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Capacitors will only blow once, the "Zap" sound is going to be electricity arc'ing off the transformer.

http://parts.pioneerelectronics.com/part.asp?productNum=ATK1094
seems most likely.

But do things like the menu for the TV display properly?  And have you tried at least  2 of the input connections?

The description you give of the man is also pretty telling, a man from Mexico, living in Houston using Paypal with an unconfirmed address, it would suggest that he is most likely an illegal immigrant, his grasp of English would be acceptable to get by, but by no means a mastery, he would be using Paypal because he lacks the documents needed to apply for a legitimate bank account, and needs a form of electronic debt to pay a certain bill, normally a cell phone.

He probably got a phishing e-mail and fell for it, entered his info on some very sketchy site, or saved his log-in info to a computer in an internet cafe on accident.

It is entirely possible that you both got ripped off.  Someone may have gotten hold of his Paypal info and used it to pay you.  It work in a similar fashion to money laundering.  If they had transfered the money to themselves, he would have disputed, and got his money back.  Instead they use his account, buy your WoW char, and strip it.  Pretty genius actually.

It stays on and displays a picture?

Funny thing about electronics, "broken" doesn't really describe the problem, if it doesn't turn on, its probably the power supply, if it turns on and you get weird horizontal line(s) its probably the deflection board.

I can also now see the forum section "Clan Members Only"  its between "Announcements" and "General Forums" its actual forums are hidden, but maybe someone should stop messing with the board controls. Its recent within the last 24hrs, unless I've been completely oblivious to it.

http://x86labs.org does not go anywhere anymore.

We see some basic data structures in the Intro. Software Engineering Class, basically, stacks/queues in STL, then we take an entire class on Algo and Data Structures which is the most overly difficult class I have ever taken, and this is the graduate level continuation of it.

Ah, cool.  I took a graduate level algorithms course last semester.  It was definitely one of the more fun classes I've taken.

I think my favorite things out of that class were van Emde Boas trees and Splay/Linking&Cutting trees.  You'll have to let me know if you guys do either of those.  VEB trees are especially 'fun' to talk about, haha.

It definitely is going to be one of the more enjoyable classes I'm taking this semester, but I'm really looking forward to "Random Network Algorithms" in Spring '10.

Yes it is, and I don't have a full syllabus but the course description is:

Review of basic data structures and Java syntax. Data abstraction and object-oriented design in the context of high-level languages and databases. Design implementation from the perspective of data structure efficiency and distributed control. Tailoring priority queues, balanced search trees, and graph algorithms to real-world problems, such as network routing, database management, and transaction processing.

Description is pretty much what I meant.  Looks pretty interesting.  Is this a graduate course?  I assume you guys have seen priority queues, BSTs, network flow, etc. before and this is a more rigorous continuation or something?

We see some basic data structures in the Intro. Software Engineering Class, basically, stacks/queues in STL, then we take an entire class on Algo and Data Structures which is the most overly difficult class I have ever taken, and this is the graduate level continuation of it.

Yes it is, and I don't have a full syllabus but the course description is:

Review of basic data structures and Java syntax. Data abstraction and object-oriented design in the context of high-level languages and databases. Design implementation from the perspective of data structure efficiency and distributed control. Tailoring priority queues, balanced search trees, and graph algorithms to real-world problems, such as network routing, database management, and transaction processing.

EC441 Networks
EC447 Software Design
EC463 Senior Design I
EC504 Adv. Data Structures
EC728 Design/Testing of Software-Intensive Systems

Why in the world are you using a spin lock here?  I sure hope lock contention is low or the critical section is trivial.

I would guess it's for school.  (I had much worse assignments in my operating systems class).

Yeah, same. It's to learn how the stuff works, not how to use things properly. It's the same as the old "implement a bubble sort" thing.

It's more like laugh at the 95% of the class that doesn't have a clue as to how to implement an atomic lock, but what I am doing here is the extra credit part of the assignment, and I was right it's not entirely possible to do it like he stated without having mutexs instead of the lock, so know I get to implement the whole thread blocking/queueing/signaling by hand.

Ok so I need to pick some brains.

Basically, I have a programming assignment to implement semaphores using pthread condition variables and a spin lock.  Now the problem I have run into is that in order to block/signal threads my professor is looking for us to use pthread_cond_wait/timedwait and pthread_cond_broadcast/signal.  But pthread_cond_wait requires the locking mutex as its second argument, and well we aren't allowed to use pthread_mutexs because we are using a spin lock.  How would you fine gentle man suggest i work around it?