At least if you fold a flat cable back upon itself, the signal may be coupled back to itself, albeit with a minor time-shift caused by signal propagation delay along the cable.
Its just I used to design with flat cable a lot and saw a lot of stuff on the scope that looked a helluva lot better when I played the game by the rules... such as having every other wire grounded.
I had some nice shielded multipair twisted cable, and it required different termination - yet if done right, would do just as well... its just that if the thing was designed for the charactistic termination impedance for flat cable, I would attempt to honor that design and use the cable it was designed for.
Who designed such a thing? Somebody with an art, business, and marketing background.. but doesn't know jack schidt about signal propagation? Those IDE cables were flat for many reasons. One of the primary reasons was the economical implemention of multiple controlled-impedance transmission lines with matched propagation delay.
The mechanical layout of the signals on the cables were carefully selected so as to minimize crosstalk between data and control lines, so that your inevitable coupling ( via E and H fields ) would occur only between groups where the coupling would not have consequences.
Bundling control lines next to data lines is not a good idea.
I consider this just another example of things designed by people who do not understand the underlying physics governing their operation.
I think this kind of thing may start becoming commonplace as the new waves of engineers enter the workforce are becoming comfortable with designing around things which they do not understand, so as to "protect" the "intellectual property" of those wishing to keep the inner details of how things work proprietary.
I dunno about the new scanners out there.. but in cases where I wanted extremely high detail on an image, I have always brought it into my lab where I have a video camera attached to a microscope.
Now, the image I can scan at one time isn't very large, maybe an area about the size of a pencil eraser at lowest magnification, but I would scan. step, repeat, and tile the resultant images.
I am sure that given proper incentive, I could modify the microscope's stage to automate the step and repeat function, as for now its still simple XY drive screws that position the sample under the lens.
Yes, it would take quite some time to do it right. It wouldn't surprise me if it took all night to do it.
But then, I don't know of any technology to defeat such a thing.
You see, I don't just do RGB, I can use any colors, including non-visible, on this setup. The camera itself is wideband mono. I flood the sample with whatever color of light I choose. Normal color photos involves a still sample and three captures, one each of red, green, and blue, which are subsequently overlaid as colors.
I routinely may look at things in infrared or ultraviolet. I can't see it but the camera can. Doing this, I can make "false color" images for things like failure analyses. Things that aren't visible in our eye's sensitive area of the light spectrum often are visible somewhere else in the spectrum.
About using credit cards... uhhh,,, that's the tinfoil hat nightmare. Cash is just about the only anonymous way to transfer wealth left. Just about anything else is traceable, hence, taxable. Unless, of course, you wanna go buy them something on your account and give them the something you bought for them.
Exactly! That is why I was so comfortable using DOS tools.
I have known for a long time that I was going to have to leave the Microsoft operating environments because I had work to do... I could not spend a helluva lot of time farting around with my tools. I feel if I stay with a Microsoft system, I will become like a gardener who spends all day trying to get his fancy power saw to cut a branch off a tree, and having to compete with the neighbor kid with a simple bow saw which would go through the branch in three minutes. Sure the power saw could do it in three milliseconds, but it may take three hours to get the saw to work! Yes, great if you do the same thing day after day and can use the economies of scale of mass production, but I do all sorts of different stuff. Anything. Mechanical, electrical, analog, digital, embedded processors/code, power/power conversion, optics, RF, even some chemistry. Its all physics and to me, all fun. Playing around in God's playground of physics law is rewarding to me cause God doesn't change the rules all the time. Bill Gates does. A sound knowledge of the way Bill Gates does things is rendered moot on the next release of code, but a good sound knowledge on how things work is nearly perfectly integral - that is you can safely build on your foundations of skill without having it systematically rendered moot by a new release of physical laws.
Incidentally, I intend to finally give up my DOS tools and migrate to Eagle, which runs on Linux.
From what I have perceived, Eagle has been the first company out there I can consider as having a product robust enough to last. The rest, albeit expensive, I consider "fly-by-night" as the companies who preceded them. Endless acquisitions and mergers, but who knows what will be compatible with what in a couple of years. If you are trying to build a computational infrastructure that will be functional for conceivably centuries, you can't use components whose lifetime is designed to expire in years.
I never said the systems will deliver state-of-the-art performance in ten years, but they should still work at the same performance they were designed to. My half-century old air compressor still does.
( Yes, it once had a dongle, but being the dongle was incompatible with the newer high-speed parallel ports, I had to fix it because they wouldn't - I had *bought* the software, so by golly I had to protect my investment. It was the frustration of removing that damned thing that taught me the value of the sales term "customer support", as I felt I, like the software I had purchased, had been abandoned. They were just using it as a hook to reel me in once I took the bait, so they could make me pay again and again and again for the same thing. I am an older guy and used to the idea that once a trade is made, they have my money, and I have the product, and both lose subsequent control over it. I feel they have no rights to tell me how to use their product anymore than I have any right to tell them how they can spend the money I paid for it. However I will respect their copyright. Its their product to sell, not mine. My product is what I do using their product. )
But going around behind my back devising ways to render my investment in their product moot to force me to buy again to me smacked of me going around behind their back to cancel my check, rendering it moot, and then trying to force them into negotiations again for more business. I wouldn't expect them to stand for it, but apparently they expected *me* to stand for it. But in my case, I just got madder than hell, and vowed to really watch those sweet-talking suit guys.
And C/C++/DSP = Borland TurboC++ for DOS. I love that old compiler. Fast little bugger. And so simple I don't fart around all day trying to set things up... just a quickie definition of how to set up my variable types and away I go. Kinda lousy for presentations, but really great for quickie algorithm testing as I can easily hook anything in my machine. Really nice for my wirewrap test cards when I just use the address/data bus in my machine just to talk to it.
I still use it. Daily. For schematic capture, PCB layout, and cross-assembler/DSP C/C++ stuff.
You see, I understand the file formats on these old files. And I know exactly how the programs work. And these programs were coded in a day where the programs would run on just about any machine you dropped them in. ( Mine require 386-16SX or higher, and are plenty fast on the minimal machine, albeit they now all are running in Pentiums for so much overkill it ain't funny.)
The big draw for me is that I still have access to any drawing I have ever done, or anyone else in my group does. The formats don't change every couple of years and require me to constantly upgrade to something that works differently, along with the probability I screw up because I didn't catch some new "feature" properly.
I chose the old programs wisely almost 20 years ago. They all have user definable libraries and do not have any "permission codes" or dongles required. They will fit on a floppy, and run on just about anything I can boot up in DOS.
The only objection some may have is that the companies who generated these tools have been out of business now for ten years. So support is moot. But from my point of view, this software was coded solid as a hammer. I don't need support for the hammer. This software was coded solid enough it doesn't need support. It just does what its supposed to.. nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, I see my using abandonware as a benefit, as there is no-one riding my back to enforce DRM or threaten me with lawyers if I take it on myself to open up the code if needed to customize it more to my liking.
Yes, I know the later systems have all sorts of features, but I don't really think those new features save me as much effort. I see them like "insurance policies" sold for its "peace-of-mind" value, but said value vanishes when the claim is denied for the exclusions in small print.
Yes, they tell me I can simulate in SPICE. And I do. But you know, I don't trust it yet. Spice models ideal components. Spice will often tell me something will work and lead me into false "peace of mind", when in reality small component variations lead me to a disaster when the product hits the consumer. Nah, I want a proto for me to run my hands all over when its running so I can introduce so many stray leakage paths and variances that just about anything that can fail will. (I exempt most SMPS power converters from this procedure).
I had to leave a previous employer over this issue. But then I have seen them spend my salary dozens of times over trying to keep their legacy filebases accessible. I know my computational infrastructures are sound and will run the rest of my biological lifetime easily.
Do I have a place for Windows? Yes. But its not for things I think I may need years from now. It to me is a pretty gizmo, quite easy to use, but its nothing I want to build a foundation on. But its damm nice for things where its very important to look good, but not important that it last. Like those "cardboard belts" that often come with a suit. Yes, they may look really good when dressing up for a job interview, but don't count on it holding your britches up for a year. Two or three days is about par for the course, but if it looks pretty enough to impress the suit guy, good enough. (My favorite belt is well used, not all that attractive, but quite functional).
When I really have important stuff, its very important to me to know how to single-handedly recover from anything without losing damn near a quarter-century of work.
I really hate to sign binding legal documents without understanding what I am agreeing to... likewise I really hate to use software I don't know exactly what its doing... especially if that software in question already has a history of being, as the article related to, a "cheating" lover who carries on trysts on the side. Rich men can afford that kind of thing, but frankly money is just too hard for me to come by to keep paying over and over again for me to just hold position.
In my case, the hardware has been damn near free. Usually something discarded.
I could not bear to see such a magnificient collection of exotically machined parts going off to the landfill, so I would snare that printer, copy machine, computer, whatever, and cart it home to take apart.
But the experience? Pure labor. Extremely time consuming. But then, in return, I get to see exactly how the thing worked, and often gain great insights on why it failed, which obviously lead to its decommissioning.
I feel its given me one helluva education of practical machine design, as I have many working designs ( err... "partially working") in my repertoire to call on when I need something similar. If they had failed, I know why and how to sidestep around that in my design.
I figure I must have over a million dollars worth of my time invested in my education via "tinkering"... but then I would rather tinker than watch TV any day of the week.
Yeh.. I remember my Grandpa talking about AC and DC.
It seems when electrification was first coming to the cities, they used DC. So everyone went out and bought motors. Then the power companies started switching to AC, and it fouled a lot of people up who had bought DC technology. Of course, the knowledgeable ones would build power converters, but without the internet and rapid means of disseminating information, this knowledge was in little pockets here and there.
Yes, a lot of DC motors will run on AC, but you now need to take into account things like inductive reactance and adjust things accordingly.
I am not familiar with the 32 volt DC, but I could sure see where it could exist in localized areas. Back in those days, the standards for power seemed just about as nebulous as today's standards for file formats.
I sure miss my Grandpa. He had more "toys" on that farm... I ended up growing up in the city, and my dad signed papers and told other people to do the neat stuff. Yeh, he got paid more to tell other people to do things, but I feel I really missed out a lot on the pure therapeutic value of doing things. Dad never quite understood the fascination I had with building things... and could not talk with me of such things - so he would spend his weekends with his buddies on the fishing boats.
He was one of those types who liked everything neat and tidy - like goods on shelves in a store. That is - unused. He lived in a suit and tie world where others ministered to their support infrastructures.
And me, I am happiest in a nest of stuff, in use, trying things out. Experimenting to find out how something *really* works.
Oh God, don't cha wish we could bring these old guys back just to talk to them? I think I would get a big kick from talking to your Grandpa.
I get so aggravated talking to most of my contempories... as all they seem to be interested in is meaningless drivel like fashion trends.
My ancestors grew up in a completely different environment where substance was far more important. It seems they had a far more acute sense for discriminating wheat from chaff.
Remember those old lever-operated water pumps? A long rod went down to where the water was and the weight of the rod was counterbalanced at the handle, so when you pushed the handle down, you effectively lifted the column of water above the piston toward you?
We had those kind down at grandpa's farm.
And yes, the windmill. It was an old tractor differential with one of the "tire" ends welded shut, as well as the "tail" assembly fin welded there as to always keep the other end facing into the wind. The drive shaft was oriented vertically, transmitting its torque down to a crank that operated this kind of pump. The faster the wind blew, the more furiously the pump cranked.
The whole differential assembly was only supported by the drive shaft so the entire assembly would face whatever way the wind was blowing. The torque actually put on the "drive shaft" ( long piece of irrigation pipe, actually ) was miniscule compared to the force of the wind against the tail assembly, which was bent just a bit to compensate for this torque.
Grandpa designed it and welded it together. All out of farm scrap. Well, I think he had the fan assembly prefab, but the rest of the whole shebang was homegrown.
It damn near always had a small creek of water overflowing from the trough Grandpa had put there to hold the water for his horses and cows, and any other living creature stopping by for a drink.
Grandpa didn't have an engineering degree, yet to me he was a true engineer. I thought my Grandpa could build anything. Still do.
But somewhere I remember where some entity was making high-res images from lots of low-res images by correlation and integrating the noise out.
Typically, you would feed live video into this, and it may integrate several hundred, maybe thousands of frames of incredibly obscure images, and return stills of very high resolution.
It was used by police detective units to analyze poor video files recorded by instore video recorders that saw a crime.
It looks like this may be useful for this kind of thing, as the DSP can be programmed to kill off the haze and just leave what comes through now and then as the fog particles drift in and out of the lines of sight.
You had breached the subject of investing in something of ephemeral benefit from a broadcasters point of view.
I countered your insight with my point of view as a possible adopter of the new technology, and indicated my fears.
No slight of your insight intended.
Personally, I wish they would let broadcast TV stay the way it is. Low res. Simple. Public. By its very nature, signals are "good enough", but that's all. Let these remain public.
And, like you, I agree - let the satellites and cable providers hawk HDTV, and as far as I am concerned, since they aren't using the "public" airspace, they can do whatever they want with their signal... they can encumber it with as much DRM as Joe Public will pay for. And change the formats every year if they like. It lets the rich generate lots of jobs for equipment constructors and garbagemen, albeit it comes as a terrible expense in manufacturing pollution and landfill capacities.
But, like any business likes, I like alternatives so I can't be shanghaied into accepting whatever one vendor offers.
I still use rabbit ears. For the very limited amount of time I choose to watch TV, its adequate.
- rant on -
As far as I am concerned, cable TV is way, way, way too expensive when you consider how little I watch TV, or even go to the movies as far as that goes. Commercials annoy the dickens out of me. The last time I went to a theater to watch a movie and got shanghaied for 30 minutes of my time to watch ads - on a screen I paid good money to see a movie on - I was so miffed it has left a good sour spot in me for theaters.
By golly, I paid for a movie. Not ads.
Wanna reach me with an ad? Use a trade magazine and educate me on why your product is better and how I can use it. I actually study ads if they are relevant to my interests, but being forced to sit through diaper and hairspray commercials or teasers for movies outside my genres of interest are 100% boring.
I don't have a "right" to sell off an Air Force Base. Its not mine to sell. It belongs to the Government, not me.
I have a hard time thinking they have a "right" to sell spectrum like this without a vote of the people.
If a majority of the people say they want to give up their older systems and adopt this new DRM-laden crap, then I have to accept it. But to have someone just force it from me, I feel as if I have been mugged.
"Why should a complany spend tens or hundreds of millions on cell tower transceivers when they might become useless 5 years down the road?"
And why should I invest hundreds or even thousands of dollars on nice video display equipment when it can be rendered useless with a revision of transmission formats which may be called on to replace a "cracked" standard?
My TV (RCA XL-100 model CTC-64) still runs fine. Its almost 30 years old. Yet its common for me to discover that anything I have digital won't be compatible with the new stuff in about three years.
I have no intention of going digital until I am assured its safe to invest in something that will last. If you are trying to tell me that I should go digital because thats what they are pushing, you might as well try to sell me on building my house on untreated wood foundations in a termite laden area.
I know how much trouble it is to build things, and once I lay a foundation, I intend it to last. My personal paradigm is to build things to last damn near forever - because the cost of materials is dwarfed by the cost of labor.
The old maxim - "If you don't have enough time to do it right, then you must make enough time to do it over" has always held true for me.
And I haven't seen the government doing near as much for my "rights" as they are doing for those who are using law as an extortionary force to coerce funding from me.
Just something about unexpectedly hitting a long "frozen puddle" in the road whose surface has just begun to melt will leave you with a thrill that you will remember for a lifetime.
Whether or not they can use the actual knowledge of the people who made up that company is yet to be seen.
It has just been in my experience that often when a larger company takes over a smaller one, often management egos and power interfere with creativity and the first ones to leave are the creative genius that made the company mean something in the first place.
In my career, I have seen this happen dozens of times. It happened at two places I personally worked. When the tie-guys took over, there was no way we could continue functioning at the level we once were, and the only amicable settlement was to give up and walk away.
Its gonna be interesting just to watch this one as "hacker" culture collides with "business marketing" culture.
At the time I posted this, my parent is marked as a troll. From my experience, Luke reported exactly the same experience I had with it, even to the point of arriving at exactly the same conclusion as I did.
Norton was just as bad.
Lots of pretty animated graphics to keep me entertained while the minutes go by - while I am chomping on the bit because I have work to do.
You know, I am so happy I kept all my DOS based DSP analysis, schematic-capture, circuit simulator, and PCB layout programs - as I do most of my work there, and have no worry about one day having some stupid marketing attempt ruin all my data files or access to them. Since the libraries on the older ones are user-modifiable and the stuff was all written in C/C++, if the program has anything I need to change, well, no big deal.
Yeh, I know, I wouldn't be able to get away with this in a large company.
I am not too worried as long as it will display on a CRT and require speakers for audio output.
Give me physical access to the CRT cathodes and the deflection yoke, and I will give you pristine analog RGB+sync.
I am not that worried about not having an exact pristine copy... having something pretty good, but clean and in an archivable standard format, is way more important to me than a 0.1% requantization error the transcription would introduce. Besides I will probably compress it anyhow to DivX, which should just about cover any visible errors to my requantization anyway...
Bring it on. I only have to play the crappy version once to transcribe it to a standard format.
This whole charade is just something for rich people to shake hands and have dinners over anyway. I think this whole effort will do way more harm to the recording industry than good, as it gives the masses even more incentive to use standard formats which are editable where objectional time-consuming content can be removed.
There is a "tipping point", and when the common Joe has had enough, its gonna be a really tough sell to convince Joe that a commercial-ridden movie that won't honor his requests to bypass unwanted content is worth paying for when clean files of the same movie, albeit illegal, exist.
Trying to force people to use a irritant-ridden commercial format in lieu of open standards formats may become like coaxing people off a freeway to spend hours in a stoplight-congested downtown area.
Already, there a helluva lot of us that actually hold.wma compatibility as a negative value when considering music players. Like, what in the hell is.wma good for? Chances are it won't work. To me, even having.wma compatibility not only is useless clutter, I consider it a major security risk, as only God and some selected insiders know what kinda of things can be slipped in a.wma file to alter or track the operations of my machine.
When I consider something I want to have, it better be something I don't have to bicker with. I literally hate it when I make a poor selection of tools, and I spend more time tinkering with a tool to get it to work than I receive from the use of that tool. I consider these new tools just about as useful as a screwdriver whose shaft slips in the handle. This kinda stuff is best sold to people who care about what it *looks like*, not what it *does*. You know, businesspeople - the kind who judge a guy by his suit and haircut, not his values or knowledge. Many businesses are still flooded with money and have yet to form much of a concern base for the usability of products offered to them.
We are facing a re-do of "prohibition", that had to be repealed. They are trying to control people from doing something in private by law. I think its gonna have just about as much success as our pot laws have had. Its gonna be very expensive to enforce this law, and a helluva lot of otherwise productive citizenry are gonna have to be sacrificed. The powers that be are gonna have to see the "big picture" and make the decision how much of our workforce can be sacrificed to maintain these laws.
Economics did Russia in. I think its gonna do the USA in too. Since we have outsourced a lot of our jobs, the only way we are surviving for the time being is lowering the interest rates so as to flood the market with "dollars".. even though anybody saving to buy a house sees how inflationary this tactic is. But, for a limited time, this tactic will keep dollars circulating as a borrowed dollar spends the same as an earned one. But as any debtor knows, debts come due. As a country, I see the behaviour of my government very similar to a young naive teen when given a credit card with no experience of having to pay it back.
My bets are when the New World Order gets going, we all better learn Mandarin.
I just always make a point of telling the sales clerk that my home CD player is my computer and that lately I have been having a lot of trouble playing purchased music through it, albeit the stuff I get from the net works fine.
I ask if the store has a policy that if the CD does not play in my machine, can I return it for my money back?
I make a point of asking while holding the CD and a couple of twenties.
Of course, they always say that they can only give me another crippled CD.
At that point, I put the CD back in the rack, go for my wallet and reinsert the twenties, muttering that at least I know the stuff I get off the net will at least play in my machine, and its just not worth the risk to me to play Russian Roulette. I often remark that if I paid in money that the bank refused, I would be held in prison for passing bogus currency.
My take is they are playing off the idea that we are being conditioned by the computer industry to accept the fact that within two or three years after purchase, our technology is obsolete and needs to be replaced.
How long will it be before even if you have your nice bigscreen TV, it will only show "This movie requires a reciever using CryptoSecure V12.34 or better to view." or something down those lines.
As if our landfills weren't already overflowing with perfectly usable stuff rendered obsolete only by design.
This "enforced consumption" kinda makes me sick. Personally, I will continue to do whatever I can to hang onto what I have.
And if that means I have to translate through whatever means necessary to use it, so be it.
To me, this scheme reeks of appliance manufacturers colluding with the power company so as to incessantly change line voltage and frequency so as to keep the market for new appliances roiled....
Just give me physical access to the cathode wiring to the CRT and the deflection yoke windings and I will give you good clean RGB to do whatever you want.
Actually, I think I would have been sorely tempted to stop by the local hospital and borrow their colonoscopy apparatus, along with their doctor and technician who know how to use it. Its neat for seeing tiny things, and has recording capability.
Power consumption - this has been of great concern to me as well. Not just the power, its also the resultant heat.
With the geometries constantly getting smaller, yet the physics of diffusion being the same, and the power consumption/heat dissipation rising at what seems to be a neverending inexorable rate...
Gee, guys, how long do we expect a processor to be in service these days before the inexorable laws of diffusion render the processor inoperable?
Worse yet, I suspect its degradation is probably a statistical thing: that the processor will succumb to bit-pattern sensitivities long before it plain quits, with the resultant apparent random crashes making it appear to be a software problem.
I knew when I was designing with the old 386SX machines, that I could reasonably expect the processor to run for 100 years easily. They were so confident of the processor reliability that it was customary to not use a socket for the processor, as the socket itself had a far higher rate of failure ( corrosion ) than the processor.
Just two weeks ago, a similar thing happened to a young teenage girl two houses down from me.
This is a little offtopic, but the principle is the same. Its what happens when you have something others can take.
Her parents had to leave on business. It was her first time. Alone. She was frightened and lonely. She called *one* friend to come over and share the evening with her.
No sooner than her friend got there, could she call a friend over too?
Out comes the cellphone. Boop!Beep!Beepety-Boop! - Yakyakyak. Presto! Friend of a friend shows up. They have cellphones too.
Soon the air is ripe with Boop-beepety-boop-yakyakyak. Chain reaction.
Friends of friends of friends call yet more friends. Exponential unchecked population growth.
For her, it was out of control. She couldn't leave the house, and had no idea what to do. She tried to evict them, but nobody would listen to her. Her house was now filled with people she did not know. First the neighbors thought there might be a problem, but when they saw so many people over there, they went back to bed just thinking she was just being socially noisy.
I heard it too, but generally I am quite tolerant of someone having a "social" provided they don't make a habit of it, or cause me problems.
It had gone past being noisy. People had not only brought their own liquor, but had also broken into and decimated anything of value in the house. It seemed no-one knew whose house it was, so it didn't matter anymore. Besides they were all drunk anyhow. The scene was reminiscent of the "old-West bar brawl".
If it wasn't for some frustrated and sleepy neighbors calling the cops on this noisy party, it would have been only her parents arriving to break up the mess.
As it turned out, the cops broke it up about 4AM, and the parents re-arrived about noon to a total shambles. All of us neighbors got a free tour of the demolition zone.
Its quite a condundrum. Nobody knows who did what. So its hard to go after any particular individual for damages. And the insurance company is reticent to call it a covered event because the calamity was "invited".
Just a word to the wise. Just because the law recognizes your property rights doesn't mean people will. If you have something like this - as much as you may hate to do this - even inviting one "friend" in could easily end in disaster.
My own recipe for survival is to have a really good knowledge of how things work. So no matter what goes wrong, I can fix it. Even if I can not fight worth a damn, or have much financial strength, I feel if I can make myself valuable to those that do, it will be in their best interests that I survive, just as it is in my best interests my tools survive.
Its times like this I feel I should have studied medicine instead of engineering. Everyone wants to make sure no-one harms their doctor!
Having something just means you have the onus to defend it. Or its quickly not yours anymore.
My greatest feeling of security is knowing that no matter what happens outside my realm, I know enough how to maintain my realm to keep the pumps running and the lights on. No matter what.
Being able to continue to operate autonomously in the event of separation from any central "authority" is my main thrust for running either older or open source stuff, as in the event of any disruptive activity, access to any central rights licensing/permission granting authority is apt to be denied.
Or worse yet, if the rights licensing/permission granting authority has been destroyed, I have no intention of having my data files suddenly rendered inaccessible and useless as those old Circuit City Divx disks suddenly became when they pulled their licensing server.
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Its just I used to design with flat cable a lot and saw a lot of stuff on the scope that looked a helluva lot better when I played the game by the rules... such as having every other wire grounded.
I had some nice shielded multipair twisted cable, and it required different termination - yet if done right, would do just as well... its just that if the thing was designed for the charactistic termination impedance for flat cable, I would attempt to honor that design and use the cable it was designed for.
Who designed such a thing? Somebody with an art, business, and marketing background.. but doesn't know jack schidt about signal propagation? Those IDE cables were flat for many reasons. One of the primary reasons was the economical implemention of multiple controlled-impedance transmission lines with matched propagation delay.
The mechanical layout of the signals on the cables were carefully selected so as to minimize crosstalk between data and control lines, so that your inevitable coupling ( via E and H fields ) would occur only between groups where the coupling would not have consequences.
Bundling control lines next to data lines is not a good idea.
I consider this just another example of things designed by people who do not understand the underlying physics governing their operation.
I think this kind of thing may start becoming commonplace as the new waves of engineers enter the workforce are becoming comfortable with designing around things which they do not understand, so as to "protect" the "intellectual property" of those wishing to keep the inner details of how things work proprietary.
Now, the image I can scan at one time isn't very large, maybe an area about the size of a pencil eraser at lowest magnification, but I would scan. step, repeat, and tile the resultant images.
I am sure that given proper incentive, I could modify the microscope's stage to automate the step and repeat function, as for now its still simple XY drive screws that position the sample under the lens.
Yes, it would take quite some time to do it right. It wouldn't surprise me if it took all night to do it.
But then, I don't know of any technology to defeat such a thing.
You see, I don't just do RGB, I can use any colors, including non-visible, on this setup. The camera itself is wideband mono. I flood the sample with whatever color of light I choose. Normal color photos involves a still sample and three captures, one each of red, green, and blue, which are subsequently overlaid as colors.
I routinely may look at things in infrared or ultraviolet. I can't see it but the camera can. Doing this, I can make "false color" images for things like failure analyses. Things that aren't visible in our eye's sensitive area of the light spectrum often are visible somewhere else in the spectrum.
About using credit cards... uhhh,,, that's the tinfoil hat nightmare. Cash is just about the only anonymous way to transfer wealth left. Just about anything else is traceable, hence, taxable. Unless, of course, you wanna go buy them something on your account and give them the something you bought for them.
I have known for a long time that I was going to have to leave the Microsoft operating environments because I had work to do... I could not spend a helluva lot of time farting around with my tools. I feel if I stay with a Microsoft system, I will become like a gardener who spends all day trying to get his fancy power saw to cut a branch off a tree, and having to compete with the neighbor kid with a simple bow saw which would go through the branch in three minutes. Sure the power saw could do it in three milliseconds, but it may take three hours to get the saw to work! Yes, great if you do the same thing day after day and can use the economies of scale of mass production, but I do all sorts of different stuff. Anything. Mechanical, electrical, analog, digital, embedded processors/code, power/power conversion, optics, RF, even some chemistry. Its all physics and to me, all fun. Playing around in God's playground of physics law is rewarding to me cause God doesn't change the rules all the time. Bill Gates does. A sound knowledge of the way Bill Gates does things is rendered moot on the next release of code, but a good sound knowledge on how things work is nearly perfectly integral - that is you can safely build on your foundations of skill without having it systematically rendered moot by a new release of physical laws.
Incidentally, I intend to finally give up my DOS tools and migrate to Eagle, which runs on Linux.
From what I have perceived, Eagle has been the first company out there I can consider as having a product robust enough to last. The rest, albeit expensive, I consider "fly-by-night" as the companies who preceded them. Endless acquisitions and mergers, but who knows what will be compatible with what in a couple of years. If you are trying to build a computational infrastructure that will be functional for conceivably centuries, you can't use components whose lifetime is designed to expire in years.
I never said the systems will deliver state-of-the-art performance in ten years, but they should still work at the same performance they were designed to. My half-century old air compressor still does.
PCB Layout = PADS 7 for DOS ( Last DOS release )
( Yes, it once had a dongle, but being the dongle was incompatible with the newer high-speed parallel ports, I had to fix it because they wouldn't - I had *bought* the software, so by golly I had to protect my investment. It was the frustration of removing that damned thing that taught me the value of the sales term "customer support", as I felt I, like the software I had purchased, had been abandoned. They were just using it as a hook to reel me in once I took the bait, so they could make me pay again and again and again for the same thing. I am an older guy and used to the idea that once a trade is made, they have my money, and I have the product, and both lose subsequent control over it. I feel they have no rights to tell me how to use their product anymore than I have any right to tell them how they can spend the money I paid for it. However I will respect their copyright. Its their product to sell, not mine. My product is what I do using their product. )
But going around behind my back devising ways to render my investment in their product moot to force me to buy again to me smacked of me going around behind their back to cancel my check, rendering it moot, and then trying to force them into negotiations again for more business. I wouldn't expect them to stand for it, but apparently they expected *me* to stand for it. But in my case, I just got madder than hell, and vowed to really watch those sweet-talking suit guys.
And C/C++/DSP = Borland TurboC++ for DOS. I love that old compiler. Fast little bugger. And so simple I don't fart around all day trying to set things up... just a quickie definition of how to set up my variable types and away I go. Kinda lousy for presentations, but really great for quickie algorithm testing as I can easily hook anything in my machine. Really nice for my wirewrap test cards when I just use the address/data bus in my machine just to talk to it.
I still use it. Daily. For schematic capture, PCB layout, and cross-assembler/DSP C/C++ stuff.
You see, I understand the file formats on these old files. And I know exactly how the programs work. And these programs were coded in a day where the programs would run on just about any machine you dropped them in. ( Mine require 386-16SX or higher, and are plenty fast on the minimal machine, albeit they now all are running in Pentiums for so much overkill it ain't funny.)
The big draw for me is that I still have access to any drawing I have ever done, or anyone else in my group does. The formats don't change every couple of years and require me to constantly upgrade to something that works differently, along with the probability I screw up because I didn't catch some new "feature" properly.
I chose the old programs wisely almost 20 years ago. They all have user definable libraries and do not have any "permission codes" or dongles required. They will fit on a floppy, and run on just about anything I can boot up in DOS.
The only objection some may have is that the companies who generated these tools have been out of business now for ten years. So support is moot. But from my point of view, this software was coded solid as a hammer. I don't need support for the hammer. This software was coded solid enough it doesn't need support. It just does what its supposed to.. nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, I see my using abandonware as a benefit, as there is no-one riding my back to enforce DRM or threaten me with lawyers if I take it on myself to open up the code if needed to customize it more to my liking.
Yes, I know the later systems have all sorts of features, but I don't really think those new features save me as much effort. I see them like "insurance policies" sold for its "peace-of-mind" value, but said value vanishes when the claim is denied for the exclusions in small print.
Yes, they tell me I can simulate in SPICE. And I do. But you know, I don't trust it yet. Spice models ideal components. Spice will often tell me something will work and lead me into false "peace of mind", when in reality small component variations lead me to a disaster when the product hits the consumer. Nah, I want a proto for me to run my hands all over when its running so I can introduce so many stray leakage paths and variances that just about anything that can fail will. (I exempt most SMPS power converters from this procedure).
I had to leave a previous employer over this issue. But then I have seen them spend my salary dozens of times over trying to keep their legacy filebases accessible. I know my computational infrastructures are sound and will run the rest of my biological lifetime easily.
Do I have a place for Windows? Yes. But its not for things I think I may need years from now. It to me is a pretty gizmo, quite easy to use, but its nothing I want to build a foundation on. But its damm nice for things where its very important to look good, but not important that it last. Like those "cardboard belts" that often come with a suit. Yes, they may look really good when dressing up for a job interview, but don't count on it holding your britches up for a year. Two or three days is about par for the course, but if it looks pretty enough to impress the suit guy, good enough. (My favorite belt is well used, not all that attractive, but quite functional).
When I really have important stuff, its very important to me to know how to single-handedly recover from anything without losing damn near a quarter-century of work.
I really hate to sign binding legal documents without understanding what I am agreeing to... likewise I really hate to use software I don't know exactly what its doing... especially if that software in question already has a history of being, as the article related to, a "cheating" lover who carries on trysts on the side. Rich men can afford that kind of thing, but frankly money is just too hard for me to come by to keep paying over and over again for me to just hold position.
Long Live DOS!
I could not bear to see such a magnificient collection of exotically machined parts going off to the landfill, so I would snare that printer, copy machine, computer, whatever, and cart it home to take apart.
But the experience? Pure labor. Extremely time consuming. But then, in return, I get to see exactly how the thing worked, and often gain great insights on why it failed, which obviously lead to its decommissioning.
I feel its given me one helluva education of practical machine design, as I have many working designs ( err... "partially working") in my repertoire to call on when I need something similar. If they had failed, I know why and how to sidestep around that in my design.
I figure I must have over a million dollars worth of my time invested in my education via "tinkering"... but then I would rather tinker than watch TV any day of the week.
It seems when electrification was first coming to the cities, they used DC. So everyone went out and bought motors. Then the power companies started switching to AC, and it fouled a lot of people up who had bought DC technology. Of course, the knowledgeable ones would build power converters, but without the internet and rapid means of disseminating information, this knowledge was in little pockets here and there.
Yes, a lot of DC motors will run on AC, but you now need to take into account things like inductive reactance and adjust things accordingly.
I am not familiar with the 32 volt DC, but I could sure see where it could exist in localized areas. Back in those days, the standards for power seemed just about as nebulous as today's standards for file formats.
I sure miss my Grandpa. He had more "toys" on that farm... I ended up growing up in the city, and my dad signed papers and told other people to do the neat stuff. Yeh, he got paid more to tell other people to do things, but I feel I really missed out a lot on the pure therapeutic value of doing things. Dad never quite understood the fascination I had with building things... and could not talk with me of such things - so he would spend his weekends with his buddies on the fishing boats.
He was one of those types who liked everything neat and tidy - like goods on shelves in a store. That is - unused. He lived in a suit and tie world where others ministered to their support infrastructures.
And me, I am happiest in a nest of stuff, in use, trying things out. Experimenting to find out how something *really* works.
Oh God, don't cha wish we could bring these old guys back just to talk to them? I think I would get a big kick from talking to your Grandpa.
I get so aggravated talking to most of my contempories... as all they seem to be interested in is meaningless drivel like fashion trends.
My ancestors grew up in a completely different environment where substance was far more important. It seems they had a far more acute sense for discriminating wheat from chaff.
We had those kind down at grandpa's farm.
And yes, the windmill. It was an old tractor differential with one of the "tire" ends welded shut, as well as the "tail" assembly fin welded there as to always keep the other end facing into the wind. The drive shaft was oriented vertically, transmitting its torque down to a crank that operated this kind of pump. The faster the wind blew, the more furiously the pump cranked.
The whole differential assembly was only supported by the drive shaft so the entire assembly would face whatever way the wind was blowing. The torque actually put on the "drive shaft" ( long piece of irrigation pipe, actually ) was miniscule compared to the force of the wind against the tail assembly, which was bent just a bit to compensate for this torque.
Grandpa designed it and welded it together. All out of farm scrap. Well, I think he had the fan assembly prefab, but the rest of the whole shebang was homegrown.
It damn near always had a small creek of water overflowing from the trough Grandpa had put there to hold the water for his horses and cows, and any other living creature stopping by for a drink.
Grandpa didn't have an engineering degree, yet to me he was a true engineer. I thought my Grandpa could build anything. Still do.
Typically, you would feed live video into this, and it may integrate several hundred, maybe thousands of frames of incredibly obscure images, and return stills of very high resolution.
It was used by police detective units to analyze poor video files recorded by instore video recorders that saw a crime.
It looks like this may be useful for this kind of thing, as the DSP can be programmed to kill off the haze and just leave what comes through now and then as the fog particles drift in and out of the lines of sight.
Has anybody else seen this? And have any links?
You had breached the subject of investing in something of ephemeral benefit from a broadcasters point of view.
I countered your insight with my point of view as a possible adopter of the new technology, and indicated my fears.
No slight of your insight intended.
Personally, I wish they would let broadcast TV stay the way it is. Low res. Simple. Public. By its very nature, signals are "good enough", but that's all. Let these remain public.
And, like you, I agree - let the satellites and cable providers hawk HDTV, and as far as I am concerned, since they aren't using the "public" airspace, they can do whatever they want with their signal... they can encumber it with as much DRM as Joe Public will pay for. And change the formats every year if they like. It lets the rich generate lots of jobs for equipment constructors and garbagemen, albeit it comes as a terrible expense in manufacturing pollution and landfill capacities.
But, like any business likes, I like alternatives so I can't be shanghaied into accepting whatever one vendor offers.
I still use rabbit ears. For the very limited amount of time I choose to watch TV, its adequate.
- rant on -
As far as I am concerned, cable TV is way, way, way too expensive when you consider how little I watch TV, or even go to the movies as far as that goes. Commercials annoy the dickens out of me. The last time I went to a theater to watch a movie and got shanghaied for 30 minutes of my time to watch ads - on a screen I paid good money to see a movie on - I was so miffed it has left a good sour spot in me for theaters.
By golly, I paid for a movie. Not ads.
Wanna reach me with an ad? Use a trade magazine and educate me on why your product is better and how I can use it. I actually study ads if they are relevant to my interests, but being forced to sit through diaper and hairspray commercials or teasers for movies outside my genres of interest are 100% boring.
-rant off -
Its still Public Property.
I don't have a "right" to sell off an Air Force Base. Its not mine to sell. It belongs to the Government, not me.
I have a hard time thinking they have a "right" to sell spectrum like this without a vote of the people.
If a majority of the people say they want to give up their older systems and adopt this new DRM-laden crap, then I have to accept it. But to have someone just force it from me, I feel as if I have been mugged.
By Congress.
My TV (RCA XL-100 model CTC-64) still runs fine. Its almost 30 years old. Yet its common for me to discover that anything I have digital won't be compatible with the new stuff in about three years.
I have no intention of going digital until I am assured its safe to invest in something that will last. If you are trying to tell me that I should go digital because thats what they are pushing, you might as well try to sell me on building my house on untreated wood foundations in a termite laden area.
I know how much trouble it is to build things, and once I lay a foundation, I intend it to last. My personal paradigm is to build things to last damn near forever - because the cost of materials is dwarfed by the cost of labor.
The old maxim - "If you don't have enough time to do it right, then you must make enough time to do it over" has always held true for me.
And I haven't seen the government doing near as much for my "rights" as they are doing for those who are using law as an extortionary force to coerce funding from me.
Just something about unexpectedly hitting a long "frozen puddle" in the road whose surface has just begun to melt will leave you with a thrill that you will remember for a lifetime.
Believe me.
Whether or not they can use the actual knowledge of the people who made up that company is yet to be seen.
It has just been in my experience that often when a larger company takes over a smaller one, often management egos and power interfere with creativity and the first ones to leave are the creative genius that made the company mean something in the first place.
In my career, I have seen this happen dozens of times. It happened at two places I personally worked. When the tie-guys took over, there was no way we could continue functioning at the level we once were, and the only amicable settlement was to give up and walk away.
Its gonna be interesting just to watch this one as "hacker" culture collides with "business marketing" culture.
Norton was just as bad.
Lots of pretty animated graphics to keep me entertained while the minutes go by - while I am chomping on the bit because I have work to do.
I have had my best luck with Grisoft AVP products so far. They have the free evaluation version here .
You know, I am so happy I kept all my DOS based DSP analysis, schematic-capture, circuit simulator, and PCB layout programs - as I do most of my work there, and have no worry about one day having some stupid marketing attempt ruin all my data files or access to them. Since the libraries on the older ones are user-modifiable and the stuff was all written in C/C++, if the program has anything I need to change, well, no big deal.
Yeh, I know, I wouldn't be able to get away with this in a large company.
I am not too worried as long as it will display on a CRT and require speakers for audio output.
Give me physical access to the CRT cathodes and the deflection yoke, and I will give you pristine analog RGB+sync.
I am not that worried about not having an exact pristine copy... having something pretty good, but clean and in an archivable standard format, is way more important to me than a 0.1% requantization error the transcription would introduce. Besides I will probably compress it anyhow to DivX, which should just about cover any visible errors to my requantization anyway...
Bring it on. I only have to play the crappy version once to transcribe it to a standard format.
This whole charade is just something for rich people to shake hands and have dinners over anyway. I think this whole effort will do way more harm to the recording industry than good, as it gives the masses even more incentive to use standard formats which are editable where objectional time-consuming content can be removed.
There is a "tipping point", and when the common Joe has had enough, its gonna be a really tough sell to convince Joe that a commercial-ridden movie that won't honor his requests to bypass unwanted content is worth paying for when clean files of the same movie, albeit illegal, exist.
Trying to force people to use a irritant-ridden commercial format in lieu of open standards formats may become like coaxing people off a freeway to spend hours in a stoplight-congested downtown area.
Already, there a helluva lot of us that actually hold .wma compatibility as a negative value when considering music players. Like, what in the hell is .wma good for? Chances are it won't work. To me, even having .wma compatibility not only is useless clutter, I consider it a major security risk, as only God and some selected insiders know what kinda of things can be slipped in a .wma file to alter or track the operations of my machine.
When I consider something I want to have, it better be something I don't have to bicker with. I literally hate it when I make a poor selection of tools, and I spend more time tinkering with a tool to get it to work than I receive from the use of that tool. I consider these new tools just about as useful as a screwdriver whose shaft slips in the handle. This kinda stuff is best sold to people who care about what it *looks like*, not what it *does*. You know, businesspeople - the kind who judge a guy by his suit and haircut, not his values or knowledge. Many businesses are still flooded with money and have yet to form much of a concern base for the usability of products offered to them.
We are facing a re-do of "prohibition", that had to be repealed. They are trying to control people from doing something in private by law. I think its gonna have just about as much success as our pot laws have had. Its gonna be very expensive to enforce this law, and a helluva lot of otherwise productive citizenry are gonna have to be sacrificed. The powers that be are gonna have to see the "big picture" and make the decision how much of our workforce can be sacrificed to maintain these laws.
Economics did Russia in. I think its gonna do the USA in too. Since we have outsourced a lot of our jobs, the only way we are surviving for the time being is lowering the interest rates so as to flood the market with "dollars".. even though anybody saving to buy a house sees how inflationary this tactic is. But, for a limited time, this tactic will keep dollars circulating as a borrowed dollar spends the same as an earned one. But as any debtor knows, debts come due. As a country, I see the behaviour of my government very similar to a young naive teen when given a credit card with no experience of having to pay it back.
My bets are when the New World Order gets going, we all better learn Mandarin.
The brewery is in quadnine, but I looked all over for moe's and no luck.
I ask if the store has a policy that if the CD does not play in my machine, can I return it for my money back?
I make a point of asking while holding the CD and a couple of twenties.
Of course, they always say that they can only give me another crippled CD.
At that point, I put the CD back in the rack, go for my wallet and reinsert the twenties, muttering that at least I know the stuff I get off the net will at least play in my machine, and its just not worth the risk to me to play Russian Roulette. I often remark that if I paid in money that the bank refused, I would be held in prison for passing bogus currency.
My take is they are playing off the idea that we are being conditioned by the computer industry to accept the fact that within two or three years after purchase, our technology is obsolete and needs to be replaced.
How long will it be before even if you have your nice bigscreen TV, it will only show "This movie requires a reciever using CryptoSecure V12.34 or better to view." or something down those lines.
As if our landfills weren't already overflowing with perfectly usable stuff rendered obsolete only by design.
This "enforced consumption" kinda makes me sick. Personally, I will continue to do whatever I can to hang onto what I have.
And if that means I have to translate through whatever means necessary to use it, so be it.
To me, this scheme reeks of appliance manufacturers colluding with the power company so as to incessantly change line voltage and frequency so as to keep the market for new appliances roiled....
No joke.
Just do a google search on +"rendezvous with rama" +"morgan freeman" and get a whole mess of links.
With the geometries constantly getting smaller, yet the physics of diffusion being the same, and the power consumption/heat dissipation rising at what seems to be a neverending inexorable rate...
Gee, guys, how long do we expect a processor to be in service these days before the inexorable laws of diffusion render the processor inoperable?
Worse yet, I suspect its degradation is probably a statistical thing: that the processor will succumb to bit-pattern sensitivities long before it plain quits, with the resultant apparent random crashes making it appear to be a software problem.
I knew when I was designing with the old 386SX machines, that I could reasonably expect the processor to run for 100 years easily. They were so confident of the processor reliability that it was customary to not use a socket for the processor, as the socket itself had a far higher rate of failure ( corrosion ) than the processor.
Just two weeks ago, a similar thing happened to a young teenage girl two houses down from me.
This is a little offtopic, but the principle is the same. Its what happens when you have something others can take.
Her parents had to leave on business. It was her first time. Alone. She was frightened and lonely. She called *one* friend to come over and share the evening with her.
No sooner than her friend got there, could she call a friend over too?
Out comes the cellphone. Boop!Beep!Beepety-Boop! - Yakyakyak. Presto! Friend of a friend shows up. They have cellphones too.
Soon the air is ripe with Boop-beepety-boop-yakyakyak. Chain reaction. Friends of friends of friends call yet more friends. Exponential unchecked population growth.
For her, it was out of control. She couldn't leave the house, and had no idea what to do. She tried to evict them, but nobody would listen to her. Her house was now filled with people she did not know. First the neighbors thought there might be a problem, but when they saw so many people over there, they went back to bed just thinking she was just being socially noisy.
I heard it too, but generally I am quite tolerant of someone having a "social" provided they don't make a habit of it, or cause me problems.
It had gone past being noisy. People had not only brought their own liquor, but had also broken into and decimated anything of value in the house. It seemed no-one knew whose house it was, so it didn't matter anymore. Besides they were all drunk anyhow. The scene was reminiscent of the "old-West bar brawl".
If it wasn't for some frustrated and sleepy neighbors calling the cops on this noisy party, it would have been only her parents arriving to break up the mess.
As it turned out, the cops broke it up about 4AM, and the parents re-arrived about noon to a total shambles. All of us neighbors got a free tour of the demolition zone.
Its quite a condundrum. Nobody knows who did what. So its hard to go after any particular individual for damages. And the insurance company is reticent to call it a covered event because the calamity was "invited".
Just a word to the wise. Just because the law recognizes your property rights doesn't mean people will. If you have something like this - as much as you may hate to do this - even inviting one "friend" in could easily end in disaster.
My own recipe for survival is to have a really good knowledge of how things work. So no matter what goes wrong, I can fix it. Even if I can not fight worth a damn, or have much financial strength, I feel if I can make myself valuable to those that do, it will be in their best interests that I survive, just as it is in my best interests my tools survive.
Its times like this I feel I should have studied medicine instead of engineering. Everyone wants to make sure no-one harms their doctor!
Having something just means you have the onus to defend it. Or its quickly not yours anymore.
My greatest feeling of security is knowing that no matter what happens outside my realm, I know enough how to maintain my realm to keep the pumps running and the lights on. No matter what.
Being able to continue to operate autonomously in the event of separation from any central "authority" is my main thrust for running either older or open source stuff, as in the event of any disruptive activity, access to any central rights licensing/permission granting authority is apt to be denied.
Or worse yet, if the rights licensing/permission granting authority has been destroyed, I have no intention of having my data files suddenly rendered inaccessible and useless as those old Circuit City Divx disks suddenly became when they pulled their licensing server.