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lebuffon

685 karmajoined il y a 7 ans

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lebuffon
·il y a 23 heures·discuss
And don't forget AMI Tabfunkenwerk from USA.
lebuffon
·avant-hier·discuss
There were native horses, in fact the genus began in N. America and migrated out. Remains have been found in permafrost in Northern Canada. They went extinct about 12,700 years ago, sometime after humans arrived.
lebuffon
·avant-hier·discuss
In southern Ontario where there are many ( the most?) greenhouses electricity is primarily produced by Nuclear (50..55%) Hydro power is about 24 ..38% of the total.

I think the bigger difference is the Canadian attitude about the "commons" nature of electricity and so profiting excessively on power is frowned upon.
lebuffon
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
Back in the good old days of analog audio we made differential audio inputs with Iron and copper. :-)

Transformers are amazing at reducing common mode noise like induced hum, but rather expensive compared to the price of these boards.

Fun fact: The entire landline telephone system used to rely on balanced lines with transformers for in/out. The hum nulling is so good that trunk lines had no shielding inside buildings.
lebuffon
·il y a 11 jours·discuss
I look at culture, under which I put language as a component, as the O/S of the human brain. So yes a brain with no O/S can think but it probably will never replicate, in one life time, the accumulated thinking skills of a brain given a good O/S.

How many of us would independently reinvent language with specific tenses, the diatonic scale, the number zero, perspective drawing, geometry, calculus, atomic theory, quantum mechanics etc. if left on our own from childhood?

So to me, the question becomes, can human language encode the sum of all human thought? The answer might be no. But it might be good enough to get close.
lebuffon
·il y a 12 jours·discuss
It's not a technology limitation as you say. The issue is a psychology problem. How do you keep a nation all playing on the same team, so to speak, when there are an infinite number of contradictory voices screaming at them?

My observation is that a society is based on some common ideas, many times myths, but without those common threads you can't make a civilization. This is why dictatorial regimes shut down open internet access rather quickly. They know it will undermine and/or destroy their control of the masses.
lebuffon
·il y a 13 jours·discuss
I like to look back in history for parallels. In 1912 the USA required that all radio transmitters be licensed. There were classifications established for commercial and amateur stations. So at that time Feds understood the power of giving citizens the ability to communicate with the masses.

Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.

The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
lebuffon
·il y a 13 jours·discuss
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
lebuffon
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
That, in my opinion, is the question of the era for the USA. We were taught that the rule of law prevailed and there are "checks and balances" but it seems like there is no prescibed way to enforce the rules inside the system.
lebuffon
·il y a 29 jours·discuss
The RIAA equalization curve for recording and playback, was typically implemented with only resistors and capacitors. No DSP required.

I know I know. It's so hard to believe you can manipulate signals without a processor. ;-)
lebuffon
·il y a 29 jours·discuss
In my case it was around 1975ish. There was no digital circuitry in signal paths then.

If you are asking how the thread pitch motor controller was working I have no in depth knowledge but it would likely be an analog envelope detector. (simple RC filter/integrator would suffice) That would be rectified to make a DC control voltage and the control voltage would be used to modulate the power to the motor in an inverse fashion. ( more audio signal -> less power )

No digits would be harmed in the process. :)
lebuffon
·le mois dernier·discuss
Old guy here. I brought a few masters into RCA in Toronto, just before dinosaurs went extinct.

At that time they used a Studer A80 (if memory serves) 1/2 track machine, modified, with an extra playback head that was placed before the head stack so it read the music on tape about 500mS before the playback head got it. The extra head sound was fed to the motor controller that controlled the speed of the cutting head feed motor that turned the screw that controlled the pitch depth of the grooves.

When the preview head sound was loud, the screw motor would slow down to make bigger grooves and then return to normal when the audio envelope was smaller.

That's how they optimized groove spacing before digital buffers. :-)
lebuffon
·le mois dernier·discuss
My observation after numerous decades is that people who invent technology don't control it because they seldom imagine how the rest of humanity will ultimately use it. I am thinking of printing press versus newspapers with advertising business model. Same for Radio and TV. The techs made it work. The business weenies made the profit. The original "www" followed a similar path. How that plays out with AI is in motion I think.
lebuffon
·le mois dernier·discuss
As counter argument proposal; we should look into studies of children deprived of language until later in life. I have a dim memory of reading that one of these people never mastered complex language constructs. I could be that language and other cultural artifacts provide an "operating system" of sorts for the brain that allow higher level thinking. ?? (conjecture here by a complete layman)
lebuffon
·le mois dernier·discuss
Aside from the Jesus centered stuff what are the things in Gaudium et Spes that you find to be trash? (I only read a summary before asking)
lebuffon
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
By "back Illinois bill", does that mean they wrote it?
lebuffon
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
So the "checks and balances" we were taught in school was just nonsense?
lebuffon
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)
lebuffon
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
Forth does not specify threaded code. Implementation is left to the implementor.

Internally Forth can be direct threaded code, indirect threaded code, byte code, sub-routine calls or optimized native code.
lebuffon
·il y a 5 mois·discuss
The 16K memory block is connect to the TMS9918 video chip and is accessed by port read/write. The TI-99 out of the box only has 256 bytes of RAM memory on the 16 bit buss.

UNIX99 uses an after market card with 1Mbyte of RAM on an 8bit external buss used for peripherals. This card replaces the old 32K RAM card made by TI in the 1980s.