleminded.

Even the capacity to suspect the motives of others and themselves as inherently flawed. A little too much induction. People with IQs around 95 just don't work that way upstairs.

Dumb people always think that "those people up there" will be sending instructions "down here" on how to eat, sleep and sh*t. All it takes is the invention of a new religion to make them your slaves forever.

I could show you a Jane Goodall documentary and you would quickly realize what it is I am talking about. The beta monkeys are focused in their whole being on watching the lead of the alphas. They cannot do otherwise. It's all about "celebrities" and "the important ones" for chimpanzees. That's their biology and it is the same that humans exhibit when their reasoning ceases to be an issue. Biology takes over. No primate could ever dream of freedom. It is impossible for them. Even the alphas scarcely partake of it except to reinforce their dominance.

Monkeys in manpants. Our societies were founded by better people and cannot survive their current populations.

Vault OS : Update #6

Somebody wrote me at hotmail to ask me what in the heck this post was about. If you do not have the background to know what is involved, I realized it was probably gibberish after reading it again.

Basically, if I get the right paradigm for Vault OS, I will have written a system that not only I can use for my own customized setup, but that anybody can use anywhere. Since last month when I first got some experimental code running, my mind has been shifting around to the correct way to do it. My problem has always been starting on something without the right approach and then realizing 75% of the way through that it was not worth completing because it was not what I wanted.

If I dump my embedded ethernet fixation (it's great if you can make and hook up custom ethernet enabled embedded devices) and I move my mind towards an x86 based global framework, that means you won't have to be an electronics technician to use Vault OS to do anything you want with it if you buy a few I2C devices or simple serial port interface devices. It needs to be so simple a complete layman can plug a jack in the back of the computer and tell Vault OS to recognize it.

I want you to be able to do nothing but plug stuff into jacks and then configure your own Vault OS from inside the program. I want you to be able to say in software, "look for this unique I2C peripheral." Then you can tell the OS what that is. For example, "it's a temperature sensor." Then I want you to be able to script a little monitoring screen and say, "Display that sensor with that ID as a color bar marked in increments of fahrenheit using this formula." You could take the default script that will come with Vault OS and copy it, use it as the basis for your own custom monitoring screen layout. Add some indicators to mark some custom switches.

Ethernet is great. If you have something you want to put on the network with Ethernet, terrific. But I realize that once again writing this system is a wank on my part if everybody has to know how to write custom Ethernet devices to recognize sensors. I just barely know how to do it myself and have only gotten one device to do it correctly at present. Building a system where your control/sensor paradigm relies on Ethernet is still going in the wrong direction. Vault OS terminals should use the network to communicate to one another via TCP-IP, but the control and sensing should use a different, standardized technology. I'm getting to it.

So let's say Vault OS will be based on a few simple, ubiquitous technologies that can be standardized without custom electronics required :

1. x86. Everything runs on a minimal 386 or better in 32 bit protected mode. All x86 devices are expected to have at least one Ethernet network connection (RJ485) and one or more serial plugs. A Vault OS can operate in standalone mode with no network if it has sufficient support for hard drive/compact flash storage of files and is configured to do so.

2. All devices must support a minimum 640x480 256 color resolution, even if the actual LCD is monochrome. Eventually support will be made for devices up to 1026x768 resolution with high color but when it is put in (my SBCs have support in VGA for these resolutions) it will not break the existing functionality.

3. Devices will use either/both mouse or PS2 keyboard PC standard for input.

4. All control/switching/sensing/monitoring I/O will be assumed to take place over the serial or parallel bus of a given Vault OS installation. Ethernet will not be required although it will be supported of course.

5. The easiest, simplest and most convenient standard communications protocol for PCs and the outside world right now is I2C. It is also the easiest to design to be proof against EMP with a wide variety of optical isolators of various manufacture out there. Many PCs of all varieties may have built-in IrDa plugs that support comms over optical cables by default.

How easy is I2C? About as simple as it can get. It's like a mini-Ethernet with 90% of the technical complexity removed. Every I2C device has it's own unique one-of-a-kind address. You plug it in. You get or put data to that address. It's really, really simple. You do not have to be an electronics technician to use it at all.

Here's a good place below to get an overview for a layman and see what kind of prices you'll pay to plug'n'play on Vault OS. Mind you, if you do have a few skills in electronics, many of these I2C devices you can build yourself for peanuts. Even as complete boards the prices are very reasonable. It is likely if you spend anything it will be on an I2C device which will cost more than the computer you attach it to.

1-wire plug-n-play hubs & standardized sensor/control networks.

The control and configuration of truly amazing and cheap peripherals is possible with I2C

You could hook a seismic monitor to a post on your property aboveground and when a person sets it off, that camera image with the time could be displayed onscreen and a mini-map to show where it was triggered. It can intelligently control gamma and sensitivity to get good images at any time day or night.