Low-power, low-cost, very small, and very few electrical connections to worry about. Also plenty fast enough for anything you'd ever need to do while driving on the highway.
All it takes is a handfull of regular PC parts, some manner of enclosure, and a reliable power supply. The whole thing should end up being small enough to fit under the front seat, which is nice for a variety of reasons (not the least of which that it is climate controlled).
I envision a plain steel box, perhaps from a company like Sescom, or just whatever I can find at a local surplus house. It doesn't have to be easily modified, only solid.
Does anyone know of a source for an appropriate power supply, or a kit, or even just plans for one?
Re:Not via email you dont you wascally wabbit
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 2
Surely you all are speaking of trojan horses, right? Right? Or has the vocabulary changed?
Viruses are infectious - they spread, usually unbeknownst but sometimes not, across media and machines, branching as they go. Trojan horses explode upon execution, or at some predetermined time, and require specific action to be deposited on a user's machine.
They are different things entirely.
A shell script such as:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rF /
could be construed as a trojan horse in the hands of someone who doesn't know better. This trojan horse might be spread by means of a virus, but that's where the relationship between the two stops.
Viruses needn't even be destructive to meet the definition of being viral.
If in doubt about these terms, simply RTFM. The Jargon File might be a good starting point, or any good (or not so good) common encyclopedia.
The Audio Home Recording Act set up specific taxes on blank digital media sold for use in home audio.
It was brought about due to concern by the recording industry about "perfect" digital copies, and how terribly unfair they were in comparison to the typically lousy analog cassette dub.
At the time, its aim was mostly Minidisc, the now-defunct Philips DCC format, and consumer DAT, but the tax also extends to the "audio" CD-Rs required by consumer standalone CD recorders.
The moneys levied are handed to RIAA to compensate, in advance, the loss they'd endure through casual piracy.
In exchange for this free money, consumers would be free to copy as much music as they wanted, so long as they were using suitably taxed media.
A protocol called SCMS was also introduced, and required to be in place on consumer gear. Its purpose is to prevent copies from being made of copies. Thus, if everyone wanted a a Minidisc of Joe's new Pearl Jam album, they'd all have to get it from Joe himself, as he'd be the only one with an original.
Good plan, all together, and reasonably fair to all parties (despite the fact that it killed DAT).
To say, later on, that it is now both illegal and impossible to make a digital copy of a work, even when the rights to do so were paid for with the purchase of taxed media, is not fair by any stretch of the imagination.
Whether or not it is illegal, I'm not sure. It's been years since I've read the AHRA, but I do recall it being very specific to digital copying, and that it specifically allowed the same.
That said, alcohol which has been slightly diluted with water is very transportable and safe to handle. Common department store rubbing alcohol will burn easily but very slowly, and is typically at 90% concentration. Jack D
aniels, according to an experiment performed moments ago here at my desk, does not burn at all in its standard 43% concentration from the heat of a black Bic lighter. OTOH, Bicardi 151 will ignite readily even when reduced in potency to a flaming Dr. Pepper, as evidenced by hair I've been missing from my drinking hand since 12/31/01.
Of course, the extra water would need to be dealt with in some way, but that seems fairly easy once the device's other problems are overcome. Since the whole point of a fuel cell is to combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce heat and H20, there must be some facility to deal with waste water (or, more likely, steam), or the whole idea is doomed to failure anyway.;)
While I suppose that getting particularly dirty working on a car might be objectionable to those of you who are stereotypical non-bathing geeks, I don't seem to have much trouble spending 5 minutes with a jar of hand cleaner to save several hundred dollars in "professional" labor.
Most car troubles are fixed with simple, bolt-on parts. Starters, water pumps, alternators, and most commonly brakes, are bloody simple to replace. A couple of bolts, a wire or two, perhaps a belt and you're done - with enough extra money left over to buy a new bigass hard drive.
Suspension parts are easy. I replaced a rear wheel bearing on my Beretta in about a half hour. Shocks took slightly longer, but were still a walk in the park.
Oddly enough, I often find it easier to work on my car's hardware than my computer's. I don't want to remove every wire connecting my PC to the outside world when I work on it, just as I don't want to remove the engine from a car to change the spark plugs. Thus, I find myself crawling under desks, with my head and shoulders tucked between two shelves, and using my third elbow to install a new DIMM. Whereas, on a car, one simply puts the thing in gear, drives up a set of cheap portable ramps, and sets the brake to get at the guts inside.
Diagnosing a car is much like diagnosing failing computer hardware in terms of thought processes required. Does it crank? No. Does it click? Yes. Measure the voltage of the battery - if voltage is sane, the battery is charged and it's either a dead starter motor or a bad connection. If not, the battery is discharged, either due to age, abuse, bad alternator, or a bad connection.
Simple stuff. Turn the power on a PC. Does it boot? No. Do any fans spin? Yes. Check connections, re-seat memory, CPU and anything else that plugs in. Does machine still not boot? Yes. Measure power supply voltage. If it's sane, toss the motherboard.
I treat internal motor problems differently, but I also treat component-level problems on, say, a flakey motherboard differently as well. Which is to say, that I don't care enough to learn how to fix them - if I burn a piston on my car, it's either getting a different engine, getting fixed by someone who knows what they're doing, or being thrown away. Just like I would do with a motherboard which, for some reason, stopped doing DMA (though I'd be most likely to replace it first, and seek professional opinion later).
Point is, it's the same thing. The parts are heavier, and often dirtier, but I've never had sneezing fits from an oil-covered spark plug boot. The cruft inside of a 5-year-old PC is a different story.
And, besides, there's interesting problems to overcome. The vacuum resevoir's mounting tab broke off on my car. I noticed sthis ometime after the front tire had worn a hole into it, and delayed repairs until sometime after it had fallen off completely. Symptoms? Strange noises at odd times, and no control of heater vent selection under acceleration.
By the time I got around to doing something about it, it was not obvious at all where the thing originally mounted. I found a replacement resevoir and a length of suitable tubing at a junk yard for (literally) a couple of dollars. Using stout, expensive wire ties I attached it to one of the shocks inside of the front bumper cover. Fed the new vacuum line along the loom with the a bunch of wires and other stuff to the check valve where the old one connected.
The new location offers good protection from road debris. I'm satisfied that it won't ever break loose or become disconnected, unless I hit something hard enough to dislodge my teeth. It is thus better than the original.
Same thing with the stainless steel strap I fashioned together with grade 8 nuts and bolts to hold the muffler in place, rather than the rusty, and poorly-riveted iron strap that came from the factory. The OEM strap, given a few Ohio winters, didn't survive the impact of the car falling a few inches when the rear wheel bearing snapped. The new one, which I made from stuff I had sitting around, should outlive me, regardless of what type of abuse I deliver to it. I have no doubt that it will be justfine when the car once again goes skidding, bottomed-out, along the roadway as a complete wheel (and half of the brakes!) go bouncing merrily away. [not that I'm looking forward to a repeat of that particular episode.] GM didn't do this because it's relatively expensive, just as Dell doesn't use solid copper Alpha heatsinks for their customers' overclocking joy.
But I'm not GM or Dell. I'll use a copper heatsink if I feel like it, and I'll make up for it (with change to spare) by installing it myself.
Pride, cash in my pocket, and a working automobile that I learned something new about, which is now in some way better than new. What's not to love?
I think Gillette still gives away razors to all who ask, although I don't seem to recall them being in any sort of frantic financial turmoil at any point.
IBM sold their X10 rights awhile ago, and have since left the game. Even while they were still playing, it was the -same stuff- as X10 Corporation sold, rebranded IBM. Differences? The IBM-branded products were sometimes cheaper, and might've had different software.
Same thing with RCA's X10 stuff, RadioShack's X10 stuff, Magnavox's X10 stuff, and, well, almost everything X10 except the hideously expensive Leviton X10 stuff and a few other high-end, high-dollar items.
X10 Corp has almost -everything- to do with X10 the home automation protocol.
What? Too bent on being a karma whore to lose a few points on a malformed flame, AC? You do realize that GNU's Not Unix, right?
This thing is -just- a window manager. Which is to say that its primary purpose in life is just managing windows.
It is absurd that the above statement is not obvious to some. Those who would spend nearly half a decade adding complexity to such a simple application really need to stop, think about what they're doing, fix whatever bugs remain, and release it as 1.0.
I used Window Maker for a year or two, before I got sick of choosing between persistant bugs in older versions, or senseless bloat and new bugs in newer versions.
Since there are such huge quantities of material, I can only assume that quality is of little importance, as long as the end result is plain and intelligible. Alas, you failed to mention any budget or quality concerns...
The most unavoidable loss with high-speed playback of cassettes is that introduced by the tape deck's playback head. These things don't deal with high frequencies very well at normal playback speeds - let alone after frequencies double or quadruple with tape speed.
That said, Ma Bell doesn't think there's any useful information in the human voice outside of the band of 300-3,000Hz, so they limit telephone calls to these constraints. I don't have much trouble understanding people on the phone. I'll use this as a baseline for intelligibility, and thus assert that 4x playback would be fine on all but the rattiest tape machines.
Any good service tech will be able to modify a cheap tape deck to play at high-speed. A machine already designed for high-speed dubbing would be ideal, as it makes the mods easier (just trick it into thinking a tape is present in the record well) and they sometimes have heads designed for playing very high-frequency sounds.
Tascam and others make decks intended for mass-duplication of cassettes. These will have 1 playback compartment, and a number (from two to lots) of record wells. IIRC, these can operate at 4x normal playback speed.
Record at 44.1, 48, 96KHz, or whatever sampling rate floats your boat. Any of these should be sufficient, with 96KHz being overkill for this application.
Next, lie to your MP3 encoder about the sampling rate - divide it by the playback speed. For example, if you record double-speed audio at 48KHz, tell the encoder that the file is 24KHz.
Encode the previous tape while you're recording the next. This multitasking will allow the tape machine to stay busy. If the computer put up to the task isn't very fast, avoid VBR and other CPU-robbing features in the MP3 encoder to make sure that things don't get backlogged waiting to encode.
It'd be possible to save more time using multiple sound cards and tape decks, given some good organizational tactics.
Since the tapes are mono, it would be almost trivial (with sox and a lot of scratch space, named pipes in real-time, or what have you) to record two at once, using the left and right channels of just one sound card. With poorer-quality cards, this will might have a bit of crosstalk. It's up to you if it's acceptable or not.
Another issue which might be important:
I doubt that the speed of most "high-speed dubbing" tape machines is calibrated at all. They generally use a single motor to drive both the record and playback tapes to ensure that the copy comes out at the same pitch as the original. Better machines sometimes have completely seperate mechanisms, but the better ones also typically forego the high-speed function altogether...
So, if the pitch (or elapsed time) of the end result is important to this project, it would be a good idea to ensure that a given deck's 2x mode -really is- 2x, and not 2.3x or some other random number. Again, a good service person will be able to help you here.
Last, as a previous poster suggested, pay a neighborhood kid in small bits of cash and pizza to do all of this. And have him dump the resultant mp3s onto CD-R for you. Twice. Put one stack of CDs far, far away (the next town would be nice), as you'll never, ever want to do this again - even if there is a horrible fire, followed by a flood, just before a hurricane drops a 747 on your lecture archives.
Perhaps bandwidth, "in bulk," is in the neighborhood of $0.25 per gigabyte at a datacenter (above.net, exodus, whatever).
To an ISP, this is nearly worthless. They need that bandwidth in Cairo, Ohio and Yokum, Texas - not in an unassuming brick building located in the warehouse district of San Jose, California. Someone has to pay Ma Bell drop lines to these desolate places, cost-per-gigabyte be damned, and the price is high - higher, I suspect, than what the parent poster conjects.
I push buttons on computers at several Fortune 500 companies for a living, and something about the "MegaProxy" gizmo doesn't work. Unfortunately, the $bignum that they pay me isn't sufficient for me to think of my own solutions.
I think they run Microsoft or Linux or something.
Can someone help?
Oh. AOL does something similar, I hear. Does anyone know how they make that work?
Probably not, unless you're able to get up high enough in the air to see the tower over the trees.
2.4GHz, where 802.11b operates, is shared with things like microwave ovens. Microwaves use this frequency because it's the most efficient at heating water -- that is, it is the frequency at which water absorbs the most energy.
Trees are -full- of water...
I'm fortunate to have a clean line of sight, with no obstructions of any sort other than cornfields.
FWIW, I haven't noticed any decreased performance from combines and other farm machinery breaking LOS.
My wireless ISP (Comwavz - not recommended, unless it's your only option) installed a lightning arrestor in line with the antenna, and did some fairly serious grounding of it. They acted as if they -always- install one.
I'm not worried. Much more bothersome is the utility pole in front, which I've seen get hit, twice. No trouble to report there, either - except for a few seconds of darkness...
The installation, for the curious, consisted of hanging a plastic antenna, resembling a white Pringles can with the lid on, on the outside wall of the (attached) garage. Large (~1/2") coax connects to this, which then enters a plastic box -- also outside.
Inside this box is the lightning arrestor, which is in series with the antenna, and a splice for the two ground wires.
One ground wire sneaks down the siding to an 8' ground rod directly below - the other, across the garage attic, down the garage wall, under the house, and then to the main electrical ground. This is fairly stout wire - perhaps 6AWG - and solid.
The antenna wire, after the lightning arrestor, heads through the wall to a Cisco 802.11b access point just inside.
The Cisco box plugs into an RJ45 directly beside it, which I nailed up and wired prior to the installers' (there were two of them) appearance. I simply plugged this into the hub along with my computers.
With the hardware done, I helped them set up the Windows box to talk to the world. They didn't ask about my other machines, and I'm glad - they were scarcely qualified to handle Win98SE, let alone FreeBSD.
After they left, I removed the extra NIC from said windows box, and slammed it into my FreeBSD firewall. Set up dhcp (god bless the ports collection!), changed natd.conf, and was running.
I then collected the flashlight, hardhat, and bag of fasteners that they left behind, and put them outside in the rain - in case they felt like returning to get them. They eventually did, I think - or someone stole them.
802.11b, in this arrangement, seems to work quite well. Things are synced at 11mbps, and I never have any trouble with rain fade - even with near-zero visibility. Latencies are consistantly 3-4ms across the wireless link, and packet loss appears to be about nonexistant in all weather I've experienced since it's been here.
Of course, the tower is several hundred feet high, and only 2.2 miles away. I suspect others might have more difficulty, at greater distances.
Of course, things aren't all green. While the service is good (occasional router trouble on their end, plus one time when they called to tell us it would be down for awhile), I'm stuck NATted behind some firewall over there due to what they claim is a shortage of IP addresses. So, my IP is currently 10.3.3.53 or somesuch.
With PPP over SSH to a T1-hosted Linux box that I control, this isn't much of a problem for me, but it could be for others who are accustomed to having a real IP address.
Sometimes, I wish I still had the solid 24x7 static IP dialup I had before, but then I download a big file at a few hundred K per second, and those wishes vanish.
For signals with meaningful information above ~16KHz, yes - a sampling rate higher than 32KHz is in order. For frequencies less than 16KHz, 32KHz is perfect. (Note that 16 is half of 32.) For this argument, lossy compression and even bit-depth are irrelevant.
Have you forgotten (or perhaps, were never informed, or never measured, or...) that FM radio means, at least to us 'Merkins, that nothing exists at or above 15KHz except for a carrier signal (only with cheap tuners - it should otherwise be filtered) and unwanted noise from op-amps and (in my example) ADCs?
Certainly, a 32KHz sampling rate is sufficient to capture such attrocious sounds - and, I dare say, the audio portion of broadcast NTSC signals.
Nyquist states, IIRC, quite simply that a sine wave must be sampled at least twice as quickly as it occurs in order to be accurately reconstructed later. Which is to say that any sampling rate over 32,000Hz would be sufficient for a 16,000Hz sine wave [1]. This, from a more practical standpoint, is also to say that a sampling rate of 32,001Hz would work justfine, as long as the DAC utilizes sufficient oversampling to move the reconstruction filter (which is just a low-pass to get rid of inherent aliasing noise) out of the desired pass-band.
Of course, this all means that 32KHz sampling, while fine for FM radio, is not quite sufficient for reproduction of 16KHz signals. I submit that the the absent few (if that) Hz worth of television audio bandwidth won't be missed.
I further submit that there are few (if any) broadcast engineers with reliable hearing at such frequencies, and that if any signals exist up there which are meaningful to anyone, including any engineers who have yet to destroy their ears, it is by mistake.
This might also be a good time to point out that DBS systems such as DirecTV also use a 32KHz sampling rate, and that things tend to sound markedly better to my ears with DirecTV than with stereo NTSC and flakey dbx noise reduction.
Oh. I bet you didn't know that stereo NTSC had noise reduction as part of the standard, either.
Hit the books, kid. It's good for you, and demonstrably saves bandwidth. Why bother recording information which isn't there to begin with?
[1] Sine waves are all that we care about, anyway. Any other signal at 15 or 16KHz would consist of harmonics which would be filtered at the head end, and never make it down the wire/over the air for us to get a chance to recieve them.
I used to archive radio shows, with cron and a decent sound card (think Tivo, applied to FM broadcasts).
Things worked quite well at 32 and 44.1KHz, though 44.1 had a tendancy toward more artifacts from the mp3 encoder at a given bitrate.
Which is to say that 32khz sounded better, all said. Nyquist be damned.
OTOH, I ended up running at 44.1KHz long-term, as it was more agreeable with portable mp3 players.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2
I suppose it could be induced noise, but I didn't presume that the poster's audio system was very far away, given the casual stance portrayed -- he just plugged it in. No mention was made of wasted efforts of procuring and installing obscenely long patch cords.
Indeed, balanced lines will tend to eliminate induced noise, but at such lengths being discussed here (20-30 feet, at most) it should be well within non-issue status at frequencies of 50 or 60Hz. Hence, the bit about ground loops, of which he exhibits every symptom.
I've run into grounding issues with cable TV what seems like hundreds of times. Induced noise has been an issue for me exactly three times, and one of those involved a poorly-designed preamp that made a better wide-band AM reciever than anything else - a whole 'nother ballgame.
Though, there is one point I've failed to mention in any of my comments in this thread: balanced lines also make good ground loop eliminators, as the sheild only needs grounded at one end.
I lessened the problems of the aforementioned troubled preamp, which was getting EMI from the TV, by replacing the fairly long cables to the amp with Canare mic wire. With the pin on the RCA connected to positive, the shell of the RCA connected to negative, and the shield grounded at the amp's balanced input, EMI/RFI hasn't been an issue.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As another poster has pointed out, the hum you experience is known as a ground loop.
The vast majority of ground loops (~95%) in homes are due to improperly-grounded telephone, cable, and satellite systems. The rest are due to dangerously broken equipment.
Here's what happens:
Cable/phone/sat guy shows up to wire a house. The existing ground rod is inconvenient for him to tie onto, so he drives his own in a more convenient spot, and uses that to connect the shield of the coax to earth. This is usually illegal, per National Electric Code, not to mention a Bad Thing To Do.
So. You connect this to your TV, and your VCR, and whatever else you have - and that to your stereo. No problem, because these components typically do not have a connection to earth (ie, they use 2-prong power connectors) - there is only one path to ground, and no hum occurs.
That is, there's no hum until you plug in your grounded, 3-prong-having PC to the mess. After that, you've got two paths to ground from the stereo - one, via the cable TV wire, and another through the audio cable, sound card, PC chassis, and electrical outlet.
More often than not, there is voltage potential between these two grounding points. By tieing them together with a patch cord, current flows. This gets amplfied, and delivered to the speakers
as familiar 60-cycle hum.
So. How to fix? Just identify and remove or isolate the offending ground. Leaving your computer plugged in (and humming) start pulling wires off of the stereo, unplug your modem, and so on until you identify the source of the problem and achieve silence.
If I recall, the NEC specifies that ground rods need to be driven 6 feet into moist earth, and that if more than one is used for a given structure, that they must be connected together using #6 wire, with additional rods also driven 6 feet into the ground at 6 foot intervals along the run. It's expensive, and laborious.
That said, it's better/cheaper/easier to remove/disconnect the offending rod, and run a wire to the main (electrical) ground. Simple enough, and should be able to be done in less than an hour in all but the most extreme cases. Also complies with NEC.;)
But, you're not allowed to touch the cable company's wiring, as it doesn't belong to you. Which means that they'll need to come out and fix it themselves - which is great, if they're willing to even acknowledge that it's their problem, because they also have to do it for free, just like any other problem that happens on their side of the demarc box.
In the likely event that they're not so cooperative...
Use a pair of real transformers (the Radio Shack 75300 ohm jobbie made for outdoor antennas works, and is probably the most readily availalble) back-to-back (that is, connect the 300 ohm twinlead ends of them together) to "fix" it.
All this does is isolate the ground. You can insert your newly created device any point on your cable TV wiring that falls before your stereo -- the further upstream, the better. Bonus points if you connect your ground-isolated coax to the proper grounding rod with heavy-guage wire - it's good for signal quality, and helps keep stuff from leaking. Done right, no ground loops will be introduced.
For troublesome telephone and satellite systems, there is no plug-and-play Radio Shack solution. The FCC says you're not allowed to have a transformer on your phone line. Also, both satellite and telephones need DC voltage to operate - which the transformer would block. You'll have to remove their existing ground connection, and tie them onto the building's main (and now, only) ground. Same no-touch rule about phones, though - they own that end of it, too. Good thing that the phone line is almost never the culprit, due to the way things interface with it.
And you should own all of your satellite gear, since the demise of Primestar - you're (thankfully) on your own if that's the problem.
Oh. Lest I forget: Don't just clip or otherwise disconnect the ground wires. Same goes for 3-prong "adapters", or 3-to-2s. Bad news. Ground connections are there to prevent you from killing yourself, to keep your cable system from leaking, to shield your PC, and prevent static discharge into your AV system from your fiberglass satellite dish, as well as lightning protection for phone and cable networks, and surge protection on PCs.
Copper isn't cheap, and they wouldn't throw in extra wires without a damn good reason.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I must be missing something, too:
1. Audio cable runs can only be so long with out degradation of signal. Cat5 has longer run length.
Wrong. 100MHz ethernet over Cat5 tops out at, what, ~100 meters? Analog audio can go for hundreds of miles. The local loop for my telephone here is 25 miles big.
The trick? Balanced signals. For the price of this box, one can have balanced line drivers for every room in the house, which can consist of as little as an op amp, or a transformer, or a somewhat more-expensive pre-fab box. In my line of work, I've used -lots- of several-hundred-foot runs of audio cable, and a few thousand foot runs in places like schools and factories. Never a problem, as long as it's balanced... better audio equipment includes balanced IO out of the box, anyhow.
As for the rest of your claims and queries:
There probably is a Web interface for Winamp, somewhere in the world. However, why do you care?
You're worried about it being operated by people that don't need to be messing around on a computer. But, whatever the case, if not winamp, there's a thousand other players which -do- have some manner of intregration with http.
The remote is a nice touch. And if you'd studied your X10 popups like a good boy, you'd see bit of kit they sell which has remote, expressly intended for controlling an MP3-playing computer with, say, Winamp running on it. If you speak unix, you might also look at the LIRC project for remote control.
And, it's vastly easier to install audio wiring to multiple points than computer networks. No need for a hub, or expensive termination tools - wirenuts, solder, or crimp-on splices from the telco industry are the order of the day. It doesn't get much more simple. If you're running things balanced, Cat5 will work fine for wire, though I prefer Belden 2200. It's cheap, stranded, a little heavier-guage than cat5, shielded, and can withstand a lot of abuse during installation (as opposed to Cat5, which will break if you look at it funny).
That all said, >$250 for a device which can only play MP3s stored elsewhere, over a network, seems silly to me. Especially when it doesn't even match the rest of the stereo - did you even read the review? It's the size of a car stereo faceplate, but a little thicker, with a bare circuit board on the back. Not my idea of a finished, quality audio component.
Re:Cool device, but here's what I did
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2
Don't all SBLive! cards have SP/DIF output?
Or. More to the point, six channels worth of it?
Pinouts of the Live's expansion headers are on this page, and Hoontech sells a fairly cheap ($25-35) adapter offering some digital IO capabilities.
Or. CVS ALSA, these days, supports the digital output of the Live 5.1 cards, which have a coaxial digital output on the back panel. OEM-packaged Live 5.1 cards are also a fairly cheap $25-35.
Seems to work fairly well for me, driving an Audio Alchemy DDE 1.1 (which I'm using as a DAC instead of the thing built into the sound card).
HBO seems to be doing fairly well, these days, and has been since the early days.
Note: "Early days" in this context is defined as the time when "basic cable" meant paying a sum of money every month to a company which would deliver to your home via coaxial cable a handful of local television stations which could easily be recieved -for free- with an antenna, with the possibility of paying an additional monthly sum for HBO.
I drive a 1995 Beretta. When I aquired the car, the ABS system was broken, which caused the computer to disable it completely. I didn't mind - after all, I'd never had ABS before, and I considered myself good at threshold braking on all types of surfaces. I used to get a kick out of trail braking, leaving beautiful black tracks as the wheels were on the edge of lockup at the entrance of a turn, distributing heat generation between the brake pads and the tires in marvelous ways.
Thing is, careful braking requires a split second of forethought and planning. There's times (driving for fun, or on a track) where that's quite acceptable, and preferred.
Most times, it's a different story. Such as when driving home after work, and having a large deer run in front of the car just inside the range of the headlights.
I missed the deer, but flatspotted a new set of front tires because of it. There simply isn't -time- to react in any way other than mashing the brake as hard as possible with a wild animal of several hundred pounds being unpredictably close to the front of the car. Tires aren't cheap, and I did not enjoy buying them again after having them a few days.
I investigated and fixed the ABS problem the next day - a broken wire on the rear axle. Now that I'm looking for a new car, it's a must-have feature. I find that I can still do every fun braking trick that I enjoyed before, such as left-foot braking, or just alternatingly modulating brake and throttle in a turn to induce oversteer in a turn.
I just can't do threshold braking anymore on that car anymore.
But, so what? The car does about as well, automatically, with zero reaction time and with no forethought required on my part. Stomp on the brake pedal on any surface, and the only thing experienced is the seatbelt being forced painfully across one's chest, sometimes with a quick, sharp *chirp*. As the nose dives, the chirp dies, the seatbelt stays taught, and in an instant, the car is stopped - and pointing precisely the same direction it was before (unless you tell it different while braking - an order which it will comply with readily). No tire damage. No "oops" factor. It, quite simply, works.
ABS isn't all about poor weather, or driving on ice. The greatest benefit I get from it is on smooth, dry pavement. On rough pavement, it is -vastly- more capable of modulating braking power (independantly for each wheel) than any driver ever could with only one brake pedal.
The only instance where ABS is not desirous in normal driving is when travelling on gravel roads, where a locked wheel will dig a trench and build a mound of stone in front of it, greatly increasing decelleration.
So. I do know how to drive, and I'm completely willing to take advantage of whatever I can that will allow me to do so more effectively or safely - including ABS brakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Also perfect for in-car systems.
Low-power, low-cost, very small, and very few electrical connections to worry about. Also plenty fast enough for anything you'd ever need to do while driving on the highway.
All it takes is a handfull of regular PC parts, some manner of enclosure, and a reliable power supply. The whole thing should end up being small enough to fit under the front seat, which is nice for a variety of reasons (not the least of which that it is climate controlled).
I envision a plain steel box, perhaps from a company like Sescom, or just whatever I can find at a local surplus house. It doesn't have to be easily modified, only solid.
Does anyone know of a source for an appropriate power supply, or a kit, or even just plans for one?
-
please don't post like this.
it looks like ass.
Surely you all are speaking of trojan horses, right? Right? Or has the vocabulary changed?
Viruses are infectious - they spread, usually unbeknownst but sometimes not, across media and machines, branching as they go. Trojan horses explode upon execution, or at some predetermined time, and require specific action to be deposited on a user's machine.
They are different things entirely.
A shell script such as:
#!/bin/sh
rm -rF /
could be construed as a trojan horse in the hands of someone who doesn't know better. This trojan horse might be spread by means of a virus, but that's where the relationship between the two stops.
Viruses needn't even be destructive to meet the definition of being viral.
If in doubt about these terms, simply RTFM. The Jargon File might be a good starting point, or any good (or not so good) common encyclopedia.
-
The Audio Home Recording Act set up specific taxes on blank digital media sold for use in home audio.
It was brought about due to concern by the recording industry about "perfect" digital copies, and how terribly unfair they were in comparison to the typically lousy analog cassette dub.
At the time, its aim was mostly Minidisc, the now-defunct Philips DCC format, and consumer DAT, but the tax also extends to the "audio" CD-Rs required by consumer standalone CD recorders.
The moneys levied are handed to RIAA to compensate, in advance, the loss they'd endure through casual piracy.
In exchange for this free money, consumers would be free to copy as much music as they wanted, so long as they were using suitably taxed media.
A protocol called SCMS was also introduced, and required to be in place on consumer gear. Its purpose is to prevent copies from being made of copies. Thus, if everyone wanted a a Minidisc of Joe's new Pearl Jam album, they'd all have to get it from Joe himself, as he'd be the only one with an original.
Good plan, all together, and reasonably fair to all parties (despite the fact that it killed DAT).
To say, later on, that it is now both illegal and impossible to make a digital copy of a work, even when the rights to do so were paid for with the purchase of taxed media, is not fair by any stretch of the imagination.
Whether or not it is illegal, I'm not sure. It's been years since I've read the AHRA, but I do recall it being very specific to digital copying, and that it specifically allowed the same.
According to this document, think like this was made doubleplus bad in 1996.
Or has everyone forgotten that one already?
-
Which is safer? Some laptops have been known to sspontaneously combust once plugged in.
;)
That said, alcohol which has been slightly diluted with water is very transportable and safe to handle. Common department store rubbing alcohol will burn easily but very slowly, and is typically at 90% concentration. Jack D
aniels, according to an experiment performed moments ago here at my desk, does not burn at all in its standard 43% concentration from the heat of a black Bic lighter. OTOH, Bicardi 151 will ignite readily even when reduced in potency to a flaming Dr. Pepper, as evidenced by hair I've been missing from my drinking hand since 12/31/01.
Of course, the extra water would need to be dealt with in some way, but that seems fairly easy once the device's other problems are overcome. Since the whole point of a fuel cell is to combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce heat and H20, there must be some facility to deal with waste water (or, more likely, steam), or the whole idea is doomed to failure anyway.
-
While I suppose that getting particularly dirty working on a car might be objectionable to those of you who are stereotypical non-bathing geeks, I don't seem to have much trouble spending 5 minutes with a jar of hand cleaner to save several hundred dollars in "professional" labor.
Most car troubles are fixed with simple, bolt-on parts. Starters, water pumps, alternators, and most commonly brakes, are bloody simple to replace. A couple of bolts, a wire or two, perhaps a belt and you're done - with enough extra money left over to buy a new bigass hard drive.
Suspension parts are easy. I replaced a rear wheel bearing on my Beretta in about a half hour. Shocks took slightly longer, but were still a walk in the park.
Oddly enough, I often find it easier to work on my car's hardware than my computer's. I don't want to remove every wire connecting my PC to the outside world when I work on it, just as I don't want to remove the engine from a car to change the spark plugs. Thus, I find myself crawling under desks, with my head and shoulders tucked between two shelves, and using my third elbow to install a new DIMM. Whereas, on a car, one simply puts the thing in gear, drives up a set of cheap portable ramps, and sets the brake to get at the guts inside.
Diagnosing a car is much like diagnosing failing computer hardware in terms of thought processes required. Does it crank? No. Does it click? Yes. Measure the voltage of the battery - if voltage is sane, the battery is charged and it's either a dead starter motor or a bad connection. If not, the battery is discharged, either due to age, abuse, bad alternator, or a bad connection.
Simple stuff. Turn the power on a PC. Does it boot? No. Do any fans spin? Yes. Check connections, re-seat memory, CPU and anything else that plugs in. Does machine still not boot? Yes. Measure power supply voltage. If it's sane, toss the motherboard.
I treat internal motor problems differently, but I also treat component-level problems on, say, a flakey motherboard differently as well. Which is to say, that I don't care enough to learn how to fix them - if I burn a piston on my car, it's either getting a different engine, getting fixed by someone who knows what they're doing, or being thrown away. Just like I would do with a motherboard which, for some reason, stopped doing DMA (though I'd be most likely to replace it first, and seek professional opinion later).
Point is, it's the same thing. The parts are heavier, and often dirtier, but I've never had sneezing fits from an oil-covered spark plug boot. The cruft inside of a 5-year-old PC is a different story.
And, besides, there's interesting problems to overcome. The vacuum resevoir's mounting tab broke off on my car. I noticed sthis ometime after the front tire had worn a hole into it, and delayed repairs until sometime after it had fallen off completely. Symptoms? Strange noises at odd times, and no control of heater vent selection under acceleration.
By the time I got around to doing something about it, it was not obvious at all where the thing originally mounted. I found a replacement resevoir and a length of suitable tubing at a junk yard for (literally) a couple of dollars. Using stout, expensive wire ties I attached it to one of the shocks inside of the front bumper cover. Fed the new vacuum line along the loom with the a bunch of wires and other stuff to the check valve where the old one connected.
The new location offers good protection from road debris. I'm satisfied that it won't ever break loose or become disconnected, unless I hit something hard enough to dislodge my teeth. It is thus better than the original.
Same thing with the stainless steel strap I fashioned together with grade 8 nuts and bolts to hold the muffler in place, rather than the rusty, and poorly-riveted iron strap that came from the factory. The OEM strap, given a few Ohio winters, didn't survive the impact of the car falling a few inches when the rear wheel bearing snapped. The new one, which I made from stuff I had sitting around, should outlive me, regardless of what type of abuse I deliver to it. I have no doubt that it will be justfine when the car once again goes skidding, bottomed-out, along the roadway as a complete wheel (and half of the brakes!) go bouncing merrily away. [not that I'm looking forward to a repeat of that particular episode.] GM didn't do this because it's relatively expensive, just as Dell doesn't use solid copper Alpha heatsinks for their customers' overclocking joy.
But I'm not GM or Dell. I'll use a copper heatsink if I feel like it, and I'll make up for it (with change to spare) by installing it myself.
Pride, cash in my pocket, and a working automobile that I learned something new about, which is now in some way better than new. What's not to love?
-
I think Gillette still gives away razors to all who ask, although I don't seem to recall them being in any sort of frantic financial turmoil at any point.
-
IBM sold their X10 rights awhile ago, and have since left the game. Even while they were still playing, it was the -same stuff- as X10 Corporation sold, rebranded IBM. Differences? The IBM-branded products were sometimes cheaper, and might've had different software.
Same thing with RCA's X10 stuff, RadioShack's X10 stuff, Magnavox's X10 stuff, and, well, almost everything X10 except the hideously expensive Leviton X10 stuff and a few other high-end, high-dollar items.
X10 Corp has almost -everything- to do with X10 the home automation protocol.
-
What? Too bent on being a karma whore to lose a few points on a malformed flame, AC? You do realize that GNU's Not Unix, right?
This thing is -just- a window manager. Which is to say that its primary purpose in life is just managing windows.
It is absurd that the above statement is not obvious to some. Those who would spend nearly half a decade adding complexity to such a simple application really need to stop, think about what they're doing, fix whatever bugs remain, and release it as 1.0.
I used Window Maker for a year or two, before I got sick of choosing between persistant bugs in older versions, or senseless bloat and new bugs in newer versions.
-
It's only been, what, four years since Window Maker's initial release? And to think that things have already sped along to version 0.80!
Folks, this must be the most combed-through, finished and complete 2.5 megabyte tarball in existance. A mastery of software engineering and code.
I can't wait for 1.0, which should be coming along as early as 2003 or early 2004.
Let's hear it for GNUstep, and the most feature-depleted, slowly-developed window manager of all time - Window Maker 0.80!
Anyone know how well this thing works in HURD?
-
Sounds like a big project. Glad I'm not involved.
Since there are such huge quantities of material, I can only assume that quality is of little importance, as long as the end result is plain and intelligible. Alas, you failed to mention any budget or quality concerns...
The most unavoidable loss with high-speed playback of cassettes is that introduced by the tape deck's playback head. These things don't deal with high frequencies very well at normal playback speeds - let alone after frequencies double or quadruple with tape speed.
That said, Ma Bell doesn't think there's any useful information in the human voice outside of the band of 300-3,000Hz, so they limit telephone calls to these constraints. I don't have much trouble understanding people on the phone. I'll use this as a baseline for intelligibility, and thus assert that 4x playback would be fine on all but the rattiest tape machines.
Any good service tech will be able to modify a cheap tape deck to play at high-speed. A machine already designed for high-speed dubbing would be ideal, as it makes the mods easier (just trick it into thinking a tape is present in the record well) and they sometimes have heads designed for playing very high-frequency sounds.
Tascam and others make decks intended for mass-duplication of cassettes. These will have 1 playback compartment, and a number (from two to lots) of record wells. IIRC, these can operate at 4x normal playback speed.
Record at 44.1, 48, 96KHz, or whatever sampling rate floats your boat. Any of these should be sufficient, with 96KHz being overkill for this application.
Next, lie to your MP3 encoder about the sampling rate - divide it by the playback speed. For example, if you record double-speed audio at 48KHz, tell the encoder that the file is 24KHz.
Encode the previous tape while you're recording the next. This multitasking will allow the tape machine to stay busy. If the computer put up to the task isn't very fast, avoid VBR and other CPU-robbing features in the MP3 encoder to make sure that things don't get backlogged waiting to encode.
It'd be possible to save more time using multiple sound cards and tape decks, given some good organizational tactics.
Since the tapes are mono, it would be almost trivial (with sox and a lot of scratch space, named pipes in real-time, or what have you) to record two at once, using the left and right channels of just one sound card. With poorer-quality cards, this will might have a bit of crosstalk. It's up to you if it's acceptable or not.
Another issue which might be important:
I doubt that the speed of most "high-speed dubbing" tape machines is calibrated at all. They generally use a single motor to drive both the record and playback tapes to ensure that the copy comes out at the same pitch as the original. Better machines sometimes have completely seperate mechanisms, but the better ones also typically forego the high-speed function altogether...
So, if the pitch (or elapsed time) of the end result is important to this project, it would be a good idea to ensure that a given deck's 2x mode -really is- 2x, and not 2.3x or some other random number. Again, a good service person will be able to help you here.
Last, as a previous poster suggested, pay a neighborhood kid in small bits of cash and pizza to do all of this. And have him dump the resultant mp3s onto CD-R for you. Twice. Put one stack of CDs far, far away (the next town would be nice), as you'll never, ever want to do this again - even if there is a horrible fire, followed by a flood, just before a hurricane drops a 747 on your lecture archives.
-
Perhaps bandwidth, "in bulk," is in the neighborhood of $0.25 per gigabyte at a datacenter (above.net, exodus, whatever).
To an ISP, this is nearly worthless. They need that bandwidth in Cairo, Ohio and Yokum, Texas - not in an unassuming brick building located in the warehouse district of San Jose, California. Someone has to pay Ma Bell drop lines to these desolate places, cost-per-gigabyte be damned, and the price is high - higher, I suspect, than what the parent poster conjects.
-
I push buttons on computers at several Fortune 500 companies for a living, and something about the "MegaProxy" gizmo doesn't work. Unfortunately, the $bignum that they pay me isn't sufficient for me to think of my own solutions.
I think they run Microsoft or Linux or something.
Can someone help?
Oh. AOL does something similar, I hear. Does anyone know how they make that work?
Please help.
Thanks, Bob.
-
Probably not, unless you're able to get up high enough in the air to see the tower over the trees.
2.4GHz, where 802.11b operates, is shared with things like microwave ovens. Microwaves use this frequency because it's the most efficient at heating water -- that is, it is the frequency at which water absorbs the most energy.
Trees are -full- of water...
I'm fortunate to have a clean line of sight, with no obstructions of any sort other than cornfields.
FWIW, I haven't noticed any decreased performance from combines and other farm machinery breaking LOS.
My wireless ISP (Comwavz - not recommended, unless it's your only option) installed a lightning arrestor in line with the antenna, and did some fairly serious grounding of it. They acted as if they -always- install one.
I'm not worried. Much more bothersome is the utility pole in front, which I've seen get hit, twice. No trouble to report there, either - except for a few seconds of darkness...
The installation, for the curious, consisted of hanging a plastic antenna, resembling a white Pringles can with the lid on, on the outside wall of the (attached) garage. Large (~1/2") coax connects to this, which then enters a plastic box -- also outside.
Inside this box is the lightning arrestor, which is in series with the antenna, and a splice for the two ground wires.
One ground wire sneaks down the siding to an 8' ground rod directly below - the other, across the garage attic, down the garage wall, under the house, and then to the main electrical ground. This is fairly stout wire - perhaps 6AWG - and solid.
The antenna wire, after the lightning arrestor, heads through the wall to a Cisco 802.11b access point just inside.
The Cisco box plugs into an RJ45 directly beside it, which I nailed up and wired prior to the installers' (there were two of them) appearance. I simply plugged this into the hub along with my computers.
With the hardware done, I helped them set up the Windows box to talk to the world. They didn't ask about my other machines, and I'm glad - they were scarcely qualified to handle Win98SE, let alone FreeBSD.
After they left, I removed the extra NIC from said windows box, and slammed it into my FreeBSD firewall. Set up dhcp (god bless the ports collection!), changed natd.conf, and was running.
I then collected the flashlight, hardhat, and bag of fasteners that they left behind, and put them outside in the rain - in case they felt like returning to get them. They eventually did, I think - or someone stole them.
802.11b, in this arrangement, seems to work quite well. Things are synced at 11mbps, and I never have any trouble with rain fade - even with near-zero visibility. Latencies are consistantly 3-4ms across the wireless link, and packet loss appears to be about nonexistant in all weather I've experienced since it's been here.
Of course, the tower is several hundred feet high, and only 2.2 miles away. I suspect others might have more difficulty, at greater distances.
Of course, things aren't all green. While the service is good (occasional router trouble on their end, plus one time when they called to tell us it would be down for awhile), I'm stuck NATted behind some firewall over there due to what they claim is a shortage of IP addresses. So, my IP is currently 10.3.3.53 or somesuch.
With PPP over SSH to a T1-hosted Linux box that I control, this isn't much of a problem for me, but it could be for others who are accustomed to having a real IP address.
Sometimes, I wish I still had the solid 24x7 static IP dialup I had before, but then I download a big file at a few hundred K per second, and those wishes vanish.
-
For signals with meaningful information above ~16KHz, yes - a sampling rate higher than 32KHz is in order. For frequencies less than 16KHz, 32KHz is perfect. (Note that 16 is half of 32.) For this argument, lossy compression and even bit-depth are irrelevant.
Have you forgotten (or perhaps, were never informed, or never measured, or...) that FM radio means, at least to us 'Merkins, that nothing exists at or above 15KHz except for a carrier signal (only with cheap tuners - it should otherwise be filtered) and unwanted noise from op-amps and (in my example) ADCs?
Certainly, a 32KHz sampling rate is sufficient to capture such attrocious sounds - and, I dare say, the audio portion of broadcast NTSC signals.
Nyquist states, IIRC, quite simply that a sine wave must be sampled at least twice as quickly as it occurs in order to be accurately reconstructed later. Which is to say that any sampling rate over 32,000Hz would be sufficient for a 16,000Hz sine wave [1]. This, from a more practical standpoint, is also to say that a sampling rate of 32,001Hz would work justfine, as long as the DAC utilizes sufficient oversampling to move the reconstruction filter (which is just a low-pass to get rid of inherent aliasing noise) out of the desired pass-band.
Of course, this all means that 32KHz sampling, while fine for FM radio, is not quite sufficient for reproduction of 16KHz signals. I submit that the the absent few (if that) Hz worth of television audio bandwidth won't be missed.
I further submit that there are few (if any) broadcast engineers with reliable hearing at such frequencies, and that if any signals exist up there which are meaningful to anyone, including any engineers who have yet to destroy their ears, it is by mistake.
This might also be a good time to point out that DBS systems such as DirecTV also use a 32KHz sampling rate, and that things tend to sound markedly better to my ears with DirecTV than with stereo NTSC and flakey dbx noise reduction.
Oh. I bet you didn't know that stereo NTSC had noise reduction as part of the standard, either.
Hit the books, kid. It's good for you, and demonstrably saves bandwidth. Why bother recording information which isn't there to begin with?
[1] Sine waves are all that we care about, anyway. Any other signal at 15 or 16KHz would consist of harmonics which would be filtered at the head end, and never make it down the wire/over the air for us to get a chance to recieve them.
I used to archive radio shows, with cron and a decent sound card (think Tivo, applied to FM broadcasts).
Things worked quite well at 32 and 44.1KHz, though 44.1 had a tendancy toward more artifacts from the mp3 encoder at a given bitrate.
Which is to say that 32khz sounded better, all said. Nyquist be damned.
OTOH, I ended up running at 44.1KHz long-term, as it was more agreeable with portable mp3 players.
I suppose it could be induced noise, but I didn't presume that the poster's audio system was very far away, given the casual stance portrayed -- he just plugged it in. No mention was made of wasted efforts of procuring and installing obscenely long patch cords.
Indeed, balanced lines will tend to eliminate induced noise, but at such lengths being discussed here (20-30 feet, at most) it should be well within non-issue status at frequencies of 50 or 60Hz. Hence, the bit about ground loops, of which he exhibits every symptom.
I've run into grounding issues with cable TV what seems like hundreds of times. Induced noise has been an issue for me exactly three times, and one of those involved a poorly-designed preamp that made a better wide-band AM reciever than anything else - a whole 'nother ballgame.
Though, there is one point I've failed to mention in any of my comments in this thread: balanced lines also make good ground loop eliminators, as the sheild only needs grounded at one end.
I lessened the problems of the aforementioned troubled preamp, which was getting EMI from the TV, by replacing the fairly long cables to the amp with Canare mic wire. With the pin on the RCA connected to positive, the shell of the RCA connected to negative, and the shield grounded at the amp's balanced input, EMI/RFI hasn't been an issue.
As another poster has pointed out, the hum you experience is known as a ground loop.
;)
The vast majority of ground loops (~95%) in homes are due to improperly-grounded telephone, cable, and satellite systems. The rest are due to dangerously broken equipment.
Here's what happens:
Cable/phone/sat guy shows up to wire a house. The existing ground rod is inconvenient for him to tie onto, so he drives his own in a more convenient spot, and uses that to connect the shield of the coax to earth. This is usually illegal, per National Electric Code, not to mention a Bad Thing To Do.
So. You connect this to your TV, and your VCR, and whatever else you have - and that to your stereo. No problem, because these components typically do not have a connection to earth (ie, they use 2-prong power connectors) - there is only one path to ground, and no hum occurs.
That is, there's no hum until you plug in your grounded, 3-prong-having PC to the mess. After that, you've got two paths to ground from the stereo - one, via the cable TV wire, and another through the audio cable, sound card, PC chassis, and electrical outlet.
More often than not, there is voltage potential between these two grounding points. By tieing them together with a patch cord, current flows. This gets amplfied, and delivered to the speakers
as familiar 60-cycle hum.
So. How to fix? Just identify and remove or isolate the offending ground. Leaving your computer plugged in (and humming) start pulling wires off of the stereo, unplug your modem, and so on until you identify the source of the problem and achieve silence.
If I recall, the NEC specifies that ground rods need to be driven 6 feet into moist earth, and that if more than one is used for a given structure, that they must be connected together using #6 wire, with additional rods also driven 6 feet into the ground at 6 foot intervals along the run. It's expensive, and laborious.
That said, it's better/cheaper/easier to remove/disconnect the offending rod, and run a wire to the main (electrical) ground. Simple enough, and should be able to be done in less than an hour in all but the most extreme cases. Also complies with NEC.
But, you're not allowed to touch the cable company's wiring, as it doesn't belong to you. Which means that they'll need to come out and fix it themselves - which is great, if they're willing to even acknowledge that it's their problem, because they also have to do it for free, just like any other problem that happens on their side of the demarc box.
In the likely event that they're not so cooperative...
Use a pair of real transformers (the Radio Shack 75300 ohm jobbie made for outdoor antennas works, and is probably the most readily availalble) back-to-back (that is, connect the 300 ohm twinlead ends of them together) to "fix" it.
All this does is isolate the ground. You can insert your newly created device any point on your cable TV wiring that falls before your stereo -- the further upstream, the better. Bonus points if you connect your ground-isolated coax to the proper grounding rod with heavy-guage wire - it's good for signal quality, and helps keep stuff from leaking. Done right, no ground loops will be introduced.
For troublesome telephone and satellite systems, there is no plug-and-play Radio Shack solution. The FCC says you're not allowed to have a transformer on your phone line. Also, both satellite and telephones need DC voltage to operate - which the transformer would block. You'll have to remove their existing ground connection, and tie them onto the building's main (and now, only) ground. Same no-touch rule about phones, though - they own that end of it, too. Good thing that the phone line is almost never the culprit, due to the way things interface with it.
And you should own all of your satellite gear, since the demise of Primestar - you're (thankfully) on your own if that's the problem.
Oh. Lest I forget: Don't just clip or otherwise disconnect the ground wires. Same goes for 3-prong "adapters", or 3-to-2s. Bad news. Ground connections are there to prevent you from killing yourself, to keep your cable system from leaking, to shield your PC, and prevent static discharge into your AV system from your fiberglass satellite dish, as well as lightning protection for phone and cable networks, and surge protection on PCs.
Copper isn't cheap, and they wouldn't throw in extra wires without a damn good reason.
I must be missing something, too:
1. Audio cable runs can only be so long with out degradation of signal. Cat5 has longer run length.
Wrong. 100MHz ethernet over Cat5 tops out at, what, ~100 meters? Analog audio can go for hundreds of miles. The local loop for my telephone here is 25 miles big.
The trick? Balanced signals. For the price of this box, one can have balanced line drivers for every room in the house, which can consist of as little as an op amp, or a transformer, or a somewhat more-expensive pre-fab box. In my line of work, I've used -lots- of several-hundred-foot runs of audio cable, and a few thousand foot runs in places like schools and factories. Never a problem, as long as it's balanced... better audio equipment includes balanced IO out of the box, anyhow.
As for the rest of your claims and queries:
There probably is a Web interface for Winamp, somewhere in the world. However, why do you care?
You're worried about it being operated by people that don't need to be messing around on a computer. But, whatever the case, if not winamp, there's a thousand other players which -do- have some manner of intregration with http.
The remote is a nice touch. And if you'd studied your X10 popups like a good boy, you'd see bit of kit they sell which has remote, expressly intended for controlling an MP3-playing computer with, say, Winamp running on it. If you speak unix, you might also look at the LIRC project for remote control.
And, it's vastly easier to install audio wiring to multiple points than computer networks. No need for a hub, or expensive termination tools - wirenuts, solder, or crimp-on splices from the telco industry are the order of the day. It doesn't get much more simple. If you're running things balanced, Cat5 will work fine for wire, though I prefer Belden 2200. It's cheap, stranded, a little heavier-guage than cat5, shielded, and can withstand a lot of abuse during installation (as opposed to Cat5, which will break if you look at it funny).
That all said, >$250 for a device which can only play MP3s stored elsewhere, over a network, seems silly to me. Especially when it doesn't even match the rest of the stereo - did you even read the review? It's the size of a car stereo faceplate, but a little thicker, with a bare circuit board on the back. Not my idea of a finished, quality audio component.
Don't all SBLive! cards have SP/DIF output?
Or. More to the point, six channels worth of it?
Pinouts of the Live's expansion headers are on this page, and Hoontech sells a fairly cheap ($25-35) adapter offering some digital IO capabilities.
Or. CVS ALSA, these days, supports the digital output of the Live 5.1 cards, which have a coaxial digital output on the back panel. OEM-packaged Live 5.1 cards are also a fairly cheap $25-35.
Seems to work fairly well for me, driving an Audio Alchemy DDE 1.1 (which I'm using as a DAC instead of the thing built into the sound card).
Is the script you speak of available for a lay-person to peruse, or are you hoarding it for yourself?
HBO seems to be doing fairly well, these days, and has been since the early days.
Note: "Early days" in this context is defined as the time when "basic cable" meant paying a sum of money every month to a company which would deliver to your home via coaxial cable a handful of local television stations which could easily be recieved -for free- with an antenna, with the possibility of paying an additional monthly sum for HBO.
I used to think along the same lines.
I drive a 1995 Beretta. When I aquired the car, the ABS system was broken, which caused the computer to disable it completely. I didn't mind - after all, I'd never had ABS before, and I considered myself good at threshold braking on all types of surfaces. I used to get a kick out of trail braking, leaving beautiful black tracks as the wheels were on the edge of lockup at the entrance of a turn, distributing heat generation between the brake pads and the tires in marvelous ways.
Thing is, careful braking requires a split second of forethought and planning. There's times (driving for fun, or on a track) where that's quite acceptable, and preferred.
Most times, it's a different story. Such as when driving home after work, and having a large deer run in front of the car just inside the range of the headlights.
I missed the deer, but flatspotted a new set of front tires because of it. There simply isn't -time- to react in any way other than mashing the brake as hard as possible with a wild animal of several hundred pounds being unpredictably close to the front of the car. Tires aren't cheap, and I did not enjoy buying them again after having them a few days.
I investigated and fixed the ABS problem the next day - a broken wire on the rear axle. Now that I'm looking for a new car, it's a must-have feature. I find that I can still do every fun braking trick that I enjoyed before, such as left-foot braking, or just alternatingly modulating brake and throttle in a turn to induce oversteer in a turn.
I just can't do threshold braking anymore on that car anymore.
But, so what? The car does about as well, automatically, with zero reaction time and with no forethought required on my part. Stomp on the brake pedal on any surface, and the only thing experienced is the seatbelt being forced painfully across one's chest, sometimes with a quick, sharp *chirp*. As the nose dives, the chirp dies, the seatbelt stays taught, and in an instant, the car is stopped - and pointing precisely the same direction it was before (unless you tell it different while braking - an order which it will comply with readily). No tire damage. No "oops" factor. It, quite simply, works.
ABS isn't all about poor weather, or driving on ice. The greatest benefit I get from it is on smooth, dry pavement. On rough pavement, it is -vastly- more capable of modulating braking power (independantly for each wheel) than any driver ever could with only one brake pedal.
The only instance where ABS is not desirous in normal driving is when travelling on gravel roads, where a locked wheel will dig a trench and build a mound of stone in front of it, greatly increasing decelleration.
So. I do know how to drive, and I'm completely willing to take advantage of whatever I can that will allow me to do so more effectively or safely - including ABS brakes.