rplst8

Yeah. People really overlook the value of muscle memory on the keyboard and how changing the affects productivity.

Most rail equipment, powered units included, can be pulled along by just about any other powered railcar.

Yeah I don't agree with that assertion either. Microsoft will produce hardware to show the art of the possible with their software. It largely comes out of a situation where the PC/device manufacturers were doing a sh* job of it.

P.S. sitting down and learning git was probably the single most useful activity I've done on my 23 year career as a dev.

No thanks.

I've worked on teams using trunk based development before and I ended up being the one having to fix other people's messes, deal with them losing work, and the absolute hell of trying to find where a bug was introduced.

The only people I really want on my team are those that understand Git. And even when there are team members that don't understand Git, I sure do and can pretty easily un-eff any situation someone gets themselves into.

Seriously, Git is actually simple and it should be a fundamental CS class taught at all universities.

One of the giants in this industry, Lionel, has been struggling for the last 30 or so years to stay alive. It’s been through several sales and I think two bankruptcies.

One thing about them though is they continue to innovate with new ways to put effects into their locomotives. Other companies have contributed as well, like MTH, ESU LocSound, SoundTrax, Broadway Limited, and others.

Model trains have a pretty loyal following, but the industry continues to narrow year after year.

IMHO all of these companies, but particularly Lionel and MTH missed out big time in the “maker movement” due to their closed, proprietary command and control systems. The patents have expired though, and many people have started to reverse engineer everything about them.

I think they also have completely failed on the marketing aspects of their businesses. Model trains have so many educational opportunities, and pitting this against video games could be a big win for them IMHO. The great thing for programmers and engineering types is it’s low threat to us since there is still a lot of software and hardware that could be built around model train products in the form of control and automation, and maybe even gamification of the operations of a model railroad.

But all of this is coming from a long time model train (and real train) enthusiast who is software engineer by day, so I’m biased.

Was the development of those JS frameworks funded with federal tax dollars?

Tom also builds military grade subwoofers.

He had a hand the design of the BassTech 7 servo drive subs as well. Their not being made anymore as I think they went out of business 20 years ago or so. All the reports I've read about those indicated that those subs were a pinnacle of rock concert audio technology and were devastatingly loud, lol.

Once BassTech folded, he worked with an online forum known as the Live Audio Board (LAB) to open source the design and replace the servo based driver with a conventional voice coil and cone driver.

The resultant design became known as the LAB Sub. A friend of mine built 12 of these beasts ~ 45x45x22 inches and let me tell you, they were amazing performers, that you could build yourself for around $500 (at the time).

Mr. Danley truly is a treasure to audio engineering and loudspeaker design.

Nothing you said refutes my assertion.

Ah you're right. It still breaks the "even division" argument though.

PCM is also a lossy compression due to the quantization step

Wrong, especially today. Modern ADCs use oversampling to push quantization noise into the inaudible range, and then filter it out before decimation to standard PCM.

This used to be somewhat true, but modern digital often uses such high internal rates that converting between the two is near lossless. For instance, the least common multiple of 44.1k and 48k is in the 7MHz region. Realtime conversion between them is pretty doable today. We've been doing it by using decimation with much simpler hardware for a few decades before that.

Input signals are ALWAYS band limited for digital systems. If you don't do this and you work for any company designing such circuitry, you'd be fired.

Wrong. You need to read some more Shannon and Nyquist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp...

I don't know much about the Yamaha technology referenced, but he's not totally off his rocker.

CDs don't record 0s as pits and 1s as lands. A change from pit to land or land to pit is a one, and no change over a time base is a 0.

Therefore, the recording and tracking performance can be affected by the disc content and processing applied.

This is a great example of why I prefer lossless source material. I can tell an MP3 from a CD nearly every time (on recordings of good original quality) once it's sent through Bluetooth.

Agreed on the 44.1k 16-bit is all you need as a delivery medium for a final audio product.

However higher bit rates and sample rates are needed for multi track recordings so that during the mixing stage and mastering, the fidelity is preserved when _math_ causes rounding errors and what not. Unless, you are using nondestructive editing.

As for listening to the final product, i.e. store bought CDs and their equivalent MP3 and AAC rips... I can often hear the difference in specific recordings, no matter the bit rate, because the perceptual encoding schemes often butcher certain recordings.

For example, on RUSH's Red Barchetta from Moving Pictures, there is a synth intro that slowly vamps in volume. Every MP3 encoder (that is normally worth it's salt) I've ever tried encoding that with outputs a garbled, distorted, electronic sounding distortion. It clears up immediately once it reaches full volume, but during the crescendo it falls on it's face.

AFAIK, 48k was preferred over 44.1k in movie and cinema recordings because it divides evenly by 24. Both 44.1k and 48k are evenly divided by 30 and 60 fps. However, none of that really matters for TV where the actual frame rates are 59.97 and 29.98 to reduce flicker with US household mains frequency.

In the early days of digital audio, and before oversampling was possible, the anti aliasing filters were analog circuitry.

It's very difficult to cheaply implement a 20kHz brick wall filter with a 2kHz sideband.

Doing it in 4kHz yielded better results at the cost of slightly faster ADC designs.

I believe this is why 48kHz designs got the foothold in professional audio circles. The analog parts of those designs were WAY better sounding.

Once oversampling became common and affordable, the anti aliasing filters where implemented much more easily in the digital domain.

That's not how it works. Each bit of sample size yields about 6db of SNR. If you amplify a source to 120db SPL that was recorded with 4-bit samples the quantization noise would be about 96db SPL.

Most professional (i.e. cinema or public address) amplifiers have an SNR of around 108db. A properly functioning amplifier is never a likely source of noise.

What do TV and radio stations have to do with active radar?

Not to mention all the additional access constraints that require folks that use it to be properly credentialed.

Some states, like Oregon I believe, have similar prohibitions about the word "engineer" being one's job title. Others only prohibit signing off as a PE unless certified.

Most life critical systems, such as medical devices, bridges, and buildings, require a PE to sign off in the states.

Removing the "engineer" from a title or position that doesn't require a PE is not likely to happen, and is really just semantics.

The bigger issue I see, especially with DoD IT systems, is that the federal government career field that manages those requires NO education.

With a HUGE infusion of cash from Microsoft.

Yeah but when you find out they lied, you can't just look the other way. People and organizations shouldn't need the threat of oversight to be honest.

A billion times more complex than the safety-critical parts of an airplane? I think you lack perspective on avionics packages and the safety measures that are undertaken in that industry. Additionally, I think you're vastly over estimating how complex a smartphone is.

5/3rd has some suuuuper sketchy loan terms that caught my parents up during a refi on the mortgage for their primary residence. I do not recommend that bank, at all.

The fact that the loss of particulate matter in the atmosphere increases warming has been known for at least two decades.

This is not surprising to me. It started years ago when scrubbers began to be installed on coal power plants and continued with low sulphur diesel requirements that started 15 years ago.

The reply was a bit harsh, but let's not act like the real estate industry isn't riddled with skeezy practices.

1) Home inspections that aren't really "inspections" and are just there to grease the skids 2) Buyer's agents don't have a fiduciary duty to protect the buyers. 3) Pricing "knowledge" that is typically public info, just locked behind access restrictions 4) predatory lending practices

It's a very incestuous market where the agents are friends with mortgage loan officers at banks, handymen, inspectors, and law offices that handle closing.

The fact that it costs somewhere between 10-15% of the value of a home to actually transfer ownership is highway robbery.

Wrong. Most compact cars and midsized sedans from the 80s were downright awful. Sub 100 hp motors, with restrictive exhausts and poorly designed emissions systems. They were mostly garbage.

My family's Pontiac 6000 had a 2.5 liter 92 hp pile of hot garbage for an engine, and couldn't get out its own way.