OT? : Netherlands to switch 100% to VOIP before 2010

It was dinosaur technology. But guess what, it worked. If it ever quit a good spritz from the contact spray can would make it work again ;-)

Classic digital without power-hungry processors is the ticket. On an oil rig we had a computer (PDP-11 style, actually) that was "customized" by the oil exploration company. The circuit boards were fully coated so when someone was hosing off our doghouse and one of us accidentally walked out the door nothing went wrong, even though the rack was dripping salt water. That "spritz" was so powerful that it blew the guy back inside. Now imagine what would happen if there was just one of those newfangled GHz-processors with a fan on top.

Same thing happened here (Seattle area) during our little pre-Xmas windstorm.

Or 'Goodbye cruel world'. :-/

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copper

the help

third world? ;-)

Can't agree. The image from the digital decoders we have (DVB Samsung) is much better than analog especially with multiple TVs connected in parallel. But you really should use a scart cable, not composite video.

Digital TV artifacts annoy me. Everytime I listen to my cell phone I get annoyed. Maybe someday we will get somthing of decent quality. Oh, we used to have it!

greg

Well, sometimes you needed to get a spring bender out, and adjust the tension in the stack up a little, but that was about it... 8-)

Charlie

Yet another by-product of a throw-away society. Almost everyone is conditioned to throw away and replace if it breaks; and then are surprised and confused when competent engineers insist that this is not acceptable for some particular application.

I recently got my wife a LCD HD-ready TV. Picture quality using a Freeview STB was poor, clearly worse than her old CRT TV. Signal strength was fine (I took a spectrum analyser home to check the signals out).

I then got her a PVR which has the capability of interpolating the SD signals to HD. The displayed picture quality improved very significantly.

I assume this may well be related to driving the LCD at its "native" resolution, as we do with computer display LCD's.

Regards Ian

POTS technology is actually the opposite. One telco technician told me that some of the installations that he had wired up as an apprentice were still there and in full service when he retired about 45 years later. Oh, and the phone in our kitchen is vintage 1927. Still works like a champ. The only TLC it needs is the occasional wood polish. And don't try to hang one of these on drywall. It sure ain't one of those plastic VoIP gizmos ;-)

(It is via SCART) I think the problem is that I can see the Emley moor transmitter through my window, (about 5 miles away). A bit of wet string gives a good quality analogue picture and the steerable aerial on the roof need pointing off beam to keep the signal levels down. For years now I've been used to the best that analogue can offer, hence easy to notice when intrinsic picture quality degrades. Although I've talked to people in mediocre reception areas who benefit from picture improvement with the digital. Some win some lose. john

I worked for a supplier of mobile telephone equipment for the military. The design goal was for a minimum serviceability of 25 yrs. This included mobile shelters which served as branch offices as well as portable hand helds. We even did a lifetime buy of components to service the equipement. I wonder if it has survived the cellphone age?

Al

I remember helping hang several 'new' shelves of switches, with dates on their frames of 1938 (this was in '86) and most of the wiring was cloth insulated! That stuff was never destroyed, just recycled to somewhere with less technology!

Charlie

In the army the truck our unit was assigned was 20 years old, had non-synchronized gear, the jake brake required standing on it and what they called power steering back then required muscles. Yet it looked brand new. So I asked the guy from which I was taking it over, how come? He said that when he took it a year before it was delivered with zero miles and the protective wax cover had to be removed. Talking about "new old stock"...

Wax? Are you sure it wasn't "Cosmoline"?