I wonder if there might be a bit of switching choreography required, if a unit in the middle of a train dies. And what if an axle jumps the rails ? What does rerailing look like ?
I know these are all solved issues for railroads, but I wonder if tunnels and lack of lateral access by heavy equipment makes a difference.
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.
Hardware manufacturers that aren't Microsoft have little reason to take speculative risks that might prove that there's a market for a new configuration of commodity hardware to sell Microsoft’s latest non-commodity software; it's all potential downside with very little potential upside.
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.
Yeah data is often recoverable by experts. But it’s too hard.
My VCS rule is that commit ids are sacrosanct. If you make a commit that commit is safe. You can do whatever the hell you want. Merge, rebase, whatever. But you can always go back to that commit.
This is kinda sorta true for Git. But that isn’t a first principle. And Git’s management of branch labels is super finicky.
Mercurials anonymous branching is a better default imho.
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.
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.
>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.
Because the end result is standard PCM, the quantization can be only worse, not better.
Oversampling ADCs push a much greater quantization noise into the inaudible range, and then, by low-pass filtering, reduce the quantization noise to the level of standard PCM.
Oversampling ADCs are not better, they are much cheaper, because 16-bit or 24-bit quantizers with enough speed and accuracy are extremely expensive.
Oversampling, i.e. sigma-delta modulation, in both ADCs and DACs, allows the use of much cheaper quantizers with low resolution, of only a few bits, or even of only 1 bit, and of much cheaper filters, which do not have to be very steep, without degrading too much the quality in comparison with real PCM conversion done at the Nyquist frequency.
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.
That might be true for the hardware, but since mixing of multiple streams is a software function nowadays (… some older HW was multi-stream capable…), any 44.1kHz stream has a good chance of being resampled to 48kHz just to allow mixing it with other sounds.
Even if it's the only stream and you could switch the codec to 44.1kHz mode, what do you do if the OS wants to play a random notification sound? Switching between 44.1kHz and 48kHz is not going to be hitless on a significant number of HW (not all, but most I'd guess), so whoever's writing your OS mixer code would reasonably make a call to always mix at 48kHz…
(Yes this argument primarily applies to PCs and phones, hopefully on a HiFi system that just happens to use COTS embedded devices they'd write some code to switch the rate…)
Well, my OS lets me configure the output device and specify the sampling rate. I would think that if I configure it at 44.1 kHz and I'm playing back some ripped CD and the system tries to play a notification sound, that whatever that sound is sampled at it'll ensure to output it at 44.1 kHz. Otherwise what's the point of the setting?
