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There is no such thing as an external PCI sound card. The PCI bus is available in computers as an internal expansion slot. Internal/external expansion on PCs of a certain age is via PCMCIA or PC Card devices. External audio devices are available for the Firewire, USB, and Thunderbolt serial buses.The Rise and Fall of Creative LabsCreative Technology (later Creative Labs) was founded by Sim Wong Hoo in 1981 as a computer repair shop in the Chinatown section of Singapore. They produced a sound board for the Apple II in the early 1980s, and worked on retrofitting IBM PCs with Chinese and sound. That lead directly to their first PC product, the Sound Blaster, a productized version of the custom integration they were doing in their PC retrofit business.The Sound Blaster took off, and eventually became the de-factor standard for 8-bit sound and simple music on the IBM PC. In the days of MS-DOS, your programs had to have built-in support for a thing like this or it wasn’t supported, so most of the competition had to support some kind of Sound Blaster emulation.Creative was very aggressive on their OEM deals with PC vendors, and they were growing every year. They got patents as their technology grew, and were also pretty effective at legally challenging the competition.The CompetitionThis new market had lots of different companies building sound cards, including Turtle Beach and various electronic synthesizer companies like Ensoniq, E-Mu, Roland, and Yamaha. They often had problems with emulation, some didn’t even try, preferring to chase more professional use of PCs for music.In fact, Creative bought E-Mu in 1993, in order to have access to their in-house developed synthesizer chips. It was becoming critical to build multi-voice synthesizers into higher end audio cards, and not just the FM-synthesis chips that the early Sound Blaster used, but some kind of wavetable chip. And RAM. This drove up the price of the higher end sound card considerably.But in 1997, Ensoniq had a breakthrough product: the AudioPCI card. This was far, far cheaper than a Sound Blaster, but it had better specs, rivalling the higher end cards from Creative. It used the new PCI “Local Bus” rather than the ISA bus, so it was pretty much just “plug and play”, whereas ISA cards were often an adventure to get running properly. Given the fast interface, much of the need for music synthesis could be done on the PC’s processor, in the driver. So no RAM, no synth chip. And that was the other piece: Windows 95 used real 32-bit drivers, not hard-coded interfaces to hardware. And the 32-bit system meant that games and other programs actually ran in Windows mode, rather than just launching from Windows to MS-DOS in Windows 3.x.Even with that, Ensoniq had delivered software virtualized support for the Sound Blaster stuff under MS-DOS, and it worked better than just about anyone else’s PCI cards. Creative Labs, meanwhile, didn’t see the PCI bus as being all that important right then. Ensoniq started to drink Creative’s milkshake.Ensoniq had started out as a keyboard company, started by a number of ex-Commodore engineers. The Ensoniq Mirage was a true breakthrough product, the world’s first affordable sampling synthesizer. But by the mid-1990s, they weren’t doing so well. So rather than fight, Creative Labs bought Ensoniq in early 1998 for $77 million.And that was their mode of operation. Creative wanted to own PC audio, so they sued or acquired just about all of the direct competition. Another one they went after was Aureal Semiconductor. Aureal had designed a PCI audio chip of their own, with very elegant hardware taking advantage of the new capabilities of PCI to do on-chip synthesis without much CPU involvement. But worse yet for both Aureal and Creative Labs, Aureal released an API (programming interface) for 3D audio, called A3D. And that was starting to get support by gaming companies.Creative couldn’t have that — an API that they couldn’t support becoming popular. So they used some old E-Mu patents to sue Aureal, and Aureal fought back. And won. And also lost, because Creative had been so brutal in their attack, they sucked up most of Aureal’s money and scared away their investors. Aureal went bankrupt in 2000… and sure enough, Creative sucked up their assets, pretty much just to ensure no one brough that stuff back. I used their AU8830 in a system. on the main board, in 1997.The Rise of Motherboard IntegrationAnd there was the real problem faced by Creative Labs. The introduction of PCI and software synthesis meant that you didn’t need a Sound Blaster, and the chips could be put on the PC motherboard. And that wasn’t lost on Intel.Intel had, has, and will have one singular mission for its existence: sell chips. And the best way to sell a CPU is to make you want to buy a new one, either by making your CPU today too slow by making it work harder, or by making a new PC cheap enough to lure you in. Intel saw both of these things happing based on motherboard audio. The audio synthesis would work best on faster CPUs, and building the audio chip itself into the main board, then into the PC chipset, would make the full PC much cheaper.So Intel came out with the AC97 specification in 1997. This was a standard for building audio chips at the hardware/chip level, based on a standard register set. They moved all kind of things to software. For example, rather than the need to support both 48kHz and 44.1kHz (CD) digital audio, AC97 chips only had to support 48kHz, and the software would resample on the fly from 44.1kHz.The inevitablity of Intel’s win should have been clear to most companies anyway, but many got lost along the way. The only companies with long-term success in the PC industry have been the PC manufacturers, the chip manufacturers, and the software people. In 2005, laptops outsold desktops for the first time in the USA. Not one laptop had a Sound Blaster built-in to it. Creative made a PC Card version of the Sound Blaster, but laptop add-in cards were never all that popular. If you weren’t selling the chips, you lost out. Much the same reason ATi and nVidia won the GPU race.And so before you knew it, every PC shipped with motherboard audio that simply didn’t involve Creative Labs. They started pushing surround sound, but in fact, AC97 supported 5.1 sound in the specs, though not necessarily implemented in the first chips. And so Creative moved into different product areas… some succeeded, some failed. And they still sell sound cards, it’s just that most people don’t use their cards. You can find the modern-day Creative Labs sound card offerings here: Creative Labs (United States)The Tragic Case of Turtle BeachTurtle Beach was founded in 1975 as "Turtle Beach Softworks" by co-founders Roy Smith and Robert Hoke (note: Roy Smith is a former co-worker and personal friend of mine, and a damn fine guitarist). Curiously, their first product was a graphical environment to control the programming of the Ensoniq Mirage keyboard via PC. It’s a Pennsylvania thing — every tech innovator in Eastern PA knows each other.They expanded their products to support other sampling synthesizers, and in 1988 introduced the 56K-PC system, their first hardware product, using the Motorola 56001 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to make audio processing easy and reliable on a PC (it wasn’t, back in those days). This was a PC card and accompanying software for recording to hard drive on a PC, a pretty unique thing back then. In 1990, they released the Multisound, another high-end-ish audio card for the PC, using the 56K DSP and a MIDI chip from E-Mu. After the E-Mu chip became unavilable, thanks to Creative Labs’ acquisition of E-Mu, the sound card part was split off as the Tahiti, with a header provided for add-on synthesizers. I used a Tahiti back in 1993 for home recording.Also in the early 1990s, IC company Integrated Circuit Systems bought Turtle Beach. Somewhere along the way, Smith and Hoke left the company, and they went a little crazy with the number of products, increasingly consumer oriented. ICS moved Turtle Beach to San Jose, CA, and over time, pretty much ran it into the ground In 1996, ICS sold Turtle Beach off to Voyetra Technologies, a music software company based in New York. IC manufacturer Integrated Device Technology Inc. bought ICS in 2005.Voyetra had a good enough idea — their audio drivers and applications coupled with Turtle Beach’s hardware could be pretty compelling. But they ran into the same immovable object that hit Creative: PCs were building in their audio hardware. So like most, they pivoted. They still exist (Turtle Beach), but they’re primarily concerned with gaming headsets, for consoles and PCs.Modern PC Audio Add-OnsMost companies making PC audio devices are making them for professional or amateur use by musicians and sound people.The recording system in my home studio is built around this one, the Tascam US-1800. With two external dual-channel preamps, I have 14 channels of audio input, four channels of output, on the one device. This lives in a rack, along with a 1U PC I made specifically for recording music. That PC has a 128GB SSD internally, and a slot for plugging in a project drive.I have a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 on my main PC, connected as well via USB. Focusrite has a whole line of these, they’re excellent! This unit supports professonal mics (with phantom power), guitars, keyboards, etc. If you only need two channels at the PC, you’re good. But they have models with many more inputs and outputs.Other external audio interface companies today include M-Audio, Roland, Steinberg, Behringer, Peavy, PreSonus, MOTU, RME, etc. Some of the big main board manufacturing companies, like ASUS, also make fairly generic PCI or PCI Express sound cards. Creative Labs is still big in this market, it’s just a pretty small market.

PCs are not my area of research, though i’ve had tangents through my colleagues.One thing to note is that the article in question uses Al2O3 rods with air at a target freuqncy of 13.7 GHz. The chance of man-made photons of 0.056 meV is quite low (we can’t reliably create optical transitions in the level of what would be mK of temperature delta).By all means the result in the deflection of the wave in the “left hand” is not very “visual” when the wavelength is this large.Imaging with microwaves, Prof. M Jaleel Akhtar from http://iitk.ac.in/new/microwave-imaging-and-remote-sensing-of-concealed-objects (used without permission)The key with PCs is that the [math]\epsilon[/math] and [math]\[/math][math]mu[/math][math][/math] are periodically modulated (i.e. layers of materials). To get an idea of how such modulation can get very unintuitive results, have a look at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1661499 , in this case they were the first to explain how the peridicity of gratings works to self-select evanescently coupled wavelengths. Back in the days they didn’t have FDTD modelling, which is crude, but effective.In my hand-wavy understanding , the abrupt periodic discontinuity at the edge of the material types is what causes certain group velocities to negatively refract. From a wave perspective, this is a bit like describing several resonators grouped in such a way that the signal reflection happens forward rather than backward: several specular reflections are forcibly aligned in-phase, amplified, and churned out in the opposite direction vs. expectation.So whilst Negative Refraction by Photonic Crystal with microwave radiation is somewhat common, I am not aware of any material combination to achieve such an effect in the visible radiation range, which I belive may be what the questioner is hoping for.It may be quicker/more likely to ‘bend’ visible light using the optical doppler(Cherenkov) effect and other non-linear optics than to find such a pair of materials, and develop the technology to process the photonic crystal to the perfection required ([math]\pm 0.1 nm[/math] precision preferred). E-beam lithography is not a panacea…Refute to Mr. Thomas’ answer:Photonic crystals, at least in the example given, are a 2D engineered material (or material pairs). Several natural crystals have interesting optical properties, but that does not make it sufficient to class them as photonic crystals.The hollow earth theory has been throughly debunked and can be evidenced with back-of-the envelope gravitational calculations: An empty/void geode the size of Earth’s crust will likely crush itself under its own gravity.-Earth’s core is not surrounded by sufficient critical mass to form a point-singularity.-No material known to man is likely to withstand the astronomic shear forces from a gravity singularity, save perhaps for something made of pure neutrons (we don’t know how to do that yet).-Trans photonic wafer - No such alliteration of words exists. This is meaningless technobabble. Perhaps you meant retroreflectors. Retroreflectors employ geometric(prism mirrors), not wave optics.-Photonic crystals are not designed to scatter (bad!) or “spread”(ambiguous) light in a designated matter. This description fits neither the necessary, nor sufficient criteria.the iridescence is just an incidental property due to diffraction.here’s some 1D surface-PCs from the catalogue of a well-known vendor Visible Ruled Reflective Diffraction Gratingsattached you will see a representation of what happens to a wave laterally propagating inside a 1D crystalColours represent alternating refraction indices.from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8570256 this is not a wave that is “scattered”, nor “spread”example of a vertical cavity laser using 2D PCs for ultimate control of laser radiation:https://iopscience.iop.org/artic...

I didn’t know the Veterans’ Administration ran on HP desktops.Seriously, I’m guessing, that VA really stands for “virtual address”, and it sounds like this error occurs because a program is trying to access memory that does not exist or is write-protected. All you said was that it was on an HP 7800p computer. You did not say if it was the operating system or an application, or anything useful that might help diagnose the problem. You did not say if this is in a program you (or your company) wrote, for which you have the source, or it is a packaged application you have licensed. You didn’t even say what OS was running! In fact, the model and manufacturer of the computer are typically completely irrelevant to solving the problem. It is a software problem, and in no place did you actually describe any of the software involved. Note that if this is a defective program, it will fail no matter what machine it is running on. There is a very, very slight possibility that if it is the operating system crashing, that it might be a driver specific to the HP DC 7800P, but lacking any useful information about the error, there is no way to answer this question. So I will offer some guesses.If it is a program you or your company wrote, fix it. (More later)If it is the operating system, contact the vendor of your operating system, such as Microsoft or Red Hat or wherever you get your OS.If it can be isolated to a device driver, if the device driver came from the device manufacturer, contact them to get a new driver, and make sure that you actually are running their latest driver before you complain.That said, memory access errors are among the nastiest bugs to track down. You can find the instruction that failed, and you can find the address it was using, but unless that address is 0, you are about to embark on a lengthy and tedious process of debugging. If you don’t have the source, forget about it. You aren’t going to be able to fix it. Send a detailed description to the vendor, not something that says “your program crashes”, but one that has the address of the failure, the register dumps of the processor, and every other piece of information you can collect. What were you doing when this happened (no, not “Eating a pizza” but “I had just clicked the menu item to…”). Can you give them a dataset that does not compromise corporate IP but triggers the bug. Can you reproduce it at will? If you send them the above question, they will laugh hysterically before hitting the “delete” button on your email.But, if you have the source, the long nightmare has begun. Once, in a company I was working for, the release version of the application would crash, but the debug version would not. The problem with the release version was that it was highly optimized code and had no symbol table, just a link map. The debug version was unoptimized code, and had full symbol table and instruction-to-source-line maps.In a previous newsgroup, people would write things like, “I never use the Debug version; it issues all kinds of error messages. I never get these from the Release version.” Mu response was always, “Yes, and what this means is the Release version is checking for stupid errors like NULL pointers and illegal handles, and is telling you. The Release version doesn’t check, it just uses them. Your code is wrong, and if you don’t run in the Debug version, you will never know why, and may not find out until your most important customer gets screwed by your broken code.”There are several differences between debug and release code, and between test sets and live data. For example, VA errors are frequently caused by NULL pointers. Windows application memory addresses 000000000–0000FFFF do not exist (add a few more zeroes on the left for 64-bit apps). Thus a NULL pointer will almost always (99.9999999% probability) cause your program to try to access an address in that range. The crash record for your app usually tells you exactly what address access caused the error, and it is almost always an address < 0000…000FFFF. That means you are failing to check for NULL pointers, so go fix the problem. If a NULL pointer is not legal, you want to issue an application-specific error message at the point where that NULL pointer is first created (for example, in C, malloc() can return a NULL pointer if it fails to find memory). new is supposed to throw an exception (you are catching exceptions, aren’t you?). Failing to check for a NULL pointer is just sloppy programming.It gets worse if you see an address that is not < 0000…0000FFFF. What this means is that you have pointer damage. This is really, really bad.In Microsoft C++, you can writeASSERT(ptr != NULL);and if the pointer is NULL, the assertion fails and issues an error message. Control results immediately after the ASSERT statement, so this code will fail with a NULL pointer dereference error:ASSERT(ptr != NULL);ptr->field = value;The only correct code is this:ASSERT(ptr != NULL);if(ptr == NULL)// error reporting and recovery hereptr->field = value; // you never get here if ptr == NULLIn Microsoft C++, the ASSERT statement in the Release build is defined as#define ASSERT(x)Whatever you use for the expression must not have side effects you depend on, because no code is compiled for an ASSERT in the Release build. Also read about VERIFY. VERIFY is particularly useful for debugging GDI code.One of the serious problems in using C/C++ is “stale pointers”. An example isThing * p = (Thing *) malloc(sizeof(Thing));…free(p);…p->field = value;Now you rarely see this in real code, but what you don’t see is that the malloc was done one place, the free in another, and the field access in a third place. You might not even have control of where the free occurs, but you need to be aware that when you call FinishUp(p) that one of the roles of FinishUp is to free the storage used by p, and that the pointer is no longer valid (note that this can be a failure in documentation of FinishUp). If you know that FinishUp frees the pointer, the correct way to deal with this is. There is a whole separate set of nightmares if the pointer were allocated in a DLL that had the C runtime compiled into it instead of using the shared C runtime. Then only the DLL can free the storage; if you call free(p) anywhere in your program, you have screwed up two heaps!FinishUp(p);p = NULL; // FinishUp freed the storageThis kills the pointer and makes it a bit harder to use a stale pointer. Of course, if some other routine has a copy of that pointer, and tries to use it, the world falls into chaos. Dogs living with cats, etc.The reason is that when you writep->field = value;p is no longer pointing at a Thing, it is pointing to a free block in the heap. In the heap, part of the space of the block is used by the heap for “bookkeeping”, and if you overwrite that, you break the heap. This can cause addressing errors. Then, there is the case where after the free, someone doesWhatever * p2 = (Whatever *)malloc(sizeof(Whatever));It just happens that when p2 is allocated, it happens to be the recently-freed Thing, so now some other part of the program is using it, treating it as a Whatever. It writes floating-point values into the memory where the Thing thought there were pointers. So your code reaches out and saysptr->tail->value = expression;and ptr is still pointing to the freed storage, which has been reallocated. When it tries to pick up the “tail” pointer (probably to another Thing *) it loads a floating point number into the address register and tries to use it as a memory address. Oops. Or you could writeptr->tail = some_other_Thing*;you have just overwritten someone else’s floating point number. The program doesn’t crash, but the bridge falls down.Microsoft C/C++, in the Debug build, has a somewhat expensive storage allocator. When a block is freed back to the heap, it writes into every 32-bit value 0xFEEEFEEE. Local variables are initialized to 0xCCCCCCCC. When a block is allocated by malloc() (which new uses internally) it is set to something like 0xCDCDCDCD. So if you start using values in a free block, instead of being mostly-valid values (except for the heap management values), they are completely nonsensical values, and you will get an addressing error if you try to use them as pointers. And they don’t make good integers, characters, or floating-point values.All allocation is done in multiples of 8 bytes. The debug heap detects if you have overwritten the “padding” bytes; if you dochar * p = (char *)malloc(strlen(s));and s is “ABCDE”, then you will get an allocation of five bytes, which means eight bytes with three bytes of “padding” to round it up. Now you dostrcpy(p, s);and it copies…hold it…SIX bytes. Oops! Well, “ABCDE” is really ‘A’,’B’,’C’,’D’,’E’,’\0′, that is, it is terminated by the NUL character. So it writes the five letters into the buffer p, plus a sixth, the ‘\0’. This NUL character (by the way, NULL is a pointer, NUL is a 0 character). This overwrites one of the three padding bytes, and when this storage is freed, the heap manager reports a buffer overrun. It doesn’t matter for any string whose (length % 8 != 0), but if the string is a multiple of 8, that NUL overwrites the next byte in memory. This might be a bookkeeping byte in the next block (actually, it usually is) or something else important, so catching that bug on shorter strings reduces the chances that you will release a defective program.If you do not have a smart allocator for the debug version, you are trying to program with one keyboard tied behind your back, or some such phrase.To do this, the allocator also uses a minimum of 72 bytes of overhead, so malloc(1) allocates 80 bytes, and in the release version, it is 64 bytes, so malloc(1) allocates 72 bytes. One poor soul was dismayed; being clueless as to how allocators worked, he thought he could call malloc(1) a billion times, but he ran out of memory first. And he knew he had a billion bytes available to his program, so why did it start failing after a mere 15,000,000 or so allocations? He was using a bit more than a billion bytes, because 1E9/80=12,500,000.So, for a moment, back to my memory damage problem. A damaged pointer that is merely changed to another valid pointer means that your program is using a stale pointer to get a pointer value that is no longer meaningful. Which means that whatever that pointer pointed to is also going to get damaged. And that damaged a pointer, so what it pointed to was damaged. 17 hours with an assembly code debugger and a link map revealed that the addressing error was seven levels away from the original damage. I got it because management knew that I was probably the only person in the company who could find that error.So be prepared for a long, hard, debug session. If the program was written in Microsoft C/C++, build a debug release and try it. Otherwise, you had better bring a sleeping bag into your office, and have vast quantities of your favorite stimulant readily at hand. I was also part of a tag-team effort that ran for three days looking for one of these errors. I’d work on it for 8–12 hours, call up the next person, describe what I had found, and he would pick up for another 8–12 hours, at which point he called the third person, summarized what he had discovered, and that person would pick it up. It was also confusing because this was over a weekend, one of the people was an observant Jew (and would not work on Saturday) and the other an observant Christian (and would not work on Sunday). My friend John and I did double-shifts to cover these days. Sometime Monday afternoon, John found the problem, which was using <= when < should have been used. It was something like 74 hours of combined debugging. Yes, you will be frustrated. Yes, it is hard. No, the only way to have avoided this was careful development and using “bulletproof” data structures, e.g., Microsoft’s CArray class, which in the debug version does bounds-checking, or C++ array<type> class, ditto. In C++ you can also use “smart pointers”, which raise an error if you try to use a stale pointer.Good luck. You’ll need it (luck is where preparation meets opportunity).