Dumbed down consumer electronics: Adding DTV channels

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:44:43 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:


Jim Thompson wrote:

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:26:29 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:


Jim Thompson wrote:

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:09:07 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:


Jim Thompson wrote:

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:41:50 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:


Jim Thompson wrote:

That's pretty poor... Firefox claims _92_ "Radio Broadcast Companies"
in Mesa alone... which I doubt... maybe 30 active AM and FM that I can
think of.

I have Sirius in the Q45, but I do web radio in my office...Roku
Soundbridge.


Here are pictures of some of your local radio stations:

http://www.fybush.com/site-010509.html
http://www.fybush.com/sites/2005/site-051125.html
http://www.fybush.com/sites/2009/site-090918.html

Our house is one additional ridge south of the South Mountain towers,
so I don't have to constantly see the !@#$% blinking lights ;-)


Yeah, but you can't see inside the studios from your house. :)

Almost bought a lot on the next ridge north, but checked it out at
night to see how driving the ridge road in the dark would be. The
towers were blindingly annoying.


Then they aren't tall enough. :)

Quite visible when you're on an adjacent hill.


Some of the towers around here stick up through the clouds. :)

But you live in "flat-land".

Actually South Mountain is in the clouds one or two days a year when
it rains ;-)

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

Spice is like a sports car...
Performance only as good as the person behind the wheel.

Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.

The 'Datasette' was a modified cassette deck that plugged onto the PC
board with a six pin edge connector, not the storage media.
Yeah, but you know how it goes. People start using a catchy name for the
media as well. Just like many people say "I made a mess here, do you
have a Kleenex?" even though Kleenex is the manufacturer and not the
product name.


That may be, but I never saw any 'Compact Cassette' marked Datasette.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:52:36 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:24:30 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joel Koltner wrote:
Hi Joerg,

Joerg wrote:
? Yes, having landed a de-facto monopoly provides a plum position in the
? marketplace no matter how small that monopoly is.

True... the problem with iBiquity is that the FCC let them have the entire
market. At least with, e.g., Apple, while they get a cut of every (non-free)
app that ends up on a (non-jailbroken) iPhone, there are plenty of other GSM
phones out there.

? I vaguely remember one of the domestic car manufacturers offering it
? (Polk i-something) but I also remember seeing a $500 price tag there.

The car manufacturers have incredibly inflated ideas about how much radios
ought to cost -- even a simple AM/FM/CD player radio is often ?$200...
$40 for the radio & $160 for three union members to install it.
No, only $20 for the radio. The other $20 is for the retirement fund and
the "jobs bank"
Did you ever talk to the engineers who designed them? ...
Yes, but not in the US. I don't think there are any manufacturers left
for car stereos (which is sad).


... Where do you think I got the numbers?
From GM? :-)

The used to be DELCO _Radio_ Division. I designed chips for them. And
Guide Lamp Division... designed a head light dimmer for them.

One of mine ran on the DELCO process. But that's all gone now. The next
one will run at X-Fab.

Yep. Once-upon-a-time Delco had a respectable HV process.

Almost all of my recent stuff is on X-Fab. Which process?

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.

The 'Datasette' was a modified cassette deck that plugged onto the PC
board with a six pin edge connector, not the storage media.
Yeah, but you know how it goes. People start using a catchy name for the
media as well. Just like many people say "I made a mess here, do you
have a Kleenex?" even though Kleenex is the manufacturer and not the
product name.


That may be, but I never saw any 'Compact Cassette' marked Datasette.

There were, in Europe. IIRC "data cassette" or something like that. I
guess the only reason was to make a buck more on them. Supposedly they
were 100% tested for no dropouts in the magnetic layer.

Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.
The 'Datasette' was a modified cassette deck that plugged onto the PC
board with a six pin edge connector, not the storage media.
Yeah, but you know how it goes. People start using a catchy name for the
media as well. Just like many people say "I made a mess here, do you
have a Kleenex?" even though Kleenex is the manufacturer and not the
product name.

That may be, but I never saw any 'Compact Cassette' marked Datasette.
There were, in Europe. IIRC "data cassette" or something like that. I
guess the only reason was to make a buck more on them. Supposedly they
were 100% tested for no dropouts in the magnetic layer.


A stronger, thicker backing so it wouldn't stretch like cheap c-120
cassettes. Radio Shack used to sell them. Some were as short as five
minutes.

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:52:36 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:24:30 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joel Koltner wrote:
Hi Joerg,

Joerg wrote:
? Yes, having landed a de-facto monopoly provides a plum position in the
? marketplace no matter how small that monopoly is.

True... the problem with iBiquity is that the FCC let them have the entire
market. At least with, e.g., Apple, while they get a cut of every (non-free)
app that ends up on a (non-jailbroken) iPhone, there are plenty of other GSM
phones out there.

? I vaguely remember one of the domestic car manufacturers offering it
? (Polk i-something) but I also remember seeing a $500 price tag there.

The car manufacturers have incredibly inflated ideas about how much radios
ought to cost -- even a simple AM/FM/CD player radio is often ?$200...
$40 for the radio & $160 for three union members to install it.
No, only $20 for the radio. The other $20 is for the retirement fund and
the "jobs bank"
Did you ever talk to the engineers who designed them? ...
Yes, but not in the US. I don't think there are any manufacturers left
for car stereos (which is sad).


... Where do you think I got the numbers?
From GM? :-)

The used to be DELCO _Radio_ Division. I designed chips for them. And
Guide Lamp Division... designed a head light dimmer for them.

One of mine ran on the DELCO process. But that's all gone now. The next
one will run at X-Fab.

Yep. Once-upon-a-time Delco had a respectable HV process.

Almost all of my recent stuff is on X-Fab. Which process?


The XH035 process, 100V.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:42:59 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:52:36 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:24:30 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joel Koltner wrote:
Hi Joerg,

Joerg wrote:
? Yes, having landed a de-facto monopoly provides a plum position in the
? marketplace no matter how small that monopoly is.

True... the problem with iBiquity is that the FCC let them have the entire
market. At least with, e.g., Apple, while they get a cut of every (non-free)
app that ends up on a (non-jailbroken) iPhone, there are plenty of other GSM
phones out there.

? I vaguely remember one of the domestic car manufacturers offering it
? (Polk i-something) but I also remember seeing a $500 price tag there.

The car manufacturers have incredibly inflated ideas about how much radios
ought to cost -- even a simple AM/FM/CD player radio is often ?$200...
$40 for the radio & $160 for three union members to install it.
No, only $20 for the radio. The other $20 is for the retirement fund and
the "jobs bank"
Did you ever talk to the engineers who designed them? ...
Yes, but not in the US. I don't think there are any manufacturers left
for car stereos (which is sad).


... Where do you think I got the numbers?
From GM? :-)

The used to be DELCO _Radio_ Division. I designed chips for them. And
Guide Lamp Division... designed a head light dimmer for them.

One of mine ran on the DELCO process. But that's all gone now. The next
one will run at X-Fab.

Yep. Once-upon-a-time Delco had a respectable HV process.

Almost all of my recent stuff is on X-Fab. Which process?


The XH035 process, 100V.

OK. I'm just bringing up that library set.

...Jim Thompson

A stronger, thicker backing so it wouldn't stretch like cheap c-120
cassettes. Radio Shack used to sell them. Some were as short as five
minutes.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:51:19 -0700, Jim Thompson
To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon_at_On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:42:59 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:52:36 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:24:30 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joel Koltner wrote:
Hi Joerg,

Joerg wrote:
? Yes, having landed a de-facto monopoly provides a plum position in the
? marketplace no matter how small that monopoly is.

True... the problem with iBiquity is that the FCC let them have the entire
market. At least with, e.g., Apple, while they get a cut of every (non-free)
app that ends up on a (non-jailbroken) iPhone, there are plenty of other GSM
phones out there.

? I vaguely remember one of the domestic car manufacturers offering it
? (Polk i-something) but I also remember seeing a $500 price tag there.

The car manufacturers have incredibly inflated ideas about how much radios
ought to cost -- even a simple AM/FM/CD player radio is often ?$200...
$40 for the radio & $160 for three union members to install it.
No, only $20 for the radio. The other $20 is for the retirement fund and
the "jobs bank"
Did you ever talk to the engineers who designed them? ...
Yes, but not in the US. I don't think there are any manufacturers left
for car stereos (which is sad).


... Where do you think I got the numbers?
From GM? :-)

The used to be DELCO _Radio_ Division. I designed chips for them. And
Guide Lamp Division... designed a head light dimmer for them.

One of mine ran on the DELCO process. But that's all gone now. The next
one will run at X-Fab.
Yep. Once-upon-a-time Delco had a respectable HV process.

Almost all of my recent stuff is on X-Fab. Which process?

The XH035 process, 100V.
OK. I'm just bringing up that library set.

...Jim Thompson

CAUTION, I just got an E-mail announcement:

"Dear X-TIC User,

Our approach is to continually improve our processes to meet and
exceed our customers expectations. Nevertheless we need to inform you
today about an issue that occurred with the matching of the XH035,
XA035 and XO035 MIM capacitors cmm, cdmm. The re-characterization of
the XH035, XA035 and XO035 processes showed lower than expected
performance. Please read the attached PDF document for more details.

The XH035 Cadence PDK will be updated in accordance to the changed
parameters.

X-FAB has started immediate internal actions to find out the root
cause for this behavior. An update of that issue is expected to be
available by the end of January 2011."

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:

[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.

In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.

Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.


What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.

What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Joerg wrote:
JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.
What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.
The 'Datasette' was a modified cassette deck that plugged onto the PC
board with a six pin edge connector, not the storage media.
Yeah, but you know how it goes. People start using a catchy name for the
media as well. Just like many people say "I made a mess here, do you
have a Kleenex?" even though Kleenex is the manufacturer and not the
product name.

That may be, but I never saw any 'Compact Cassette' marked Datasette.
There were, in Europe. IIRC "data cassette" or something like that. I
guess the only reason was to make a buck more on them. Supposedly they
were 100% tested for no dropouts in the magnetic layer.


A stronger, thicker backing so it wouldn't stretch like cheap c-120
cassettes. Radio Shack used to sell them. Some were as short as five
minutes.

I just bought answering machine grade. 30 minutes, sturdy as heck, and a
lot cheaper.

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:44:43 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:26:29 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:09:07 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:41:50 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
mike.terrell_at_earthlink.net> wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
That's pretty poor... Firefox claims _92_ "Radio Broadcast Companies"
in Mesa alone... which I doubt... maybe 30 active AM and FM that I can
think of.

I have Sirius in the Q45, but I do web radio in my office...Roku
Soundbridge.

Here are pictures of some of your local radio stations:

http://www.fybush.com/site-010509.html
http://www.fybush.com/sites/2005/site-051125.html
http://www.fybush.com/sites/2009/site-090918.html
Our house is one additional ridge south of the South Mountain towers,
so I don't have to constantly see the !@#$% blinking lights ;-)

Yeah, but you can't see inside the studios from your house.
Almost bought a lot on the next ridge north, but checked it out at
night to see how driving the ridge road in the dark would be. The
towers were blindingly annoying.

Then they aren't tall enough.
Quite visible when you're on an adjacent hill.

Some of the towers around here stick up through the clouds. :)

But you live in "flat-land".

Actually South Mountain is in the clouds one or two days a year when
it rains

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg <invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now
that would be a few seconds and included (and would dissapear) in my
monthly. Today, a sloppy webpage will eat up a MB or more, and an
overnight DL would be about 5 GB; over 5 thousand times the data
volume. Just about 20 years difference.
In those cases I'd rather send them a SASE envelope, a blank diskette
and $20 for the effoert to copy and the walk by the mail room. Then use
the remaining $80 for a nice dinner with the wife.
Probably would have if it was available that way at that time.

What wasn't available? Stamps? Envelopes? Dinner? Wife? Ok then, maybe a
girlfriend?

Ok, diskettes could be hard to come by but we sometimes used audio
cassettes for data storage. Those were cheap. I believe Commodore called
them datasettes.

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.


Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:43:03 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:13:17 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:25:19 -0700, Joerg<invalid_at_invalid.invalid
wrote:

JosephKK wrote:
[...]

cost me about $100 long distance for a little less than a MB. Now

Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it
or go without.

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could
have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send
you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I
almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to
_find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just
was NOT there.