Some time ago I had been toying with the idea of writing an apache module that automatically integrates a tracker and seed. You could apply it on top of a directory or location section and it would convert all the files to.torrent's instead that it would serve up via the integrated tracker.
This reminded me to do some checking up on the idea again, and it already seems to exist now as mod_torrent!
Some types of digital streams have error correction; some don't. CDDA for instance, has error correction, though some formats (HDCD) sacrifice some of it for enhanced fidelity (20bit vs 16bit) audio. Some formats are checksummed only (so you can detect a bit error but not correct it)
Generally, though it's the formats themselves that have the error correction and the interlinks are supposed to be good enough not to have bit errors.
On DVI you have a lot of parallel data channels (ie data moving over multiple pairs of cables), low voltage signalling, and a very high datarate too (up to 5gbps). The main problems you have to battle with cable quality in this circumstance are jitter and interference. The interference is the same thing as with analog cable, except that it's manifested differently in digital -- as bit errors. A simple analogy for jitter is bits arriving out of order or out of sync on differnt cable paths. Some pairs may be physically longer than others due to being twisted tighter or stretched out when a cable was wound onto a spool. The receiver is, for the sake of an example, expecting to read the status of 8 bits on 8 wires when a pulse comes over a 9th wire. If the physical wire carrying one of those bits is 1cm longer than another pair, the time difference of a few nanoseconds might mean that the incorrect bit is read from the wire. The longer the cable is, the more likely it is that either or both of these problems will increase enough to cause bitstream errors. The longer cable makes a bigger antenna to receive intereference and the longer length means that there is a higher likelyhood that data pairs have a larger length disparity due to varied rates of twisting, stretching, etc. and finally the increased resistance of the cable can drop the (already low) voltage down to where the ADC cannot reliably reassemble the digital stream.
Personally, I try to buy quality cables whenever possible without going insane about it. I'd rather get it right the first time than get a sub par cable somewhere and have to take the time to troubleshoot it. I have gotten stuff from Blue Jeans Cable before and found that they take a pretty no-nonsense approach to selling good cables that are designed for specific purposes. I plan to trust their 15m DVI cable when I get a projector, and that's probably the most insane/extreme cable they sell.
The rules of the state where the recording is made apply. IE if you are in Texas (single party consent to record) and call California (All-party consent to record) you may record the call without telling the person.
The converse is true, too. You have to tell someone in Texas that you are recording the call if you call them from California. (not sure if california requires a tone to indicate recording though)
Note also if you live in California (All party) but place the call through a 3rd party service in Texas, for instance (Single party) that records the call in Texas, you do not have to notify the person that you are having the call recorded.
Sony already is trending to this with their "LocationFree TV" products; however, outside of ideal circumstances, they have tended to be very very poor performers. I would imagine that the disparity between download/upload rates on consumer connections is mostly the problem here. The idea is great, but the implementations have been fairly lackluster so far..
It's not really a bath, but you can use conformal coatings to protect PCB's against this and other maladies such as high humidity, salt water spray, etc. I tend to spray down most PCB's I produce myself as they have no solder mask to protect the bare traces otherwise.
A generic SD card can typically have a much higher throughput than a CF card.
People who continue to make this type of statement really confound me. Generally speaking, there are various companies out there who make flash memory and another set of companies that buy flash memory and produce memory cards in various form factors. It's one thing to say that a specific interface's maximum throughput is theoretcially better than another's (and I'm not actually sure whether or not the SD interface allows higher bandwidth than CF or not), but it's quite another thing to make a blanket statement like "SD is faster than CF."
Ironically a lot of it has to do with preventing ground loops and reducing other interference; which is also why most of those devices you mention have a standalone ground lug so that you can run them from an isolated ground if you feel so inclined.
Well, if it had developed the stuck pixel after only a couple of months, it would have been no big deal to get it fixed in warranty; however the camera was about 2 years out of warranty, so it's really not a big deal. A couple hundred dollars is really not so bad when you consider that he has quite a bit more money tied up in the add-on lenses than he does in the camera itself.
I have had excellent luck with both Nikon and Canon's service centers on various digital cameras over the years. Both have excellent turnaround times. My first digital, an Olympus, never had a problem, so I never had to experience their service...
At least the dead pixel is just in the screen of the camera itself.. that's really not a big deal considering it could have been on the CCD. My brother has a CoolPix 950 with a CCD element stuck red. They wanted a few hundred bucks to repair it, but I have made him a photoshop droplet that automatically doctors it out of his photos, so it's worked around. I just hope the same kind of thing doesn't happen to my D70, but at least on the D70 the CCD sensor is more accessible than on the CP950 so maybe at least the repair would be less expensive...
Several companies already have laser projected displays in development. Most use MEMS switches to adjust light levels and aim the beam. The best part of these systems is that there are little to no optics between the imager and the surface being projected, meaning that you can control focus and image distortion and the like all in software. This will make for some pretty neat possibilities: rear projection tv's that are only a couple of inches thick, front projection screens that you can walk in front of without distubing the image, projecting onto highly deformed surfaces (spheres, domes, etc)
Uhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm............ The only way you are going to get it is without sacrificing native resolution is to use an anamorphic lens as you stated. Therefore you're going to have to look harder for a 2.35:1 anamorphic lens.
Canon has a 2.35:1 lens in its HD-EC line, but it's made to work on a native 16:9 camera, as are most 2.35:1 lenses. Therefore, as another poster said, you're going to have to find a native 16:9 DV camera, or you're going to have to stack a 2.35:1 -> 16:9 converter onto a 16:9 -> 4:3 converter.
This was happening to me too, so I cleared the baysesian database and retrained it. It helped a lot but I sitll get a fair amount of spam coming through... I'd say 10 per day to my box, which is pretty good considering almost 1000 are blocked per day to the same box.
Probably the toaster - Hair dryers all tend to have GFCI devices on the power cords these days while most toasters still don't. You will zap yourself pretty good if you drop a hair dryer into a bathtub still, but you probably won't die anymore... Unless your house is totally miswired!
No; the extra junk needed to support the GB/GBC (Mainly just a Z80 core) is not active at all with a GBA game. The z80 core cannot be accessed in any way from the "GBA side".
As I said in another post, they probably plan on dropping the current GBA processor in the DS in favor of one without the vestigal Z80 stuff in a future hardware revision, so this modification may not continue to work until they run out of their current stock or order commitments on the chip.
The Z80 CPU of the GB/GBC is basically built into the silicon of the GBA processor. It has really nothing to do with being a seperate chip of any sort. The modification works because the DS in "GBA Mode" is hardware identical to a GBA. The only other difference is that GB/GBC carts take 5V instead of 3V, which it appears is the main function of the jumper wires in this mod.
It's likely though that after nintendo burns up their (presumable) back stock or order commitments of GBA CPU's that they will switch to a CPU that does not contain these extra elements and this modification may become impossible.
The speed problems are mostly related to roaming between towers since it's a matter of how fast the call can be handed off to the next tower and the phone can switch over while the phone is in contact with both towers. The large altitude means clearer path to any given tower, so that probably offsets some of the problems related to high speed roaming.
Even if his phone couldn't hold a call when hopping cells at that speed, the text messaging probably would have been more reliable since it just needs to do a quick data setup and send a 1s message -- and the poster says that sending a text message was all he did.
Now if you were moving faster than the speed of light, on the other hand...
If you are confused by remote controls and dislike them, you might be a good canidate for a Harmony remote. You tell it whatever equipment you have and how it's hooked together, then you punch buttons on it like "Watch TV" and "Watch DVD" and "Turn Everything Off". I have not used one, so I don't know how well it actually performs, but they continue to be popular after at least 3 years on the market.
Engadget had a piece on the Nevo SL, an upcoming device with a color touchscreen, a good compliment of hardbuttons, and a builtin pocketpc with wifi and the whole bit -- http://www.mynevo.com/Mynevo/Home.aspx
I highly endorse the pronto line of remotes. They are expensive, but they are very well supported, a lot of people use them, and they really can do a ton of stuff. They don't have many hard buttons if that's what you want, but for maximum flexibility, it's really hard to beat a touchscreen.
I use a Pronto NEO and found that with a lot of work, it really works well. It's a lot cheaper than the other Pronto's but still very capable if you are willing to put a lot of work into setting it up. I think that I'd probably spring for a real pronto remote if I were going to buy another, though.
Overpriced cables like monster are a stupid waste of money, but he did not hawk a brand there. You can't just wire everything up with unshielded 24awg wire and expect to get away with it. Proper cabling is very important in any setup - phone, video, electrical, audio, etc. A lot of the cheap cables really are cheap and do not do a good job of eliminating interference. Good connectors are important too. I ran into the connector problem when wiring the coax for cable tv in my last house. I got decent RG-6U coax, but skimped on the connectors. I had a heck of a time getting a good signal with a modulator in the high frequency catv ultra-band (channels 88-96) despite using a bandpass filter, etc. Good termination (along with a power filter on the CATV amplifier) would have most likely alleviated this problem.
If you want good cables at fair prices, check out Blue Jeans Cable or something similar. They won't try to sell you some special $30 "modem cable" or $40 USB cable like best buy/monster cable either.
Even if the screen is driven digitally, it's still serially updated. If the timings are in sync enough to 60hz (or 30Hz even), then you could get some kind of semblance of an image on your TV (59.97Hz) from the interference. This is proably likely, too, since most games are striving to run at 30-60Hz. Maybe you don't get an image all the time as the framerate is not always high enough to reach 60Hz updates -- this is further backed by the evidence of people only getting decent screenshots of things like menus, etc. where there are low poly counts and the hardware can easily manage a constant 60fps.
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Some time ago I had been toying with the idea of writing an apache module that automatically integrates a tracker and seed. You could apply it on top of a directory or location section and it would convert all the files to .torrent's instead that it would serve up via the integrated tracker.
This reminded me to do some checking up on the idea again, and it already seems to exist now as mod_torrent!
I see your whistiling DTMF and raise you speaking 75 baud!
Some types of digital streams have error correction; some don't. CDDA for instance, has error correction, though some formats (HDCD) sacrifice some of it for enhanced fidelity (20bit vs 16bit) audio. Some formats are checksummed only (so you can detect a bit error but not correct it)
Generally, though it's the formats themselves that have the error correction and the interlinks are supposed to be good enough not to have bit errors.
On DVI you have a lot of parallel data channels (ie data moving over multiple pairs of cables), low voltage signalling, and a very high datarate too (up to 5gbps). The main problems you have to battle with cable quality in this circumstance are jitter and interference. The interference is the same thing as with analog cable, except that it's manifested differently in digital -- as bit errors. A simple analogy for jitter is bits arriving out of order or out of sync on differnt cable paths. Some pairs may be physically longer than others due to being twisted tighter or stretched out when a cable was wound onto a spool. The receiver is, for the sake of an example, expecting to read the status of 8 bits on 8 wires when a pulse comes over a 9th wire. If the physical wire carrying one of those bits is 1cm longer than another pair, the time difference of a few nanoseconds might mean that the incorrect bit is read from the wire. The longer the cable is, the more likely it is that either or both of these problems will increase enough to cause bitstream errors. The longer cable makes a bigger antenna to receive intereference and the longer length means that there is a higher likelyhood that data pairs have a larger length disparity due to varied rates of twisting, stretching, etc. and finally the increased resistance of the cable can drop the (already low) voltage down to where the ADC cannot reliably reassemble the digital stream.
Personally, I try to buy quality cables whenever possible without going insane about it. I'd rather get it right the first time than get a sub par cable somewhere and have to take the time to troubleshoot it. I have gotten stuff from Blue Jeans Cable before and found that they take a pretty no-nonsense approach to selling good cables that are designed for specific purposes. I plan to trust their 15m DVI cable when I get a projector, and that's probably the most insane/extreme cable they sell.
Holy crap that thing is awesome!
OOOooooooooo!
DVI with DRM!
Sign me up!
The rules of the state where the recording is made apply. IE if you are in Texas (single party consent to record) and call California (All-party consent to record) you may record the call without telling the person.
The converse is true, too. You have to tell someone in Texas that you are recording the call if you call them from California. (not sure if california requires a tone to indicate recording though)
Note also if you live in California (All party) but place the call through a 3rd party service in Texas, for instance (Single party) that records the call in Texas, you do not have to notify the person that you are having the call recorded.
Sony already is trending to this with their "LocationFree TV" products; however, outside of ideal circumstances, they have tended to be very very poor performers. I would imagine that the disparity between download/upload rates on consumer connections is mostly the problem here. The idea is great, but the implementations have been fairly lackluster so far..
It's not really a bath, but you can use conformal coatings to protect PCB's against this and other maladies such as high humidity, salt water spray, etc. I tend to spray down most PCB's I produce myself as they have no solder mask to protect the bare traces otherwise.
A generic SD card can typically have a much higher throughput than a CF card.
People who continue to make this type of statement really confound me. Generally speaking, there are various companies out there who make flash memory and another set of companies that buy flash memory and produce memory cards in various form factors. It's one thing to say that a specific interface's maximum throughput is theoretcially better than another's (and I'm not actually sure whether or not the SD interface allows higher bandwidth than CF or not), but it's quite another thing to make a blanket statement like "SD is faster than CF."
Ironically a lot of it has to do with preventing ground loops and reducing other interference; which is also why most of those devices you mention have a standalone ground lug so that you can run them from an isolated ground if you feel so inclined.
Well, if it had developed the stuck pixel after only a couple of months, it would have been no big deal to get it fixed in warranty; however the camera was about 2 years out of warranty, so it's really not a big deal. A couple hundred dollars is really not so bad when you consider that he has quite a bit more money tied up in the add-on lenses than he does in the camera itself.
I have had excellent luck with both Nikon and Canon's service centers on various digital cameras over the years. Both have excellent turnaround times. My first digital, an Olympus, never had a problem, so I never had to experience their service...
At least the dead pixel is just in the screen of the camera itself.. that's really not a big deal considering it could have been on the CCD. My brother has a CoolPix 950 with a CCD element stuck red. They wanted a few hundred bucks to repair it, but I have made him a photoshop droplet that automatically doctors it out of his photos, so it's worked around. I just hope the same kind of thing doesn't happen to my D70, but at least on the D70 the CCD sensor is more accessible than on the CP950 so maybe at least the repair would be less expensive...
Several companies already have laser projected displays in development. Most use MEMS switches to adjust light levels and aim the beam. The best part of these systems is that there are little to no optics between the imager and the surface being projected, meaning that you can control focus and image distortion and the like all in software. This will make for some pretty neat possibilities: rear projection tv's that are only a couple of inches thick, front projection screens that you can walk in front of without distubing the image, projecting onto highly deformed surfaces (spheres, domes, etc)
Uhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm............ The only way you are going to get it is without sacrificing native resolution is to use an anamorphic lens as you stated. Therefore you're going to have to look harder for a 2.35:1 anamorphic lens.
Canon has a 2.35:1 lens in its HD-EC line, but it's made to work on a native 16:9 camera, as are most 2.35:1 lenses. Therefore, as another poster said, you're going to have to find a native 16:9 DV camera, or you're going to have to stack a 2.35:1 -> 16:9 converter onto a 16:9 -> 4:3 converter.
This was happening to me too, so I cleared the baysesian database and retrained it. It helped a lot but I sitll get a fair amount of spam coming through... I'd say 10 per day to my box, which is pretty good considering almost 1000 are blocked per day to the same box.
Probably the toaster - Hair dryers all tend to have GFCI devices on the power cords these days while most toasters still don't. You will zap yourself pretty good if you drop a hair dryer into a bathtub still, but you probably won't die anymore... Unless your house is totally miswired!
No; the extra junk needed to support the GB/GBC (Mainly just a Z80 core) is not active at all with a GBA game. The z80 core cannot be accessed in any way from the "GBA side".
As I said in another post, they probably plan on dropping the current GBA processor in the DS in favor of one without the vestigal Z80 stuff in a future hardware revision, so this modification may not continue to work until they run out of their current stock or order commitments on the chip.
The Z80 CPU of the GB/GBC is basically built into the silicon of the GBA processor. It has really nothing to do with being a seperate chip of any sort. The modification works because the DS in "GBA Mode" is hardware identical to a GBA. The only other difference is that GB/GBC carts take 5V instead of 3V, which it appears is the main function of the jumper wires in this mod.
It's likely though that after nintendo burns up their (presumable) back stock or order commitments of GBA CPU's that they will switch to a CPU that does not contain these extra elements and this modification may become impossible.
The speed problems are mostly related to roaming between towers since it's a matter of how fast the call can be handed off to the next tower and the phone can switch over while the phone is in contact with both towers. The large altitude means clearer path to any given tower, so that probably offsets some of the problems related to high speed roaming.
Even if his phone couldn't hold a call when hopping cells at that speed, the text messaging probably would have been more reliable since it just needs to do a quick data setup and send a 1s message -- and the poster says that sending a text message was all he did.
Now if you were moving faster than the speed of light, on the other hand...
If you are confused by remote controls and dislike them, you might be a good canidate for a Harmony remote. You tell it whatever equipment you have and how it's hooked together, then you punch buttons on it like "Watch TV" and "Watch DVD" and "Turn Everything Off". I have not used one, so I don't know how well it actually performs, but they continue to be popular after at least 3 years on the market.
Engadget had a piece on the Nevo SL, an upcoming device with a color touchscreen, a good compliment of hardbuttons, and a builtin pocketpc with wifi and the whole bit -- http://www.mynevo.com/Mynevo/Home.aspx
Well you can get an IR X-10 controller and program it to work with any remote you have...
I highly endorse the pronto line of remotes. They are expensive, but they are very well supported, a lot of people use them, and they really can do a ton of stuff. They don't have many hard buttons if that's what you want, but for maximum flexibility, it's really hard to beat a touchscreen.
I use a Pronto NEO and found that with a lot of work, it really works well. It's a lot cheaper than the other Pronto's but still very capable if you are willing to put a lot of work into setting it up. I think that I'd probably spring for a real pronto remote if I were going to buy another, though.
Overpriced cables like monster are a stupid waste of money, but he did not hawk a brand there. You can't just wire everything up with unshielded 24awg wire and expect to get away with it. Proper cabling is very important in any setup - phone, video, electrical, audio, etc. A lot of the cheap cables really are cheap and do not do a good job of eliminating interference. Good connectors are important too. I ran into the connector problem when wiring the coax for cable tv in my last house. I got decent RG-6U coax, but skimped on the connectors. I had a heck of a time getting a good signal with a modulator in the high frequency catv ultra-band (channels 88-96) despite using a bandpass filter, etc. Good termination (along with a power filter on the CATV amplifier) would have most likely alleviated this problem.
If you want good cables at fair prices, check out Blue Jeans Cable or something similar. They won't try to sell you some special $30 "modem cable" or $40 USB cable like best buy/monster cable either.
Even if the screen is driven digitally, it's still serially updated. If the timings are in sync enough to 60hz (or 30Hz even), then you could get some kind of semblance of an image on your TV (59.97Hz) from the interference. This is proably likely, too, since most games are striving to run at 30-60Hz. Maybe you don't get an image all the time as the framerate is not always high enough to reach 60Hz updates -- this is further backed by the evidence of people only getting decent screenshots of things like menus, etc. where there are low poly counts and the hardware can easily manage a constant 60fps.