[TheForge] Re:analog vs digital YAK

Sat Apr 3 19:28:01 2004

It is pretty easy to put together a line of complete bullshit in 
electronics. Abstract to start with, it is easy to roll over your 
audience, if you're unscrupulous. Getting ready for an ipo is always a 
good clue...

Steve

Dann Johnson wrote:
> 
> I found a  new to me/ sent to me:  New hacker fishing  scam  using  eBAY 
> this afternoon.
> 
> Official looking eBAY question / response quoting  shipping costs for an 
> item that I had supposedly bid
>  with an eBAY "looking"  link.
> If it had been on the isp email account that I use on eBAY I might have 
> been tempted to bite on that hook.
> 
> Andy and Steve,
> 
> The thread below has been educational for me.   I knew that my old 
> stereo was analog  but ....     Thanks all for this quickie course in 
> electronics.   8 years ago, I remember sitting  on the board of 
> directors  of our electric coop,  being given the same kind of hype  at 
> an area convention.   The presenters  sounded exactly as Andy described  
> and were big muckety mucks  for  a dot.com company, getting ready for 
> the  IPO.   Luckily  my electric coop didn't get hooked on that one either.
> 
> Dann Johnson
> 
> *********
> 
> 
> 
> At 11:30 AM 4/3/2004 -0800, you wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Steve Smith wrote:
>> >
>> > Since I currently gainfully employed designing analog chips, I'll have
>> > to stick my oar in here.
>> >
>> > Some things are just easier and cheaper to do analog, such as the
>> > megahertz video filters I've been working on lately. Note, however, 
>> that
>> > the signal fed to these chips comes from a digital to analog 
>> converter...
>> >
>> > Digital does not work directly with the real world. In most cases there
>> > needs to be some analog piece as the interface. The more digital there
>> > is, the more need for analog. Cell phones are largely digital, until 
>> you
>> > get to the two ends of the phone, antenna and speaker. Those bits are
>> > analog (and the antenna end is pretty non-trivial). There are many 
>> other
>> > examples.
>> >
>> > Steve Smith
>>
>>         Very true.  If one wishes to get down to real nitty gritty,
>>         there is no such thing as a purely digital anything.  It's
>>         all analog.  A CPU is actually an analog simulation of an
>>         truely digital device, which is to say there is a homoporphic
>>         mapping between the theoretical device and the real one.
>>
>>         I used to laugh when during the dot.com spoogefest the
>>         ignorant but very velvety-toungued CEOs and other such
>>         dullards were proclaiming how the great digital revolution
>>         was going to make all analog devices disappear from our
>>         world.  I'm not joking, I used to hear this fairly often
>>         from people that, taking their titles at face value, should
>>         have known so much better.  Then again, these were the same
>>         fops that were busily convincing their investors that everyone
>>         was going to become trillionaires in under 27 minutes and
>>         that the "product" was going to miraculously pop into
>>         existence and find its way onto retail shelves without anyone
>>         ever having to raise a finger.  What was so staggering about
>>         this lay in the sheer numbers of people who swallowed it,
>>         hook, line, and sinker.  I'm not sure even Voltaire would
>>         not have been moved had he borne witness to it, and he
>>         had pretty well written humanity off as hopelessly stupid.
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