Yea. I work in Riverside. Done audio and video work for groups such as The Neil Deal and other bands out in Studio City. I have plenty of experience with digital recording and multitracking/overdubbing, starting with Cool Edit back in the late 90s (and some MIDI/MOD/IT tracking.)

Simple physics alone is going to dictate that sub 5ms latency is pretty much impossible without your cables being a foot long once you take all the signal pathways, processing overhead, etc. in a piece of hardware into account.

Everything else is marketing.

"you need PCIe or Thunderbolt if you want to have a few hundred tracks and still have under 5 milliseconds latency"

That's what a mixer board is for and even ASIO drivers don't provide sub 5ms latency. The only thing on this planet providing sub 5ms latency are direct connections from instrument to IEMs, and even then you have to deal with things like comb filtering.

Yamaha has a good piece on this and I'd take their word well over Avid's, given Yamaha has been in this game FAR longer, starting with musical instruments back in 1887, versus Avid's 1984 starting date.

Heesa left een Jar Jar?

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you've a date in Constantinople
She'll be waiting in Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Istanbul, Istanbul
Istanbul, Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Istanbul

Best version - Craig Ferguson!

"You're obviously not in the pro audio world."

You obviously aren't either. Thunderbolt's way overkill for bandwidth requirements, and most onboard sound systems in a typical desktop handle proper mixer outputs and inputs just fine, with pretty much professional noise floors. I get more noise from my guitar amp and distortion pedal than I get recording the line-in with nothing attached/everything turned off.

Pretty easy setup. Added bonus, you can't infect through a line-in signal that I'm aware of!

Three movie review stories on the front page.

Plenty of other techy stuff that could be advert^W^Wtalked about.

But for Kindle if it's supported in Kindle Previewer, then someone screwed up pretty carelessly.

I'd argue that if any WebKit-based reader doesn't support it, then someone screwed up pretty carelessly, but that's just me. :-)

I am, of course, assuming that Thunderbolt controllers contain an IOMMU, but given that it has to function as a nontransparent PCI bridge when attached between two computers, that should be a safe assumption.

The whole point of requiring every driver to call the prepare method on an IOMemoryDescriptor object before telling a device to do DMA and calling the matching complete method when the I/O is done is so that the OS can create and tear down mappings in various IOMMU hardware to protect the system as a whole from buggy devices (and particularly those that don't understand 64-bit address spaces). If that isn't happening, I'd argue that it is a kernel bug, and given the security implications, a pretty serious one.

Thunderbolt is rather different, because the devices are basically PCI-E cards with a Thunderbolt transceiver bolted on. As such they can do anything that a PCI-E card can do, including accessing all RAM. PC Card devices have the same issue, and so does Firewire. It's a serious issue and tools that exploit it have been available for a while, both open source and commercial.

Here's what I don't get. Back when the G5 came out, Apple used a custom piece of hardware called DART to create a boundary between the I/O address space used by PCI devices and the physical address space used by RAM. It required device drivers to explicitly configure mappings before a PCI device could scribble on RAM, and limited those devices to scribbling over the ranges specified by the OS. That hardware went away with the Intel transition, of course, but most of the newer 64-bit Intel hardware has a feature called VT-d that does essentially the same thing. AFAIK, the 64-bit OS X kernel uses that functionality by default if the hardware supports it, so all of those tools should be completely non-functional on recent Macs running Mountain Lion and later. And I think I remember reading somewhere that Thunderbolt controllers contain an address translation table as well.

With that in mind, how is this Thunderbolt device somehow gaining the ability to tickle hardware that probably doesn't live on the PCI bus, on the opposite side of the Thunderbolt controller, at a location that wasn't explicitly configured for DMA by a device driver? Does it involve rebooting the machine and exploiting a driver bug in EFI?

Heh. I'll show you. I haven't updated my preferred roaming list since 2003. My ancient flip phone will never even see your tower!

On the other hand there is only so much wireless spectrum available that is set aside for 802.11x. Ever been to big even in a hotel where eveybody and their brother has the hot spot function enabled on their phones, is caring around those mobile hot spot things, folks are running classes in conference with their own wireless AP setup for their students, etc.

IIRC, cell phone hotspots deliberately limit their maximum gain to minimize interference. They typically have an indoor range of about 66 feet—essentially, your hotel room and one or two rooms on either side. Based on that, I suspect that those personal hotspots are more likely to be a symptom of the problem than its actual cause.

If you're seeing poor performance on a hotel's infrastructure Wi-Fi network, odds are good that either:

• The hotel doesn't have enough APs.
• The hotel's external bandwidth is insufficient for the traffic.
• The hotel's DHCP server ran out of IP addresses for the number of clients.
• The hotel's DHCP server is buggy and sends out offers based on what the client asked for, without properly checking that the request is sensible (e.g. that it is in the right subnet, that no other client is using that address, etc.).
• The hotel's systems are, in fact, down.

The first one is usually the main problem. Most hotels' networks were designed under the assumption that folks will have at most one Wi-Fi-capable device per room, and that most folks won't be using them at any given point in time. When you have a bunch of geeks with three or four devices, all talking at once, the spectrum can get clogged pretty badly.

There are two possible fixes for that problem. The first fix is to deploy 802.11ac more broadly. For clients that support it, this reduces congestion considerably, both by providing more channels and by reducing interference through beamforming. The second fix is to greatly increase the number of 802.11b/g APs (and, to a lesser degree, 802.11n APs) so that you can reduce their maximum receive and transmit gain settings, effectively creating a large number of very small clusters of nodes instead of a few big ones. Note that these solutions are not mutually exclusive.

Because they don't allow you to bring your own drinks and snacks...and you don't want to be "forced to purchase theirs at a dramatically inflated price". I'm just curious how strong your principles are.

That's not really a fair comparison, for several reasons:

• Movie theaters are considered public locations. Hotel rooms are considered private locations. Just as a hotel cannot authorize the police to search your hotel room without a warrant, it also has limited authority to govern what you do in your room, so long as your actions do not cause damage to the room.
• You stay in a movie theater for the duration of a single movie. Unless your metabolism is insane, you can trivially eat before you go inside and wait to eat again until after you leave. By contrast, you stay at a hotel for several days. Going without Internet service for a week is usually a much bigger burden than going without snacks for 90 minutes.
• Health code regulations often prohibit businesses that sell food from allowing outside food to be consumed on the premises, so even if theaters wanted to allow you to bring food in, they may not be able to do so.
• Movie theaters charge high prices on food to make up for their miniscule profit on movie tickets. Hotels that charge hundreds of dollars per night are making a lot more than a buck per person, so they really don't have any good excuse for ripping people off by charging $15 per day for Internet service.

So although they might be similar in principle, the differences in practice are so large so as to render one a meaningless annoyance that we can live with, while rendering the other a serious act of interference that cannot be tolerated.