Stacker

A stacker is a large machine used in bulk material handling. Its function is to pile bulk material such as limestone, ores and cereals on to a stockpile. A reclaimer can be used to recover the material.

Gold dredges in Alaska had a stacker that was a fixed part of the dredge. It carried over-size material to the tailings pile.

Stackers are nominally rated for capacity in tonnes per hour (tph). They normally travel on a rail between stockpiles in the stockyard. A stacker can usually move in at least two directions: horizontally along the rail and vertically by luffing (raising and lowering) its boom. Luffing of the boom minimises dust by reducing the distance that material such as coal needs to fall to the top of the stockpile. The boom is luffed upwards as the height of the stockpile increases. Some stackers can rotate the boom. This allows a single stacker to form two stockpiles, one on either side of the conveyor.

Stackers are used to stack in different patterns, such as cone stacking and chevron stacking. Stacking in a single cone tends to cause size segregation, with coarser material moving out towards the base. In raw cone ply stacking, additional cones are added next to the first cone. In chevron stacking, the stacker travels along the length of the stockpile adding layer upon layer of material.

Stac Electronics

Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its Lempel–Ziv–Stac lossless compression algorithm and Stacker disk compression utility for compressing data for storage.

History

The original founders included five Caltech graduate students in Computer Science (Gary Clow, Doug Whiting, John Tanner, Mike Schuster and William Dally), two engineers from industry (Scott Karns and Robert Monsour) and two board members from industry (Robert Johnson of Southern California Ventures and Hugh Ness of Scientific Atlanta). The first employee was Bruce Behymer, a Caltech undergraduate in Engineering and Applied Science.

Originally headquartered in Pasadena, California and later in Carlsbad, California, the company received venture capital funding to pursue a business plan as a fabless chip company selling application-specific standard products to the tape drive industry. The plan was to include expansion into the disk drive market, which was much larger than the tape drive market. Following the success of Cirrus in the disk drive market, this was the real basis for venture capitalists' interest in Stac.

Stacker (game)

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Stacker is a game merchandiser manufactured by LAI Games. The goal of the game is to align rows of moving blocks on top of each other. A player who can stack 11 rows will win a minor prize, which is usually low in value, sometimes lower in value than the amount of money the player paid to play the game. A player who gets to the top row wins a major prize. The major prize varies from machine but will often include present day game consoles, cellular phones, and mp3 players.

Standard layout

There is a row of three cubes which move side to side on the screen, at the first row. When the player pushes the start/stop button, the row of squares will stop. Then, another row of three moving squares appears above the previous row, moving faster than the one before it. If the squares do not align directly above the previous set, any overhanging squares will be removed. If the player misses completely, the game is over. The number of available squares is automatically reduced to two, then one, during the game. The goal is to consistently get the squares directly above the previous set, "stacking" them to the minor prize and ultimately major prize levels. According to the merchandise manual, a major prize is worth about 100 times the cost per play.