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Some Hazy Thoughts About Intellectual Property as it Relates to the World of Lighting Software

Allow me, dear reader, to take you through my last month with my computer. I realize a lot of what I’m going to say below also applies to hardware, but I’m not going to address that here. Like many of you, I have a laptop that I do basically all of my work on. I have a desktop at home to run MA3D and heavily-modded TES III: Morrowind, but my laptop does a lot of heavy lifting for me. It’s an older-model MacBook Pro, which will sometime soon need to be replaced by a not-Apple device (I have reasons, but they’re beyond the scope of today’s post) but for the time being, the ol’ 2013 MacBook Pro gets it done.… Read More »Some Hazy Thoughts About Intellectual Property as it Relates to the World of Lighting Software

On Termination, Part One

(This is an old post, but I do plan on posting an update, someday, when I get a digital scope.) [lighting nerd speak] The USITT PLASA specification for DMX-512A requires that the last physical device in any DMX link, whether it connects to one device or 31 others, be terminated with a 120Ω resistor. This is to prevent unwanted “reflections” coming down the line and corrupting the DMX data. Here’s the theory: DMX-512 signals travel at around 60% the speed of light. Although fast, this is not instantaneous. When a signal traveling at over half the speed of light hits the end of a cable, a percentage of the signal is reflected back down the signal chain. Each digit of… Read More »On Termination, Part One