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Comment Re:All about HDCP (Score 1) 704

ADAT Lightpipe uses the same fiber and physical connectors as S/PDIF TOSLINK. It handles 8 channels of uncompressed PCM audio at 24 bit, 48kHz, for a totally unimpressive but sufficient bitrate of 9.2MBit. A slightly better quality ADC is needed on the receiving end of the signal due to the higher bandwidth, but is mostly the same.

Comment Re:why phase out DVI? (Score 1) 704

SATA CAN be hotpluggable, but is not required to be. That said, most hosts support it, though only in AHCI mode, not emulation mode. From the systems I've seen in the field, about half are using IDE emulation mode, either because the OS doesn't natively support it and the installer did not spend time looking for drivers, or because it is a "fleet" computer where the BIOS was configured in a "safe" mode.

Comment Counterexample (Score 1) 135

Tunneling accelerometers are mainstream. They are basically a STM without the scanning ability, with the "pinhead" on a MEMs arm. These are in tiny chips. Combining these with perhaps thermal expansion "heater" actuators, and you have a crude yet tiny STM, with very limited storage capacity (limited by X * Y travel / bit spacing.

Comment All contracts are negotiable, but not all are usef (Score 1) 138

The rub in 2 and 4 comes when you STILL have to click the checkbox to make the software run. Nothing that they send back in paper form will get you past a hardcoded EULA/TOS agreement. By clicking OK even when you have the paper document in hand, you are explicitly accepting the original agreement and the company laughs at you.

Comment Baseband's been doing it for 16 years... (Score 1) 129

..100Base-T. Albeit not over incredibly long distances.

Conversely on that broadband cable line already coming to your house, each 6MHz channel can support a downstream rate of 42.88Mb/sec using QAM256 (with some of this as overhead). Devoting that entirely to "Internets", the usable frequency range of that cable (typically) is from ~54MHz to 750MHz which represents 116 channels. 116*42.88 = 4974Mb/sec, or ~5Gb/sec of useful data in one direction. Cut that in half, and allowing for upstream inefficiencies (QAM64 instead of QAM256), you could theoretically get ~2.5Gb/sec down, ~1.75Gb/sec up over that one cable using current tech.

Of course you'd need multiple cable modems on the receiving side (or a killer DOCSIS 3 device supporting 58 down, 58 up channels) and the corresponding hardware at the head end. This is not unfeasable, just impractical.

And with Comcast you'd reach your bandwidth cap in just under 7 minutes...

The point is that the claimed level of performance of DSL can be trumped by a single entry level DOCSIS 3 cable modem (152Mb/sec down, 123Mb/sec up) using just 4 channels each way.

Comment Re:True, but $5 are still worse... (Score 1) 399

Interestingly, gold plated contacts when in contact with mating gold plated contacts, can spontaneously stick or form weak "welds" to each other. This is not useful mechanically as they can still be separated (usually), but electrically it results in a copper-nickel-gold-nickel-copper regime, rather than two separate gold interfaces. Also GP Poster's comment about audio applications is not true - the skin effect does not apply at such low frequencies, especially for the thickness of the plating.

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