User Manual (Release 7: Fill & Download for Free

How did I feel, when a co-worker got the promotion that I felt should have gone to me?I felt cheated and unappreciated.—I was a senior technical writer at a computer company.One of my biggest accomplishments was that we had been put in charge of all written material for all the products. What made it extra hard, was that the CEO wanted all products translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. Not easy. And the translation was not just as a re-issue of the English version. No; he wanted the products to be released in all 7 languages, on the same day. Simultaneously. That meant that we had to pre-write every drop-down menu, every dialogue box, every user manual and every Help file - months before the software was even written. And I was able to make that happen, for every new product, for years.—My useless boss had been demoted, then fired. Another manager was temporarily slotted in. This was my big chance, as I was already basically doing my ex-boss’s job. So, I put in extra effort to make sure my leadership was visible to the CEO, to help ensure I could seal the deal. I even went to the CEO for a list of skills I should demonstrate, to show I was ready.And then, the announcement came, for who would become the new permanent manager of the Tech Writing Group.Yup, the CEO gave the promotion to some other guy, from a bigger department. Maybe it was because the CEO didn’t want to lose the other guy, or maybe the CEO imagined the other guy would do a better job than me.But the job I was doing was very specialized, especially the simultaneous issuing part, and the guy the CEO picked, while a good guy, just didn’t know this stuff. So I basically was supposed to train him, but I only did the very least I could get away with. That’s because I felt unappreciated. What? I’m supposed to stay a happy Worker Bee, while doing the new manager’s job? After already doing it for two previous managers? Nope.In less than a month, the new guy was over-whelmed, and asked for his old job back.But at that point I had been aggressively job-searching, and I had already found a job with a better future. I was gone before they could even think about maybe trying to retain me.After that, the old department was basically disbanded, and the work was farmed out to contractors. No way were they now pulling off the 7-language miracle.On my last day, the CEO told me that he thought I was “a lifer”, and was surprised that I was actually leaving. That explained a lot. I really wasn’t appreciated.—If you are following along, this is the same CEO:David L. Clinton's answer to What’s the most questionable cost-cutting move you’ve seen an employer make?

It is now a days a common phenomenon to launch multiple satellites using single launch vehicle.It really depends on the rocket, and mission.Primary PayloadsA rather common strategy is to 'pile' two or more satellites on top of each other. The upper satellite sits directly inside the payload fairing. Any further satellite below is sitting inside some sort of an inner fairing. Depending on the satellites' needs, the upper stage of the rocket (the one directly below the payload dispenser), can be ignited multiple times (it needs to be designed in such a way) to deploy the satellites on rather different orbits with only one launch.However, 'piling' satellites is not the only technique. E.g. Russian Glonass satellites are launched right next to each other, virtually sharing a single payload adapter. This can be done if the satellites are build and designed in such a way.For further reading, have a look at the Ariane 5 User's Manual (e.g. page 1-7) or the Vega User's Manual.Satellites marked as secondary payloads-The spacecraft are typically spring loaded on to the rocket, held in place by some sort of explosive bolts (Or other clamps) type technology. When the rocket is ready to release the spacecraft, it activates the explosive bolts, causing the spacecraft to be pushed away from the rocket at some speed.A very simple example is the P-POD, used to deploy cubesats, pictured below, from PE0SAT. The door to the POD is closed until it receives the signal from the spacecraft, where it opens. The spring slowly deploys the spacecraft until they are all released.For larger satellites, the satellites are typically placed around some sort of a ring, such as the ESPA ring . Essentially, the spacecraft lay hiding in the nose code, the ring deploys, and one at a time the spacecraft are deployed from the espa ring until everything has been deployed. There are similar systems with other names by other providers, but they all follow the same principals.The use of secondary payload opportunities is limited by the lack of control on the launch schedule and destination orbit of the vehicle, both controlled by the requirements of the primary payload or determined by a compromise between the payload operators in a rideshare launch. As a result, satellites launched as secondary payloads need to be flexible with regard to the orbit in which their mission can be performed. For some missions, this flexibility may not be feasible or may be too costly to embed in the system design.Further restrictions on the launch of small satellites utilising secondary payload opportunities can include the requirement to be compatible with a certain class of deployment mechanism (e.g. P-POD, X-POD, ISIPOD), reducing the level of certification required by the secondary payloads by isolating them from the launch vehicle and primary payload. This can further constrain the mass and volume of the satellite and any provision for deployable surfaces such as solar arrays or wireless communication antennae. Constraints on volumes and pressures of stored propellant, nominally to protect the primary payload, can also limit the capability of on-board propulsion systems, further restricting the ability of the secondary payloads to manoeuvre into more suitable or favourable mission orbits.There are in fact 'user manuals' for virtually all commercially available rocket types and they are freely available. Buying a rocket is a bit like buying a house-hold-device, if you ignore the price tag - they come with manuals. You can google for them, they are amazing reads. There are various implementations for deploying multiple satellites from different rockets / launchers, so it is worth digging for them

As many answers have said, a lot of ways, none of which would be palatable to today's C# and Java coders who have all the memory they need (or at least, a heckuvalot more than coders had 25 years ago), and so are focused on packaging it in a logical, easy-to-decipher manner, allowing for the app (be it a game, an online banking app, or what have you) to be updated for compatibility with future hardware. Programmers of games for systems like the Atari 2600, Sega Master System, NES, SNES, and even later-generation consoles like PSX and N64, had none of these concerns; they had very little interest in people outside the team needing to go in and understand the code or its memory usage and in fact, the more obscure the code was, the better the defense against the relatively few knowledgeable "hackers" out there (like the guys working for Game Genie; remember those?). The platform for the game was static, and the game had direct, almost complete control over the console's capabilities, so there was no need for the multilayered architecture that is ubiquitous in modern software to allow hardware/software independence.The only problem was that those consoles' capabilities were sharply limited.As my example, I'll use The Legend of Zelda for the NES. For its day, this was a massive game, comprising a large overworld and two underworlds (for first and second quest), both twice the size of the overworld, and yet the game's ROM is fairly small, as it had to be for one of Nintendo's first releases for the console.Overworld:First Quest Underworld:Second Quest Underworld:You'll notice the first trick used right away; they crammed as much as they possibly could into a standard grid size. The entire overworld and half of each underworld is 16 screens by 8 screens, or 128 total screens. The current screen Link was on in either the overworld or the underworld could thus be contained in one byte (two nibbles, one for X-coordinate and one for Y, with one bit of the Y coordinate not used in the overworld). The second quest underworld has an interesting hack; the "L" dungeon couldn't be made to fit, so they put in an underground passage leading to the two blue rooms at the far left, nestled into the left side of the Z, then they simply fudged the dungeon map.Each screen, if you zoom in, has a similar matrix arrangement to the whole. Overworld and underworld screens were handled a little differently. Each overworld screen is simply a grid of 16x11 "tiles", each one of which could be ground, sand, rock, bush, water, waterfall, gravestone, staircase, bridge/dock, "trapdoor" or wall opening, plus a few options for special ornamentation like large trees and the entrances to dungeons which are rendered in a special way. There are never more than 3 tile types besides bare ground, so 2 bytes, broken up into 4-bit "nibbles" (half a byte is a nibble - get it?), can be used to identify which terrain types are used for a screen, and then each tile of the screen can be identified with two bits of data, so the terrain map of each screen only requires 44 bytes of data. 44 bytes. The map data for the entire overworld can be stored in just five and a half kilobytes.Color schemes in the overworld are divided into "outside" (the outer two rows/columns) and "inside" (everything else). Most screens are all one color scheme, either green, brown, or white, with a few screens being brown on green, green on brown, or white on brown. That's 6 options, storable in 3 bits (or another nibble as odd numbers of bits are not kosher).Each underworld "room" uses a 12x7 grid for the actual contents of the room, and they further reduce space in a very ingenious way; except for a few very special rooms, like dungeon entrances (sand and statues, virtually all the same layout, just different colors), Triforce rooms (stones and statues, again all the same layout), Ganon's room (uses blackness and statues and is unique) and the final room where Princess Zelda is kept (stones, statues and blackness), and some underground passages which have both stairs and walls, no two different obstacle types are in the same room. This means, for the majority of rooms, all the information needed to render the floorplan can be held by one byte per column in the room, which is 12 bytes total, plus the information about what's on each wall (nothing, open door, shuttered door, locked door, bomb point, bombed opening). 6 options times four walls is 24 permutations, which can be held in 5 bits. Here's where it gets even cleverer; remember that there are only 7 rows in each room, and a byte is 8 bits? The wall information is stored as the last bit of the first 5 columns of the room. The remaining 7 bits is divided in three; 3 bits hold 8 options for the primary obstacle type in the room, either stone, statue, water/lava, sand, or blackness. The last four bits determine the color scheme; there's basically a unique combination of main and alternate color for each dungeon, and there are 16 in the game, so the last nibble basically identifies which dungeon scheme the room uses, and each scheme can be described in a byte (16 possible colors each for room and water/lava). So, each room's map data can be stored in just 12 bytes. The underworlds of both first and second quest are stored in just 3KiB, so the entire game's map is just 8 KiB.They used other pretty obvious tricks as well. The maximum number of bombs you can carry is 16 (5 bits); the other 3 bits of that byte is used to store the number of keys you can have (up to 7), which leaves one bit free. Arrows and Rupees (money) use the same one-byte value store, so shooting an arrow costs you one Rupee and you can only have 255. One byte is used to store the Triforce pieces you have collected; it is possible to obtain them out of order, so instead of using 3 bits to indicate how many you have, they used a full byte as a bitmask. There are only 8 usable treasures, so that's another byte, however one of them (medicine/potion) is available in three levels (red, blue and the "letter" that allows you to buy more), while two more are available in two levels (blue and red candles, and normal or silver arrows. There are 6 more "passive" treasures that grant you additional abilities like being able to cross gaps in water and push heavy stones, one of which (the ring) comes in two flavors. Finally, you can have no sword, or the bronze, white, or magical swords. So, there are 22 possible things to have in your inventory, which can be stored in 3 bytes with 2 bits spare. You can have up to 16 heart containers (4 bits) with a varying number of them full (4 bits), and the game can count half-hearts using one of the leftover bits from your inventory. You can have a regular shield or a magic shield (protects against fireballs), so that's one more bit, and finally, you could have completed the first quest or not, which is the last available bit in 7 bytes of storage. Finally, there are 26 characters, 10 numbers and a couple special characters in the game's alphabet, which can be stored in 6 bits; 8 characters for your name can be stored in 6 bytes (although as the Japanese alphabet is much larger they go ahead and use the full ASCII charset, limiting your name to 6 characters). One byte each for your coordinates in the overworld and underworld, plus one byte for anything I'm forgetting (probably something like whether you've defeated each of the 8 dungeon monsters), and everything the game needs to know about your character can be stored in just 16 bytes. 16 bytes for a savegame is unheard of in modern games, though modern game programmers do still do quite a bit of byte-packing and other memory-saving tricks to get a savegame to fit into a certain unit of storage space (often referred to as a "page" in user manuals and UI; more accurately a "cluster" or a "leaf" of the file allocation system that is within a few orders of magnitude of the minimum addressable amount of memory the file system permits).