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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Spice is like a sports car...
Performance only as good as the person behind the wheel.
It's not super-loud, just annoying. They can retreat into another room if it goes on their nerves.
Yep, the Siskiyou range is dead even for regular GSM or CDMA networks. Anyhow, I don't think mankind really needs the constant din of radio at all times. I am perfectly happy with AM/FM and a CD (or cassette) player. Often I turn all this off, roll down the window and listen to the roar of a Harley in front of me. Or I think about some circuitry or technical problem. There's always a little notebook in the glove compartment. The real thing, made from dead trees.
Audio isn't very demanding in bandwidth. When I do layout checks I often listen to Bluegrass on an Internet station. The modem is right here in the office and the yellow traffic LED barely flashes. Not like when a fat PDF gets downloaded and it's constantly on for tens of seconds.
The problem with unlimited plans is when people constantly watch ballgames or YouTube. I have no Internet cell phone but I can't imagine audio being very expensive even on a limited plan.
That's true, one can make money with a technology that's only lasting a relatively short time.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Which are those? In the UK the main terrestrial commercial channel decided that "broadcasting" was not one of its *core* activities and so outsourced it to some cheap and nasty cowboy outfit. They got their comeuppance during the world cup when their HD channel ran an advertising break across Englands opening goal. A genuine own goal.
I think Joergs best bet if he has plenty of signal but suffers multipath from passing aircraft is to use a phased array of vertical smaller aerials with the nulls arranged to hit the problem area of sky.
Even a pair combined on equal length coax might provide enough vertical selectivity if placed at the right separation...
If I were him I would investigate a cheap satellite dish to see what is actually available.
The satellite dish and a bowtie I am going to try out some day but anything more is beyond what TV is worth for us. Then we'll just add the two of us to the ad revenue loss problems they already have.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
In theory Windows Media Audio sounds a skosh better at the same bit rate as MP3... but they might be using a different bit rate on their WMA streams than their MP3 streams, so you end up having to try each and judge for yourself. It's also a very small difference and pretty much completely irrelevant for bit rates at or above 128kbps, though. (Just how much is hotly debated, although at very low bit rates such as 32kbps WMA is a clear winner -- MP3 wasn't really designed to go that low whereas WMA was.)
Sure, they don't need it, but they're perfectly willing to pay for it.
Kids on long car trips today often have their choice of movies (DVD player or laptop), audio (iPhone or similar), or games (PSP or similar). That's entertainment, all right! ;-)
Oh, and I suppose there are those things called "books" as well, although today some people will be reading them on a Kindle or laptop as an eBook. :-)
Compared to video, no, but it's kinda like leaving a dripping facuet going... a 128kbps stream listened to for, say, 5 hours a day for 20 days a month is
5.76GB of data per month, which is *well* beyond what most cell phone data plans figure you "should" be using -- even on "unlimited" plans. (I have an "unlimited" Sprint plan but the unofficial policy is that once you go past ~1GB per month, you're on Sprint's radar and they may chose to simply no longer offer to provide data services to you except at the "casual" rate of... one penny per *kilobyte!*.)
It'd be interestingly to see the volume over time for, e.g., 56kbps modems. I would expect a pretty fast ramp up, with a shallower decline, and of course they're still available today -- but probably selling 1/100th as many annually as at the peak? Effectively that particular "standard" in modems probably lasted for
Not a joke, unfortunately: Friends bought a new minivan so that grandson can watch VHS tapes while they were driving. I think it all goes a bit far in today's society. We don't have kids but I certainly would not do that.
I will never buy a Kindle. I mean, first you pay $150-200, then you are perfectly vendor-locked to buy e-books from Amazon. No way. If I ever felt the urge to read an e-book out by the pool I'd use the netbook.
But then they must let you out of the 2-year agreement for free or you could drag them to court. Breach of contract and all that. After all, _they_ also signed on the dotted line :-)
Anyhow, when I listen to Bluegrass I try to be a good netizen and select the 32k stream. It's good enough. But I never listen 5h/day for 20 days, it's only on when I check Gerber files for EMI gotchas. I get less tired that way.
They will be around for a long time. First, there's lots of 3rd world countries where the roll-out of anything broadband is years away, if it ever happens. Tne there's the boonies, I guess even HughesNet will become iffy in some areas north of the Klondike. Last but not least, people often ignore a backup plan. Most of our neighbors will not know how to access their email when the DSL goes down. Even if they did know they couldn't because they foolishly sold their modem at a garage sale years ago for 50 cents. In the same way that they didn't keep at least one POTS phone that doesn't rely on electricity. We do, I even upgraded that to a speakerphone for $1, yep, at a garage sale ... and the last time we needed that sort of backup was three days ago.
I found that 56k connections only work very locally. When I did data transfers across the pond a couple decades ago the most I could reliably work at was 4800bd, sometimes 1200bd was required.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
I find "Books on Tape" (now "Books on CD") useful on long trips across rural Arizona, where FM is pretty much non-existent and AM is mostly Mexican; and Fox News on satellite starts repeating :-) ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Spice is like a sports car...
Performance only as good as the person behind the wheel.
When I was a kid, we occasionally made the 1500 mile (3 days, or sometimes 2 really long days) trip to my grandparents in Naples, Florida starting from Middleton, Wisconsin. Neither of my parents was particularly interested in talking, playing games, or otherwise interacting all that horribly much with my brother and me on those trips, so it was up to us to keep ourselves entertained. Books were available but reading them tended to make me car sick, and otherwise there were cassette tapes (but only 2 or 3 -- couldn't afford much of anything pre-recorded), the radio (out in the boonies of, e.g., Kentucky, not a whole lot there!), or -- later on -- two electronic games: Simon and Split Second.
I would have loved to have had movies and a *large*, randomly accessible music collection as I do today...
I do read the occasional eBook on my phone. I see some value in Kindles and similar (the LCDs on those create far less eye strain than reading off of a traditional backlit LCD), but not the $150+ they currently want for them -- and I agree with you completely that vendor lock-in is quite the drawback: the ever-so-slightly discounted price you pay on the eBook vs. the dead tree version doesn't make up for not being able to pass it along to someone else when you're done.
A co-worker here keeps multiple copies of the bible (different languages and different translations) on his iPhone and finds it enjoyable to read the different versions and to be able to do a little "compare and contrast"... and I imagine that being able to almost instantly search for any text phrase with wildcards, etc. is even better than a concordance.
Yep, and you occasionally see people asking about using these unwritten rules as a "strategic" exit from their contracts. Apparently it works, if you're careful that you haven't given them any other reason through which they can hold you to the contract. I suppose this is one of the reason that the telcos no longer advertise as many "unlimited" plans and instead call it something like the "everything" plan with the fine print then spells out the limits.
[56k modems]
...plus most DSL or cable modem plans no longer come with traditional dial-up service anyway, so even if they still had the knowledge and technical know-how it wouldn't have helped...
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
Yep, my wife and I often do the same when we make the 4+ hour drive up to Portland. You can download a lot of free readings these days (we bought a ~$20 compilation of books on CD off of eBay, though -- you end up with like
20GB of data, and for that much I'd rather just hand someone the $20 than download it manually), and at most truck stops (e.g., Pilots, Loves) they'll rent them to you... although they often want $5-$10 for a rental for a $20-$40 book on CD, which seems a little much, but oh well.
Well, I didn't buy a kindle, but I did win one. I haven't bought a book for it yet, though. First, there are all the 'free' books out there by Wells, Verne, etc. that I can get. Many of these I have never actually read, just seen the movies and other versions. Been interesting to see what was there originally!
I also have a lot of e-books from other sources. You can read PDF's on it. Also, Baen books has e-books that will work on a kindle. I bought one book, and it had a CD containing the rest of the series, plus a dozen other e-books. Still working my way through those!
Our trips where up to 500 miles in this car, made by Borgward (except ours was blue):
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The back was stuffed to the hilt, parents up front and me and my sister in back sitting on the stuff (younger brother wasn't born yet). Once we were stopped and the police made us enter a trucker's weigh station ->
whoops, heavily overloaded. There was also a heavy tent packed on a roof rack ...
The car didn't have a radio, it wasn't even geared for that. We kept busy with simple games and stuff, mostly. Usually we started at 3:00am to avoid traffic, and us kids snoozed through the first 250 miles.
When my younger brother was born the little Lloyd was simply too smal and we had this one:
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It was developed in the US but deemed "too small" here. Other times US-linked European companies such as Ford, Opel or Vauxhall seemed to use American drawings, multiply everything by 0.7 or so, and replace the V8 with a straight-4 of less than 1.5 liters.
Our pastor has something similar on a Palm Pad. I prefer the netbook. It has a much brighter display, backlit with LED.
AT&T does, at least out here. If not, it's best to have a backup service somewhere, some sort of cheap dial-in service. You can always go to the next Internet cafe, but so will everyone else and if the power outage is major that won't help.
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
Wow... we had a good-sized cooler that sat between my brother and me when we were little that contained breakfast, lunch, and dinner; by the time we hit about high school that was seriously impinging on any "personal space" we might have had left, but thankfully my parents also decided about then that, OK, we'll just have fast food and in the grand scheme of things the additional $50 or so was nothing in the overall cost of the trip.
Might possibly have prevented a nasty accident there!
Only 250 "waking" miles wouldn't have been so bad at all...
[Internet backup service]
But if the power outage lasts for more than, e.g., a day, the phone lines are probably all going to die anyway, aren't they? -- Only some installations have actual backup diesel generators, the rest relying on battery banks to ride through brief (hours long) blackouts?
Nah, just a nuisance (and money for the ticket). We've made many trips that way, it was a very reliable little car, almost built like a tank. I think the reason was more that the 0.6l engine (yes, point six liters) wouldn't pull it up an incline fast enough on autobahns. That can be dangerous because a speed below 50mph usually isn't considered safe on German autobahns. They made a heavier duty van and it was the same chassis:
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If they last that long there are usually bigger underlying issues, and then you have other worries. Like making sure older neighbors don't freeze to death in winter because their "modern" gas furnace won't work without power.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
My wife just bought a Nook (B&N's version of the Kindle). She reads a couple of books a week and likes the Nook a lot. I don't know about the Kindle, but the Nook will take software from a lot of places, like the Gutenburg project and even PDFs.
The rule is in one of those dots. ;-)
That makes no sense. The connection rate only depends on your "last mile".
That's always a slightly dicey area... if the manufacturer says it's reated for such-and-such amount of cargo, just how much can you push it before you really are jeopardizing the handling and safety of the vehicle?
[Power outages, Internet backup]
Sure, but who really needs to be able to go without Internet access for, e.g.,
24 hours or less? Businesses -- including consultants who work from their homes :-) -- sure, but regular Ma and Pa Kettles?
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