Rensselaer County is a county in the U. S. state of New York. As of the 2010 census, the population was 159,429, its county seat is Troy. The county is named in honor of the family of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the original Dutch owner of the land in the area. Rensselaer County is part of NY Metropolitan Statistical Area; the area, now Rensselaer County was inhabited by the Algonquian-speaking Mohican Indian tribe at the time of European encounter. Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch jeweler and merchant, purchased the area in 1630 and incorporated it in his patroonship Rensselaerswyck.. The land passed into English rule in 1664; until 1776, the year of American independence, the county was under British control. The county was not organized as a legal entity until after the Revolution in 1791, when it was created from an area, part of the large Albany County. In 1807, in a county re-organization, the rural sections of Troy were set off as Towns, the city was incorporated; the two towns created were Grafton.
A third town, was set off in 1806. In 1808 it was renamed Nassau after the duke of that area. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 665 square miles, of which 652 square miles is land and 13 square miles is water. Rensselaer County is in the eastern part of New York State; the eastern boundary of Rensselaer County runs along the New York–Vermont and New York–Massachusetts borders. The terrain runs from level and flat near the Hudson and rises into the Rensselaer Plateau around Poestenkill and Sand Lake to the Taconic Mountains along the Massachusetts state line; the highest point is 2,818 feet above sea level, in the town of Berlin. The lowest point is 62 feet above sea level at the Hudson River's southernmost extent in the county; the Hoosic River, a tributary of the Hudson River, is in the north part of the county. Depending on precise location within the county, road travel distance to New York City ranges between 132 miles and 178 miles. Washington County — north Bennington County, Vermont — northeast Berkshire County, Massachusetts — east Columbia County — south Greene County — southwest Albany County — west Saratoga County — northwest As of the census of 2010, there were 161,129 people, 62,694 households, 39,989 families residing in the county.
The population density was 233 people per square mile. There were 69,120 housing units at an average density of 109 per square mile; the racial makeup of the county was 88.73% White, 7.14% Black or African American, 0.23% Native American, 1.71% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.89% from other races, 1.34% from two or more races. 5.01 % of the population were Latino of any race. 22.3% were of Irish, 14.7% Italian, 12.8% German, 7.5% English, 6.2% French, 5.3% American and 2.3% Puerto Rican ancestry according to Census 2010. 95.4 % spoke 2.7 % Spanish as their first language. There were 61,094 households out of which 33.30% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 46.80% were married couples living together, 12.00% had a female householder with no husband present, 34.80% were non-families. 27.90% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.30% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.46 and the average family size was 3.02. In the county, the population was spread out with 24.20% under the age of 18, 10.10% from 18 to 24, 29.10% from 25 to 44, 23.00% from 45 to 64, 13.60% who were 65 years of age or older.
The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females there were 95.90 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.70 males. The median income for a household in the county was $42,905, the median income for a family was $52,864. Males had a median income of $36,666 versus $28,153 for females; the per capita income for the county was $21,095. About 6.70% of families and 9.50% of the population were below the poverty line, including 11.90% of those under age 18 and 6.60% of those age 65 or over. Beginning in 1791, Rensselaer County was governed by a Board of Supervisors, which acted as the Legislature, with the chairman of the board serving as a de facto Executive; the Board of Supervisors form of government was terminated as a result of a class action lawsuit brought by Troy attorney Marvin I. Honig on behalf of his wife, during March 1968. Mr. Honig brought this lawsuit to declare that the Board of Supervisors, as constituted, violated the "one man, one vote" principal declared by the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Honig's motive in bringing the lawsuit was to punish the Rensselaer County Republican Party chairman and certain members of the Board of Supervisors for defaulting on an agreement with him; the NY Supreme Court ruled in Honig's favor, ordered the creation of a legislative body. Several plans were offered, but a plan proposed by Honig was adopted by the Court, its decision was affirmed by the Appellate Division and Court of Appeals; the first "Honig Plan" was drawn to favor of the Democratic party, which had not had control of the county government in decades. That plan, which controlled the 1969 election, resulted in the Democrat's winning control of the new Rensselaer County Legislature. Thereafter, following a change of leadership in the Republican party, Honig brought a new plan, drawn to favor Republican candidates, to the court, which adopted his revised plan; the second "Honig Plan" was affirmed by the Appellate
In Greek mythology, Sithon was a king of the Odomanti or Hadomanti in Thrace, the eponym of the peninsula Sithonia and the tribe Sithones. Sithon was the son of either Poseidon and Ossa or of Anchiroe, he was married to the nymph Mendeis, though Anchiroe is otherwise given as his wife rather than mother, had at least two daughters: Rhoeteia, eponym of the promontory of Rhoetium in the Troad, Pallene. One source gives him as the father of the Thracian princess Phyllis. Sithon promised both the hand of Pallene and his kingdom to the one who would defeat him in single combat. Pallene was so beautiful that a lot of suitors sought her hand, but all of them, including Merops of Anthemusia and Periphetes of Mygdonia, were slain by Sithon; as he grew older and his strength began to fail him, he arranged that the suitors fight each other instead of himself until one of them was killed. When two new wooers and Cleitus, Pallene fell in love with Cleitus. Out of fear for him, she cried so much that her old tutor realized what her feelings were and decided to help.
As the suitors were supposed to fight on chariots, he bribed Dryas' charioteer so that he left undone the pins of the chariot wheels. So when Dryas attacked, the wheels came off and he fell to the ground, was defeated and killed by Cleitus with ease. Sithon became aware of the stratagem and was outraged so much that he intended to slay his daughter next to Dryas' funeral pyre, but the girl was saved by Aphrodite, who appeared at night in front of the inhabitants of the country. He married Pallene to Cleitus. A different story of Sithon and Pallene is found in Nonnus' Dionysiaca. According to it, Sithon was in love with his own daughter, and, the reason why he was killing her wooers one after another; this lasted until one day Dionysus came and suggested that he would fight for Pallene's hand with the maiden herself. Sithon agreed, Dionysus wrestled with Pallene in a manner, more like seducing her. Sithon pronounced the god winner, he consorted with Pallene. The myths of Sithon and the suitors are similar to those of Oenomaus and Pelops
Futurebus, or IEEE 896, is a computer bus standard, intended to replace all local bus connections in a computer, including the CPU, plug-in cards and to some extent, LAN links between machines. The effort started in 1979 and didn't complete until 1987, immediately went into a redesign that lasted until 1994. By this point, implementation of a chip-set based on the standard lacked industry leadership, it has seen little real-world use, although custom implementations continue to be designed and used throughout industry. In the late 1970s, VMEbus was faster, it was quite reasonable to connect a RAM to VME on separate cards to build a computer. However, as the speed of the CPUs and RAM increased, VME was overwhelmed. Increasing the speed of VME was not easy, because all of the parts plugged into it would have to be able to support these faster speeds as well. Futurebus looked to fix these problems and create a successor to systems like VMEbus with a system that could grow in speed without affecting existing devices.
In order to do this the primary technology of Futurebus was built using asynchronous links, allowing the devices plugged into it to talk at whatever speed they wished. Another problem that needed to be addressed was the ability to have several cards in the system as "masters", allowing Futurebus to build multiprocessor machines; this required some form of "distributed arbitration" to allow the various cards to gain access to the bus at any point, as opposed to VME, which put a single master in slot 0 with overall control. In order to have a clear performance benefit, Futurebus was designed to have the performance needed ten years in the future. Typical IEEE standards start with a company building a device, submitting it to the IEEE for the standardization effort. In the case of Futurebus this was reversed, the whole system was being designed during the standardization effort; this proved to be its downfall. As companies came to see Futurebus as the system, they all joined in. Soon the standards meetings had hundreds of people attending, all of them demanding that their particular needs and wants be included.
As the complexity grew, the standards process slowed. In the end it took eight long years before the specification was agreed on in 1987. Tektronix did make a few workstations based on Futurebus. American Logic Machines continues to build end to end system Futurebus hybrid solutions, including VME-to-Futurebus+ and other Bus-to-Futurebus bridge technologies; that was just in time for the US Navy, looking for a new high-speed system for the Next Generation Computer Resources project for passing sonar data around in their newly designed Seawolf-class submarines, they said they would standardize on Futurebus if only a few more changes would be made. Seeing a potential massive government buy, the additions effort started on Futurebus+, it took another four years for the Futurebus+ Standard to be released by this time custom variation of Futurebus took the lead in industry. All of the Futurebus + proponents had their idea of; this degenerated into "profiles", different versions of Futurebus+ targeted towards a particular market.
Boards that were compliant with one Futurebus+ profile were not guaranteed to work with boards built to a different profile. The Futurebus+ standards development politics got so complicated that the IEEE 896 committee split from the IEEE Microcomputer Standards Committee and formed the IEEE Bus Architecture Standards Committee. In the end little use of Futurebus was attempted; the decade-long performance gap they gave the system had evaporated in the decade-long standards process, conventional local bus systems like PCI were close in performance terms. Meanwhile, the VME ecosystem had evolved to such a degree that it continues to be used today, another decade on. Custom implementations of the Futurebus technology are used as backplane technologies for high-end network applications, enterprise class routers, high performance blade servers, application with high demand-content such as video on demand. Futurebus effort did act as a catalyst for simpler serial technologies. A group organized to create a system aimed directly at this need, which led to Scalable Coherent Interface.
Meanwhile, another member decided to simple re-create the entire concept on a much simpler basis, which resulted in QuickRing. Due to the simplicity of these standards, both standards were completed before Futurebus+. Futurebus+ was ahead of its time in the 1980s. VME and other parallel bus standards are still trying to adapt concepts that are implemented in the Futurebus, specially in high performance applications. Futurebus was the source of some of the original work on cache coherency, Live Insertion of boards, Trapezoidal Transceivers. Trapezoidal Transceivers make backplane and bus design much simpler; the original Trapezoidal Transceivers were made by National Semiconductor. Newer Futurebus+ transceivers that meet the IEEE Std 1194.1-1991 Backplane Transceiver Logic standard are still made by Texas Instruments. Futurebus + was used as the I/O bus in the DEC 4000 DEC 10000 AXP systems. Futurebus+ FDDI boards are still supported in the OpenVMS operating system. Futurebus+ custom chips support advanced Symmetric and Asymmetric versions of Unix-Like operating systems supported by companies such as American Logic Machines.
Many of the technical features are shared with IEEE standard FASTBUS. FASTBUS was used as a data acquisition system in many high-energy physics experiments in the 1980s and 1990s. Futurebus is described in just a few IEEE standards: 896