Allegedly, on or about 26 November 2012, Corey Fedoravic waxed lyrical: > does this mean then that so-called broadband providers must maintain > some permutation of "repeaters" , or signal amplifiers? It's a basic part of wired communication. There's a line length limit, where you need to put amplifiers into the signal, if you want to go past that point. In the analogue days, it literally was amplifiers. For digital data, it's something else more complex. For analogue, it's mostly simply a loss of signal strength over distance. For data, it's not just signal loss, but timing issues between data going out and coming back, such as the handshaking that controls the flow of data. If handshaking and data can't be nicely timed against each other, data flow is corrupted or even totally interrupted. > Remember telephone-poles. Uh... been a while since light outside this > cave has touched this face. Do we still have telephone-poles? We do, I don't know about where you live. > Moreover, is the technology so archaic that-- for example-- one > malevolent individual might "out" an entire community, simply through > use of brute force as to sever connection (i.e. bulldozer, trailor > tractor, tow-truck, industrial saw-toothed equipment; anything capable > of severing such a line?) That happens all the time. Depending on where the accident happens, it can even put most of a country out. On a WAN where a whole street shares a common signal path back to a local distribution point, which eventually leads back to the ISP, rather like a tree (trunk, branches, etc.), it's not impossible for one house to disrupt the whole street, by accident or design. It is/was a common enough model employed with cable TV and internet, where a local node feeds a whole street, with tap-offs from a common line going into each house. If the taps don't provide sufficient isolation between the house and the common cable, one house could disrupt the neighbours. Of course neighbourly disruption isn't limited to cabled connections. If all the wireless LANs in each house share common channels (for example, there's a few different WLANs on channel 6 around here), the chatter on the same frequency can prevent communication. The distance between each house usually stops this from happening, but if you're close enough, it can be a problem (such as apartments in a building, or the position of your computer being used closer to your neighbour's access point than your own). > I don't subscribe to such Huxlian tech, as the smart-phone, etc., but > are these not independent of any "wiring"? When it comes to internetting, there are often multiple paths of communication. But it's not always automatic to switch over to a backup, sometimes that has to be organised by humans. For islands and continents, it's common that there are submarine cables and satellite links. But the loss of one can severely cripple a network that often uses both simultaneously, to be able to handle their normal bandwidth. > I suppose the real question; where the ramble wanes: > Consider the public at-large. From where does the data enter an > HDMI-equipped device? HDMI is rather like ethernet. There's several pairs of wires in the connector, each pair carries a digital signal. There's loss over distance to contend with, and interference between adjacent pairs, and external signals. And, with increases in length, or bad termination in the equipment, you have timing and reflection issues. The effects of cable problems can be picture breakups and unexpected behaviours of equipment. The old high school science experiments with extended springs (usually using the "slinky" toy) give a crude example of these issues. If you extend them across the room, so they don't touch the floor, then wiggle them to make a wave pass along them, you can see a wave flow across and an echo bounce back. Dependent upon length and the frequency that you wiggle the spring, it's efficient at neatly sending a wave across, or the reflections bounce back and mess up your wave. > I used to shoot birds with a bee-bee-gun; considered my score, > dependent upon whether the poor creater fell from the telephone line. > Rhetorically; to self, i wonder: is this what shall determine my > eternal damnation? ugh. If you believe in karma, what goes around comes around. If you've ever dabbled with Microsoft Windows, you're eternally damned. ;-) You may as well accept the inevitable, and resort to chatting with people you actually know, face to face. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.6.7-4.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Nov 20 19:40:01 UTC 2012 x86_64 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
