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Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
Wang Mini Computer Systems sell a top of the l;ive 2200 system and neglect to tell the guy he sold it to, a drug store owner, that it had to be programmed.
:-)
The guy took it, put in a wood shed out behing his little counrtyu drugstore and left it there for a couple of years until it finally got reposessed and made its way to our software firm where we were programming Wang 2200 machine (in BASIC.
I met that salesman and he was an absolute sleaze.
Talk about selling a pig in a poke.
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Thats pitiful, I remember a former company I worked for spending many many thousands on being a member of MSDN so we could get access to "All the latest info", and surprise! When we needed docs for all those undocumented APIs, they told us to buy a source code licence, forgeting that they had already told us we would have access to the info we wanted through MSDN, they wanted an extra $500K if I recall, and I know of others this happened to, but somehow I can't see a line-item on any M$ accounts that says "Fraud"
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I think this belongs, despite the fact that Bill Gates was actually speaking the truth when he said, a few days before the roll-out of Windows 95, that people needing tech support from Microsoft would never be kept on hold for longer than an hour.
Yup, it was the literal truth. Anyone who called Microsoft waited on hold, and then, after 59 minutes, they were cut off.
Advertised "250 watt" computer speakers which weigh three pounds and are powered off a 9V 300mA AC adapter.
P = E x I, where P is power in watts, E is electromotive force in volts, and I is current in amperes.
1 amp = 1000mA. You do the math.
A real 200 watt power amplifier will generally have a power supply with a transformer which weighs at least 50 pounds, and that's *per channel*.
And they use the term "PMPO" - "Peak Music Power Output". Fine, putting aside the fact that this term has no accepted definition in electrical engineering - let's say that those little Taiwanese-made speakers contain an amplifier with a big bank of capacitors to dump out enough current to achieve 250 watts peak. If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V. If the speakers themselves have a standard nominal impedance of 8 ohms, then we can calculate.
A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms could yield a maximum current of (I = E/R) 1.125 amps. 1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak. And in real world situations, we must include the on-state resistance of all the transistors in the output stages.
10.125W < 250W. Therefore, they are lying. By a factor of almost 25.
Wattage ratings tend to be utter lies with any consumer electronics, especially car audio equipment and boom boxes. The absolute worst come from tiny little Chinese sweatshops making brands of computer speakers that no one has ever heard of.
My computer's sound system includes a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x bookshelf speakers driven off a highly modified Sound A-5000 power amplifier. B+ to the output stages is 45V DC derived from a 10 pound power supply transformer, and it does produce a solid and stable 25W RMS per channel into 8 ohms, using a 1kHz sinewave driving a resistive load. And that's the accepted standard for wattage ratings of real power amplifiers.
As a former professional sound technician who has done lead sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte, and The Three Tenors at such prestigious venues at the SkyDome, I've frequently used 240 watt power amplifiers from companies like ElectroVoice, Crown and QSC to power stage monitors on 5000 square foot stages. I speak from experience that running some of this stuff in your house will make your nose bleed. You're not gonna tell me with inflated numbers that a set of $19.95 at Fry's computer speakers will do the same thing.
There's no shame in admitting that a given computer speaker system has a rating of 1W RMS per channel, but idiot consumers just buy the biggest number they can find. In reality, it takes four times the power to double the volume.
Jeez, it's almost as bad as the horsepower ratings on new cars...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Data CDs and Audio CDs have different encodings. Data CDs use 304 ECC bits per 2048 data bits. Audio CDs use 24 ECC bits per 2352 data bits. Audio CDs can degrade if you record/rip/record/rip multiple times. Data CDs can potentially degrade too, but the higher number of ECC bits makes it much rarer.
1 bit DACs are clever inventions that avoid the problems with traditional voltage ladders. They are nothing to laugh about.
The coding on a PAL DVD is different to the encoding on an NTSC DVD. This is why R4 vs R1 sites tend to recommend R4 because the higher resolution on PAL DVDs gives you a better picture on decent TVs.
I love all these comments "correcting" the commenter. Anyhow.
Audiop CDs are written with less error correction than data. It's just how life is. The reason for that is you won't notice a few bits that are off with a music CD, but binary code that's wrong can render a whole disc worthless.
Think of it this way: ECC is basically a way of encoding data, not unlike compression. With the bits used for audio, you can make up for huge errors but little problems are just glossed over. Data CDs avoid that problem by spending an order of magnitude more bits to guarantee a perfect match.
± 29 dB