Re: Thinking About Laptop Computers (yet) Again


soundhaspriority wrote:

Mike, how reliable do you want your car to be? Are you satisfied with a 90%
chance that it will not have a failure on your trip? Or do you prefer 99% ?

I never really thought about it. My car has proved to be sufficiently
reliable that I don't expect it to fail on a trip. If it does, I'll
deal with it when it happens. Last time I had a car fail on a trip was
back when they just had plain old fan belts, and it broke.

I don't know how much testing Toyota did before they declared the
design of my car ready for production. I suspect that they did a lot
more calculation, which is how much reliability numbers are derived.

I'd like my DAW to be as reliable as my car, or TV set (which hasn't
failed since I bought it in 1981). Now I know better than to expect
that kind of long, reliable service out of a computer, but an interface
can certainly be designed to be that reliable. It can also be designed
to not be susceptible to normally expected levels of EMI. If I'm
careful not to lay my cell phone down next to the cable, or not record
next to a radio transmitter, there's no reason for it not to work. If
TASCAM tells me that it might not work without a 6-pin cable, I'd like
to investigate (and I'll admit that this is just curiosity) whether
this problem is unique to the TASCAM device, or if it's common to all
Firewire audio interfaces.

Since this is the first I've heard of this warning, I suspect that it's
not all that common. But how common is it? Well, first off, probably
close to half the people who buy these things will be using them with
Macs, and Macs have 6-pin Firewire connectors, so they'll never "test"
the setup. Of the ones using it with a PC (almost all of which have
4-pin Firewire connectors) some will have a PC with an incompatible
chipset and will either return the interface or use a PCMCIA card as
you do. So they're out of the test group too. So how many who are using
a 4-pin connector are having problems that can be attributed to noise
picked up by the cable and not cancelled by the differential input of
the receiver? Unfortunately, most of that population isn't very
analytical.

By the way, I've been involved in reliability testing for a long time
and I know a lot about the test methods and calculations. Those are
valuable if you have a certain number that you have to meet. I just
want to know if it works or not, and if not, whether the reason it
doesn't work is because of the cable. Maybe TASCAM is on to something
here. I'd like to know more about it from a hardware standpoint.

Computing lambda requires either an excellent stochastic model of the
system, or extensive statistical experience. Whatever Lambda is, reducing
the noise on the interface will reduce it.

I suppose they could warn you not to operate it under water, too. That
would improve the reilability, too. By the way, have you included the
failure rate of the PCMCIA card, the PCMCIA slot and its associated
baggage, and the additoinal connectors in your serial failure model?
Since I can't avoid it with my computer, I choose not to worry about
it. Those things, however, might cause a more catastrophic failure than
noise.

.

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