Nothing a single U.S. president does can "fix" economy or add/destroy jobs. Sorry. People who think so are so out of touch with reality it's scary. U.S. economy has been self-destructed from inside by greedy and unscrupulous businesspeople at all levels (both in small businesses and on tops of corporations), and by equally greedy and uneducated/ignorant consumers. The only way to "fix" it is to let a generation or two die off and be replaced by better people. Where the heck we'll get those, though, is a hard guess.
Somehow blaming G.W.Bush for job losses is, as much as I disliked him and his policies, simply retarded. It's a coincidence there was a silly guy in the office in the time where a lot of bad shit happened -- plenty of it a result of policies of several administrations leading up to him. Same with Obama -- whatever happened economically would have happened no matter what, and my guesstimate is that it'd have happened stimulus or no stimulus.
Wow, talk about coincidences. A couple days ago I was flying on ANA from Narita to Chicago, and the in-flight entertainment system had a video about how TMSUK came to be. They were showing the very dental simulator talked about here. TMSUK was started by a very colorful guy who had liberal arts background and wanted to be an archeologist (among other things). TMSUK was a spinoff company from what a production line machinery (conveyor etc) business IIRC.
Side note: those "inspirational" videos on ANA's in-flight entertainment are quite well done. On my way there I watched the one about the ABC Cooking School and the lady who started it. Quite ingenious of a system they have. While in Japan, I ran into one of those cooking schools in a shopping center, so I signed up for a lesson online using Google translate (ha!). Nothing beats learning cooking in Japanese, without anyone speaking more than a couple words of English (and me knowing no Japanese either). It was an experience I'd repeat in a heartbeat, though.
My experience is that you can add a few dB of loss into almost any digital signaling cable (Cat 6 ethernet, or Cat 2 HDMI) and things will work with very minor increase in bit error rate as long as your cabling system is sound to begin with. If you have borderline time domain parameters like far/near echo and crosstalks, then loss plays a big role, otherwise it doesn't. Signal fidelity, as measured with echo and crosstalks, is much more important than absolute signal amplitude. I've done some tests on a run-of-the-mill monitor with HDMI inputs, and I could go 10dB under spec with signal amplitude, as long as it was clean, and you couldn't see any degradation in the static test signal specifically designed to make errors easy to notice. This was with a custom signal-generator-on-a-PCB directly plugged into the monitor, without any intervening cable.
The clocks are usually not matched at all: the oscillators are anywhere within +/-50ppm or so from where they should be. All digital receivers these days use PLLs and clock extractors, they literally generate a local clock, locked to match the rate of the transmitter's clock. PLL jitter of course is there, and if excessive it will manifest as increased bit error rate.
The "internal wiring" in the TV will likely be impedance controlled traces on a PC board, and not very long ones at that (maybe a couple of inches). Internal wiring harnesses cost a lot of money, and designers try to do anything they can to minimize that. When you see connectors on the back/side of your TV, they don't end up in wires: they end on a PC board, and traces go from connectors directly to transceiver chips (for digital signals).
I'd think that for most broadband digital signaling, electrical interference is a minor concern: you'd need a whole lot of broadband energy to do significant disruption of the signal. What is really important, though, is all the details like near/far echos, crosstalks, etc. Those are even more important than loss: digital transceivers can deal with low signal level as long as the signal is of decent enough quality. So the time and frequency domain response of the cabling system does play a role, and small details like how you terminate the cable play a BIG role. It's like with making homemade cat-6 patch cords. You can only learn to do them correctly when you have a test set worth a couple thousand USD. If you try what you "think" should be OK, you'll waste a perfectly good Cat6 cable and connectors to get maybe Cat5e level of performance. The details of how you untwist the pairs, how much you shift/bend things when terminating, and so on -- all play a role. Cat6 usually doesn't have all that great of a margin to begin with, you're very close to the performance limits of that particular type of cabling and terminations.
Look, impedance match and loss is fine enough if you're a HAM dealing with narrowband transmissions. For broadband (100s of MHz) digital signaling, you also need to look at the near and far echo, crosstalks, ultimately also at the eye pattern of the complete data transmission system.
Sorry, BS about "exactly one cable factory in China". I've personally dealt with a couple of them, so you have no clue here. If you're a serious business purchaser (I'd think anything over 100 employees would qualify), you need to do your own acceptance testing on any sort of cabling, whether patch cords or premise wiring. Renting a tester is way cheaper than having to rewire a whole fucking office. I do agree about the type of a tester that has to be used: the tester need to verify whatever specs the IEEE standards mandate for a given category/type of a link. This really means time domain reflectometry setup -- surely if you know what you're doing you can set it up yourself for a couple hundred bucks worth of parts, but then your know-how makes it an inefficient proposition anyway (you're not paid a minimum wage haha).
Yup. I'm not trying to make up an excuse, just pointing out that some things really cannot be offshored -- as, seemingly, Amazon did with their review "moderation" process.
Head preamps are usually somewhere on the arm assembly, and they drive controlled impedance differential pairs, so an extra inch or two shouldn't be that big of a deal. Latency is not an issue at all, each arm would be controlled separately and they don't need to be synchronous at all.
I agree -- it's true in such obvious cases, but I think in most of the reviews it's more subtle than that. Words that refer to things someone has no direct experience with are often relegated to a common "gobbledygook" bin. If someone doesn't have a car, is not interested in cars, doesn't care about car brands (a car is a car is a car), and never saw a Prius, then they may well see not much of a difference. Call it a mental block if you will.
I guess if they outsource their customer service, you're dealing with people who not only never saw the product that's reviewed, but also don't have the cultural background and social norms needed to correctly judge the reviews in our culture. That's probably all there's to it.
Same with ATMs: first of all, finding one that has messages in English is a problem. Even if it does have English messages, my debit Visa has a 1 out of 3 chance of working (n=33, I write them down not to have to scramble around when I revisit a place). It's not a problem with my banks since the cards have worked fine in Europe (7 countries), Australia (3 states/territories). The cards are issued each by a different major bank. It's a genuinely Japanese problem. I never had to call the banks to have the cards work abroad. I find that AMEX works everywhere it's accepted, though, but it's not accepted everywhere. These days when I go to a store in Japan I've never been to, I pull out all four cards to speed things up. They usually know what it means: try them until one works.
You haven't been to Japan, then. I have four U.S. issued credit cards (personal MC, business MC, personal AMEX, personal VISA), and I've been to plenty of establishments where only one of them works, and to some where none of them go through in spite of VISA/MASTERCARD logos displayed on the doors.
I've never had any problems in U.S. and Europe, though, with any of those cards (as long as they accept a particular type, that is).
Unfortunately, international standards organizations like ISO and IEC are in the same boat. The standards are developed AFAIK as volunteer work of industry professionals, who are not paid by ISO nor IEC. I recall someone paying about $50 for ISO 13854, a half-page standard (I kid you not) titled "Safety of machinery -- Minimum gaps to avoid crushing parts of the human body". That standard is 9 pages long, but's it's all filler, the meat is just 8 numbers. In the interest of saving anyone who is after this information some money, here is pretty much what the standard says:
For whole body, minimum gap to avoid crushing is 500mm. For head in worst case orientation it's 300mm. For leg -- 180mm. For a foot, 60mm less than for a leg. Toes -- 1/6 of gap for the head. Arm -- same as for foot. Hand, fisted or not, and the wrist -- twice as wide as for toes. A single finger requires 25mm gap.
There, $50 worth of information. Oh, sorry, lest someone sue me for factual errors: the standard has a page long "methodology section", where they basically tell you that you should not forget what engineering is about.
At least ITU standards/recommendations are freely accessible. If you want to build a modem, you know where to look, now.
Wikipedia/media is a webservice with their servers in one room.
Ha ha ha.Their infrastructure is pretty complex, and even if physically it's not that huge, it's a lot of work. I'd say their infrastructure is way more advanced than whatever, say, Elseview or Kluwer has got facing the public.
Academic publishing are several actors all around the globe, which actively maintains their libraries and publishes physical copies once a month.
Actors, yes, actors they surely are. Supposedly there should be economy of scale, right? Then guess my astonishment when I inquired how much would it cost to print a small-circulation journal. I can tell you one thing: academic publishers are either swimming in money, or they are so wasteful with their spending that they must be warming their buildings in winter by burning US dollar bills. Because their business-critical costs (servers & IT, printing/distribution, office) would be covered by 1/5th of what people pay them. Easily, at that.
I don't see how getting a larger dish wouldn't help. I don't buy that there's anything behind "an effective size limitation", unless you provide some links, that is. To get advantage of a big dish you definitely need to align things well -- the bigger the dish, the less tolerance for error there is.
I used to use it back in Windows 95 times, and I did pay for a version way back then. It was, at the time, the fastest browser out there. It switched to an ad-supported model, then the GUI ads disappeared, so I don't really know how they made ends meet... I don't use it much nowadays.
You have a bit of a point, but be very careful claiming that we found anything that "completely proves every accepted theory of live[sic] wrong, overnight" -- for there have been no such discoveries. For your statement to be true, the life would need to be truly extraordinary -- not using DNA and/or RNA, not using common energetic cycles, etc. I'm all ears to citations as to the contrary, but so far you're just way ahead of yourself. You have good intentions, but you know, hell is paved with those.
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Those might be, though, the only examples, and that's a whole lot of spending for not much in return.
I pretty much agree.
It's a coincidence. The stimulus was not even a drop in the bucket, in the grand scheme of things.
Nothing a single U.S. president does can "fix" economy or add/destroy jobs. Sorry. People who think so are so out of touch with reality it's scary. U.S. economy has been self-destructed from inside by greedy and unscrupulous businesspeople at all levels (both in small businesses and on tops of corporations), and by equally greedy and uneducated/ignorant consumers. The only way to "fix" it is to let a generation or two die off and be replaced by better people. Where the heck we'll get those, though, is a hard guess.
Somehow blaming G.W.Bush for job losses is, as much as I disliked him and his policies, simply retarded. It's a coincidence there was a silly guy in the office in the time where a lot of bad shit happened -- plenty of it a result of policies of several administrations leading up to him. Same with Obama -- whatever happened economically would have happened no matter what, and my guesstimate is that it'd have happened stimulus or no stimulus.
Wow, talk about coincidences. A couple days ago I was flying on ANA from Narita to Chicago, and the in-flight entertainment system had a video about how TMSUK came to be. They were showing the very dental simulator talked about here. TMSUK was started by a very colorful guy who had liberal arts background and wanted to be an archeologist (among other things). TMSUK was a spinoff company from what a production line machinery (conveyor etc) business IIRC.
Side note: those "inspirational" videos on ANA's in-flight entertainment are quite well done. On my way there I watched the one about the ABC Cooking School and the lady who started it. Quite ingenious of a system they have. While in Japan, I ran into one of those cooking schools in a shopping center, so I signed up for a lesson online using Google translate (ha!). Nothing beats learning cooking in Japanese, without anyone speaking more than a couple words of English (and me knowing no Japanese either). It was an experience I'd repeat in a heartbeat, though.
My experience is that you can add a few dB of loss into almost any digital signaling cable (Cat 6 ethernet, or Cat 2 HDMI) and things will work with very minor increase in bit error rate as long as your cabling system is sound to begin with. If you have borderline time domain parameters like far/near echo and crosstalks, then loss plays a big role, otherwise it doesn't. Signal fidelity, as measured with echo and crosstalks, is much more important than absolute signal amplitude. I've done some tests on a run-of-the-mill monitor with HDMI inputs, and I could go 10dB under spec with signal amplitude, as long as it was clean, and you couldn't see any degradation in the static test signal specifically designed to make errors easy to notice. This was with a custom signal-generator-on-a-PCB directly plugged into the monitor, without any intervening cable.
The clocks are usually not matched at all: the oscillators are anywhere within +/-50ppm or so from where they should be. All digital receivers these days use PLLs and clock extractors, they literally generate a local clock, locked to match the rate of the transmitter's clock. PLL jitter of course is there, and if excessive it will manifest as increased bit error rate.
The "internal wiring" in the TV will likely be impedance controlled traces on a PC board, and not very long ones at that (maybe a couple of inches). Internal wiring harnesses cost a lot of money, and designers try to do anything they can to minimize that. When you see connectors on the back/side of your TV, they don't end up in wires: they end on a PC board, and traces go from connectors directly to transceiver chips (for digital signals).
I'd think that for most broadband digital signaling, electrical interference is a minor concern: you'd need a whole lot of broadband energy to do significant disruption of the signal. What is really important, though, is all the details like near/far echos, crosstalks, etc. Those are even more important than loss: digital transceivers can deal with low signal level as long as the signal is of decent enough quality. So the time and frequency domain response of the cabling system does play a role, and small details like how you terminate the cable play a BIG role. It's like with making homemade cat-6 patch cords. You can only learn to do them correctly when you have a test set worth a couple thousand USD. If you try what you "think" should be OK, you'll waste a perfectly good Cat6 cable and connectors to get maybe Cat5e level of performance. The details of how you untwist the pairs, how much you shift/bend things when terminating, and so on -- all play a role. Cat6 usually doesn't have all that great of a margin to begin with, you're very close to the performance limits of that particular type of cabling and terminations.
Look, impedance match and loss is fine enough if you're a HAM dealing with narrowband transmissions. For broadband (100s of MHz) digital signaling, you also need to look at the near and far echo, crosstalks, ultimately also at the eye pattern of the complete data transmission system.
Sorry, BS about "exactly one cable factory in China". I've personally dealt with a couple of them, so you have no clue here. If you're a serious business purchaser (I'd think anything over 100 employees would qualify), you need to do your own acceptance testing on any sort of cabling, whether patch cords or premise wiring. Renting a tester is way cheaper than having to rewire a whole fucking office. I do agree about the type of a tester that has to be used: the tester need to verify whatever specs the IEEE standards mandate for a given category/type of a link. This really means time domain reflectometry setup -- surely if you know what you're doing you can set it up yourself for a couple hundred bucks worth of parts, but then your know-how makes it an inefficient proposition anyway (you're not paid a minimum wage haha).
But the "snow" and flashes etc are very visible and it's obvious you have a problem. That's what's meant by "you either get a picture or you don't".
Yeah, because the connectors in your TV and your computer will outlast the cables by definition, almost. Or will they, huh?
Yup. I'm not trying to make up an excuse, just pointing out that some things really cannot be offshored -- as, seemingly, Amazon did with their review "moderation" process.
Head preamps are usually somewhere on the arm assembly, and they drive controlled impedance differential pairs, so an extra inch or two shouldn't be that big of a deal. Latency is not an issue at all, each arm would be controlled separately and they don't need to be synchronous at all.
I agree -- it's true in such obvious cases, but I think in most of the reviews it's more subtle than that. Words that refer to things someone has no direct experience with are often relegated to a common "gobbledygook" bin. If someone doesn't have a car, is not interested in cars, doesn't care about car brands (a car is a car is a car), and never saw a Prius, then they may well see not much of a difference. Call it a mental block if you will.
I guess if they outsource their customer service, you're dealing with people who not only never saw the product that's reviewed, but also don't have the cultural background and social norms needed to correctly judge the reviews in our culture. That's probably all there's to it.
Same with ATMs: first of all, finding one that has messages in English is a problem. Even if it does have English messages, my debit Visa has a 1 out of 3 chance of working (n=33, I write them down not to have to scramble around when I revisit a place). It's not a problem with my banks since the cards have worked fine in Europe (7 countries), Australia (3 states/territories). The cards are issued each by a different major bank. It's a genuinely Japanese problem. I never had to call the banks to have the cards work abroad. I find that AMEX works everywhere it's accepted, though, but it's not accepted everywhere. These days when I go to a store in Japan I've never been to, I pull out all four cards to speed things up. They usually know what it means: try them until one works.
You haven't been to Japan, then. I have four U.S. issued credit cards (personal MC, business MC, personal AMEX, personal VISA), and I've been to plenty of establishments where only one of them works, and to some where none of them go through in spite of VISA/MASTERCARD logos displayed on the doors.
I've never had any problems in U.S. and Europe, though, with any of those cards (as long as they accept a particular type, that is).
Unfortunately, international standards organizations like ISO and IEC are in the same boat. The standards are developed AFAIK as volunteer work of industry professionals, who are not paid by ISO nor IEC. I recall someone paying about $50 for ISO 13854, a half-page standard (I kid you not) titled "Safety of machinery -- Minimum gaps to avoid crushing parts of the human body". That standard is 9 pages long, but's it's all filler, the meat is just 8 numbers. In the interest of saving anyone who is after this information some money, here is pretty much what the standard says:
For whole body, minimum gap to avoid crushing is 500mm. For head in worst case orientation it's 300mm. For leg -- 180mm. For a foot, 60mm less than for a leg. Toes -- 1/6 of gap for the head. Arm -- same as for foot. Hand, fisted or not, and the wrist -- twice as wide as for toes. A single finger requires 25mm gap.
There, $50 worth of information. Oh, sorry, lest someone sue me for factual errors: the standard has a page long "methodology section", where they basically tell you that you should not forget what engineering is about.
At least ITU standards/recommendations are freely accessible. If you want to build a modem, you know where to look, now.
Yep. And your editor was handsomely paid by the publisher, right? 6 figure USD salary? I guess not.
Wikipedia/media is a webservice with their servers in one room.
Ha ha ha.Their infrastructure is pretty complex, and even if physically it's not that huge, it's a lot of work. I'd say their infrastructure is way more advanced than whatever, say, Elseview or Kluwer has got facing the public.
Academic publishing are several actors all around the globe, which actively maintains their libraries and publishes physical copies once a month.
Actors, yes, actors they surely are. Supposedly there should be economy of scale, right? Then guess my astonishment when I inquired how much would it cost to print a small-circulation journal. I can tell you one thing: academic publishers are either swimming in money, or they are so wasteful with their spending that they must be warming their buildings in winter by burning US dollar bills. Because their business-critical costs (servers & IT, printing/distribution, office) would be covered by 1/5th of what people pay them. Easily, at that.
I don't see how getting a larger dish wouldn't help. I don't buy that there's anything behind "an effective size limitation", unless you provide some links, that is. To get advantage of a big dish you definitely need to align things well -- the bigger the dish, the less tolerance for error there is.
I used to use it back in Windows 95 times, and I did pay for a version way back then. It was, at the time, the fastest browser out there. It switched to an ad-supported model, then the GUI ads disappeared, so I don't really know how they made ends meet... I don't use it much nowadays.
You have a bit of a point, but be very careful claiming that we found anything that "completely proves every accepted theory of live[sic] wrong, overnight" -- for there have been no such discoveries. For your statement to be true, the life would need to be truly extraordinary -- not using DNA and/or RNA, not using common energetic cycles, etc. I'm all ears to citations as to the contrary, but so far you're just way ahead of yourself. You have good intentions, but you know, hell is paved with those.