The way you did this back in the days of WW2 surplus crystals in screw-closed FT-243 holders, was to open up the holder and use a soft pencil to make a mark on the surface of the crystal, increasing the mass slightly and lowering its frequency. To increase the frequency, you would grind the crystal thickness down a little against plate glass with a very fine abrasive (e.g. toothpaste).
Wow, does that bring back memories.
until it oscillates at 31903.94 Hz instead of 32768 I got about the same number. We must be doing the math right. I rounded to the nearest hertz as the trim range may be enough to pull it on frequency.
I got a kick out of the watchmaker in the article. He made custom lead weights for the flywheel to slow a mechanical watch. I was thinking a little nail polish might be easier to attach. It could be trimmed later with more enamel later or lightened with acitone and a small brush.
Is making a frequency divider that deals with a non-round number like 33655 a hard problem, or am I way off the mark here?
Would it be easer to get a 31904 HZ resonator instead of a 32768 for the watch instead? Whats easer to get? A custom IC or a custom cut crystal? Hint, I think I know where to ask for the crystal with no custom IC's needed. With 2 pins, the crystal is much easer to retrofit into a watch.
I don't really know how this stuff works, but I don't see why you'd need a custom crystal at all.
What's simpler, repalce the stock crystal with a lower frequency one of the same size, or stuff some custom divider logic into an already full watch case. We are talking about a wristwatch, not a breadboard project.
I wish they would simply take and air sample and light it in a plasma tube to get a spectrum to see what elements are present. Is there much H2? O2? From there one could see if water components are in the atmosphere. Just what is the dew point on Mars anyway? It should be one of the experiments on board. Pretty pictures don't answer all the science questions that could be easly tested. Is there really enough moisture to cause the polar winter frost from condensation and sublimation of water?
If you want digital, these folks make most of the watch crystals out there. It would be a small order to get digital watches to run at any speed. I've ordered custom crystals for radio's from them. Small orders are no problem and they are not expensive.
http://www.icmfg.com/
A standard Tera Firma digital watch crystal frequency is 32.768 kHz. They are listed here.
http://www.icmfg.com/surfacemount_crystals.html
It would be a small task to get custom crystals made for the Martian day from them for your watch. You may need SMD tools to change it.
At the bottom of the page gives informatin for ordering non standard frequencies. IMPORTANT: When ordering any non-standard crystals, please specify series or parallel resonance. If parallel, the load capacitance (CL) needs to be specifed in picofarads___ pF. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
This may be offtopic, but this is just history repeating itself. This is the same tricks that hit the car audio field 20 years ago and migrated into home stereo. In the 70's high end manufactures were proud of high quality touting specs of receivers in s/n ratio, Watts RMS at 0.01% or better THD. A few manufactures lied. The consumer protection guys were all over it. The cheap industry manufactures got around it by publishing non standard specs such as peak power total instead of RMS watts at a specified low distortion level per channel. Buyers of car stereo stuff had no idea what some of the numbers meant. More watts meant more power to many buyers. Many times this was dead wrong. Just as some high megapixel cameras have fewer pixels than some honestly rated lower pixel count cameras. Peak power ratings became popular. This is the 100% clipped distorted square wave into the lowest possible impedance at the highest supply voltage rating. I used to show people a 25 watt RMS per channel into 4 ohms at 0.01% THD with a sine wave was a much more powerful amplifier than most 250 watt peak power amps on the market. The 25 watt 2 channel amp was fused at 18 amps and would deliver about 50 volts peak to peak single ended. (it used an inverter power supply) The 250 watt amp didn't use an inverter, had a bridged output for only about 25 volts peak to peak. Remember volts times amps into a resistave load equals watts. 50 volts into the same load as 25 volts is double the voltage at double the current or 4 times the power. It was easy to show this on a scope. Now they are playing the same games with numbers and some digital cameras and video card models. Too bad. Let the buyer beware. Hunt the true specs. It takes work, but it's worth it.
The market became flooded with cheap junk and high end with the high priced parts (high power, low noise and distortion) became hard to sell. Not many people bought Carver, Hafler, early Yamaha, Pioneer, Fisher, Marantz etc. Later Fisher and Pioneer started aiming for the K-mart crowd. Pioneer split and kept a high end, the Elite line. Most stores carry stereo equipment but don't bother to print the S/N ratio, the dynamic range, the THD and Watts RMS into a specified load. Without going to a specialty store it's hard to find stuff that will put out more than 100 Watts RMS/channel at 0.005% THD or better listed in the specifications.
The demo I did with the car audio was using a Magestic 250 watt booster/EQ which was really a 2 channel bridged booster with a post amp fader for "4 channel output" and a Sanyo 50 watt 2 channel amp (25W/channel). People just didn't understand at first how adding a booster to a bridged 25 watt/channel (bridged amp) deck didn't help. The simple reason was the bridged output booster put out the same voltage at clipping as the original bridged output deck but added lots of noise and distortioin. It was a downgrade in most cases. It was only slightly helpful when connected to 6 watt single ended decks.
Presumably, what the article is referring to is the ability to decrypt the.m4p file and extract plain AAC from it.
Well close but not quite. The article is dealing with playing encrypted AAC files, not removing the wrapper. The article is about getting the key and the wrapped file both to a Linuz box so it can play it. It is not about unwrapping the file to an un-encrypted file for playback anywhere.
Unfortunately the records show he bought the DRM'ed version customised for his machine. The one on KaZa is not the same copy. It's kind of like buying a PC without the Windows install disk, but a recovery disk. Having a hard drive failure does not make it legal to use a full retail version of Windows instead of the recovery disk. It's possible the Kaza download might not stand up in court. Get a good laywer. It could go either way.
The easy way to do it is to support it as much as the failed Circuit City DIVIX format.
Insist on seeing the Compact Disk logo. The copy protected disks don't have it. Not buying the non-functional disks don't break the law and have an added benifit of encouraging their demise just like the Circuit City DVD format. They can add stuff to make a CD useless. Don't cry foul when nobody wants to buy it.
I use mine for the National Geographic topographic maps using a GPS as the primary use. The secondary use is my MIDI workstation (it fits nicely in a home made bracket that replaces the music stand) and doubles as a piano teacher for the kids. The Voyetra piano teacher is a good program. Niether of these apps work on Linux or have a good Linux replacement to my knowledge.
There are some Linux maping programs, but they don't have the 7.5 minute series topo maps of my entire state.
There are some nice Linux MIDI programs, but very little in good piano tutors.
Windows 98SE upgraded and patched does everything they need The real trouble is when a hard drive or something fails, it can no longer be recovered by reloading the software and cruising to MS for all the latest patches. I could see a lot of systems going from patched to unpatched as machines need re-loaded and the patches are no longer there. I wish MS would provide an end of life support CD with all the patches on it so when my laptop with a max of 72 meg of EDO memory needs reloaded, I can have some security. There is absolutely no way to run XP on it. That is not an option. It ain't broken. It's my mobile GPS enabled topographic map for geocaching and outdoor adventure.
I heard there is a way to download and save the MS updates to Cd, but I don't know how yet. I guess I have less than 2 weeks to figure it out.
What it doesn't show is the number of web sites that won't return a page if you are not using Netscape or IE. How many IE or Netscape visitors are realy opera pretending to be one of the popular browsers so it can view the page?
This is only a collection of data of what the browser reports. Data may be skewed by the number of web pages giving non-IE browsers trash instead of the real page. This leads to other browsers which have versatility to be configured to send false data that the webserver is looking for. Don't take stats at face value. Learn the variables that may affect the results.
Why would you take google results and then follow it with an off-topic troll?
This especially becomes more interesting as GPS becomes common in cars... it could easily be one more example of how big brother enters our lives.
Big brother is a factor if you take the information from your GPS receiver and re-transmit it to someone else. On-Star is noted for this using a cell phone connection. The Toyota Prius GPS is not noted for this as the GPS receiver feeds the on-board map unit and is not sent off to 3rd parties. The same thing is true for my hand held GPS I use hiking. I would have to tell someone my location via cell or radio. The unit does not broadcast that info.
The speed function is great. I can tell my speed even when factors such as oversize tires make the mechanical speedomoter wrong. The owners manual specs the speed accuracy at about 0.1 MPH. It's much more accurate than the speedometer built into the dash.
Me too. I don't have to have it re-calibrated each time I change tires. No more speeding tickets just because the big tires make the speedomoter read low.
"fifteen meters, plus or minus". Not a problem. If you have drift, the reading could be that far off. Drift is slow. Races are fast. Who cares if the position data has drifted off 15 feet? You are not using the GPS to find the finish line. Even with the drift, the speed data is usualy quite good. My owners manual states the speed accuracy as 0.1 nautical mile. (MPH but using Nautical miles, not US miles) Second to second speed accurate to about 0.1 MPH is usualy better than you can do with a stopwatch.
Re:automatically entered and graphs and charts
on
Equine Speedometers
·
· Score: 1
perhaps...but would you like to be the trainer who has to manually enter the data into the computer?
Some data gathered by GPS simply can't be captured by hand to manualy enter. NMEA output from GPS receivers give speed, direction, position, and other data once a second. Acceleration is easly calculated. Try that with a pencil and a stopwatch.
If you hild a normal (consumer-grade) GPS unit in your hand and stand still, you'll be surprised to find that you're bouncing around like an ADD-ridden five-year-old after eating a bag of Skittles
Add differential correction to it. That fixes the problem. Most consumer handheld GPS units will accept a signal from a differential receiver. However the receivers may cost several times the cost of the hand held GPS receiver.
so will the speed be measured in furlongs per fortnight?
By the time you capture the data to a file, a simple spreadsheet could convert the data to almost any format you wish. It could even convert to the percent of the speed of light so you could figure how much red or blue shift there was. I wouldn't want to be wrong choosing the winner because of the color shift.
Besides a goat link, the information is dead wrong. There is a mention of high price on GPS.. Um do a google search on OEM GPS modules, or hand held GPS receivers with NMEA output. A GPS (about the price of a wireless card) costing more than 802.1b with many receivers and network to do triangulation is dead wrong. Many GPS receivers are cheaper than a wireless lan card. Any PDA or pocket PC that can record RS232 can capture data from any handheld GPS that has a NMEA output. The file can be transfered to a PC and loaded into many of the popular map programs. The NMEA data includes second by second time, speed direction and location. You could graph the speed, distance, acceleration and position on a spreadsheet. No need for expensive equipment. Just use off the shelf PDA, sportsman's GPS, PC etc. Off the shelf sportsmen's GPS units are weather resistant and wouldn't have the dust and moisture issues mentioned in the article. I guess it's the PDA that is hard to protect, not the GPS. A single board PC with a COM port running DOS could easly be configured to boot, open a file, open a COM port, and copy NMEA data to a file. This costs more than running 802.11b trangulation how?
At best, I will be pissed off at their ridiculous price and refuse to buy it later when it's cheaper, simply because I don't support thieves (yep, I mean what I just said!)
Most of the time I disagree with you. However, I have bought a few albums based on one song I have heard. The rest of the album was junk. In these cases, I agree with you. I buy less music nowdays. It's too much like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get. I wouldn't be disappointed if they were all sweet, but the moldy ones tend to be a turn-off. Quality Control definately needs fixed.
While I'm on that topic, the DVD's are starting to get that problem. I picked up some old television shows. I got some Andy Griffith show and Beverly Hillbillies. What happened to the opening music? It's been replaced by some muzak junk. Talk about not getting what you thought you bought. So much for a walk down memory lane. I really look at any pre-packaged recording on the shelf as a pig in a poke now with a let the buyer beware attitude.
With Audio, I always look for the Compact Disk logo. I won't knowingly buy any DRM broken CD's.
The router would like you much better if you replaced the antenna with a proper (microwave not CB band) 50 ohm dummy load. It is possible to feed a stub of tin foil and it could radiate the signal. A dummy load in a coaxial fitting provides a load on the transmitter preventing high standing waves which can produce high current or high voltage nodes in the router which radiate the signal.
One particularly annoying connection gave me a 192.168.1 address and let me ping 192.168.1.1 but do absolutely nothing else. I ran nmap and nessus against the ip and absolutely nothing came back. It was freakiest thing I've ever seen. Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side.
Most likely, neither solution is correct. The WIN box sharing the internet connection is in BSOD and nobody noticed it yet.;-)
The problem of spam is lately being overshadowed by the subject of spam saturating the media.
Think of the media business model. Media lives on paid advertisements and subscriptions. Spam doesn't grease their pockets. Of course advertising directly to the public is a bad idea.
I'm hoping the IR scanning cameras will come down in price. Getting through the fog near San Francisco is a real bear sometimes. I would love to have a fog cutting camera hooked up to a display to enhance driving.
Slashdot Mirror
The way you did this back in the days of WW2 surplus crystals in screw-closed FT-243 holders, was to open up the holder and use a soft pencil to make a mark on the surface of the crystal, increasing the mass slightly and lowering its frequency. To increase the frequency, you would grind the crystal thickness down a little against plate glass with a very fine abrasive (e.g. toothpaste).
Wow, does that bring back memories.
until it oscillates at 31903.94 Hz instead of 32768 I got about the same number. We must be doing the math right. I rounded to the nearest hertz as the trim range may be enough to pull it on frequency.
I got a kick out of the watchmaker in the article. He made custom lead weights for the flywheel to slow a mechanical watch. I was thinking a little nail polish might be easier to attach. It could be trimmed later with more enamel later or lightened with acitone and a small brush.
Is making a frequency divider that deals with a non-round number like 33655 a hard problem, or am I way off the mark here?
Would it be easer to get a 31904 HZ resonator instead of a 32768 for the watch instead? Whats easer to get? A custom IC or a custom cut crystal? Hint, I think I know where to ask for the crystal with no custom IC's needed. With 2 pins, the crystal is much easer to retrofit into a watch.
I don't really know how this stuff works, but I don't see why you'd need a custom crystal at all.
What's simpler, repalce the stock crystal with a lower frequency one of the same size, or stuff some custom divider logic into an already full watch case. We are talking about a wristwatch, not a breadboard project.
How about saving the time and trouble and ask the manufacture for a small run of off standard frequency crystals?
I wish they would simply take and air sample and light it in a plasma tube to get a spectrum to see what elements are present. Is there much H2? O2? From there one could see if water components are in the atmosphere. Just what is the dew point on Mars anyway? It should be one of the experiments on board. Pretty pictures don't answer all the science questions that could be easly tested.
Is there really enough moisture to cause the polar winter frost from condensation and sublimation of water?
If you want digital, these folks make most of the watch crystals out there. It would be a small order to get digital watches to run at any speed. I've ordered custom crystals for radio's from them. Small orders are no problem and they are not expensive.
http://www.icmfg.com/
A standard Tera Firma digital watch crystal frequency is 32.768 kHz.
They are listed here.
http://www.icmfg.com/surfacemount_crystals.html
It would be a small task to get custom crystals made for the Martian day from them for your watch. You may need SMD tools to change it.
At the bottom of the page gives informatin for ordering non standard frequencies.
IMPORTANT: When ordering any non-standard crystals, please specify series or parallel resonance. If parallel, the load capacitance (CL) needs to be specifed in picofarads___ pF. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
This may be offtopic, but this is just history repeating itself. This is the same tricks that hit the car audio field 20 years ago and migrated into home stereo. In the 70's high end manufactures were proud of high quality touting specs of receivers in s/n ratio, Watts RMS at 0.01% or better THD. A few manufactures lied. The consumer protection guys were all over it. The cheap industry manufactures got around it by publishing non standard specs such as peak power total instead of RMS watts at a specified low distortion level per channel. Buyers of car stereo stuff had no idea what some of the numbers meant. More watts meant more power to many buyers. Many times this was dead wrong. Just as some high megapixel cameras have fewer pixels than some honestly rated lower pixel count cameras. Peak power ratings became popular. This is the 100% clipped distorted square wave into the lowest possible impedance at the highest supply voltage rating. I used to show people a 25 watt RMS per channel into 4 ohms at 0.01% THD with a sine wave was a much more powerful amplifier than most 250 watt peak power amps on the market. The 25 watt 2 channel amp was fused at 18 amps and would deliver about 50 volts peak to peak single ended. (it used an inverter power supply) The 250 watt amp didn't use an inverter, had a bridged output for only about 25 volts peak to peak. Remember volts times amps into a resistave load equals watts. 50 volts into the same load as 25 volts is double the voltage at double the current or 4 times the power. It was easy to show this on a scope. Now they are playing the same games with numbers and some digital cameras and video card models. Too bad. Let the buyer beware. Hunt the true specs. It takes work, but it's worth it.
The market became flooded with cheap junk and high end with the high priced parts (high power, low noise and distortion) became hard to sell. Not many people bought Carver, Hafler, early Yamaha, Pioneer, Fisher, Marantz etc. Later Fisher and Pioneer started aiming for the K-mart crowd. Pioneer split and kept a high end, the Elite line. Most stores carry stereo equipment but don't bother to print the S/N ratio, the dynamic range, the THD and Watts RMS into a specified load. Without going to a specialty store it's hard to find stuff that will put out more than 100 Watts RMS/channel at 0.005% THD or better listed in the specifications.
The demo I did with the car audio was using a Magestic 250 watt booster/EQ which was really a 2 channel bridged booster with a post amp fader for "4 channel output" and a Sanyo 50 watt 2 channel amp (25W/channel). People just didn't understand at first how adding a booster to a bridged 25 watt/channel (bridged amp) deck didn't help. The simple reason was the bridged output booster put out the same voltage at clipping as the original bridged output deck but added lots of noise and distortioin. It was a downgrade in most cases. It was only slightly helpful when connected to 6 watt single ended decks.
Presumably, what the article is referring to is the ability to decrypt the .m4p file and extract plain AAC from it.
Well close but not quite. The article is dealing with playing encrypted AAC files, not removing the wrapper. The article is about getting the key and the wrapped file both to a Linuz box so it can play it. It is not about unwrapping the file to an un-encrypted file for playback anywhere.
Unfortunately the records show he bought the DRM'ed version customised for his machine. The one on KaZa is not the same copy. It's kind of like buying a PC without the Windows install disk, but a recovery disk. Having a hard drive failure does not make it legal to use a full retail version of Windows instead of the recovery disk. It's possible the Kaza download might not stand up in court. Get a good laywer. It could go either way.
The easy way to do it is to support it as much as the failed Circuit City DIVIX format.
Insist on seeing the Compact Disk logo. The copy protected disks don't have it. Not buying the non-functional disks don't break the law and have an added benifit of encouraging their demise just like the Circuit City DVD format.
They can add stuff to make a CD useless. Don't cry foul when nobody wants to buy it.
I use mine for the National Geographic topographic maps using a GPS as the primary use. The secondary use is my MIDI workstation (it fits nicely in a home made bracket that replaces the music stand) and doubles as a piano teacher for the kids. The Voyetra piano teacher is a good program. Niether of these apps work on Linux or have a good Linux replacement to my knowledge.
There are some Linux maping programs, but they don't have the 7.5 minute series topo maps of my entire state.
There are some nice Linux MIDI programs, but very little in good piano tutors.
Windows 98SE upgraded and patched does everything they need
The real trouble is when a hard drive or something fails, it can no longer be recovered by reloading the software and cruising to MS for all the latest patches. I could see a lot of systems going from patched to unpatched as machines need re-loaded and the patches are no longer there. I wish MS would provide an end of life support CD with all the patches on it so when my laptop with a max of 72 meg of EDO memory needs reloaded, I can have some security. There is absolutely no way to run XP on it. That is not an option. It ain't broken. It's my mobile GPS enabled topographic map for geocaching and outdoor adventure.
I heard there is a way to download and save the MS updates to Cd, but I don't know how yet. I guess I have less than 2 weeks to figure it out.
What it doesn't show is the number of web sites that won't return a page if you are not using Netscape or IE. How many IE or Netscape visitors are realy opera pretending to be one of the popular browsers so it can view the page?
This is only a collection of data of what the browser reports. Data may be skewed by the number of web pages giving non-IE browsers trash instead of the real page. This leads to other browsers which have versatility to be configured to send false data that the webserver is looking for. Don't take stats at face value. Learn the variables that may affect the results.
Why would you take google results and then follow it with an off-topic troll?
This especially becomes more interesting as GPS becomes common in cars... it could easily be one more example of how big brother enters our lives.
Big brother is a factor if you take the information from your GPS receiver and re-transmit it to someone else. On-Star is noted for this using a cell phone connection. The Toyota Prius GPS is not noted for this as the GPS receiver feeds the on-board map unit and is not sent off to 3rd parties. The same thing is true for my hand held GPS I use hiking. I would have to tell someone my location via cell or radio. The unit does not broadcast that info.
The speed function is great. I can tell my speed even when factors such as oversize tires make the mechanical speedomoter wrong. The owners manual specs the speed accuracy at about 0.1 MPH. It's much more accurate than the speedometer built into the dash.
speedometer in my car
Me too. I don't have to have it re-calibrated each time I change tires. No more speeding tickets just because the big tires make the speedomoter read low.
"fifteen meters, plus or minus".
Not a problem. If you have drift, the reading could be that far off. Drift is slow. Races are fast. Who cares if the position data has drifted off 15 feet? You are not using the GPS to find the finish line. Even with the drift, the speed data is usualy quite good. My owners manual states the speed accuracy as 0.1 nautical mile. (MPH but using Nautical miles, not US miles) Second to second speed accurate to about 0.1 MPH is usualy better than you can do with a stopwatch.
perhaps...but would you like to be the trainer who has to manually enter the data into the computer?
Some data gathered by GPS simply can't be captured by hand to manualy enter. NMEA output from GPS receivers give speed, direction, position, and other data once a second. Acceleration is easly calculated. Try that with a pencil and a stopwatch.
If you hild a normal (consumer-grade) GPS unit in your hand and stand still, you'll be surprised to find that you're bouncing around like an ADD-ridden five-year-old after eating a bag of Skittles
Add differential correction to it. That fixes the problem. Most consumer handheld GPS units will accept a signal from a differential receiver. However the receivers may cost several times the cost of the hand held GPS receiver.
so will the speed be measured in furlongs per fortnight?
By the time you capture the data to a file, a simple spreadsheet could convert the data to almost any format you wish. It could even convert to the percent of the speed of light so you could figure how much red or blue shift there was. I wouldn't want to be wrong choosing the winner because of the color shift.
Besides a goat link, the information is dead wrong. There is a mention of high price on GPS.. Um do a google search on OEM GPS modules, or hand held GPS receivers with NMEA output. A GPS (about the price of a wireless card) costing more than 802.1b with many receivers and network to do triangulation is dead wrong. Many GPS receivers are cheaper than a wireless lan card. Any PDA or pocket PC that can record RS232 can capture data from any handheld GPS that has a NMEA output. The file can be transfered to a PC and loaded into many of the popular map programs. The NMEA data includes second by second time, speed direction and location. You could graph the speed, distance, acceleration and position on a spreadsheet. No need for expensive equipment. Just use off the shelf PDA, sportsman's GPS, PC etc. Off the shelf sportsmen's GPS units are weather resistant and wouldn't have the dust and moisture issues mentioned in the article. I guess it's the PDA that is hard to protect, not the GPS. A single board PC with a COM port running DOS could easly be configured to boot, open a file, open a COM port, and copy NMEA data to a file. This costs more than running 802.11b trangulation how?
At best, I will be pissed off at their ridiculous price and refuse to buy it later when it's cheaper, simply because I don't support thieves (yep, I mean what I just said!)
Most of the time I disagree with you. However, I have bought a few albums based on one song I have heard. The rest of the album was junk. In these cases, I agree with you. I buy less music nowdays. It's too much like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get. I wouldn't be disappointed if they were all sweet, but the moldy ones tend to be a turn-off. Quality Control definately needs fixed.
While I'm on that topic, the DVD's are starting to get that problem. I picked up some old television shows. I got some Andy Griffith show and Beverly Hillbillies. What happened to the opening music? It's been replaced by some muzak junk. Talk about not getting what you thought you bought. So much for a walk down memory lane. I really look at any pre-packaged recording on the shelf as a pig in a poke now with a let the buyer beware attitude.
With Audio, I always look for the Compact Disk logo. I won't knowingly buy any DRM broken CD's.
The router would like you much better if you replaced the antenna with a proper (microwave not CB band) 50 ohm dummy load. It is possible to feed a stub of tin foil and it could radiate the signal. A dummy load in a coaxial fitting provides a load on the transmitter preventing high standing waves which can produce high current or high voltage nodes in the router which radiate the signal.
One particularly annoying connection gave me a 192.168.1 address and let me ping 192.168.1.1 but do absolutely nothing else. I ran nmap and nessus against the ip and absolutely nothing came back. It was freakiest thing I've ever seen. Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side.
;-)
Most likely, neither solution is correct. The WIN box sharing the internet connection is in BSOD and nobody noticed it yet.
The problem of spam is lately being overshadowed by the subject of spam saturating the media.
Think of the media business model. Media lives on paid advertisements and subscriptions. Spam doesn't grease their pockets. Of course advertising directly to the public is a bad idea.
I'm hoping the IR scanning cameras will come down in price. Getting through the fog near San Francisco is a real bear sometimes. I would love to have a fog cutting camera hooked up to a display to enhance driving.