Using HDMI with Radeon and fc17

[Tim]

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 at 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.