I really wish cable/satellite would adopt "Chinese Menu" pricing for their mid-tier, and allow people who don't care about Disney*.* or ESPN*.* to pay the same price, but substitute HBO and/or Showtime instead (ie, pick two out of four... Disney, ESPN, HBO, Showtime... 3 for $10 more, all 4 for $18 more). I believe it would mostly be revenue-neutral for the cable/satellite companies, and would go a long way towards softening the sting of my monthly cable bill by letting me substitute two channels I don't currently pay for, but would LOVE to get instead of two expensive blocks of channels I never watch.
The problem with many of OCZ's drives (like the Vertex2 and Agility2) was that traditional RAID wouldn't save you because whatever killed drive #1 could (and often did) kill one or more of your OTHER drives, too.
The fault lies 100% with OCZ. They omitted the supercapacitor that Sandforce's engineers intended to keep it powered up if it unexpectedly lost power during a write, and they compiled their drivers to NOT use the multi-step write strategy that a drive without backup power needed in order to write safely and recover gracefully from power loss (because multi-step writes killed performance).
I don't know about him, but in my case, I happen to like having 5GHz 802.11ac with beamforming. The last time I checked, every open firmware in existence for the AC68U has broken support for 5GHz 802.11ac and its advanced radio features.
It's not so much "tough" as "the goddamn solder paste has to be kept refrigerated until you're ready to use it, then goes bad within a few days of warming it up to room temperature". Throwing away mostly-full syringe after syringe of solder paste after you used maybe 0.5mL of it to solder one chip gets expensive after a while.
LOL, if you think Digikey and Mouser are expensive, check the prices (including shipping) from Newark or Farnell. Jesus God naked on a Harley, Newark absolutely *rapes* you on the shipping charges. I can't even count the number of times I *almost* bought something from Newark, then called it off once they revealed their criminally-expensive shipping charges at checkout time.
DigiKey's shipping is expensive, but they have a huge advantage -- if you absolutely MUST have something tomorrow, their cutoff time for next-day delivery is something like 10pm most nights, and they'll happily ship via USPS Overnight so you can order on Friday night or Saturday and get your part by Saturday or Sunday.
Mouser's shipping isn't *cheap*, but their rates for Priority Mail are relatively reasonable & they don't have a minimum order amount like DigiKey does.
I still have occasional fantasies about Radio Shack closing MOST of their retail stores, but keeping at least one store per metro area open that's well-stocked with just about any component hobbyists might want to buy (say, everything that SparkFun and AdaFruit sells). Back in the 80s (when Radio Shack's parts department occupied the rear third of the store), people paid INSANE prices for components because you could walk in, grab what you needed, and go home with it in hand.
Ah... but were they able to do it with a chip that was available in DIP form, with useful amounts of flash & ram, and relatively relaxed power & I/O design on a breadboard?
We've gotten spoiled by $7 Arduino knock-off boards from China, and a lot of us have forgotten that just 5 years ago, Atmel literally couldn't make the ATmega644p fast enough for stores like DigiKey and Mouser to reliably keep it in stock. For those who weren't into AVR microcontrollers a few years ago, the 644p was Atmel's beefiest AVR that you could buy in DIP form. The next step up from a 644p was a 1280 or 2560 (the 2560 is used in the reference design for Android ADK), and they easily cost $30-50 (~$30 for a board that was literally just a bare chip soldered to a breakout board, $50 for one that had most of the same hardware that's the norm for an Arduino board). The 1280 and 2560 themselves were fairly cheap... I think the 1280 was around $10-12, and the 2560 was around $15. But the act of having someone solder it to a board to make it something YOU could deal with (unless you had a hot air rework station & didn't object to buying solder paste that had to be kept refrigerated, warmed to room temperature over the span of a day, and went bad a few days later when the flux separated out) basically doubled or trebled the purchase price.
Back in the same era, it was almost UNHEARD of for people to buy breakout boards for Atmel's smaller chips, like the Mega168 (unless they were rank n00bs buying their first one), because a DIP Mega168 cost around $4, but a Mega168 soldered to a dev board with Arduino-like hardware ran about $25.Back then, the hardest problem every N00b had to solve was "how the fuck do I connect the 3x2 or 5x2 header from the AVRISP to MISO/MOSI/SCK/~RST/Vcc/Gnd on the breadboard (I used to endlessly wish somebody would make a breadboard whose pins from one side were extended by one into the middle , so you could stick a 2xN header straight into the breadboard and wire away (for some inane reason, breakout boards to convert 3x2 and 5x2 headers to breadboard-spacing were always outrageously expensive, and stayed that way until about the eBay floodgates from China opened about 2 years ago).
As a thought experiment, how much linear resolution/sample bandwidth would you need to capture a VHS videotape "straight through" in a way that allowed you to digitally-reconstruct the path of virtual rotating heads AFTER the raw linear capture was completed? Say, if you had the means to somehow fabricate a custom high-density matrix of read heads that massively oversampled the tape as it followed a linear path... assuming such a beast doesn't already exist for something like DLT?
Why? Because all present restoration technologies that involve rotating heads produce results that are very much dependent upon the player's ability to iaccurately track the helical paths at capture time. What I'm proposing is capturing a linear 2-D signal map of the tape that's so precise, you could analyze it & synthesize an optimal virtual path & instantaneous velocity to extract higher-order data in non-realtime that's not even visible when played back via normal means.
The biggest problem with most VHS-to-DVD transfers is inadequate sample resolution or encoding bitrate. VHS is low-res... but it's also noisy, and noise compresses badly. Encoding captured VHS video in a way that preserves it EXACTLY the way it was read from the VCR (preserving higher-order information like chroma shift and luminance noise) so it can be further restored later requires a MINIMUM 704x480 resolution and 6-8mbps bitrate. In English, that basically means you'll get about an hour of high-quality captured video from VHS on a single-layer DVD. Two hours might be do-able at good quality if you're digitizing 24fps content, but a straight VHS capture encoded to 4mbps or lower is probably going to look worse than the original from the tape did.
A good way to think about it is to envision taking a photograph of an early-80s videogame's CRT display. The nominal resolution of the game might have only been something like 320x200 or 256x192, but other factors like the electron gun alignment, mask pitch, bleed, bloom, etc enter into the equation as well. If your goal is to just capture an approximation of the display, you could resample it down to its nominal resolution... but if your goal is to preserve every nuance of the video's appearance as it appeared on the CRT (so you can literally emulate things like CRT alignment bleed and color halos on a 2560x1440 LCD), your photograph of the CRT will have to be MUCH higher resolution than its nominal resolution.
The tapes you'll have the hardest time transferring with a new VCR are the ones made with a cheap VCR after ~1999 (after everyone had basically switched to DVD for watching movies, but VHS still existed as a nasty kludge for time-shifting prior to DVRs becoming affordable & common). Old tapes recorded with expensive VCRs generally play fine unless they were stored someplace humid. New tapes recorded with $99 VCRs might not be playable by anything besides the VCR that recorded them... and even THAT's questionable. 1980s tapes were built to last, and VCRs were precision devices built to exacting standards. Early-2000s tapes were designed to cost a dollar to manufacture & last for a year or two, and the VCRs were as mechanically shoddy as they could get without outstripping the capabilities of the DSP chip.
In audiocassette terms, last-gen VCRs & tapes had CATASTROPHIC problems with what would have been called "wow & flutter" on an audiotape. Basically, VHS depends upon having a precise match between the tape speed and head rotation speed, and the last-gen models were UNBELIEVABLY sloppy with it. Often, as belts aged, they'd lurch and slip.
Big tip: forget everything you've been told about the "real" resolution of VHS tapes. If your goal is to preserve them in digital form forever, without making them worse, capture at 720x480 & accept the fact that noise compresses badly, so you'll need a fairly high bitrate (6mbps BARE MINIMUM). And don't be too eager to throw away YUV color information -- keep it 4:2:2 unless you literally don't ever intend to try restoring it. Remember, most video-restoration tools depend upon exactly the kind of "higher-order" that aggressive compression throws away & mangles.
Most importantly, never forget that the only thing Nyquist guarantees is that a sample rate less than double the information rate is guaranteed to fail... it says NOTHING (directly) about the minimum sample rate that will actually preserve higher-order detail.
The really bad news: at the moment, there's no compression scheme that's mostly lossless (like lossless h.264 with x264) AND compliant enough with Blu-Ray standards to be directly playable by a random Blu-Ray player. So... don't get too hung up on near-line playability. Capture your minimally-compressed gold copy and carve it into (non-LTH BD-R) stone, then re-encode a DVD-playable copy (704x480 MPEG-2 6-8mbps, AC3 or MP3 audio, possibly with long GOPs and/or VBR if you know your player can handle them).
For those who've never heard of it, it's the phone everyone at XDA-developers.com has been having wet dreams about for months -- a top-shelf, best-of-breed Android phone that makes no hardware compromises & ships unlocked with Cyanogenmod. There have been officially "open" phones in the past, but they were always last year's hardware or lacked important features like microSD (when you reflash a lot, microSD makes your life several orders of magnitude easier & more convenient) and/or LTE.
The last time I checked, Oppo's plan for the Find 7 is to make it directly available in the US as a retail product with US warranty by June, but AFAIK if you're dying to get one now, the GSM international model is hardware-identical to what you'll be able to get from stores like Newegg, Amazon, and Tiger Direct. If 1700MHz AWS HSPA+ is important to you (ie, T-mo in a market that hasn't been refarmed yet), you might want to double-check support for AWS.
One caution... the mildly-rare model M13 with pointer stick (manufactured around 1995) has mouse buttons that are pretty fragile & become flaky after just a few years... and the printing on the black one with black keys rubbed off mine within a couple of years (a known issue with white printing on black keys, and the reason why the black ones are particularly rare). Also, the beige plastic insulation on the cable turned brittle and started disintegrating sometime around 2009 (purchased as new-old-stock sometime around 1999). For some reason, this didn't happen to the black keyboard's cable.
I know I could get the buttons fixed (I own two M13 keyboards... a beige one with white keys, and a black one with black keys), but the keyboards themselves DO seem to be having occasional issues now that they're approaching their 20th birthdays, and the original Trackpoint (I) is a little lacking in the resolution/sensitivity department... it was developed in an era where 1024x768 was a physically huge huge hi-res display, and it's kind of painful to depend upon as the only navigation device in a 3-monitor setup.
Russia isn't pulling out of ISS. They're in it for the long haul, and they haven't been shy about making that unambiguously known. When NASA announced a tentative schedule to deorbit the ISS at the end of its planned service life, Russia IMMEDIATELY said it would regard any attempt to deorbit the ISS as an act of war. The Russian modules were built (at higher cost) to be serviced and refurbished indefinitely in space, and they fully intend to keep it up there until they literally don't have the ability to keep it in orbit.
Russia's new plan is to launch additional modules to make its half of the ISS capable of existing on its own, but leave it connected to the rest of the ISS as long as NASA's side remains in space. They might reserve the right to close interior doors, have alcohol on board (if they don't already), and tell their American neighbors that there are rooms they aren't allowed to go into, but they recognize that even if the US and Russian sides were functionally independent, having them docked together profoundly improves the likelihood of both crews surviving a disaster.
If NASA were to officially decide to deorbit its half of the ISS on a specific date, I'd be shocked if the Russians DIDN'T politely (but firmly) inform the Americans on board a few days before the separation that they were going to be going home ahead of schedule & would NOT be deorbiting NASA's half as officially planned. There's no way in HELL Russia will voluntarily allow the American half to be deorbited if it has any meaningful value to them in space, even as scrap.
Of course the US would scream, and Washington would claim it was an act of war/piracy, but as long as the American crew members got home safely & smiling, I'm sure the Russians would negotiate the American side's purchase as scrap, and lease-back agreement that would allow the US to continue using it as long as it remained habitable.
Then, the presentation layer in that display manager could be swapped out as needed based on the form factor involved.
It's still mostly experimental at this point, but there's ALREADY an active effort to port KDE to Windows as an outright replacement for Windows' native UI -- http://windows.kde.org/
you're not creating a usable platform for any since you are constantly making compromises
Microsoft has a long, proud history of compromising the usability of their products for power users for the sake of accommodating casual users who've never read the manual and expect everything to work like Word... even when it turns an action you're going to do a LOT into 40 seconds of drilling down through menus and dialogs to do something a non-Microsoft application might be able to do with ctrl-shift-rightclick and a few keystrokes. More importantly, though, is that Microsoft has increasingly gotten into the habit of making the dumbed-down way of doing something the ONLY way to do it, instead of merely the default.
Microsoft SHOULD have taken MVC design to its next logical level, and built upon.net instead of throwing it all away in the blighted name of Metro... common model and controller code across all Windows platforms, with different views for desktop, tablet, and maybe mobile devices whose displays are too small to treat like a tablet. They could have compiled the code to CLR, then had the installer itself compile it to native code optimized for the local platform. But no... they just *had* to ruin a good thing, and try to ram touch down everybody's throats.
Instead of racing to smaller and lower-res touch displays, Microsoft should be encouraging bigger multiple-unit displays and high-DPI/high-rate gaming mice. If Microsoft REALLY wanted to do something positive, they'd partner with someone like Samsung to define an official form factor for Portrait-Landscape-Portrait displays with matched pixel density and alignment (up to now, the holy grail we've never really had... as far as I know, nobody has ever made displays explicitly matched for P-L-P use). We could have laptops with a main 2560x1440 display flanked by a pair of 1280x1440 displays that fold inward like window shutters (glass facing glass), then latch down over the keyboard, or desktop with 27-32" 2560x1440 or higher display flanked by displays of identical vertical height and pixel density, specifically manufactured to be in portrait orientation.
The second-to-last piece of the puzzle (commercial unavailability of PLP-matched panel sets) was finally solved a couple of years ago by DisplayPort (a 3-monitor assembly could incorporate a DisplayPort hub that connects to all 3 displays internally & presents a single DisplayPort interface to the outside world).
No, you've just gotten burned too many times by consumer goods that were value engineered to the absolute limits of low quality.
Give Arduino a try... specifically, the Arduino boards made by RuggedCircuits.com. They're way too expensive to use for final versions of things you're building, but they totally rock for building your development prototype. Genuine Arduino boards are generally high-quality too, but aren't quite as "idiot-proofed" as the Ruggeduino. I'd recommend against Arduino clones from China that cost less than what you'd have to pay USPS to mail it from New York to Miami -- at least, for your first few experiments -- just because THEIR quality really is no better than an average consumer electronics product from the same anonymous factories in China.
If you used to be into hardware, you'll feel right at home with Arduino. Imagine what it would have been like to develop software for a Commodore 64... if it ran at 8-20MHz, had 5v-tolerant 3.3v i/o, and modern development tools and Stackoverflow.com. That's basically Arduino. And when/if the Arduino environment ITSELF starts to feel limiting, you can graduate to AVR Studio.
Well... actually... it wasn't "desktop publishing" that drove print shops out of business... it was cheap, fast photocopying by stores like Kinko's. If anything, desktop publishing GENERATED lots of business business for small print shops by enabling them to make high-quality (or more cost-effective) prints for customers who did the layout themselves with Pagemaker, and enabled small print shops to offer layout & design as a profitable service to customers instead of having to settle for lame generic signs or outsource it to a service bureau for actual typesetting.
I can't personally speak for small town America, but in South Florida, we still have a very strong local printing industry, if only because there's so much local demand for glossy real estate magazines, tourist magazines, and nightclub handouts. The barriers to entry are more formidable than they were 20 years ago (a 4-color high-res digital printing press is now non-negotiable), but the companies we have now are doing quite well.
I forgot to add the "best" part about the circumstances under which the outages occurred -- the storm's worst part was Sunday afternoon, but Comcast & U-verse went down on Monday morning. Why? Because storm knocked out commercial power to their network centers on Sunday afternoon, and Monday morning is when they ran out of diesel for the generators. This seems to be the new normal with tropical storms.:-(
So if we take the opposite approach, we run Internet service as slow and rickety DSL (which is highly dependent on distance from the telco switch) over the POTS copper. Which would you really prefer?
VDSL2 over POTS copper, leased to a CLEC at rates that are open, published, and available to all on equal terms (ie, if AT&T or Verizon charges themselves $19/month for a dry copper pair, they're required by law to lease it to any CLEC who wants to use it instead for the same $19/month).
With the best VDSL2 available today, 100mbps over two pairs (one for uplink, one for downlink) up to about 2,000 feet is quite do-able... and those are 100mbps that AT&T and Verizon can't fuck with, and are my inalienable right to use as intensively as I want to communicate with my ISP's VDSL2 backplane.
This isn't about un-burdening AT&T and Verizon with obsolete legacy infrastructure. This is about eliminating one of the few remaining back channels that motivated individuals can use to do an end run around them to avoid their metering & caps.
If Verizon wants to deploy ONLY wireless in Mantoloking, fine... let them. But apply the same regulatory standards that applied to POTS to them. Require 10 days of backup power, like the central office had a gigantic array of lead acid batteries to provide them with. Force them to sell unbundled raw IP transit to any CLEC, with the same guaranteed and unmetered throughput that could be achieved via VDSL2, for the same price as unbundled dry copper.
The second part alone would probably stop them dead in their tracks, because the only way they COULD provide guaranteed hundred-megabit throughput (maybe pooled among 2-4 households, max) within the constraints of their spectrum licenses via LTE would be to lay new fiber to all the neighborhoods ANYWAY, and stick a microcell every 4 houses. And prohibit them from charging higher or new fees, so they can't pass off the costs on customers anyway.
If the up-front capital costs of deploying 14,000 fiber-networked picocells across Mantoloking to serve ~40,000 customers didn't stop Verizon in its tracks, the long-term maintenance costs of replacing 14,000 sets of backup batteries capable of supplying power for a week, plus the nontrivial number of picocells that would die due to lightning or ruptured Chinese electrolytic capacitors, *would*. Verizon barely has enough spectrum to feed any one tower site with 50mbps. If they had to potentially supply that much guaranteed sustained throughput to every single customer at the costs they now charge for a dry copper pair, their only option would be to settle for making literally the "last hundred feet" wireless and deploying a brand new fiber-networked nightmare of picocells serving 3-4 customers apiece.
For LESS than what it would cost them to purchase, deploy, and maintain an ungodly huge network with 14,000 fiber-connected neighborhood picocells, they could just skip the picocells and run fiber the last hundred feet to everyone's house. Actual fiber is now cheaper per linear foot than UTP copper wires, and a bundle of direct-burial cable with 8-16 fibers now costs less per linear foot than direct-burial cat5e.In contrast, if Verizon could deploy a remote picocell with fiber termination and enough battery backup power to run for a week without commercial power for less than $20,000, they'd be lucky. If they had to shoulder the cost of deploying all those picocells themselves as the cost of eliminating copper, they'd NEVER go through with it.
What REALLY needs to be done is another forced breakup of AT&T and Verizon to make them divest their ROW, wire, and fiber to a new company that's required by law to deal with them at arm's length, on equal terms with other wireless carriers, CLECs, and service providers. If Verizon and AT&T don't want to own wires anymore, fine... but make them sell them to someone who DOES, instead of allowing them to create artificial scarcity by decommissioning them, then hoarding the public r
The fundamental problem is that POTS sucks by any definition, but it rarely fails suddenly and catastrophically in areas where the phone lines are mostly underground (I don't know about the rest of the US, but in Florida, there are a LOT of places where the phone lines are buried, even though the power lines aren't). Most of what you describe is progressive deterioration over relatively long periods of time. Wireless networks, in contrast, tend to lose power suddenly, and stay down for at least the remainder of whatever catastrophe caused the failure in the first place.
Twenty years ago, it was almost UNHEARD of in Florida to actually lose phone service during anything short of an Andrew-like hurricane... and even in Andrew, few people actually lost phone service. When they did, it was almost always due to catastrophic destruction of their own home's demarc box. Two years ago, half of Dade & Broward county lost Comcast & U-verse for half the day during a GODDAMN TROPICAL STORM (Isaac) that didn't even hit us directly. In fact, it seems like the most disruptive storms are, in fact, "slow & sloppy" tropical storms that have enough gusts to knock out commercial power early in the storm, then leave the area in limbo for another day and a half as the storm slowly passes through the area.
Just to add... frankly, I'm NOT happy with the current state of desktop publishing. PageMaker is gone, WordPerfect lobotomized itself, Word sucks, and MS Publisher sucks even more.
HTML, and the attitudes it encouraged (no, make that *demanded*) towards formatting, coupled with the dire state of publishing software today, have combined to give us ebooks that are ugly enough to make your eyes bleed, and printed books with sloppy typesetting that would have gotten people *fired* 20 years ago. 20 years ago, people would spend HOURS tweaking the layout of chapters until every page was *perfect* -- no widows, no orphans, no dangling paragraphs intruding into the visual space of a diagram or photo.
Years ago, I used to wonder how civilizations could fall and cause arts and technological advances to be lost. Now, I can say I've seen it happen firsthand with regard to desktop publishing. We reached the pinnacle sometime around the mid-90s, and we've been sliding downhill into ugly barbarism ever since.
> There were plenty of arguments against doing your own desktop publishing in the C64/Apple II days.
And most of them were 100% right. C64 and Apple II DTP almost without exception looked like total shit. And I'm writing that as someone who personally used both the Print Shop and Newsroom on both platforms from the day they arrived until the day I got my first Amiga in '86, and suffered *horribly* with a Star Gemini 10X connected to a C64 through a Cardco CardPrint+G. For those who never had the pain of using that particular combo, it had a design flaw made a thousand times worse by rushed, buggy firmware that caused the printhead to scrub back and forth thousands of times per line, printing only a single column of dots with each swipe. It made it basically IMPOSSIBLE to print even a single-page sign, because it took HOURS to finish & beat up the printer.
At least the Print Shop's output looked halfway OK. The Newsroom was another matter entirely... my eyes started to bleed a few seconds ago just REMEMBERING how awful its print quality was.
> We live in an economy of mass computing, because it is way, way cheaper to perform a calculation on a mainframe than a microcomputer on your desk.
I disagree. If that were true, nobody would build Bitcoin-mining rigs. They'd just lease server resources from EC3.
Look what happened to aGPS the moment phones blew past a gigahertz -- the round-trip time it took to query the remote server after taking a reading from a local radio exceeded the time to just calculate it locally, and the idea of offloading the math to a remote server just quit making sense.
If we all had gigabit fiber connections to the internet and you could get the latency down to under ~50ms, it *might* be viable to offload OpenGL rendering tasks to remote server farms and simply stream it back to a Chromebook as h.264 instead of spending $2,400 on an Alienware gaming laptop with high-end discrete graphics card. At least, for games not involving hair-trigger reflex actions. But by the time we get to that point, Android watches will probably have a 3GHz 16-core processor, and will probably be able to do realtime raytracing at any meaningful resolution, color depth, and framerate the display is capable of.
Given the relatively low price of Lego blocks if you buy them in bulk (as opposed to buying the theme sets whose price is mostly licensing fees paid to Disney or someone like them), plus the amount of work you'll have to do to sand off the spurs and finish them off, is it *really* worth printing Lego blocks yourself? Especially if you're paying retail prices for the plastic filament in relatively small quantities, and making an effort to avoid plastic with dangerous (or unknown) amounts of lead?
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> And why shouldn't we count satellite and wireless?
Satellite is broadband for the damned & desperate.
I really wish cable/satellite would adopt "Chinese Menu" pricing for their mid-tier, and allow people who don't care about Disney*.* or ESPN*.* to pay the same price, but substitute HBO and/or Showtime instead (ie, pick two out of four... Disney, ESPN, HBO, Showtime... 3 for $10 more, all 4 for $18 more). I believe it would mostly be revenue-neutral for the cable/satellite companies, and would go a long way towards softening the sting of my monthly cable bill by letting me substitute two channels I don't currently pay for, but would LOVE to get instead of two expensive blocks of channels I never watch.
The problem with many of OCZ's drives (like the Vertex2 and Agility2) was that traditional RAID wouldn't save you because whatever killed drive #1 could (and often did) kill one or more of your OTHER drives, too.
The fault lies 100% with OCZ. They omitted the supercapacitor that Sandforce's engineers intended to keep it powered up if it unexpectedly lost power during a write, and they compiled their drivers to NOT use the multi-step write strategy that a drive without backup power needed in order to write safely and recover gracefully from power loss (because multi-step writes killed performance).
Why weren't you running Openwrt?
I don't know about him, but in my case, I happen to like having 5GHz 802.11ac with beamforming. The last time I checked, every open firmware in existence for the AC68U has broken support for 5GHz 802.11ac and its advanced radio features.
It's not so much "tough" as "the goddamn solder paste has to be kept refrigerated until you're ready to use it, then goes bad within a few days of warming it up to room temperature". Throwing away mostly-full syringe after syringe of solder paste after you used maybe 0.5mL of it to solder one chip gets expensive after a while.
LOL, if you think Digikey and Mouser are expensive, check the prices (including shipping) from Newark or Farnell. Jesus God naked on a Harley, Newark absolutely *rapes* you on the shipping charges. I can't even count the number of times I *almost* bought something from Newark, then called it off once they revealed their criminally-expensive shipping charges at checkout time.
DigiKey's shipping is expensive, but they have a huge advantage -- if you absolutely MUST have something tomorrow, their cutoff time for next-day delivery is something like 10pm most nights, and they'll happily ship via USPS Overnight so you can order on Friday night or Saturday and get your part by Saturday or Sunday.
Mouser's shipping isn't *cheap*, but their rates for Priority Mail are relatively reasonable & they don't have a minimum order amount like DigiKey does.
I still have occasional fantasies about Radio Shack closing MOST of their retail stores, but keeping at least one store per metro area open that's well-stocked with just about any component hobbyists might want to buy (say, everything that SparkFun and AdaFruit sells). Back in the 80s (when Radio Shack's parts department occupied the rear third of the store), people paid INSANE prices for components because you could walk in, grab what you needed, and go home with it in hand.
Ah... but were they able to do it with a chip that was available in DIP form, with useful amounts of flash & ram, and relatively relaxed power & I/O design on a breadboard?
We've gotten spoiled by $7 Arduino knock-off boards from China, and a lot of us have forgotten that just 5 years ago, Atmel literally couldn't make the ATmega644p fast enough for stores like DigiKey and Mouser to reliably keep it in stock. For those who weren't into AVR microcontrollers a few years ago, the 644p was Atmel's beefiest AVR that you could buy in DIP form. The next step up from a 644p was a 1280 or 2560 (the 2560 is used in the reference design for Android ADK), and they easily cost $30-50 (~$30 for a board that was literally just a bare chip soldered to a breakout board, $50 for one that had most of the same hardware that's the norm for an Arduino board). The 1280 and 2560 themselves were fairly cheap... I think the 1280 was around $10-12, and the 2560 was around $15. But the act of having someone solder it to a board to make it something YOU could deal with (unless you had a hot air rework station & didn't object to buying solder paste that had to be kept refrigerated, warmed to room temperature over the span of a day, and went bad a few days later when the flux separated out) basically doubled or trebled the purchase price.
Back in the same era, it was almost UNHEARD of for people to buy breakout boards for Atmel's smaller chips, like the Mega168 (unless they were rank n00bs buying their first one), because a DIP Mega168 cost around $4, but a Mega168 soldered to a dev board with Arduino-like hardware ran about $25.Back then, the hardest problem every N00b had to solve was "how the fuck do I connect the 3x2 or 5x2 header from the AVRISP to MISO/MOSI/SCK/~RST/Vcc/Gnd on the breadboard (I used to endlessly wish somebody would make a breadboard whose pins from one side were extended by one into the middle , so you could stick a 2xN header straight into the breadboard and wire away (for some inane reason, breakout boards to convert 3x2 and 5x2 headers to breadboard-spacing were always outrageously expensive, and stayed that way until about the eBay floodgates from China opened about 2 years ago).
As a thought experiment, how much linear resolution/sample bandwidth would you need to capture a VHS videotape "straight through" in a way that allowed you to digitally-reconstruct the path of virtual rotating heads AFTER the raw linear capture was completed? Say, if you had the means to somehow fabricate a custom high-density matrix of read heads that massively oversampled the tape as it followed a linear path... assuming such a beast doesn't already exist for something like DLT?
Why? Because all present restoration technologies that involve rotating heads produce results that are very much dependent upon the player's ability to iaccurately track the helical paths at capture time. What I'm proposing is capturing a linear 2-D signal map of the tape that's so precise, you could analyze it & synthesize an optimal virtual path & instantaneous velocity to extract higher-order data in non-realtime that's not even visible when played back via normal means.
The biggest problem with most VHS-to-DVD transfers is inadequate sample resolution or encoding bitrate. VHS is low-res... but it's also noisy, and noise compresses badly. Encoding captured VHS video in a way that preserves it EXACTLY the way it was read from the VCR (preserving higher-order information like chroma shift and luminance noise) so it can be further restored later requires a MINIMUM 704x480 resolution and 6-8mbps bitrate. In English, that basically means you'll get about an hour of high-quality captured video from VHS on a single-layer DVD. Two hours might be do-able at good quality if you're digitizing 24fps content, but a straight VHS capture encoded to 4mbps or lower is probably going to look worse than the original from the tape did.
A good way to think about it is to envision taking a photograph of an early-80s videogame's CRT display. The nominal resolution of the game might have only been something like 320x200 or 256x192, but other factors like the electron gun alignment, mask pitch, bleed, bloom, etc enter into the equation as well. If your goal is to just capture an approximation of the display, you could resample it down to its nominal resolution... but if your goal is to preserve every nuance of the video's appearance as it appeared on the CRT (so you can literally emulate things like CRT alignment bleed and color halos on a 2560x1440 LCD), your photograph of the CRT will have to be MUCH higher resolution than its nominal resolution.
The tapes you'll have the hardest time transferring with a new VCR are the ones made with a cheap VCR after ~1999 (after everyone had basically switched to DVD for watching movies, but VHS still existed as a nasty kludge for time-shifting prior to DVRs becoming affordable & common). Old tapes recorded with expensive VCRs generally play fine unless they were stored someplace humid. New tapes recorded with $99 VCRs might not be playable by anything besides the VCR that recorded them... and even THAT's questionable. 1980s tapes were built to last, and VCRs were precision devices built to exacting standards. Early-2000s tapes were designed to cost a dollar to manufacture & last for a year or two, and the VCRs were as mechanically shoddy as they could get without outstripping the capabilities of the DSP chip.
In audiocassette terms, last-gen VCRs & tapes had CATASTROPHIC problems with what would have been called "wow & flutter" on an audiotape. Basically, VHS depends upon having a precise match between the tape speed and head rotation speed, and the last-gen models were UNBELIEVABLY sloppy with it. Often, as belts aged, they'd lurch and slip.
Big tip: forget everything you've been told about the "real" resolution of VHS tapes. If your goal is to preserve them in digital form forever, without making them worse, capture at 720x480 & accept the fact that noise compresses badly, so you'll need a fairly high bitrate (6mbps BARE MINIMUM). And don't be too eager to throw away YUV color information -- keep it 4:2:2 unless you literally don't ever intend to try restoring it. Remember, most video-restoration tools depend upon exactly the kind of "higher-order" that aggressive compression throws away & mangles.
Most importantly, never forget that the only thing Nyquist guarantees is that a sample rate less than double the information rate is guaranteed to fail... it says NOTHING (directly) about the minimum sample rate that will actually preserve higher-order detail.
The really bad news: at the moment, there's no compression scheme that's mostly lossless (like lossless h.264 with x264) AND compliant enough with Blu-Ray standards to be directly playable by a random Blu-Ray player. So... don't get too hung up on near-line playability. Capture your minimally-compressed gold copy and carve it into (non-LTH BD-R) stone, then re-encode a DVD-playable copy (704x480 MPEG-2 6-8mbps, AC3 or MP3 audio, possibly with long GOPs and/or VBR if you know your player can handle them).
> Samsung is planning a 2560*1440 cell phone.
The Oppo Find 7 already *has* one :-)
http://forum.xda-developers.co...
For those who've never heard of it, it's the phone everyone at XDA-developers.com has been having wet dreams about for months -- a top-shelf, best-of-breed Android phone that makes no hardware compromises & ships unlocked with Cyanogenmod. There have been officially "open" phones in the past, but they were always last year's hardware or lacked important features like microSD (when you reflash a lot, microSD makes your life several orders of magnitude easier & more convenient) and/or LTE.
The last time I checked, Oppo's plan for the Find 7 is to make it directly available in the US as a retail product with US warranty by June, but AFAIK if you're dying to get one now, the GSM international model is hardware-identical to what you'll be able to get from stores like Newegg, Amazon, and Tiger Direct. If 1700MHz AWS HSPA+ is important to you (ie, T-mo in a market that hasn't been refarmed yet), you might want to double-check support for AWS.
One caution... the mildly-rare model M13 with pointer stick (manufactured around 1995) has mouse buttons that are pretty fragile & become flaky after just a few years... and the printing on the black one with black keys rubbed off mine within a couple of years (a known issue with white printing on black keys, and the reason why the black ones are particularly rare). Also, the beige plastic insulation on the cable turned brittle and started disintegrating sometime around 2009 (purchased as new-old-stock sometime around 1999). For some reason, this didn't happen to the black keyboard's cable.
I know I could get the buttons fixed (I own two M13 keyboards... a beige one with white keys, and a black one with black keys), but the keyboards themselves DO seem to be having occasional issues now that they're approaching their 20th birthdays, and the original Trackpoint (I) is a little lacking in the resolution/sensitivity department... it was developed in an era where 1024x768 was a physically huge huge hi-res display, and it's kind of painful to depend upon as the only navigation device in a 3-monitor setup.
Russia isn't pulling out of ISS. They're in it for the long haul, and they haven't been shy about making that unambiguously known. When NASA announced a tentative schedule to deorbit the ISS at the end of its planned service life, Russia IMMEDIATELY said it would regard any attempt to deorbit the ISS as an act of war. The Russian modules were built (at higher cost) to be serviced and refurbished indefinitely in space, and they fully intend to keep it up there until they literally don't have the ability to keep it in orbit.
Russia's new plan is to launch additional modules to make its half of the ISS capable of existing on its own, but leave it connected to the rest of the ISS as long as NASA's side remains in space. They might reserve the right to close interior doors, have alcohol on board (if they don't already), and tell their American neighbors that there are rooms they aren't allowed to go into, but they recognize that even if the US and Russian sides were functionally independent, having them docked together profoundly improves the likelihood of both crews surviving a disaster.
If NASA were to officially decide to deorbit its half of the ISS on a specific date, I'd be shocked if the Russians DIDN'T politely (but firmly) inform the Americans on board a few days before the separation that they were going to be going home ahead of schedule & would NOT be deorbiting NASA's half as officially planned. There's no way in HELL Russia will voluntarily allow the American half to be deorbited if it has any meaningful value to them in space, even as scrap.
Of course the US would scream, and Washington would claim it was an act of war/piracy, but as long as the American crew members got home safely & smiling, I'm sure the Russians would negotiate the American side's purchase as scrap, and lease-back agreement that would allow the US to continue using it as long as it remained habitable.
Then, the presentation layer in that display manager could be swapped out as needed based on the form factor involved.
It's still mostly experimental at this point, but there's ALREADY an active effort to port KDE to Windows as an outright replacement for Windows' native UI -- http://windows.kde.org/
you're not creating a usable platform for any since you are constantly making compromises
Microsoft has a long, proud history of compromising the usability of their products for power users for the sake of accommodating casual users who've never read the manual and expect everything to work like Word... even when it turns an action you're going to do a LOT into 40 seconds of drilling down through menus and dialogs to do something a non-Microsoft application might be able to do with ctrl-shift-rightclick and a few keystrokes. More importantly, though, is that Microsoft has increasingly gotten into the habit of making the dumbed-down way of doing something the ONLY way to do it, instead of merely the default.
Microsoft SHOULD have taken MVC design to its next logical level, and built upon .net instead of throwing it all away in the blighted name of Metro... common model and controller code across all Windows platforms, with different views for desktop, tablet, and maybe mobile devices whose displays are too small to treat like a tablet. They could have compiled the code to CLR, then had the installer itself compile it to native code optimized for the local platform. But no... they just *had* to ruin a good thing, and try to ram touch down everybody's throats.
Instead of racing to smaller and lower-res touch displays, Microsoft should be encouraging bigger multiple-unit displays and high-DPI/high-rate gaming mice. If Microsoft REALLY wanted to do something positive, they'd partner with someone like Samsung to define an official form factor for Portrait-Landscape-Portrait displays with matched pixel density and alignment (up to now, the holy grail we've never really had... as far as I know, nobody has ever made displays explicitly matched for P-L-P use). We could have laptops with a main 2560x1440 display flanked by a pair of 1280x1440 displays that fold inward like window shutters (glass facing glass), then latch down over the keyboard, or desktop with 27-32" 2560x1440 or higher display flanked by displays of identical vertical height and pixel density, specifically manufactured to be in portrait orientation.
The second-to-last piece of the puzzle (commercial unavailability of PLP-matched panel sets) was finally solved a couple of years ago by DisplayPort (a 3-monitor assembly could incorporate a DisplayPort hub that connects to all 3 displays internally & presents a single DisplayPort interface to the outside world).
No, you've just gotten burned too many times by consumer goods that were value engineered to the absolute limits of low quality.
Give Arduino a try... specifically, the Arduino boards made by RuggedCircuits.com. They're way too expensive to use for final versions of things you're building, but they totally rock for building your development prototype. Genuine Arduino boards are generally high-quality too, but aren't quite as "idiot-proofed" as the Ruggeduino. I'd recommend against Arduino clones from China that cost less than what you'd have to pay USPS to mail it from New York to Miami -- at least, for your first few experiments -- just because THEIR quality really is no better than an average consumer electronics product from the same anonymous factories in China.
If you used to be into hardware, you'll feel right at home with Arduino. Imagine what it would have been like to develop software for a Commodore 64... if it ran at 8-20MHz, had 5v-tolerant 3.3v i/o, and modern development tools and Stackoverflow.com. That's basically Arduino. And when/if the Arduino environment ITSELF starts to feel limiting, you can graduate to AVR Studio.
Well... actually... it wasn't "desktop publishing" that drove print shops out of business... it was cheap, fast photocopying by stores like Kinko's. If anything, desktop publishing GENERATED lots of business business for small print shops by enabling them to make high-quality (or more cost-effective) prints for customers who did the layout themselves with Pagemaker, and enabled small print shops to offer layout & design as a profitable service to customers instead of having to settle for lame generic signs or outsource it to a service bureau for actual typesetting.
I can't personally speak for small town America, but in South Florida, we still have a very strong local printing industry, if only because there's so much local demand for glossy real estate magazines, tourist magazines, and nightclub handouts. The barriers to entry are more formidable than they were 20 years ago (a 4-color high-res digital printing press is now non-negotiable), but the companies we have now are doing quite well.
I forgot to add the "best" part about the circumstances under which the outages occurred -- the storm's worst part was Sunday afternoon, but Comcast & U-verse went down on Monday morning. Why? Because storm knocked out commercial power to their network centers on Sunday afternoon, and Monday morning is when they ran out of diesel for the generators. This seems to be the new normal with tropical storms. :-(
So if we take the opposite approach, we run Internet service as slow and rickety DSL (which is highly dependent on distance from the telco switch) over the POTS copper. Which would you really prefer?
VDSL2 over POTS copper, leased to a CLEC at rates that are open, published, and available to all on equal terms (ie, if AT&T or Verizon charges themselves $19/month for a dry copper pair, they're required by law to lease it to any CLEC who wants to use it instead for the same $19/month).
With the best VDSL2 available today, 100mbps over two pairs (one for uplink, one for downlink) up to about 2,000 feet is quite do-able... and those are 100mbps that AT&T and Verizon can't fuck with, and are my inalienable right to use as intensively as I want to communicate with my ISP's VDSL2 backplane.
This isn't about un-burdening AT&T and Verizon with obsolete legacy infrastructure. This is about eliminating one of the few remaining back channels that motivated individuals can use to do an end run around them to avoid their metering & caps.
If Verizon wants to deploy ONLY wireless in Mantoloking, fine... let them. But apply the same regulatory standards that applied to POTS to them. Require 10 days of backup power, like the central office had a gigantic array of lead acid batteries to provide them with. Force them to sell unbundled raw IP transit to any CLEC, with the same guaranteed and unmetered throughput that could be achieved via VDSL2, for the same price as unbundled dry copper.
The second part alone would probably stop them dead in their tracks, because the only way they COULD provide guaranteed hundred-megabit throughput (maybe pooled among 2-4 households, max) within the constraints of their spectrum licenses via LTE would be to lay new fiber to all the neighborhoods ANYWAY, and stick a microcell every 4 houses. And prohibit them from charging higher or new fees, so they can't pass off the costs on customers anyway.
If the up-front capital costs of deploying 14,000 fiber-networked picocells across Mantoloking to serve ~40,000 customers didn't stop Verizon in its tracks, the long-term maintenance costs of replacing 14,000 sets of backup batteries capable of supplying power for a week, plus the nontrivial number of picocells that would die due to lightning or ruptured Chinese electrolytic capacitors, *would*. Verizon barely has enough spectrum to feed any one tower site with 50mbps. If they had to potentially supply that much guaranteed sustained throughput to every single customer at the costs they now charge for a dry copper pair, their only option would be to settle for making literally the "last hundred feet" wireless and deploying a brand new fiber-networked nightmare of picocells serving 3-4 customers apiece.
For LESS than what it would cost them to purchase, deploy, and maintain an ungodly huge network with 14,000 fiber-connected neighborhood picocells, they could just skip the picocells and run fiber the last hundred feet to everyone's house. Actual fiber is now cheaper per linear foot than UTP copper wires, and a bundle of direct-burial cable with 8-16 fibers now costs less per linear foot than direct-burial cat5e.In contrast, if Verizon could deploy a remote picocell with fiber termination and enough battery backup power to run for a week without commercial power for less than $20,000, they'd be lucky. If they had to shoulder the cost of deploying all those picocells themselves as the cost of eliminating copper, they'd NEVER go through with it.
What REALLY needs to be done is another forced breakup of AT&T and Verizon to make them divest their ROW, wire, and fiber to a new company that's required by law to deal with them at arm's length, on equal terms with other wireless carriers, CLECs, and service providers. If Verizon and AT&T don't want to own wires anymore, fine... but make them sell them to someone who DOES, instead of allowing them to create artificial scarcity by decommissioning them, then hoarding the public r
The fundamental problem is that POTS sucks by any definition, but it rarely fails suddenly and catastrophically in areas where the phone lines are mostly underground (I don't know about the rest of the US, but in Florida, there are a LOT of places where the phone lines are buried, even though the power lines aren't). Most of what you describe is progressive deterioration over relatively long periods of time. Wireless networks, in contrast, tend to lose power suddenly, and stay down for at least the remainder of whatever catastrophe caused the failure in the first place.
Twenty years ago, it was almost UNHEARD of in Florida to actually lose phone service during anything short of an Andrew-like hurricane... and even in Andrew, few people actually lost phone service. When they did, it was almost always due to catastrophic destruction of their own home's demarc box. Two years ago, half of Dade & Broward county lost Comcast & U-verse for half the day during a GODDAMN TROPICAL STORM (Isaac) that didn't even hit us directly. In fact, it seems like the most disruptive storms are, in fact, "slow & sloppy" tropical storms that have enough gusts to knock out commercial power early in the storm, then leave the area in limbo for another day and a half as the storm slowly passes through the area.
Just to add... frankly, I'm NOT happy with the current state of desktop publishing. PageMaker is gone, WordPerfect lobotomized itself, Word sucks, and MS Publisher sucks even more.
HTML, and the attitudes it encouraged (no, make that *demanded*) towards formatting, coupled with the dire state of publishing software today, have combined to give us ebooks that are ugly enough to make your eyes bleed, and printed books with sloppy typesetting that would have gotten people *fired* 20 years ago. 20 years ago, people would spend HOURS tweaking the layout of chapters until every page was *perfect* -- no widows, no orphans, no dangling paragraphs intruding into the visual space of a diagram or photo.
Years ago, I used to wonder how civilizations could fall and cause arts and technological advances to be lost. Now, I can say I've seen it happen firsthand with regard to desktop publishing. We reached the pinnacle sometime around the mid-90s, and we've been sliding downhill into ugly barbarism ever since.
> There were plenty of arguments against doing your own desktop publishing in the C64/Apple II days.
And most of them were 100% right. C64 and Apple II DTP almost without exception looked like total shit. And I'm writing that as someone who personally used both the Print Shop and Newsroom on both platforms from the day they arrived until the day I got my first Amiga in '86, and suffered *horribly* with a Star Gemini 10X connected to a C64 through a Cardco CardPrint+G. For those who never had the pain of using that particular combo, it had a design flaw made a thousand times worse by rushed, buggy firmware that caused the printhead to scrub back and forth thousands of times per line, printing only a single column of dots with each swipe. It made it basically IMPOSSIBLE to print even a single-page sign, because it took HOURS to finish & beat up the printer.
At least the Print Shop's output looked halfway OK. The Newsroom was another matter entirely... my eyes started to bleed a few seconds ago just REMEMBERING how awful its print quality was.
> I can print a set off for $1
Maybe, but it would be a pretty shitty set. $1 worth of plastic *might* be enough to print 5-7 blocks...
> We live in an economy of mass computing, because it is way, way cheaper to perform a calculation on a mainframe than a microcomputer on your desk.
I disagree. If that were true, nobody would build Bitcoin-mining rigs. They'd just lease server resources from EC3.
Look what happened to aGPS the moment phones blew past a gigahertz -- the round-trip time it took to query the remote server after taking a reading from a local radio exceeded the time to just calculate it locally, and the idea of offloading the math to a remote server just quit making sense.
If we all had gigabit fiber connections to the internet and you could get the latency down to under ~50ms, it *might* be viable to offload OpenGL rendering tasks to remote server farms and simply stream it back to a Chromebook as h.264 instead of spending $2,400 on an Alienware gaming laptop with high-end discrete graphics card. At least, for games not involving hair-trigger reflex actions. But by the time we get to that point, Android watches will probably have a 3GHz 16-core processor, and will probably be able to do realtime raytracing at any meaningful resolution, color depth, and framerate the display is capable of.
Given the relatively low price of Lego blocks if you buy them in bulk (as opposed to buying the theme sets whose price is mostly licensing fees paid to Disney or someone like them), plus the amount of work you'll have to do to sand off the spurs and finish them off, is it *really* worth printing Lego blocks yourself? Especially if you're paying retail prices for the plastic filament in relatively small quantities, and making an effort to avoid plastic with dangerous (or unknown) amounts of lead?