A perfect solution is probably scumming away in the basements and attics of a lot of people: the Commodore 64.
I actually brought my VIC-20 to college in the early 90s for electronics courses. While the rest of the class was using PCs for hardware projects, I did them all on the VIC. Top reason : the BASIC is so funky and primitive that you can poke memory and run ML from it. Reason #2, the video output works on CGA monitors...
One of the projects back then was with an 8 bit DAC for generating waveforms. While the rest of the class was using a seperate calculator to generate 256 hex values for a sine wave, I wrote a few lines in BASIC to poke memory with sine values and a 10 byte or so ML routine to write to the DAC. I finished so fast that I went on to make a DAC to LM317 power supply with a BASIC program asking for a voltage, calculating the 8 bit word and writing it, while everyone else was still halfway through their dumb sine table.
Of course, the C64s and VICs out there might not be too reliable anymore, getting them to work would demand the skills you are trying to teach in the first place.
Yeah, I agree with this. I mean I got started in EE because I was taking things apart as a kid. 20 years ago discrete parts were still common, especially for things in the garbage.
A kid interested in biology will get taken to the psychologist if he takes the neighborhood squirrel apart. Sadly, it's when you're young that it's the best time to learn by tinkering, so if you do like bio, you'll only get to tinker in your 20s when you hit university and put mice in the blender.
Like the other poster mentionned, the local priest also doesn't care if you take a radio apart and engineer it into a television, let's say. The freaky 12th-century religious fuckwits that dominate the US (it seems) are the biggest problem. (Yet they are the first to demand extraordinary measures for keeping corpses alive.)
It's my feeling from working in EE that the dying fields are EE and software; the future is in the hands of the bio guys. So why did you leave? I'd give everything to get rid of my floaters, but don't give two hoots about the latest hardware. I don't think I'm alone in waiting for the sci-fiesque promises of advanced biotech.
"But what does a company built around making inexpensive PCs know about HDTVs?"
Who cares? Do you honestly think manufacturers build their own parts? Evderybody is selling something to someone else. A SONY DVD player with Panasonic chips and a Matsushita mechanism with a taiwanese PCB designed with Japanese software... Sold in Europe to play American movies.
Dell will probably re-brand someone else's design, or outsource the design. Remember the Casio products re-branded as Tandy in the 80s? Same idea.
Look, I watch maybe two or three shows more or less regularly. I couldn't care less if I miss an episode. I mean, who gives a shit? Are you twelve years old? Do you go to school the next day and say "did you see..."?
You are addicted. You are surrounding yourself with toys to keep the real world away. Grow up.
Never, ever say you don't watch or like TV around here. If you don't have at least two TiVos running 24/7 and don't watch the latest dreck at least 50 times a month for hours on end, it's -1, troll for you!
Ah, a sensible reply. A rare thing on slash. I don't have cable or satellite for the same reason you mention, the vomit-inducing programming out there. And it's not TV that's getting worse, no sir, it's us, we're getting older. Also known as taste, or intelligence.
But I've always found a VCR to be enough for time shifting. The only show I want to watch that's on too late for me is the Daily Show. I just have to make sure the piece of wire I use as an antenna is still in the RF IN connector of the VCR.
Nice strawman. Did you make it yourself? My opinion is that the EXCESS of anything is something to worry about. When you are watching so much TV that you need a computer to keep track of all your shows and a hard drive to keep them on, then yeah, you have a problem.
I'm just a regular guy. I work full time. I come home at night, I study for my one course I take at university, sometimes I cook, clean or read.
The fact you described TiVo as a *NEED* tells me everything I need to know about you, my friend.
Wow, I barely even have broadcast TV. Seriously, every time I call my friend, he's watching a movie. Have we become a world of protoplasm living by proxy, entertaining ourselves to death? Who cares if TiVo dies? Who the hell can watch SO MUCH TV, you need a COMPUTER to track it all?
Yeah, no kidding, I remember when TLC and Discovery showed good stuff, until they became the interior decorating, wedding, baby and repeat channel. What a shame.
Actually, I have. It was fruit flies, and the flame thrower was a can of butane and a lighter. The butane comes out so cold from the can that the flame is actually cold. Plus fruit flies have good vision, they evaded the flame most of the time.
However, fruit flies don't seem to have ears. They never heard that vacuum cleaner coming.
The color of the PCB is actually the color of what's called the solder mask. Usually, PCBs in computers are made of a material called FR-4 (flame retardant grade 4), which is fiberglass woven together, impregnated in epoxy and laminated together in a hot press. Various types and weaves of glass and formulations of epoxy give you a vast range of materials that fall under the category FR-4, but they all pretty much have the same grayish color.
Solder mask is basically a paint that isolates the various 'pads', or landing areas for component pins, physically in space, so that the solder has much less tendency to bridge gaps and cause shorts. Usually, it is green, but it can be made in any color. Myself, I've made boards with black, red or transparent solder mask. Green is the traditional color, and afaik, there is no performance difference electrically or physically between the colors.
Just for completeness' sake, the lettering you sometimes see on a PCB is called silkscreen, and is usually white, but again can come in a variety of colors like yellow or black. Again, tradition says it should be white.
PS: I'm not an electrical engineer, and I never will be.
Well what you have here is a clearly measurable, electrical difference in cabling. I agree with you that with lengths of that order, you can certainly hear differences, but I think you could have just bought regular 8 gauge cable to get the difference. Of course if you run 10 meters of 18 gauge vs 10 meters of 8 gauge, you can measure the difference with a LCR meter. My problem with the 'gee-whiz' cables is when you have *no* electrical differences that can supposedly give rise to big changes in sound? I don't think so. Again, this is assuming good gear. If you have such a badly designed amplifier that it oscillates into 102pf but not 100pf, then exotic cables will make a difference, but the problem isn't the cables!
I still say that 90% of the 'sound' comes from speakers and their placement.
Ever hear of expectation bias or placebo effect? I'll bet you have terrible speakers, but a cable can change them? The #1 thing to look/listen for in a speaker is RADIATION PATTERN, the ONE thing that is NEVER specified anywhere (a simple polar plot would do), but it's the only thing that will give you the real soundstage of the recording, ie you will hear each instrument in its place, and you won't hear the speakers.
I have relatively expensive Totem speakers, with nothing but 8 gauge lamp cord for a 1.50$ a foot, and modest NAD setup. Blows away ANYTHING you can buy at a 'brand name' retailer. People just walk in my place and think from the other room that there's a live performance in my living room! It's eerie. Even cats are befuddled by it. My cat used to never pay attention to my old crappy Paradigm speakers, for a while it used to look around for where the sound was coming from when I got the Totems.
Human, and I guess animal, hearing is excessively good at picking minute phase differences and building a 3D image of the sound source from that. That's why, for example, you can always tell without looking if it's a TV or real people in another room. The Totems are built to act as a point source radiator in space, and can re-create sound wavefronts much more accuarately than other speakers. It's all in the cabinet construction and materials. And Dynaudio drivers too. No cable is going to change that.
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I actually brought my VIC-20 to college in the early 90s for electronics courses. While the rest of the class was using PCs for hardware projects, I did them all on the VIC. Top reason : the BASIC is so funky and primitive that you can poke memory and run ML from it. Reason #2, the video output works on CGA monitors...
One of the projects back then was with an 8 bit DAC for generating waveforms. While the rest of the class was using a seperate calculator to generate 256 hex values for a sine wave, I wrote a few lines in BASIC to poke memory with sine values and a 10 byte or so ML routine to write to the DAC. I finished so fast that I went on to make a DAC to LM317 power supply with a BASIC program asking for a voltage, calculating the 8 bit word and writing it, while everyone else was still halfway through their dumb sine table.
Of course, the C64s and VICs out there might not be too reliable anymore, getting them to work would demand the skills you are trying to teach in the first place.
What's a braniac? Is it like a really big 50s robot, but he's really regular?
A kid interested in biology will get taken to the psychologist if he takes the neighborhood squirrel apart. Sadly, it's when you're young that it's the best time to learn by tinkering, so if you do like bio, you'll only get to tinker in your 20s when you hit university and put mice in the blender.
Like the other poster mentionned, the local priest also doesn't care if you take a radio apart and engineer it into a television, let's say. The freaky 12th-century religious fuckwits that dominate the US (it seems) are the biggest problem. (Yet they are the first to demand extraordinary measures for keeping corpses alive.)
It's my feeling from working in EE that the dying fields are EE and software; the future is in the hands of the bio guys. So why did you leave? I'd give everything to get rid of my floaters, but don't give two hoots about the latest hardware. I don't think I'm alone in waiting for the sci-fiesque promises of advanced biotech.
Never mind the math, I barely understood the english on that site...
I haven't, but they do.
I used to be closer to the consumer electronics repair field, but I don't remember who makes who anymore.
Who cares? Do you honestly think manufacturers build their own parts? Evderybody is selling something to someone else. A SONY DVD player with Panasonic chips and a Matsushita mechanism with a taiwanese PCB designed with Japanese software... Sold in Europe to play American movies.
Dell will probably re-brand someone else's design, or outsource the design. Remember the Casio products re-branded as Tandy in the 80s? Same idea.
Web developper needed, must have 5 years experience with AJAX
I love HR departments...
I think I'll stick to AC comments.
And it would be nice if Taco didn't sit at his computer to mod down so quickly, too.
Why does slashdot put stories up before it's quite ready?
He's paraphrasing our illustrious founder and leader, Taco, who called the iPod lame a while back... How soon we forget. Oh well, back to TV.
It's amazing that someone who also bought THIS has enough brain cells to make 386000$. Life really is unfair.
Look, I watch maybe two or three shows more or less regularly. I couldn't care less if I miss an episode. I mean, who gives a shit? Are you twelve years old? Do you go to school the next day and say "did you see..."?
You are addicted. You are surrounding yourself with toys to keep the real world away. Grow up.
Like this...
But I've always found a VCR to be enough for time shifting. The only show I want to watch that's on too late for me is the Daily Show. I just have to make sure the piece of wire I use as an antenna is still in the RF IN connector of the VCR.
I'm just a regular guy. I work full time. I come home at night, I study for my one course I take at university, sometimes I cook, clean or read.
The fact you described TiVo as a *NEED* tells me everything I need to know about you, my friend.
Wow, I barely even have broadcast TV. Seriously, every time I call my friend, he's watching a movie. Have we become a world of protoplasm living by proxy, entertaining ourselves to death? Who cares if TiVo dies? Who the hell can watch SO MUCH TV, you need a COMPUTER to track it all?
Yeah, no kidding, I remember when TLC and Discovery showed good stuff, until they became the interior decorating, wedding, baby and repeat channel. What a shame.
However, fruit flies don't seem to have ears. They never heard that vacuum cleaner coming.
I guess that extra apostrophe in "its" is really a devious form of steganography? That explains a lot of posts around here!
Solder mask is basically a paint that isolates the various 'pads', or landing areas for component pins, physically in space, so that the solder has much less tendency to bridge gaps and cause shorts. Usually, it is green, but it can be made in any color. Myself, I've made boards with black, red or transparent solder mask. Green is the traditional color, and afaik, there is no performance difference electrically or physically between the colors.
Just for completeness' sake, the lettering you sometimes see on a PCB is called silkscreen, and is usually white, but again can come in a variety of colors like yellow or black. Again, tradition says it should be white.
PS: I'm not an electrical engineer, and I never will be.
I still say that 90% of the 'sound' comes from speakers and their placement.
I have relatively expensive Totem speakers, with nothing but 8 gauge lamp cord for a 1.50$ a foot, and modest NAD setup. Blows away ANYTHING you can buy at a 'brand name' retailer. People just walk in my place and think from the other room that there's a live performance in my living room! It's eerie. Even cats are befuddled by it. My cat used to never pay attention to my old crappy Paradigm speakers, for a while it used to look around for where the sound was coming from when I got the Totems.
Human, and I guess animal, hearing is excessively good at picking minute phase differences and building a 3D image of the sound source from that. That's why, for example, you can always tell without looking if it's a TV or real people in another room. The Totems are built to act as a point source radiator in space, and can re-create sound wavefronts much more accuarately than other speakers. It's all in the cabinet construction and materials. And Dynaudio drivers too. No cable is going to change that.
My speaker stands? Cinder blocks, $1.79 each.