OT: just a suggestion

[Ed Pawlowski]

I used to get occasional power blips, just long enough to trip out the receiver. Reboot takes forever. Finally put in on a UPS and problem solved.

[krw]

OK, I'm all for tautologies as arguments. ;-)

IOW, DSL, ADTV, Satellite TV, Cell phones, and just about everything else that's considered "digital". You will get errors, retries, data drop, freezes, and all that jazz before it drops the connection completely.

OK, so the question remains, is v.90 digital or analog?

Your "distinction" isn't, either.

[krw]

I thought about that. ...every time we had a power blip. That would be a bunch of UPSs, though. I still might.

BTW, so far UVerse hasn't been perfect either. The WiFi signal no longer gets to the TVs in the back bedrooms and I'm not happy turning over control of my router to AT&T (it's theirs and I don't have the admin password).

[Bill]

As something of an "expert", I say that if the data is abstractable to a sequence of 0's and 1's, then even if it is transmitted in an analog fashion, then it's

*digital*. E.g. Computer files are digital. A paper tape is digital. While, not an expert about them, I would say that a cassette recording is not digital.

[Leon]

But if the satellite is higher in the sky, through the clouds is a thinner slice than if you were aimed lower and had to receive the signal through a long/wider low cloud.

I'm looking to do that one day, netflix is good, the mail service has a LOT of stuff including TV shows and pretty current movies. Streaming is pretty good to catch up on series that have been going on for years.

[Leon]

Ahhhh be careful with UPS. My BIL used UPS and kept ruining DVR's. If the power is out long enough you end up with a brown out type situation and the DVR did not do well with that situation. The Dish company finally told him to not use a UPS and he stopped having problems with the DVR. Now if your UPS will simply shut off at a certain low voltage point It may not be a problem.

[Leon]

I still have Uverse internet, they let me get into the router/gateway through my computer. IIRC the password is on the unit.

AND you can change the antenna with a software setting.

[Leon]

Not sure what you are trying to say here but I can assure you a weak digital signal will come in pixilated and is just about as bad as a bad analog signal. Been there seen that too many times.

[Leon]

Well what about cassette tape backups of data on a hard drive?

[Bill]

That's different (troublemaker!) ;)

[Bill]

My "paper tape" (used in early years) shows that the medium used to store the 0s and 1s, is not the issue.

[J. Clarke]

For the longest time we were getting fairly regular very short outages-- not enough to even notice the lights blinking but the clocks would reset and the computers would reboot. We used to joke about "another fried squirrel".

A couple of years ago there was a very early snowstorm while the leaves were still on the trees that knocked down a lot of power lines and caused a widespread power outage that lasted about a week. After that they put some effort into to trimming the trees back from the power lines and replaced all the broken lines and it hasn't happened since.

[J. Clarke]

So if I speak into a microphone "one, zero, one, one, zero ..." then it's "digital"?

And yet a cassette recorder has no trouble storing computer files.

Some signalling systems, the various Ethernets for example, are designed from the ground up to carry digital information. Others, POTS modems for example, carry digital information over channels that were originally intended to carry analog data and do so by modulating a carrier signal that is compatible with that channel.

That's where the distinction lies.

[Leon]

LOL. :-)

[John McCoy]

-MIKE- wrote in news:n5mfgv$hft$ [e-mail]:

That "one person at a time" thing (technically called "half-duplex") is a network problem somewhere between you and whoever you're talking to. All cell phones are full-duplex and can receive and transmit simultaneously.

John

[John McCoy]

krw wrote in news:8f3u7bptdh2n8805n919imkaplhu18st8q@

4ax.com:

These have always struck me as one of the greatest marketting feats ever: get people to use their own internet bandwidth, that they pay for, to compensate for inadequate service on the cell system that they're also paying for. Viola! They get to pay twice for one thing.

John

[Puckdropper]

krw wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I've got a Hauppauge HD-DVR that records over the component connection (YPbPr). Channels are changed by a channel change script that goes over a serial to USB adapter to talk to the H24 and now Genie Mini. (It's better than an IR blaster, but that's a common option as well.)

Yes, the receiver has to be "watching" to record.

One channel per tuner/receiver pair.

In practice conflicts are minimal. It's something like 1 or 2 a month. Most TV shows are reruns anyway, so it's not a big deal.

Puckdropper

[Puckdropper]

Bill wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Not really... Except we didn't have hard drives in those days. If we had diskette drives we were doing good. (Everyone seemed to have the 1541 if they had a Commodore 64, though.)

I've always wondered if we'd be successful playing an old computer's cassette "recording" over the phone line to another computer that was listening for it. Basically, convert the cassette ports in to a modem. I know it's an extremely convoluted and pathetic way to do it, but sometimes that's reason enough to do it!

Puckdropper

[J. Clarke]

Probably not. A cassette has a good bit more bandwidth than a phone line. But sounds like a fun thing to try.

[Joseph Gwinn]

On Dec 26, 2015, krw wrote (in article):

That?s odd. There are some gremlins in the middle of my reply. I?ll repost, with the center deleted.

Joe Gwinn