OT: just a suggestion

[krw]

Sounds like a lot of manual setup and management.

My wife was disappointed that the UVerse receiver "only" records four things at once. We do have conflicts.

[clare]

Pixellation is due to dropout. The signal is either there or it is not. If it is not there you get a black square in your video stream.

If that particular vireo segment was supposed to have a blue eye in it, it either had a blue eye or nothing. Not a green eye. Not a brown eye. Not an ear or a bird, and if there was a blue eye it was distinct, with no blurring or other distortion.

That is the nature of digital communication. There. Not there. Nothing in between. If the error detection/correction detects the lost segment and requests a resend - and gets it on time to pop it into the data train on time, there is no dropout. If not, you get the dropout - and most systems will only allow so many dropouts before they just blank.

[krw]

But you're abstracting that cassette recording into '1's and '0's for the computer (unless you changed subject in the middle of the paragraph and are talking about audio cassettes).

Yes, there are end-cases that are clearly one or the other. Most of what we deal with, these days, is not so clear. The distinctions are mostly just jargon or marketeering, with no real meaning.

[krw]

So DSL is analog? ;-)

[Bill]

The only point I wanted to make was that whether something is digital or not does not depend on the "carrier". For instance, a drawing is not digital. It could be digitized, in many different ways...

Bill

[Spalted Walt]

Not sure I understand the question... but whether your PC is on or off should have absolutely no effect on the functionality of the phones in your house. Obviously, Phonetray would not intercept unwanted calls if the PC is turned off but there would be no adverse effect to your home's phone system. (At least there isn't on a POTS)

Good question. I can't answer because I've got all sleep/hibernate disabled. A quick Google found this:

Michael Rakita answers a laptop question: "If your laptop supports USB wake-up you can keep it in sleep mode and the modem will wake it up when a call comes in. Your laptop has to be fast enough to wake up in 2-3 seconds, otherwise it will miss caller id. If your laptop is not that fast it will be better to turn the sleep mode off."

No delay what so ever. None.

No, Phonetray doesn't make that sound.

It will, after 1 complete ring, vocalize the Caller ID information through the PC speakers. That feature can easily be disabled, however I find it useful.

[krw]

The "modulator" was a D/A converter and the demodulator was an A/D converter and it was analog in the middle, so the phone line is analog. How is the communications link digital?

A distinction without a difference. So you're saying that a v.90 modem is analog? DSL is analog? Cable Internet is analog?

There is no practical difference between a "token" and a "symbol". ("Baud" is defined as a symbol per second).

No, they are not for transmission, rather they are standardized encodings of objects (video, pictures, etc.). Transmission is only one use for such things (I bet you save some on your computer, even).

So? Internet over a 300bps modem can't have error checking, correction, or retries?

Really? I guess analog communications never existed (see above).

...and you don't in analog communications?

[clare]

The company I worked for for a period of 5 years before going off on my own built and sold thousands of "clones" of the Compaq "lunchbox computer" (Portable 111) Apparently Stirling still makes them??? We called them "luggables" too. A lot smaller and lighter than the Compaq "sewing machine" (Only about 20 lbs)

Remember the Osborne? 5 inch CRT screen. Then tha Kaypro 2 with the huge 9 inch screen? The Kaypro "only" weighed a bit less than 30 lbs. I think the Osborn was a bit heavier.

[Puckdropper]

krw wrote in news: [e-mail]:

I think of the luggable when I try to move my Lenovo Y710 laptop. 17" screen, quite a bit of dead/useless weight. I replaced it with a 15" laptop in the Thinkpad line that runs cooler, faster, and has better battery life. I sure don't miss the extra 2" of screen space.

Puckdropper

[Puckdropper]

krw wrote in news: [e-mail]:

It does require a good bit of manual setup, but management pretty much takes care of itself. If you don't make system changes, it pretty much handles things itself. (Sometimes I have to press the red reset button on the directv box.) The system handles schedule management (and you can set priorities to make sure Norm records before Roy if they happen to conflict).

I guess it depends on what you watch... In a month, I'd estimate between

10 and 50 recordings are scheduled for later showings. I'm not sure how good Uverse's conflict handler is, but MythTV gets everything it possibly can.

Puckdropper

[J. Clarke]

Flopticals were nice at the time. I still have a final-generation floptical USB drive that gets used occasionally when someone needes to read a 3-1/2 inch diskette. One neat trick was that with the right driver they could get something like 16 meg on a standard diskette.

[clare]

No, a "modulator" is not a DA converter, and nobody ever said "modem" communication was digital.

Nope. V90 is straight analog. DSL? I'm not sure. By my definition, since it uses a Modem, the transmission is a modulated signal - which means it is an analog signal. The cable internet uses DOCSIS and QAM, which is technically a CODEC, not a simple MODEM. QAM is quadrature amplitude modulation - which is a 4 state "digital" implementation instead of a binary digital - and ises "tokens" or "symbols" for upstream QAM, but uses MPEG for downstream.

Thats as much as I know about HOW it works - and it's different in north america (6mhz) DOCSIS and 8mhz EuroDOCSIS. - and the fiber optic backhaul works differently than the coax "last mile" section. Cable internet is digital - at least mine is. There is no modem. It runs with a digital router.

[Trenbidia]

Close, but no cigar. My 8" drives were 1.2mb and were faster than the

5.25" because they stored more data on a "cylinder" so the head didn't have to be stepped as often. Also, they had a higher transfer rate.

That's not to say that a good software type couldn't fudge a little on all 3 types :-).

[Trenbidia]

I even remember the Osbourne :-).

[Doug Miller]

krw wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Well, I'm not sure how you got out of the bozo bin -- new email addy, maybe? -- but it's time to put you back in.

[clare]

The bad thing is half the time even THEY could not read the data after it was stored ---

[clare]

I didn't say anything about the 8 inch.. From early 5.25 to late 3.5 the capacity just went up and up - as did the data rate.

[krw]

Sure I remember them, though had only IBMs for years. My first was a "first day order" 5150 PC, with a single-sided floppy, 48K DRAM, and a monochrome monitor (though both video adapters). I didn't own a clone until '93 or '94.

[krw]

I see you haven't changed a bit. Yours is one killfile everyone should aspire to. Bye, now.

[Unquestionably Confused]

But, but, but did you ever master the mysteries of the Timex Sinclair? ;)