Silly resistor values

Just had a thought. Do you have any anti-virus programs running that intercept downloads? Particularly those from Microsoft.

I negated Microsoft's firewall and run my own. I also exclude PDF's from Norton.

...Jim Thompson

No, but they picked the ATSC standard with IMHO way too little field testing. The European DTV system is much more robust in that respect.

Going to UHF was IMHO a serious mistake. When channel 13 was on VHF it came through, usually with little to no ghosting. Now it's unreliable. I do not understand how one can give up a VHF channel in trade for a channel the inferior UHF band. At least not without serious monetary compensation (which I wouldn't know anything about) or without putting up a fight.

Yes, I do but not from MS. However, it doesn't make a difference. I have had the same Adobe crashes on client computers. Those were usually top notch big fat workstations, maintained by an IT department. When telling the engineers the typical reply was "Yeah, happens all the time with PDF files".

Your government at its finest ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Strange crowd you hang out with ?:-)

I've never found an IT department that seemed to have ANY savvy.

...Jim Thompson

I've sometimes wondered why ~19V has seemingly become the most prevalent laptop input voltage standard today... cranking it up from 12V reduces current, of course, and perhaps much above 19V the power switches get more expensive?

I had a chat with the station's engineer and his opinion was that UHF travels through buildings and high-rises better. I guess we lost out to them flatlanders :-)

And besides, I think the vast majority of urban dwellers in high-rises will have cable TV anyhow. IMHO it's only a matter of time until folks on the outskirts hang up on such stations and go to non-local channels on satellite. Or as the next generation already does, fulfill their media consumption wishes via the web for news and Netflix for movies. Then, ad revenue drops, station budgets begin to shrivel up, pink slips are handed out. I see that coming, just as I saw the mortgage bubble burst coming .

You haven't met the guy on his Harley yet who did our IT at EndoSonics. You couldn't have wished for more savvy, he and two helpers kept a 300+ employee company going that was spread across three locations with one of them being overseas.

No idea, maybe because of the typical LiIon configuration. The old Contura was NiCd. Lasted 6h on this standard old-tech battery, regularly blew high-faluting IBMs out of the water.

WRT switches most PWM chips are designed wrong. I'll never understand why but often they have an LDO inside which I hate in the first place so I usually bypass it. Then they limit the gate swing to 7V or less which is ^*&%#!! because you can't really use standard gate swing FETs which most devices >100V are. IOW their Rdson isn't guaranteed for anything less than 10V on the gate.

Yep. Network channels are guaranteed to die, particularly given their leftist weenie leanings. Our local station here put on disclaimers before the Obama bull s*it (the White House propaganda machine a few weeks ago0, saying they were forced to carry it by the network.

I did, too.

...Jim Thompson

My Lenovo ThinkPad X61s will do about 8 hours (LiIon) _provided_ I'm not running a simulation ;-) (I up-sized the battery when I bought it.)

...Jim Thompson

Ours is pretty good. They are especially good in the unearthing of government waste which sometimes resulted in rather immediate consequences (because this made some career politician's office look bad). It would be sad to see this station go just because of technology mistakes.

Then why didn't they make us co-chairs of the Federal Reserve? We could have prevented tons of grief. Or maybe not ...

off

IBM learned it, finally. Then they sold out :-(

My netbook gets over 8h on the standard battery. But I learned rather quickly that you do _not_ want to do SPICE sims on an Intel Atom processor. Unless you are next to a pool and can do 25 laps while it crunches. So if that is required on the road I'll have to schlepp the Durabook, all 7lbs of it.

off

I'm contemplating a GoToMyPC, or PC Anywhere approach. My son says I don't need any commercial (as in "paid") method, I can do it myself. Then I could run simulations on my home box, and just read it out via the notebook.

So far I haven't pursued this idea but, unfortunately, the economy soothsayers are predicting travel is in my future :-(

...Jim Thompson

For what it's worth, PDF995 looks like a printer to the OS, and it makes PDFs with selectable text.

And it's free, albeit you get a popup and a nag screen each time you use it.

Cheers! Rich

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Your son is very much correct. The main thing the GoToMyPC guys provide is an ability to not have to worry too much about firewall settings/port forwarding, a topic that sends many people running.

A good, free tool that does the same thing (doesn't require port forwarding) and is otherwise built around the well-known (open-source) TightVNC remote desktop program is CrossLoop:

Kinda ironic how the more things change the more they stay the same... we're getting back to the "big iron" machine centrally located accessed by a "smart terminal" somewhere on the Internet. :-)

Bad economy = more travel? How does that work?

Hey, did you happen to tell us if you use hierarchy in your IC designs within PSpice Schematics? I missed it if you did.

---Joel

I made one of those 4-bay bowties, and had it hanging in front of an aluminum venetian blind, which I'd reasoned should act like a reflector.

My VHF antenna is on the roof, so I had to swap every time I went from VHF to UHF, and on the UHF channels I had to dick around with the antenna, ass-u-me-ing that the distance to the "reflector" made some difference.

Then I realized that the guy who did that demo on utube didn't even use a reflector, so I raised the venetian blind, and WOW! Everything comes in perfectly! I had to find a piece of cardboard to stuff into the window, but I get channels I've never even seen before! Of course, I had to go through the add/remove menu a couple of times to get rid of all the Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, televangelist, and etc. channels, but I'm really quite happy with it.

Disclaimer - I'm about 40 miles from Mount Baldy, which I hear is where the antennas are, and it's practically line-of-sight.

Cheers! Rich

Thanks for the pointers !!

Not surprising... forced by the airline business... toting my old Vaio was becoming exhausting :-(

More and more people won't sign on to me consulting/designing off-site... I only have ~$47K/year retirement income, so I still have to work to support the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed :-(

Yep! I use hierarchical schematics extensively... no cell over B-size if I can help it.

I obviously can't publish most of my work, but visitors are welcome to come and look over my shoulder.

...Jim Thompson

Hey, I saw the socialism coming! Note the date on this one:

Richard The Dreaded Libertarian View profile More options Aug 1 2008, 2:48 pm On Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:54:40 -0700, Joerg wrote: > John Larkin wrote: >> On Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:44:08 -0700, Joerg (or somebody) ... >>>>> but the real problem is that lots of politicos have bought it.

Vote Libertarian? Otherwise, we sit back and protect our own jewels, and try to enjoy the ride when the card house comes crashing down all around us. >:-> Cheers! Rich

Cheers! Rich