I accidentally posted anonymously, so here's what I wrote, and what I want to add to:
Well, if you want to tinker with 1970s-era home computer technology, the parts for doing so still exist. One of my builds had a Zilog Z80 processor, 32kB of SRAM and EEPROM memory (no interface circuitry required), plus a 4 MHz clock generator. For output, I had 2 latch DACs and a latch gate, hooked up to the X, Y and Z (intensity) inputs of an oscilloscope. Plotting vectors on the screen every 20 or 40 ms only takes up a few processor cycles. Input from a PS/2 keyboard runs at such a low baud rate that you don't really need to worry about having a chip for it either. Use a simple multiplexer and a couple of logical gate chips to set up interrupt triggers for the screen refresh and keyboard input. I believe the PS/2 has a clock pin, so just trigger when that's high or low. You could hook up your EEPROM so the processor can flash it, for some primitive storage, or you could hook up an old tape deck to some simple analog circuitry, for Commodore 64-style storage. IBM PC floppy drives also use a very simple interface, but you'd need more logical circuitry. You could toss on another Z80 as an I/O co-processor and run them in lockstep with the 4 MHz clock. The possibilities for fun tinkering are endless.
I must admit that I've had trouble finding an easy, inexpensive way of prototyping. Sending PCB layouts to fabs is a little bit expensive, especially if you make a mistake. I've used veroboard in the past, but all the soldering for bus lines can take its toll on the copper tracks, especially if you make mistakes, and you often end up having to throw out a board after a while. I've been tempted to try wirewrapping tools lately, because of how easy it is to fix a mispatched connection. I have also experimented with laser printer etching, but it's time consuming, and the chemical brew you need for it is rather nasty. The closest thing I have gotten to "real time development" in the way you would do with software is SPICE, specifically LTspice in my case, but you have to watch out for some things. In the simulation, conductors are ideal and have no time delay, resistance or capacitance, and components behave perfectly, with no thermal noise, so you risk doing an entire design in SPICE, and then discovering later that you actually needed those seemingly optional decoupling capacitors for the circuit to remain stable. This becomes especially apparent as you get closer to the gigahertz range (and is part of the reason why circuits have kept shrinking over the years, as this reduces those side effects).
The funny bit is that a pair of near field monitors can be had for 400 dollars or less these days and with built-in matched amplifiers for each element in the speaker cabinet, their accuracy often beats more expensive Hifi systems.
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
Vista slowed down my wife's computer tremendously. She kept getting crashes in Second Life, the frame rate was low and the whole system just ran sluggishly. Disabling Aero didn't do much good. What idiot at Microsoft managed to consume 200+ MB RAM for a visual presentation layer anyway?
I installed Windows XP for her and she's never been happier. I too thought there was a lot of "FUD in the anti-Vista hype" but I can see why people are complaining now.
I'm holding out for Windows 7 or a sudden outbreak of companies porting all my favorite software to Linux.
As a YouTube user from Norway, I now feel violated by a court decision made in the United States. I'd be pleasantly surprised if non-US IPs are excluded from this handover. Those bloodsucking leeches should be forced to sue the whole world (and have their case thrown out of the courts) before they could even touch this information.
It just seems more fair. Cellphones in Norway typically have reserved prefixes that most people will recognize. Thus you're very aware of it when you call a cellphone and it also has the advantage that you always know that you can send someone an SMS. Different operators relay these among themselves and since Europe is standardized on GSM there's no issues like in America where people on different operators sometimes can't even message each other. If you really need to reach a person and their number is obviously a cellphone, then by calling that person, you've accepted the cost of doing so. It's very convenient in situations where there's a teenager with an empty prepaid account (happens very often). Seems less fair in America, when someone is pestering you with SMSes, and you actually pay for receiving them. Or a phone salesman calls you (some of us answer calls from obscured caller IDs). Just seems pretty fair. You pay extra for calling abroad, even from America, so why is it not fair to pay the extra cash for routing the call through wireless equipment?
In the Scandinavian languages, we use the -phil suffix for sexual orientations:
heterofil - think "heterophile" - heterosexual
homofil - think "homophile" - homosexual
bifil - think "biphile" - bisexual
pedofil - pedophile
nekrofil - necrophile
And so on.
Direct your criticism at the way call centers are run in general, not Microsoft. I have worked in several of them and we always get the occasional customer like you, who has a call history of 40 calls going back to August of last year. The problem is that nobody is held accountable. If an agent in a call center makes a mistake, it becomes the next agent's problem. Customers don't get routed to the same agent every time. Perhaps they should, but being a call center employee is already stressful enough without customers being able to call back and pester you repeatedly.
You get a few weeks of training to learn what you need to know and they let you on the phone even if you don't pass the test. Then your training starts to get corrupted from misconceptions and rumors that spread among the employees. "Wait, was that 24 hours minimum or 24 hours maximum? Eh, I don't have time to ask. I'll tell him 24 hours and to call back if nothing happens. It won't be me answering the phone anyway." Sometimes you process 30 customers before you learn that you processed them the wrong way, and you have no way of tracing them back, and certainly no time for it because you have a minimum number of calls to accept per day, and a maximum number of minutes to spend with each customer.
And don't be sure it's a manager you're speaking to if you asked for one. Sometimes agents are instructed to simply transfer the call to another agent. Be especially wary if you want to speak to a manager, and the agent says something like "Allright, I'll transfer you to someone." The person you'll be speaking to is at best the person responsible for the current shift of workers. Call centers usually operate pretty independently of the rest of the company. Fat chance in hell that you ever get to speak to an engineer.
You try to follow up every customer and spend time with them, but any such impulse quickly gets squashed when the manager calls you in for a meeting and your "stats" are bad. You quickly learn to stop giving a fuck and just get the call over with as quickly as possible. Or, so do most people. I just quit working in call centers. Can't stand'em.
How many of you guys can't hear a sine wave sweep above 16-17 kHz even at high volumes? I'm 24 years old and that seems to be my limit. Isn't 20 kHz more of a theoretical limit of human hearing than what an average adult can pick up?
And why is wave phase never brought up in discussions on the Nyquist theorem?
Suppose we sample at 48kHz, we are Nyquist perfect, and our signal is a 0dB 24 kHz sine wave phase shifted 90 degrees relative to the sampling clock. Assuming IEEE Float format, our raw sample values would then look like:
1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1, etc.
Converted back to an analog signal, this would accurately represent the original signal. This is the ideal case that everyone seems to assume blindly. Let's try a less ideal case. We shift our sine wave 90 degrees further:
0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, etc.
What is this? Where did our signal go? A Nyquist sine wave shifted 180 (and in fact 0) degrees relative to the sampling clock is a sine wave sampled only at its zero-crossing points. How does the Nyquist theorem predict this? At frequencies right below the Nyquist frequency we still have the problem, but now even worse, in the form of a beat frequency. If our signal was a 23.99kHz, it would get sampled roughly as a 24 kHz signal with a beat frequency of 10 Hz.
I've always wondered why we don't hear horrible distortion as far down as 14 kHz or further when listening to a CD because of this phenomenon. It could be called aliasing but I'm not sure, since this happens even with proper low-pass filtering applied.
"Pepper" alone always refers to black or white pepper. "Paprika" usually refers to the fruit but can refer to the seasoning. "Chili" should be pretty unambiguous. The English language way is confusing to me, and it seems that it actually confuses native English speakers too. Maybe you English speaking folks ought to change those names...
If I understand you right, my thesis on that is: posts that are further down are less likely to be read. It gets you more exposure to hook onto an existing thread near the top of the page.
Slashdot Mirror
I accidentally posted anonymously, so here's what I wrote, and what I want to add to:
Well, if you want to tinker with 1970s-era home computer technology, the parts for doing so still exist. One of my builds had a Zilog Z80 processor, 32kB of SRAM and EEPROM memory (no interface circuitry required), plus a 4 MHz clock generator. For output, I had 2 latch DACs and a latch gate, hooked up to the X, Y and Z (intensity) inputs of an oscilloscope. Plotting vectors on the screen every 20 or 40 ms only takes up a few processor cycles. Input from a PS/2 keyboard runs at such a low baud rate that you don't really need to worry about having a chip for it either. Use a simple multiplexer and a couple of logical gate chips to set up interrupt triggers for the screen refresh and keyboard input. I believe the PS/2 has a clock pin, so just trigger when that's high or low. You could hook up your EEPROM so the processor can flash it, for some primitive storage, or you could hook up an old tape deck to some simple analog circuitry, for Commodore 64-style storage. IBM PC floppy drives also use a very simple interface, but you'd need more logical circuitry. You could toss on another Z80 as an I/O co-processor and run them in lockstep with the 4 MHz clock. The possibilities for fun tinkering are endless.
I must admit that I've had trouble finding an easy, inexpensive way of prototyping. Sending PCB layouts to fabs is a little bit expensive, especially if you make a mistake. I've used veroboard in the past, but all the soldering for bus lines can take its toll on the copper tracks, especially if you make mistakes, and you often end up having to throw out a board after a while. I've been tempted to try wirewrapping tools lately, because of how easy it is to fix a mispatched connection. I have also experimented with laser printer etching, but it's time consuming, and the chemical brew you need for it is rather nasty. The closest thing I have gotten to "real time development" in the way you would do with software is SPICE, specifically LTspice in my case, but you have to watch out for some things. In the simulation, conductors are ideal and have no time delay, resistance or capacitance, and components behave perfectly, with no thermal noise, so you risk doing an entire design in SPICE, and then discovering later that you actually needed those seemingly optional decoupling capacitors for the circuit to remain stable. This becomes especially apparent as you get closer to the gigahertz range (and is part of the reason why circuits have kept shrinking over the years, as this reduces those side effects).
The funny bit is that a pair of near field monitors can be had for 400 dollars or less these days and with built-in matched amplifiers for each element in the speaker cabinet, their accuracy often beats more expensive Hifi systems.
This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.
Woosh straight over my head the first time. I get it now. Thanks!
In Norwegian, "stallmann" means stable man, stable as in the place you keep your horses.
The answer is ... the currency sign?
(on Norwegian keyboards it's Alt Gr+4 you insensitive clod)
Whooosh...
Vista slowed down my wife's computer tremendously. She kept getting crashes in Second Life, the frame rate was low and the whole system just ran sluggishly. Disabling Aero didn't do much good. What idiot at Microsoft managed to consume 200+ MB RAM for a visual presentation layer anyway?
I installed Windows XP for her and she's never been happier. I too thought there was a lot of "FUD in the anti-Vista hype" but I can see why people are complaining now.
I'm holding out for Windows 7 or a sudden outbreak of companies porting all my favorite software to Linux.
Deserves 5: Insightful
As a YouTube user from Norway, I now feel violated by a court decision made in the United States. I'd be pleasantly surprised if non-US IPs are excluded from this handover. Those bloodsucking leeches should be forced to sue the whole world (and have their case thrown out of the courts) before they could even touch this information.
You do. Would you buy something you never saw an ad for? We instinctively trust advertised brands.
It just seems more fair. Cellphones in Norway typically have reserved prefixes that most people will recognize. Thus you're very aware of it when you call a cellphone and it also has the advantage that you always know that you can send someone an SMS. Different operators relay these among themselves and since Europe is standardized on GSM there's no issues like in America where people on different operators sometimes can't even message each other. If you really need to reach a person and their number is obviously a cellphone, then by calling that person, you've accepted the cost of doing so. It's very convenient in situations where there's a teenager with an empty prepaid account (happens very often). Seems less fair in America, when someone is pestering you with SMSes, and you actually pay for receiving them. Or a phone salesman calls you (some of us answer calls from obscured caller IDs). Just seems pretty fair. You pay extra for calling abroad, even from America, so why is it not fair to pay the extra cash for routing the call through wireless equipment?
I VNCed my American girlfriend's computer in America. The link works from there. WTF?
It still isn't working for me. Maybe they blocked non-US IPs?
Uh, folks. The PDF is gone. Mirror?
In the Scandinavian languages, we use the -phil suffix for sexual orientations: heterofil - think "heterophile" - heterosexual homofil - think "homophile" - homosexual bifil - think "biphile" - bisexual pedofil - pedophile nekrofil - necrophile And so on.
Mod parent up, Interesting.
Will this help us penetrate the Bozone layer?
Direct your criticism at the way call centers are run in general, not Microsoft. I have worked in several of them and we always get the occasional customer like you, who has a call history of 40 calls going back to August of last year. The problem is that nobody is held accountable. If an agent in a call center makes a mistake, it becomes the next agent's problem. Customers don't get routed to the same agent every time. Perhaps they should, but being a call center employee is already stressful enough without customers being able to call back and pester you repeatedly.
You get a few weeks of training to learn what you need to know and they let you on the phone even if you don't pass the test. Then your training starts to get corrupted from misconceptions and rumors that spread among the employees. "Wait, was that 24 hours minimum or 24 hours maximum? Eh, I don't have time to ask. I'll tell him 24 hours and to call back if nothing happens. It won't be me answering the phone anyway." Sometimes you process 30 customers before you learn that you processed them the wrong way, and you have no way of tracing them back, and certainly no time for it because you have a minimum number of calls to accept per day, and a maximum number of minutes to spend with each customer.
And don't be sure it's a manager you're speaking to if you asked for one. Sometimes agents are instructed to simply transfer the call to another agent. Be especially wary if you want to speak to a manager, and the agent says something like "Allright, I'll transfer you to someone." The person you'll be speaking to is at best the person responsible for the current shift of workers. Call centers usually operate pretty independently of the rest of the company. Fat chance in hell that you ever get to speak to an engineer.
You try to follow up every customer and spend time with them, but any such impulse quickly gets squashed when the manager calls you in for a meeting and your "stats" are bad. You quickly learn to stop giving a fuck and just get the call over with as quickly as possible. Or, so do most people. I just quit working in call centers. Can't stand'em.
I go with 'they', 'them' and 'their'.
99% of the times an American says "the American way", it's the same damned way things are done in the rest of the world too.
How many of you guys can't hear a sine wave sweep above 16-17 kHz even at high volumes? I'm 24 years old and that seems to be my limit. Isn't 20 kHz more of a theoretical limit of human hearing than what an average adult can pick up?
And why is wave phase never brought up in discussions on the Nyquist theorem?
Suppose we sample at 48kHz, we are Nyquist perfect, and our signal is a 0dB 24 kHz sine wave phase shifted 90 degrees relative to the sampling clock. Assuming IEEE Float format, our raw sample values would then look like:
1, -1, 1, -1, 1, -1, etc.
Converted back to an analog signal, this would accurately represent the original signal. This is the ideal case that everyone seems to assume blindly. Let's try a less ideal case. We shift our sine wave 90 degrees further:
0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, etc.
What is this? Where did our signal go? A Nyquist sine wave shifted 180 (and in fact 0) degrees relative to the sampling clock is a sine wave sampled only at its zero-crossing points. How does the Nyquist theorem predict this? At frequencies right below the Nyquist frequency we still have the problem, but now even worse, in the form of a beat frequency. If our signal was a 23.99kHz, it would get sampled roughly as a 24 kHz signal with a beat frequency of 10 Hz.
I've always wondered why we don't hear horrible distortion as far down as 14 kHz or further when listening to a CD because of this phenomenon. It could be called aliasing but I'm not sure, since this happens even with proper low-pass filtering applied.
In my home country of Norway we use:
pepper - plain table pepper
paprika - mild red/green pepper
chili/chilipepper - strong red/green pepper
"Pepper" alone always refers to black or white pepper. "Paprika" usually refers to the fruit but can refer to the seasoning. "Chili" should be pretty unambiguous. The English language way is confusing to me, and it seems that it actually confuses native English speakers too. Maybe you English speaking folks ought to change those names...
If I understand you right, my thesis on that is: posts that are further down are less likely to be read. It gets you more exposure to hook onto an existing thread near the top of the page.
Actually, I didn't get that it was a joke either.