Electronic Business Cards these days are called "LinkedIn" and "Facebook". -- Will, with no facebook page!

These days, in less time than it takes to reach out and grab your business cards, most Blackberry carrying business people have keyed in everything with their thumbs. You might as well just email it. -- Will

I feel your pain, Chuck. I sincerely feel that to be truly successful in human interactions, you cannot delete the human element: The sound of your voice when you call (vs. e-mail); the appearance (physically) of your Business Card when you meet; the handwritten Thank-You note when you're granted a favor. It's the 'personal touch' that will separate individuals (and companies) of quality from the rest. -- Jeff

While I quite liked Minix, I think that's going a bit far :-) -tony

At 09:05 PM 12/19/2009, Chuck Guzis wrote: Email. :-) But I sympathize. For many years, I thought there should be a keyfob device that could send and receive similar biz-card quantities of personal info, but transfer via audio over the phone or in-person. How many man-days have you spent writing or saying addresses? These days, how hard would be it be to modem-tone a URL at the end of a radio advert or a TV advert? Why aren't street billboards emitting useful data via Bluetooth and WiFi? Why am I looking at an ad and then still typing the URL on my Internet-connected phone? - John

At 07:19 AM 12/20/2009, Pete Turnbull wrote: The key-fob, of course. Or for that matter, why couldn't the average contemporary cell phone handle that sort of aural barcode? No more bytes than a twitter or a txt. I think I was sensitized to the issue of constantly spelling over the phone because I once made the mistake of picking an unusual company name for myself. I'm sure anyone with an unusual last name suffers the same way. - John

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 11:29:46PM -0600, John Foust wrote: Well, what could be done is to attach a QR-Code (two-dimensional barcode, designed to be well readable even under adverse conditions) and have the camera on said phone scan it. Just point the phone, hit scan and go to the encoded URL. Works quite well. Regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On 20 Dec 2009 at 10:09, Dave McGuire wrote: They're on the right track. Sealed stainless can, 1-wire operation. Toss 'em in your pocket, drop them in your coffee, no harm. But 8KB (64Kb) is much too small. At least someone's thinking about the matter... How long will an SD card survive being immersed in Coke? Don't laugh- -I recently rescued a QIC cart that had that gummy stuff in its innards--for over a decade. With a new tension band, after cleaning, it read fine. --Chuck

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 07:05:05PM -0800, Chuck Guzis wrote: Hmm, the cheapest memory card available at the local hardware dealer is a Kingston 2 GB MicroSD card with SD adapter for around USD 16[0]. Has the advantage of fitting both into MicroSD (think mobile phones) and SD (cameras, computers) slots. That is probably your best bet at this point in time since: - mobile phones are increasingly able to use SD cards, usually in the MicroSD form factor - USB adapters that read SD cards can be had for dirt cheap - quite a few mobile computers (laptops, netbooks) and even some desktops come equipped with SD card readers - the cards are not damaged by scratches (as the business card sized CD(-R)s are) - they are quite small while the SD (not Micro) formfactor is large enough not to get lost too easily in your wallet or pocket Regards, Alex. [0] Newegg sells a 2 GB Transced MicroSD with SD adapter for around USD 7, as usual, Switzerland is not known for low prices ;-) -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

On Sat, 19 Dec 2009, Chuck Guzis wrote: What's wrong with just sending an email, or a piece of paper with an URL, maybe shortened with tinyurl or whatever? That meets with your requirements and it's totally free. (They did make smallish ~50MB CD-R's, but the trouble with those is some machines use slot loading media, and those don't work there.)

We are getting very close to being able to assume that. Most of the US, Asian, and European population, anyway. Even the bums have internet connected phones these days. How is this different from changing phone numbers? Changing mail addresses? Changing business associations? Changing names (mostly for the fair sex)? How many people *really* keep all their handwritten notes organized? I think you are asking for too much. Chaos then, now and forever more! -- Will

On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, Chuck Guzis wrote: Well, you haven't exactly told us all the requirements ahead of time. So sounds like what you want is an EEPROM or other ROM equivalent, to be distributed via sneakernet. Well, I for one would. :) I've emails going back many years across many systems. If you want to keep it you can. That's upto whomever manages the server/domain. If you own the domain name and control the server, you can maintain it until hell freezes over. Or not. wiseass answer: archive.org? :-) All depends on what the goals are. Some things are better left to expire, others are well worth saving. Depends on what it is, who it is that decide and when they decide. I've thrown things out many years ago that I sometimes now wish I still had. It does happen. So, what is this thing you're trying to build? You've got my curiosity up. :-)

On Tue, 22 Dec 2009, Chuck Guzis wrote: Neat! I remember using one of these, with paper tape back in high school. Was a drill that behaved as a plotter and we gave it commands like drill up, drill down, move up, move left, move right, move down, could even do diagonals together. Just a couple of years ago, I was able to find floppies... time flies. :( I'm a bit suprised that floppies were used, I imagine that this would be a harsh environment for floppies, so as long as static electricity isn't too much of an issue, most kinds of flash storage should work just fine. I wonder if there's another possibility though, how about a network interface? If you can get an ethernet interface, anything with an RJ45 plug will do, even 10mbps, and set up some way to transfer the instructions, say over tftp or ftp, you'd have removed the obsolecense factor by quite a bit. That way you can use almost any machine to store the instructions and could build a nice menu system that lets the end user pick the file to send to the machine, as well as which machine to send it to. Add some sort of backup system to this machine, and you're all set. If the machine runs some sort of live CD and stores its data on flash and has a way to clone itself, you don't need to worry about backups. Keep the code to something scriptable (i.e. python, perl, bash, ksh), and it can run on future platforms as well without too much hassle. It doesn't have to be anything too fancy or modern, anything capable of booting off a CD and has USB ports, that you can get Linux or FreeBSD to run on should work nicely. You'd have to modify the startup scripts to run the menu software, and read the configs from flash, and possibly automatically back up changes to a 2nd flash drive. If you get a bit more modern, you can have the whole thing on a thumb drive and have it actively look for other thumb drives inserted, if it sees them, it can clone itself over to the other drive. Add in some sort of self checking MD5 hash to check itself to make sure there's no file system errors on the config files, menu system, and saved programs, and you're set. A bit of work, but it can be quite robust. (Just don't limit the thing to checking for actual flash drives, but rather anything removeable that can be written to, and it can be compatible with whatever replaces USB thumb drives in the future, so long as the boot OS is replaced along with it.)

Rick Bensene wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ??? Peace... Sridhar

Cameron Kaiser wrote: You, sir, are a sick puppy. 8-) Peace... Sridhar

On 23 Dec 2009 at 9:50, Ray Arachelian wrote: I've thought about it some and am thinking about using a Vinculum coupled to a microprocessor to provide a USB host interface to a variety of devices. So if one wants to use a traditional USB floppy drive or a flash drive, accomodating it should be easy, as most of the "smarts" are in the Vinculum firmware. There's even a second "USB slave to PC host" connector for direct PC connection. I think a lot of vintage collectors don't realize that there is a lot of vintage gear in CNC controllers. I recall seeing a vacuum-forming rig powered by an Imsai 8080, for example. The Excellon CNC-6 that I inquired about has a Multibus card cage in it with a Z8002 CPU card and a disk controller (WD1793 and 8085 CPU) made by Advanced Micro Computers, the ill-starred joint venture between AMD and Siemens back around 1980. I doubt that few of these have survived outside of the CNC arena, but supposedly there are still about 2,000 of the CNC-6 boxes still in the field. Excellon reports that there are far more of the CNC-6's in use than the PC- based CNC-7. Somewhere, I have an inquiry from a customer with a Mitsubishi CNC rig that used the CPU board and OS from the Mitsubishi Multi-16. Many Japanese CNC setups are based on the NEC PC9801 architecture. --Chuck

A "music" cd format product is about .80 in 1000's (sometimes in 500's depending on the house doing the work being hungry). that includes the media, cd carrier, a printed cover, and shrink wrapped. I don't know if the credit card size cd's would be comparable or not. The above also applied to product we priced with software, they didn't care what was recorded on the cd. Also the media was not from "CDR" but was actually mask mastered media. Jim Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote:

Ok, you won :o)