Advantages of analog include simpler receivers and a large installed base. That means that people will actually have the receivers if an emergency happens, whereas they're far less likely to own receivers for digital radio.
HD Radio can be problematic even on FM, though only in a few areas. When I lived in Setauket, Long Island many years ago, receiving my favorite station (the late lamented WNEW-FM in its progressive rock days; the current incarnation once again has the WNEW call sign but is a hot adult contemporary station) from New York City was challenging because WDRC-FM in Hartford CT is on the adjacent channel; although my location was outside the primary coverage area of WDRC, the water-enhanced propagation path (part of it is across Long Island Sound) meant that the two stations were about equally strong. Careful antenna placement to point a null in the direction of the unwanted station was necessary.
Nowadays it would be much harder. Both stations broadcast in HD, which means that each one is effectively broadcasting digital noise on top of the other.
The FCC rules on placement of radio stations is supposed to insure that reception situations like that don't arise. But there will always be some boundary cases where it breaks down and people experience trouble receiving radio stations they want to listen to. And HD Radio makes those boundary cases even more difficult than they used to be.
Once upon a time, cars had some of the best AM radio receivers you could get. Somewhat later, they were the only place that AM Stereo was ever commonly available. About the only thing that could beat them were communications receivers used by ham radio operators and serious shortwave listeners; those are still an excellent tool for AM reception.
Those days, alas, are long gone. Car radio manufacturers stopped paying attention to the quality of the AM side a long time ago. (Decreasing interest in listening to AM is a big factor. The FCC has also allowed the band to devolve into a horrible mess by authorizing a lot of tiny stations.) The noise from all the electronics in a modern car interfere with reception. And the large whip antennas found on older cars have been replaced with smaller ones, both for visual appeal and to reduce aerodynamic drag.
FM radios for cars also used to lead the way technologically. They were usually better in quality than most home receivers - though not for achieving the ultimate in sound quality, because the design emphasis was on things like selectivity and weak signal capability rather than fidelity. They are usually still pretty good. And nearly all have RDS displays, something that most home radios lack. Surprisingly, the car manufacturers haven't jumped on the HD Radio bandwagon; I guess they're more interested in pushing satellite radio subscriptions instead.
But you are right. A good SDR can now beat everything else out there. It's actually possible to receive adjacent channels on an SDR if they are not being obliterated by HD Radio sidebands; the nearly perfect filters that can be implemented digitally make it possible. On FM, only one very expensive McIntosh tuner and some equally expensive tuners made for the broadcast industry came close.
Recharging a phone during a disaster is not a problem. There are lots of portable charging stations. They're called cars. They have gasoline powered generators that are independent of the power grid, and even without running the engine a car battery can recharge a phone quite a few times. Many cars now have USB ports; for older cars with no port, charging adapters and cables are readily available in a nearby drug store.
If anyone wants to take a nostalgic trip to the days of Flash animation while they still can, here's a site that has a bunch of them: http://www.albinoblacksheep.co...
Flash was actually pretty good at that sort of thing. Flash animations were a thing for a while, and some of them were quite entertaining. Now we stream similar things as video, which takes ten times the bandwidth for a result that doesn't look as good to the viewer (the Flash version had no MPEG encoding artifacts). The best known example may be the web episodes of Dr Katz Professional Therapist.
I think there are a few old uploads that require the Flash player to watch. They're from the days when YouTube didn't store your original upload, just their encoded version, which in those days was a Sorensen-encoded FLV. To allow playing of those in an HTML5-only environment they would have to transcode them again, with an additional generation loss in quality. But then we're talking about video that already looks terrible, so it's not that big a deal.
Why aren't people signing up for Pre-Check? Because it's insulting to be asked to pay for something that saves the TSA money. They should be paying US to do it out of the cost savings that they were expecting from the program.
TV generates revenue for the program providers, not for the cable system. Home shopping channels are the notable exception; they pay the cable system, either a fee for being present or a small cut of sales. The important thing for the cable guys is that having more subscribers strengthens their hand when they negotiate with local broadcast channels that are looking for carriage fees. It also gives the company the ability to try to sell you add-ons like pay-per-view movies.
Tucows is still around but their name is far less visible. Their primary businesses these days are wholesale domains (OpenSRS), retail domain services (Hover), and phone and internet services (Ting). All of those have the Tucows name only in fine print. The increasingly irrelevant download site is the only thing they run that prominently features the Tucows name.
I would rather see sales taxes go away altogether. They are a regressive method of taxation, and one that discourages worthwhile transactions. I see them as the least desirable of the three basic forms of taxation (sales, income, and property) and would prefer a shift to the other two.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't see things that way and chooses to heavily emphasis sales taxes - typically under the name of value added tax, which in the end amounts to the same thing). For the US to move even further away from sales taxes and toward income and property taxes would just lead to more tax evasion of other kinds like offshoring and corporate inversions.
The original Palm Pilot did make the list, though not at #1. It was influential, but ultimately was a device and a category of devices that wasn't quite good enough to achieve the kind of mass acceptance that the smartphone has.
And no, the iPhone is not the first smartphone. Various Palm and Windows-based devices, the BlackBerry, and Nokia's Symbian phones preceded it. But it was the first one to be accepted by more people and used as a smartphone by more than just a small tech-oriented elite. Lots of Symbian devices were sold but most of them weren't really used in a way that we would recognize as smartphone use; they had either no apps installed or a handful of lightly-used ones at most. Palm devices were used in a more smartphone way, but not by enough people.
Although the gun and the printing press are both inventions that dramatically changed the world, they probably don't meet Time's definition of a tech gadget. If I were going to choose a gun to represent the category I would go with a handgun rather than a rifle; it feels more gadget-like. Perhaps the iconic Colt.45: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They did include the HP DeskJet printer as an example of the kind of personal printer that brought the power of the printing press to the masses. I might have chosen the HP LaserJet or the Apple Laserwriter, both of which preceded the DeskJet by a bit, as better examples. I'm guessing that Time chose the DeskJet because of its greater affordability, and because inkjet printing is the technology that fully democratized personal printing.
Not quite true. There are some purist DSD recordings that involve no PCM processing at all. Basically the process is put microphones in front of musicians, capture to DSD, package and sell. No editing at all other than choosing the start and end points. But you are correct that the vast majority are not made that way.
Ripping an SACD to FLAC can be useful; it benefits listeners who do not have an SACD-capable DAC. Some sites that offer original DSF or DFF files (two formats that can be used to store DSD audio) also offer FLAC versions derived from them, usually 192/24 or occasionally 384/24. The ideal would be to offer both.
Gateway, eMachines, and Acer are all the same company now. Have been since 2007 when Acer bought Gateway, which itself had bought eMachines in 2004. The eMachines brand was retired at the beginning of 2013; Acer still uses the Gateway brand for some products.
The rectifier inserts that I am familiar with were half wave rectifiers. They mostly extended the bulb life by cutting the effective voltage in half - so you got longer bulb life but also a lot less light.
Yes and no. We've known how to make cheap light bulbs that will last forever for years. You don't even have to make new light bulbs; just take a garden variety rough service bulb (available at electrical supply houses and sometimes at hardware stores), attach it to a Variac, and turn down the voltage a bunch. Even simpler, buy some European bulbs (where they use 240 volt power) and use them in the US.
But you don't want them. Why? Efficiency. The amount of visible light you get for each watt of electricity is much lower than when you operate the bulb at the standard voltage. The light is also very red.
Within the bounds of standard incandescent technology, the tungsten filament that became the standard light bulb formula was the best engineering tradeoff we knew how to make. It balanced energy efficiency (compared to other possible incandescent designs and materials, not to other lighting technologies), light quality, and cost of manufacturing in a way that pleased most of the people most of the time. More recently we got halogen bulbs, which offer about a 25% improvement in energy efficiency but cost more to manufacture. That remains the best we know now to do.
To get a more efficient light we had to shift to different methods of producing light. Fluorescent, metal halide, gas vapor, and LED are all ways of getting much more light from each watt of electricity. But it took many years of technological advances to make some of them into acceptable sounces of light for home use.
Brand new car models always have problems. One reason that Japanese cars have a good reputation here is that we never see brand new models; we only get them after they have already been available in Japan for a few months, so we miss the worst of the teething pains.
I would say the probability of Ford producing an EV is 100%, because they already make them: http://www.ford.com/cars/focus... What they do not yet make is an extended range electric car that can compete directly against Tesla's cars or the upcoming Chevy Bolt. But it's a safe bet that the company is working on one.
You're looking at different questions. The OP asked why Tesla would sell a car to Ford, and (as others have pointed out) there is no way to stop them from getting one once the cars are available to the public. The other question was why Tesla would sell the company to Ford; I don't see them doing that at present, but it could possibly happen in the future if Tesla is unable to find the money it needs to become a big car company.
USB Type C cables aren't just wire. "Full-featured type-C cables are active, electronically marked cables that contain a chip with an ID function based on the configuration channel and vendor-defined messages (VDMs) from the USB Power Delivery 2.0 specification." (from Wikipedia).
The non-compliant cables that were being sold on Amazon probably don't contain spec-compliant chips, and that is something the testing software can check. A compliant cable still won't prevent damage if you connect a 10,000 volt source to it, but it will prevent some damage that can happen with non-compliant cables. Other possible problems with the non-compliant cables (that software would not be able to check for) would include out of spec connectors (the connector pitch of USB-C is rather fine so the connectors have to be manufactured to close tolerances) or wire that is too thin.
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Most unlocked phones have FM radio apps. It's the ones that carriers sell that lack the capability.
Advantages of analog include simpler receivers and a large installed base. That means that people will actually have the receivers if an emergency happens, whereas they're far less likely to own receivers for digital radio.
HD Radio can be problematic even on FM, though only in a few areas. When I lived in Setauket, Long Island many years ago, receiving my favorite station (the late lamented WNEW-FM in its progressive rock days; the current incarnation once again has the WNEW call sign but is a hot adult contemporary station) from New York City was challenging because WDRC-FM in Hartford CT is on the adjacent channel; although my location was outside the primary coverage area of WDRC, the water-enhanced propagation path (part of it is across Long Island Sound) meant that the two stations were about equally strong. Careful antenna placement to point a null in the direction of the unwanted station was necessary.
Nowadays it would be much harder. Both stations broadcast in HD, which means that each one is effectively broadcasting digital noise on top of the other.
The FCC rules on placement of radio stations is supposed to insure that reception situations like that don't arise. But there will always be some boundary cases where it breaks down and people experience trouble receiving radio stations they want to listen to. And HD Radio makes those boundary cases even more difficult than they used to be.
Once upon a time, cars had some of the best AM radio receivers you could get. Somewhat later, they were the only place that AM Stereo was ever commonly available. About the only thing that could beat them were communications receivers used by ham radio operators and serious shortwave listeners; those are still an excellent tool for AM reception.
Those days, alas, are long gone. Car radio manufacturers stopped paying attention to the quality of the AM side a long time ago. (Decreasing interest in listening to AM is a big factor. The FCC has also allowed the band to devolve into a horrible mess by authorizing a lot of tiny stations.) The noise from all the electronics in a modern car interfere with reception. And the large whip antennas found on older cars have been replaced with smaller ones, both for visual appeal and to reduce aerodynamic drag.
FM radios for cars also used to lead the way technologically. They were usually better in quality than most home receivers - though not for achieving the ultimate in sound quality, because the design emphasis was on things like selectivity and weak signal capability rather than fidelity. They are usually still pretty good. And nearly all have RDS displays, something that most home radios lack. Surprisingly, the car manufacturers haven't jumped on the HD Radio bandwagon; I guess they're more interested in pushing satellite radio subscriptions instead.
But you are right. A good SDR can now beat everything else out there. It's actually possible to receive adjacent channels on an SDR if they are not being obliterated by HD Radio sidebands; the nearly perfect filters that can be implemented digitally make it possible. On FM, only one very expensive McIntosh tuner and some equally expensive tuners made for the broadcast industry came close.
Recharging a phone during a disaster is not a problem. There are lots of portable charging stations. They're called cars. They have gasoline powered generators that are independent of the power grid, and even without running the engine a car battery can recharge a phone quite a few times. Many cars now have USB ports; for older cars with no port, charging adapters and cables are readily available in a nearby drug store.
If anyone wants to take a nostalgic trip to the days of Flash animation while they still can, here's a site that has a bunch of them: http://www.albinoblacksheep.co...
Flash was actually pretty good at that sort of thing. Flash animations were a thing for a while, and some of them were quite entertaining. Now we stream similar things as video, which takes ten times the bandwidth for a result that doesn't look as good to the viewer (the Flash version had no MPEG encoding artifacts). The best known example may be the web episodes of Dr Katz Professional Therapist.
I think there are a few old uploads that require the Flash player to watch. They're from the days when YouTube didn't store your original upload, just their encoded version, which in those days was a Sorensen-encoded FLV. To allow playing of those in an HTML5-only environment they would have to transcode them again, with an additional generation loss in quality. But then we're talking about video that already looks terrible, so it's not that big a deal.
Why aren't people signing up for Pre-Check? Because it's insulting to be asked to pay for something that saves the TSA money. They should be paying US to do it out of the cost savings that they were expecting from the program.
TV generates revenue for the program providers, not for the cable system. Home shopping channels are the notable exception; they pay the cable system, either a fee for being present or a small cut of sales. The important thing for the cable guys is that having more subscribers strengthens their hand when they negotiate with local broadcast channels that are looking for carriage fees. It also gives the company the ability to try to sell you add-ons like pay-per-view movies.
Tucows is still around but their name is far less visible. Their primary businesses these days are wholesale domains (OpenSRS), retail domain services (Hover), and phone and internet services (Ting). All of those have the Tucows name only in fine print. The increasingly irrelevant download site is the only thing they run that prominently features the Tucows name.
They could remove it from the iTunes database without actually deleting the files. That would have been a more responsible thing to do.
I would rather see sales taxes go away altogether. They are a regressive method of taxation, and one that discourages worthwhile transactions. I see them as the least desirable of the three basic forms of taxation (sales, income, and property) and would prefer a shift to the other two.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't see things that way and chooses to heavily emphasis sales taxes - typically under the name of value added tax, which in the end amounts to the same thing). For the US to move even further away from sales taxes and toward income and property taxes would just lead to more tax evasion of other kinds like offshoring and corporate inversions.
The original Palm Pilot did make the list, though not at #1. It was influential, but ultimately was a device and a category of devices that wasn't quite good enough to achieve the kind of mass acceptance that the smartphone has.
And no, the iPhone is not the first smartphone. Various Palm and Windows-based devices, the BlackBerry, and Nokia's Symbian phones preceded it. But it was the first one to be accepted by more people and used as a smartphone by more than just a small tech-oriented elite. Lots of Symbian devices were sold but most of them weren't really used in a way that we would recognize as smartphone use; they had either no apps installed or a handful of lightly-used ones at most. Palm devices were used in a more smartphone way, but not by enough people.
Although the gun and the printing press are both inventions that dramatically changed the world, they probably don't meet Time's definition of a tech gadget. If I were going to choose a gun to represent the category I would go with a handgun rather than a rifle; it feels more gadget-like. Perhaps the iconic Colt .45: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They did include the HP DeskJet printer as an example of the kind of personal printer that brought the power of the printing press to the masses. I might have chosen the HP LaserJet or the Apple Laserwriter, both of which preceded the DeskJet by a bit, as better examples. I'm guessing that Time chose the DeskJet because of its greater affordability, and because inkjet printing is the technology that fully democratized personal printing.
Not quite true. There are some purist DSD recordings that involve no PCM processing at all. Basically the process is put microphones in front of musicians, capture to DSD, package and sell. No editing at all other than choosing the start and end points. But you are correct that the vast majority are not made that way.
Ripping an SACD to FLAC can be useful; it benefits listeners who do not have an SACD-capable DAC. Some sites that offer original DSF or DFF files (two formats that can be used to store DSD audio) also offer FLAC versions derived from them, usually 192/24 or occasionally 384/24. The ideal would be to offer both.
Gateway, eMachines, and Acer are all the same company now. Have been since 2007 when Acer bought Gateway, which itself had bought eMachines in 2004. The eMachines brand was retired at the beginning of 2013; Acer still uses the Gateway brand for some products.
The rectifier inserts that I am familiar with were half wave rectifiers. They mostly extended the bulb life by cutting the effective voltage in half - so you got longer bulb life but also a lot less light.
Yes and no. We've known how to make cheap light bulbs that will last forever for years. You don't even have to make new light bulbs; just take a garden variety rough service bulb (available at electrical supply houses and sometimes at hardware stores), attach it to a Variac, and turn down the voltage a bunch. Even simpler, buy some European bulbs (where they use 240 volt power) and use them in the US.
But you don't want them. Why? Efficiency. The amount of visible light you get for each watt of electricity is much lower than when you operate the bulb at the standard voltage. The light is also very red.
Within the bounds of standard incandescent technology, the tungsten filament that became the standard light bulb formula was the best engineering tradeoff we knew how to make. It balanced energy efficiency (compared to other possible incandescent designs and materials, not to other lighting technologies), light quality, and cost of manufacturing in a way that pleased most of the people most of the time. More recently we got halogen bulbs, which offer about a 25% improvement in energy efficiency but cost more to manufacture. That remains the best we know now to do.
To get a more efficient light we had to shift to different methods of producing light. Fluorescent, metal halide, gas vapor, and LED are all ways of getting much more light from each watt of electricity. But it took many years of technological advances to make some of them into acceptable sounces of light for home use.
Brand new car models always have problems. One reason that Japanese cars have a good reputation here is that we never see brand new models; we only get them after they have already been available in Japan for a few months, so we miss the worst of the teething pains.
I would say the probability of Ford producing an EV is 100%, because they already make them: http://www.ford.com/cars/focus... What they do not yet make is an extended range electric car that can compete directly against Tesla's cars or the upcoming Chevy Bolt. But it's a safe bet that the company is working on one.
You're looking at different questions. The OP asked why Tesla would sell a car to Ford, and (as others have pointed out) there is no way to stop them from getting one once the cars are available to the public. The other question was why Tesla would sell the company to Ford; I don't see them doing that at present, but it could possibly happen in the future if Tesla is unable to find the money it needs to become a big car company.
USB Type C cables aren't just wire. "Full-featured type-C cables are active, electronically marked cables that contain a chip with an ID function based on the configuration channel and vendor-defined messages (VDMs) from the USB Power Delivery 2.0 specification." (from Wikipedia).
The non-compliant cables that were being sold on Amazon probably don't contain spec-compliant chips, and that is something the testing software can check. A compliant cable still won't prevent damage if you connect a 10,000 volt source to it, but it will prevent some damage that can happen with non-compliant cables. Other possible problems with the non-compliant cables (that software would not be able to check for) would include out of spec connectors (the connector pitch of USB-C is rather fine so the connectors have to be manufactured to close tolerances) or wire that is too thin.
Sure they will. But it will only be sold on amazon.co.uk.