CAN WE AUDIOPHILES DO OUR PART?


So we're all tired of hearing about nothing but Covid-19 (or, as I term it, the C-Plague). What can we do, as audiophiles, to help with all this.
I was amazed, and delighted, when I went to the Cardas website to see that they are doing their part. Go to their website and you'll see their director, Angela Cardas, wearing a mask. If you click on the Cardas Nautilus logo in the upper left corner, you'll see pictures of people there in the factory making masks with sewing machines. I called the company to congratulate them, and spoke with a woman named Darla, who said it was their way, during this economic slump, to keep their employees working and also their way of trying to "do our part."
I'm not writing all this to advertise Cardas products. They are a very good company, but trust your ears, not anything I write, when it comes to buying their products. They do get credit, however, for helping me come to a realization that pushed me in the right direction. I called a woman I am friends with, who is 85 years old and is a good seamstress, to suggest she start making masks. She already was--and is. By phone she has organized several other women to do the same, and right now they are needing more material and elastic. I managed to gather about 50 pounds of material and am starting to gather elastic while also getting more material. But I don't sew. I can't help out with that. Any ideas as to what we--all of us who are good with our ears and focused with our budgets--can do to help out in other ways?

I realize this is an odd topic to bring to an audio forum, but it was a very socially responsible audio company that got me to thinking about it, and frankly I believe I should be socially responsible enough to do what I can to get other people to thinking about it. While also being open to other people's ideas about ways someone like me who is "just an audiophile" can help.

Thank you, in advance, for any and all ideas on this.



baumli

Showing 8 responses by terry9

Thanks for doing the dirty work, stereo5. That is, reading that post.

Agreed.
@glupson , Y2K mainly affected legacy systems. That is, systems that were written on OS from the 60's,  had been implemented in the 70's,  elaborated in the 80's and fudged along in the 90's.

It was all because memory was so scarce in 1960. Back then a mainframe ran on core memory - that is, magnetic beads, or cores, which were physically moved back and forth to indicate one bit. A mainframe computer the size of a truck might have 32K of core. Every bit was precious, literally.

It takes 4 bits to indicate a digit, so the software was written to use 8 bits, not 16; that is  '66' uses 8 bits, '1966' uses 16 bits. Anyhow 40 years is a long time in computing, and we'll all be retired by 2000, and "Use computers for air traffic control? Huh? What are you smokin'?"

Net result, deep in most every big application was a date function which could only handle two numbers, and returned an error message when it saw a year beginning with a zero. That caused the program to crash and fail. The prospect was a return to no computing whatsoever for all the longest standing applications (hence most important) in society, and no paper backup. Overnight.

Easy when you take the trouble to understand the issue. Thank goodness most of those responsible did.

Sorry to digress.
@snarbut , Thank you for your service, and for your exposition. Looks like the same reason that Y2K didn't close down a few continents.
@snarbut , I’ve been hearing the same stuff about Y2K for 20 years now.

"See, it was never a problem." Only because we fixed it beforehand. In my organization the Y2K committee began meeting in 1994. In 1995 serious resources were allocated. In 1996 patches were being tested. In 1999 we were running simulations at night. In 2000 "Hey, nothing happened, what was the big deal, some kinda con job?"

Yeah, right, whatever.