They're not rare in Soviet Russia! Joking aside, these VFDs are not that rare. Like some kind of state-sponsored labor monster run amuck, these (and all kinds of other vacuum tubes) were produced by the trainload during the heyday of the Cold War. They can now be picked up for a few dollars on eBay from sellers in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Of course the US produced its fair share of tubes as well, but the vacuum tube era seems to have lasted much longer in Eastern Europe than here (particularly in military applications), and lots of the common NOS tubes in the US have been used up in guitar and stereo amps. In the strange world of vintage vacuum electronics it is often the more exotic looking items covered in Cyrillic that are cheap and cheerful, and the US and UK parts that are rare and coveted.
It would be interesting to know what product these VFD tubes were initially intended for; maybe they were used in calculators given the number of digits. The US pretty much jumped directly from Nixies and Numitrons right to LEDs and LCDs, but I'm betting that in Eastern Europe the adoption of LED technology was more slow and there needed to be a display technology to fill the gap. I think my suspicions may be correct given this eBay aucion where a Russian manufactured VFD clock is for sale - the description says it supposedly was manufactured in 1982 when a similar product in the US would be LED for sure.
No effort is spared in government to protect the dishonest business practices of these sheisters, and no effort is spared in the media to disguise it as the parent companies of the major media outlets benefit greatly from keeping the public in the dark.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. research analyst Marc Irizarry's published rating on mutual-fund manager Janus Capital Group Inc. was a lackluster "neutral" in early April 2008. But at an internal meeting that month, the analyst told dozens of Goldman's traders the stock was likely to head higher, company documents show.
Nothing like selling bonds out the front door and shorting them on your prop desk, right? Oh wait, Goldman did that too!
Securities laws require firms like Goldman to engage in "fair dealing with customers," and prohibit analysts from issuing opinions that are at odds with their true beliefs about a stock. Steven Strongin, Goldman's stock research chief, says no one gains an unfair advantage from its trading huddles, and that the short-term-trading ideas are not contrary to the longer-term stock forecasts in its written research.
Riiiight. And I'm the Easter Bunny.
It's touching that you care so much about your brothers and sisters in the global village - as an American you can rest assured that they couldn't give a fuck less about you. The "citizen of the world" mindset is a predominantly White American/European peculiarity that I imagine is the result of both relatively long term economic prosperity, the underlying Christian ideology that America was founded on, and the rise in power of predominately left-wing philosophies that came to the forefront post 1960.
Unfortunately, take away one of these elements, and the house of cards collapses. Outside of the Western world there are essentially two things that matter: Nation and Race. When you are competing with people whose belief structures center around those concepts (and you will compete with them, as bringing up the standard of living in those nations to that of the West is impossible given the Earth's finite resources), having the "citizen of the world" mindset is effective suicide. Interestingly, every time there is an economic downturn in the developed world those nasty nationalistic ideas seem to be rediscovered: for example the recent election of members of the UK's BNP to the EU parliament and the uproar that went along with it. Why should this be so? In the developing world, every political party is a nationalist party, essentially by definition. The 21st century as I see it will hardly be a century of the fruition of the "global citizen" ideal, but because of declining resources the first element of the house of cards, economic prosperity, will start to be dismantled. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the rise of ethnopolitics and hypernationalism.
1 acre is actually 43560 square feet, or 6,272,640 square inches, and there are 640 acres in a square mile.
Also, you have to remember that for volume the quantity "ounce" comes in two varieties, the fluid ounce and the solid ounce. The solid ounce is defined as exactly 1/16th of a pound of any substance, but since the fluid ounce is a measure of volume (about 29 ml), not weight, the weight of a fluid ounce in pounds will vary with the density of the substance, but it's exactly 1/128th of a gallon. I've seen tall cans of beer advertised using both weight and volume measurements at the same time: a can of beer advertised as being 24 ounces and above the store display reads "$1.79 per pound!" If you didn't know there were two definitions you might get confused. At least we don't have to spend a lot of time calculating how many gills are in a hogshead anymore.
Here is my experience with Linux-Folks see the lower price, go "oooh pretty!" and no matter how you try to steer them they end up going to Walmart, or Best Buy, or Staples and going "oohhhh sale!" and putting something in their cart with ZERO research. And without research the odds of getting something from a retailer like Walmart that works in Linux is less than 20%. Then they bring it back because the PC is "broken" and expect you to "fix it", which of course you can't. So you either burn the customer, who then spreads the word at what a shitty shop you have and soon you are out of business, or take the product back and eat the difference between the new price and what you can get for it used.
When I worked for an internet electronics retailer I was amazed at just how often situations like this would happen. A typical call would go something like this:
"You idiots! You sent me the wrong item! Take this piece of junk back and send me what I want!"
"I'm sorry about that, it says on your order form you ordered a Widget ABC dash 9. What did you receive instead?
"Oh, I got a Widget ABC dash 9 alright. Why did you send me this thing?"
"Because you, um, ordered it?"
"Yeah, I ordered it, but it's not what I want.What's wrong with you guys that you can't send me what I want?
This would happen at least a couple of times a week - apparently for some customers a "Sale" banner with a low price on some item is just too much to resist, and they'll order it having absolutely no notion of what they're buying. We called this "I don't know what this thing is but I want it" syndrome. In their minds apparently it was the job of the retailer to somehow divine after the fact what the customer actually desired.
the AM3 CPU's work with both DDR2/AM2+ motherboards and DDR2/AM3 and DDR3/AM3 motherboards.
The AM3 CPUs only work with AM2+ motherboards if your motherboard vendor decides to provide a BIOS update to support them, and certain motherboard manufacturers (cough ASUS) have been reluctant to provide BIOS updates to upgrade "obsolete products" for obvious reasons.
If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton