46136,06,03/11/93,ALEX ZELL,ALL CBBS,NONO A caller asks: "Where are your programs? I thought this was a bulletin board. I am very disappointed." Don't people read the brief, but fully explanatory Welcome message and Bulletin upon logging on here? Do people not understand what is meant when the Welcome message says: "CBBS is a MESSAGE-ONLY" system catering to advanced hobbyists. . . .See Bulletin for details." 46137,07,03/11/93,WARD CHRISTENSEN,JERRY HASLETT R/TOSHIBA T1100PLUS...HELP, I think I can help - I have an 1100+, which I passed along, not sure where it is right now... Can dig it up, I'm sure. I'll check, maybe I even kept a copy of or the original of the DOS. When you call in, leave me an address when you "G" (Good bye) - make is to I can screen print it right to a label, i.e. name on one line, then addr on another, city on the last... I'll send you something, perhaps Saturday if I can dig it up. 46237,28,05/11/93,ANDY SHAPIRO,ALL SHADOW RAM -- TEST RESULTS, You always think things are snake oil until... I have an 'obsolete' computer, a CompuAdd 386sx running at 25 MHz. I've hacked around with the software about as much as I was going to, and then I remembered the BIOS -- by default, my machine uses 'shadow' RAM, and relocates system and video BIOS to RAM. In theory, this should speed things up. In reality, I was dubious. So I decided to run the following test.bat file: @echo off superpck/f timer cls d \bin\util d \bin\util d \bin\util d \bin\util d \bin\util cls timer (This is running under DR-DOS 6.0/4DOS, but it's basically generic). I start out by flushing the cache and turning on a timer, then clearing the screen and running 5 iterations of a DIR command (aliased to D) that gives me a sorted list of approximately 91 files. Then I clear the screen again and display the timer results. Without Shadow RAM, it took around 9.7 seconds timer to timer. With Shadow RAM enabled, just under 7.0 seconds for the same thing. So -- sometimes these things they sell you really work! I should note that I run with BREAK OFF -- putting BREAK ON added about .2 seconds to the time. So, if it's speed you need, THE SHADOW (really!) KNOWS! 46336,11,06/17/93,GRANT KILLEY,ALL PROGRAMMER WANTED,MINE G-Bar Limited Partnership is looking for a programmer. The position requires PASCAL, C, ASM, and some FORTRAN, scripting and SQL. All work is done on MACINTOSH, SUN and RS6000. If you're interested send your resume, with salary history and references to the address below. Phone calls and drop-ins are a MAJOR no-no so don't even think of it. Send all resumes to: April Ried G-Bar Limited Partnership 440 S. LaSalle St. suite 2900 Chicago, IL 60605 46337,09,06/17/93,ANDY SHAPIRO,BENJAMIN COHEN PS, Yeah, I still have MY Geneva (though my Kaypros are LONG gone), but we need a machine that'll do VGA (games for the kids, etc) so the handbook, while nice, is out. I tried the Toshiba 1850 at a COMPUSA store in Northern Virginia, and it was very nice, both w/respect to the screen AND the rd (a little blast of lif*ne noise here). You wanna ~2{buy another Geneva, Ben? This one has VDE 2.11 (if I recall) burned into a ROM, along with some other useful programs. If you're interested, I'll sell it cheap (I think I still have the modem/RAMdisk, even...) 46436,03,08/27/93,ANDY SHAPIRO,ROY LIPSCOMB R/PROBLEM WITH 20 MHZ 286, Glad it worked! Once you get used to the 101 key layout (which DOES take a while) you won't want to give it up. Just make sure you get a good one (I like the NMB technologies keyboards, myself). 46437,20,08/29/93,WARD CHRISTENSEN,ALL ONE BBSCON,NONE Just got back from ONE BBSCON (the ONE means Online Networking Exposition). This is a BBS related convention. Last year, 1000 attended, this year, just under 2000. Next year, they predict 3500! I think it will be at Atlanta The program started of an opening session, with Jim Warren as keynote speaker (he has been involved in the industry for many years - Dr. Dobbs Jorunal, Micro Times, Electronic Design News, etc). It then went into optional sessions, two every AM and two every PM, with some "Birds of a Feather" to round it off in the evening for topics come up with after the original program was created. There was a very large exhibit hall, with everything from modem mfgrs (US Robotics, Hayes, Supra, Zoom, Xyzel or whatever that strange one is, etc), to all the BBSs, multi-port board vendors, vendors hooking to the Internet, PageSat with their Internet news feed by satellite, (and a competitor giving more - Ilink, Fido, etc, but at $30/month right away, and not $30/month AFTER 2 YEARS like PageSat). I gave a session on the BBS history, kind of expectedly lightly attended - it was up against Dr. Vinton Cerf, the internet inventor, doing a big spiel on the internet. It was held at the old but nice Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs. They picked up my hotel bill, but I had to do my own airfare. 46536,19,12/23/93,ROY LIPSCOMB,ALL ALKALINES RECHARGEABLE?, Browsing late night TV, I came across an infomercial for a device that recharges alkaline batteries. The emcee, Dick (I had typed "Disk"!) Clark, pointed out that this device worked with otherwise- nonrechargeable alkalines because it uses a very low charging current, controlled by a high-tech circuit developed by a professor at McGaw university. At this point, they showed a video clip of the professor fiddling with some circuit board that was about the size of an adapter card for a PC. They're asking about $40-$50 for the device, as I remember. My minimal electronics savvy leads me to suspect that this device works by keeping the charging current constant (and small--like maybe a tenth or a hundredth of volt?), whereas normal battery chargers are designed to keep the voltage constant (like 1.6 volts?). But I suspect that the circuitry to accomplish this requires only a handful of chips, rather than the twenty to thirty that the infomercial implies. Assuming such a device is feasible, my question is, Would it be relatively simple to build such a device from parts bought at Radio Shack? 46537,10,12/23/93,MURRAY ARNOW,ROY LIPSCOMB R/ALKALINES RECHARGEABLE?, Roy, battery charging depends strongly on the species of battery. Batteries that become polarized when they are discharged are difficult to impossible to recharge because the reverse polarization at the anode and cathode inhibit charging currents (in effect). Carbon-zinc batteries are good examples of this. Over 20 years ago I read a NASA paper on recharging carbon-zinc (lebold) batteries. The author found he could recharge the batteries numerous times by using a real simple circuit. The circuit placed a small AC ripple current on top of a DC current. I think it was a badly filtered 1/2 wave rectifier. The AC ripple apparently overcame the polarization problems. I've often wondered if these chargers are rip-offs of this circuit.