On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Darren Salt wrote: > > (tubes for you wrong-pondians) and chokes and real transformers leaking > > oily PCBs down to the parking lot below. > > ITYM "down to the car park below". ;-) I say guv', I do believe my true roots (routes for all youse'all deep southerners and Aussies) are showing... Damn you Clarkson; if you were a fan of pushbikes, I'd be watching your show and picking up the right terms rather than being the poseur I've been outed as, waiting for the latest repeats of Family Guy on BBC3, instead of a Beeching doku on BBC4 that's more depressing than uplifting these days... Anyway, my cunning ploy to keep quiet rather than blurting out `12AX7 !!!' as a counterpoint to the claim of smashed tubes has been thwarted. `Nuvistor' would have revealed me not to be the old bearded apple that I make myself out to be, while I suppose I could redeem myself by claiming that senility keeps me from reciting the tube/valve lineup of the bakelite radio receiver, only one tube of which actually delivered a soothing orange glow, that hummed menacingly at me as I tuned in the Grand Ole Opry on WSM by gaslight. Ah, the days of dried-up electrolytic and paper condensers (capacitors for those who grew up near me and regret it). Once again I fell asleep reliving my past, thanks to Wackypedia. It is either a sign of recovery, or senility, or alcohol abuse, that not only can I not recall the markings on all the metal tubes in said radio, but that upon seeing designations such as 0A2, 0B3, and friends, I cannot for the life of me remember either which one(s) I was using, nor in what particular device, or where, or how, or anything. Sadly `6L6' and `6550' and too many other 6-foo and 12-foo numbers not only brought back memories but also reminded me that today I can't even draw a schematic of the home-built devices using those, which I had to repair. With enough beer, I hope I can kill off those brane cells, as I seem to have been unable to recycle them into something useful. Worst of all, the dream I just had took me back to those days, in a surreal reliving of my radio experience mixed with a modern-day rave. > (OTOH, at least we know to avoid these devices. And who to avoid when the > pointy-haired ones interfere, as I presume has happened here...) To get back on-topic from my perilous detour down memory lane^W trodden mudpath, the sad thing is that, at least for me, it seems the Micronas products of interest have somewhat of a monopoly position. In my case, lacking a DVB-C receiver which I'd like to try, four products with USB2 ability returned by a price comparison site are known or I suspect contain Micronas products. The one which probably does not has the added expense of including a (for me) unnecessary CI slot. But could have been a better choice, in hindsight. If I am to believe what I've read about ATSC, there's a problem with multipath interference (for which DVB-T uses the guard interval, also used to build single-frequency-networks which I expect them Merkins see no need for), and Micronas' press releases proclaim their ability to cope with this multipath. I look at this somewhat like I did the ATI/nVidia video card debate some years back, when I decided I wanted a card capable of XvMC MPEG-2 hardware decoding to allow my 200MHz-ish Pentium machines to be able to display smoothly videos recorded from DVB. As a PCI card (no AGP slot in the machines I had recovered from the dumpster/skip). At that time, the only choice was to use the closed nVidia drivers, which I did, and quite happily for my limited usage. Yes, I've read that others have complained about the stability and such, but I never experienced problems, and I was able to watch smooth (modulo generally interlaced 576i source) video, without dropping frames. Would I use the same today in the case of Micronas, should they release binary blobs that could be interfaced at a low level using standard demodulator calls? Probably -- I have no other choice as a foolish early-adopter, than to watch my USB stick be intercepted by a raven while demonstrating 9,8m/s which will then repeat the process in an attempt to get at the juicy walnut meat that has to be hidden inside. But as far as a higher-level application that, as a Unix beardy-weirdie, I'd probably never use, limiting myself to `scan' and `dvbstream' for my purposes? Hmmm... If I could get the equivalent of the drx3973d.ko or related foo.o files that I've built, except for the particular demods in my device, I'd be happier than today. I'm assuming I'd need the foo.o files to get the .ko file, else I'd be tied to a particular kernel version, which already causes me headaches. I'd say that the proper course of action would be for me to grab a pitchfork and head to Zuerich, but I'd probably be arrested for having flushed a toilet after 22h, and that's not their operative headquarters anyway. So off it is instead to Freiburg im Breisgau, but I'm highly likely to be distracted by the lure of the Kaiserstuhl and take my pitchfork instead into the wine fields and spend my lynchin'-an'-tarrin'-an'-featherin' time preparing the fields for next year, harvesting Eiswein or Trockenbeerenauslese, and drinking to try to kill off those brane cells that still are imprinted with painful memories of obsolete hardware and incorrect usage of the Queen's mother tongue, or, as them europeans says it, livin' life like it's meant ta be lived. And if tonight (or tomorrow, or whenever I pass out) I dream about that ENIAC in my workshop, it's time to break out the slivovice, damn brane cells. Time to stop living. In the past. chin chin, barry bouwsma sorry, what's that? oh yes, I will in fact shut up and beggar off now, you're very welcome _______________________________________________ linux-dvb mailing list linux-dvb@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.linuxtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-dvb
