You're using 100% of the CPU just to print out a message every minute? Surely you should be sleeping for a minute, instead?/can't believe I'm taking this seriously, but hey...
Moderators are on crack today. Parent is completely and utterly wrong about basic physics and is sitting at +4 Insightful.
You guys are supposed to be geeks! Surely you know that lasers aren't really completely parallel, right? Diffraction limits and all that? It's impossible to have a completely parallel light source, and thus all light sources follow the inverse square law -- lasers included.
Re-read my comment. You're assuming that a single connection attempt is good enough, whereas I explicitly said that I was assuming that you'd have to reconnect.
I saw that, but I agree with GP that this won't fly in practice. Even with NTP servers it's too easy to have your systems end up out of clock sync, so now you're blacklisted and don't know why or how to fix it.
I see this got tagged "obscurity", but this isn't security-through-obscurity. If you actually RTFA, you'll see that hooking up to the wrong port automatically blacklists you. So it's not like you can just try different ports until you find the right one -- any attacker without the shared secret will almost immediately be blacklisted, assuming that they have to reconnect a few times (e.g. to try different SSH passwords).
Still, requires a shared secret plus synchronized clocks, and any mistake automatically blacklists you. Sounds ridiculously impractical IMHO.
Well, the whole point is that this exception should not be necessary at all. Just have 2 ints on the stack...
Of course, because while it's possible to run out of of heap space (implying a possible OutOfMemoryError), computers have had infinite stacks since the 1960s. Simply by moving the memory over to the stack, you can't possibly run out anymore! It's brilliant!
Hint: it's all the same memory. Your desperate desire to have the bytes come out of the "stack" bucket instead of the "heap" bucket is simply irrational.
But...Linden Labs can *still* track the transactions via your user accounts.
They know 10,000 LBs went from you to Joe Hacker, don't they? They also know where those LBs went after Joe Hacker got his hands on them. And so on and so forth.
Point is: The Lindenbucks can always be tracked and followed. If they money supply is "hacked", it should be obvious and known within minutes.
GP's point is that knowing that the money changed hands doesn't tell you anything useful. You'll have Person 1 claiming that Person 2 stole the money, and Person 2 claiming that Person 1 gave it to him as a payment for such-and-such service. Whom do you believe?
Without being able to evaluate the contradictory claims, merely knowing where the money came from and went to is worse than useless.
I thought USB was popular prior to the iMac. If I remember correctly, it was Firewire that they helped bring to the forefront.
Nope, it was USB. Everybody on the Windows side of things was still using the legacy ports, it was hard to find USB peripherals and they were buggy. The iMac's popularity forced manufacturers to add decent USB support to their devices. Printers went parallel + USB, mice switched over to USB w/ PS/2 adapters, etc. Plus everything was available in your choice of five translucent colors.
And the damned legacy adapters still won't die over on the PC side of things. Most KVM switches, for example, still only support PS/2 connectors, and I had to buy a USB-to-DB9 connector to be able to program my universal remote control. Love Apple or hate 'em, you've got to admit that they're good at getting people to drop the old broken standards and move forward. We need to put them in charge of getting the US over to metric.
Great, with this proposal my remote control won't provide me with the access to advanced features that I use because some off-the-street idiot doesn't understand the difference between PCM and THX II?
The suggestion isn't that you lose access to those features. It's merely that a remote control doesn't really need dedicated buttons to switch between these modes -- perhaps you should be doing it via a menu system.
Atheists are ipso facto stupid. Like anti-gay fundamentalists, atheists have the ludicrous belief that they can make pronouncements about an emotional phenomenon which they do not experience. All people who even glimpse the complexity of the universe experience awe and wondrous exhilaration with such profundity that it cannot be described as anything other than a religious experience. Einstein understood this. You do not.
Do you believe in Odin? Zeus? Ra? Queztalcoatl? The Great Spirit?
No?
Based on the fact that you're a self-righteous prick, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're Christian. Mankind has dreamed up ten thousand different gods. You don't believe in 9,999 of them. I don't believe in the same 9,999 you don't believe in, plus I also don't believe in the God of Abraham. Evidently not believing in 9,999 gods doesn't make you stupid, but not believing in 10,000 gods makes me stupid.
I'd like to believe that there's some logic or reason behind this, but there's no logic behind religious delusions. Sad that so much time and energy is spent defending fairy tales.
I'm terribly doubtful that solar power will ever be economically competitive with coal
I think you mean "...competitive with coal at today's prices". There is a finite supply of coal, and we are using it up at an alarming rate. The price will not stay this low.
Also, people seem to be assuming a 25-year lifespan on these panels. Is that accurate? Just out of curiosity, what's the failure mode? I'm guessing a slow and steady decline in output power, but what causes it?
As for the short circuit, how much is far more current? We're dealing with milliamperes here. Enough current to cause a spark?
No, of course milliamps aren't the problem. The problem is when you get a short somewhere in the system and suddenly you're dealing with amps rather than milliamps. As other posters have pointed out, at least one plane crashed this way.
I know light can't short circuit, but you still have electricity inside the tank. What do you mean by "there's only so much power coming into the system"?
The point was that a short circuit in a conventional circuit can easily lead to much more power than you were anticipating being dumped into the fuel tank, where it is converted to heat and potentially fire. But with this system, the laser diode strictly limits how much energy you can pump into the fuel, and therefore how much heat you can put in. If you short across a normal wire, you can get all the way up to its melting point before the circuit fails. If you short across a laser diode, it will shine very brightly for a few milliseconds (not nearly enough to ignite the fuel) and then pop. Think of it as an extremely fast fuse which can't be bypassed by a short.
Perhaps if every single component in the regulation and conversion circuitry were solid state, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem... but I still see the problem of having electrical power in the fuel tank.
Having electrical power in the fuel isn't ipso facto the problem. As long as the power stays far below what it would take to ignite a fuel-air mixture, it's harmless. The problem with electricity in general is that it's hard to limit the power, because simply removing a significant amount of resistance (as in a short circuit) can cause a huge spike in current. This is a mechanism for continuing to use electricity in the fuel tank, but to make it impossible for (substantially) more power than you intended to make it to the inside of the tank, even in the event of an external short circuit.
I wonder if the efficiency of other photovoltaic cells (solar, etc.) is comparable?
This basically is a solar cell; it's just tuned to work best at the particular frequency of the lasers in question. As such it's much more efficient than any ordinary solar cell, which must deal with the full spectrum of sunlight.
The difference between parallel programming and multithreaded programming is this... with a parallel algorithm, different parts of one task/thread are done on separate CPUs, whereas with multithreaded programming each one thread/task is done entirely on one processor.
Wait... what? "Different parts of one thread are done on separate CPUs"?
In what (real world, non-research) system is a single thread run on multiple processors at the same time? And why are you claiming that running each thread on a single processor, as is done by all major OSes, not parallel programming?
It's not a semantic difference. Threads are basically just lightweight processes...so each thread of a program execution can be thought of as a different process.
I've re-read that about five times, and I still don't have a clue what point you're trying to make here. From an algorithmic standpoint, all that matters is "these instructions are run in sequence, and these two sets of sequential instructions can run in parallel". The terminology that generally describes the concept of a sequential set of instructions is "thread". Sure, on a given operating system you might use a lightweight process or even a full-blown process to implement each 'thread', but that's an implementation detail and has nothing to do with the algorithm. What are you trying to say?
OTOH, in parallel programming, a thread/task is broken down into pieces and brought back together when the pieces are done. Think SETI@Home, but on a much smaller scale.
You're referring to "data parallelism" versus "task parallelism". Breaking a single computation's data set up into parallelizable chunks a la SETI@Home is "data parallelism", whereas running two relatively unrelated tasks in parallel is "task parallelism". They are both forms of parallel programming and your assertion that only data parallelism 'counts' is simply false.
Existing sensors I've worked with typically require ~5V and low low amperage and when properly insulated the chances of sparking are very minimal. With this solution, there still is electronics inside the fuel tank, so I do not see how this solves the problem.
It solves the problem because you can't have a short circuit with light. An electrical short circuit can end up pulling in far more current than anticipated, causing excessive heat.
The light is converted into electricity inside the tank, so potentially even more problems with the conversion circuitry.
What problems? There's only so much power coming into the system. No matter what happens inside the tank, you can't dissipate more energy than is making it in in the first place. And again, there's no such thing as a short circuit with light, so it shouldn't be possible to have more energy going in than you anticipated (at least not for more than a few milliseconds until the diodes fry).
The 50% efficiency is bothersome as well, that's crap given todays electrical standards.
This is designed to run sensors consuming a few milliwatts. So this system will increase safety and consume a couple more milliwatts. Given that a plane's engines are producing many megawatts of power, I think that they can probably spare converting a couple more milliwatts into electricity.
If you were to die tomorrow, this would affect your family for the rest of their lives. You are irreplaceable. Your company would fill your position within days and except for your immediate co-workers, nobody would even care.
Not always the case. I got very tired of the working conditions at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY and was vaguely entertaining the notion of leaving. Another company that was familiar with my work contacted me out of the blue and asked me for a resume. A week later I had a job offer in hand and gave notice.
$VERY_LARGE_COMPANY panicked. They had three different managers call me and try to convince me to stay, offered me a raise, more stock, better working conditions, etc. I told them that they should have done that before I got so fed up that I decided to quit, but that I would be more than happy to answer emails if they needed help with anything after I left.
I talked to a couple of my former coworkers recently. Turns out that a few months after I left, they gave up on finding a replacement, disbanded my old team and moved further development for the product I had been working on (which is used by millions of people and has at least one book written about it) to Bangalore, where it is languishing. And it's not like it was a crufty mess, either -- it was clean, very thoroughly documented and there were several developers who were very familiar with it. Unfortunately, they were also very junior, and apparently judged unfit to be in charge of it.
The moral of the story? Don't assume that just because you work at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY that you're just a faceless drone and they'd be able to replace you at the drop of a hat. And conversely, if you're a manager at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY, make sure you give your employees appropriate treatment before they're ready to walk out the door.
I'm not really sure what your point is. Yes, technically you're correct that the Catholic church took a little while to oppose and censor his model. Aaaaandd.... what, exactly?
They accused Galileo of heresy and placed him under permanent house arrest specifically for following Copernicus' model. What difference does it make that they didn't start arresting people right away? The grandparent post was still absolutely correct, the Catholic church did indeed have a problem with the heliocentric model.
I bought a retail copy of MS Office. I'm looking at the CD right now. Unfortunately, somehow the case (on which the CD key was printed) disappeared, probably because of my two-year-old son's love of placing expensive things in trash cans when nobody's looking. I needed to reinstall it, but couldn't find the case and thus didn't have a valid CD key.
So that leaves me with a dilemma. I know I bought and paid for the thing. I've got the stupid CD. But I couldn't find a key online which would work for this particular copy (as with all Microsoft products, there are umpteen million variations, and a key from one variant won't work with any others). So I downloaded a torrent of the same Office version (but obviously a slightly different edition of it).
Technically, I broke the law. I could be thrown in jail and have all of my stuff confiscated for my horrible, evil copyright infringement. But... did I actually do anything wrong? I submit that I did not. When the law makes "not doing anything wrong" not only illegal, but assigns extremely harsh penalties which could destroy my life, we as a nation have collectively lost our minds. I could have stolen a physical copy from a store and faced much less serious penalties, and THAT crime actually would have harmed the store owner. My "crime" harmed no one and was not even unethical (in my opinion), and I risk jail time, massive fines, and confiscation of all my stuff. Thanks, politicians!
Odd logic there - "There is an A that is B, therefore all A's are B". By your logic, all humans are men.
No, his logic is more along the lines of "Wine graphically illlustrated all of the massive pitfalls with this approach, which aren't going to magically disappear when someone else attempts the same feat."
Perfect Win32 compatibility is an intractable problem.
You didn't seriously think those boxes actually contained Wiis, did you? They're empty promo boxes. The actual systems are kept in the back room, if they in fact had any.
A couple of friends of mine are interested in getting a Wii, so I've been semiseriously keeping an eye out for one every time I go shopping. Over the last six months, going to various stores which carry them at least once a week, I have seen Wiis in stock once. It was at the local Target, and the entire shipment was sold out when I went by the next day.
You seem to keep forgetting that this discussion is about cables. Not digital to analog converters or any other component of the system. Cables. In the context of cables, I submit that it is impossible for you to get harmonic distortion by using a shoddy digital cable compared to a good one. That's what I said originally, and I stand by it. I see nothing in this paper (which is about DACs) which is even the slightest bit relevant to this discussion.
Admittedly all I did was skim it -- perhaps somewhere in there is an admonishment against using cheap cables...
First, I consider RG-6 to be "common consumer cable", since it's dirt cheap and easily available. I used RG-6 to make my component video cables. Admittedly overkill for coax digital audio, but hardly expensive.
Secondly, I don't doubt that you're a smart guy, but if you honestly truly believe that you need something of at least RG-6 quality with BNC connectors to get clean digital audio, I'm afraid you have indeed been reading too many glossy brochures. Audio frequencies just aren't that demanding. Your ears, no matter how you may think otherwise, just aren't that good. Unless there is a ridiculous amount of RFI in the room, a typical 3-to-6 foot run of cable isn't going to be meaningfully affected by it, especially in digital applications.
I very much doubt that any human could hear even the slightest difference between a cheap no-name RCA cable and a nice expensive cable with BNC connectors in digital audio applications. (With obvious caveats like "the RCA cable isn't actually messed up" and "both cables are making good solid connections"). By all means, point me to a study showing otherwise. I'd love to read it.
Like the previous poster, you are woefully misinformed. Consumer audio equipment reads the clock straight off the wire. If the last bit arrives at the wrong time, then the analog signal is produced at the wrong time, which means you have distortion in the frequency domain. The quality of digital audio relies entirely on low phase noise of the sample clock. If you have phase noise on the sample clock, then you have harmonic distortion in the analog output. QED. This is all so basic, it's incredible that none of you understand it. Don't they teach anything in EE classes any more?
Maybe I missed something, but aren't we talking about a GOD DAMNED COPPER CABLE HERE?
I would really, really like to know how a copper cable can alter the time at which some bits but not others arrive. I realize you're going to cop out and start talking about crappy electronics or somesuch, but that's cheating -- the discussion started about cables. We were talking about how expensive cables are unnecessary in digital audio, because as long as you're not getting bit flips or echo or anything like that (which you shouldn't be, even with a $5 cable), you're going to hear the exact same sound.
So, please explain to me how a non-pathologically-screwed-up cable can possibly alter the timing of some bits, but not others.
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You're using 100% of the CPU just to print out a message every minute? Surely you should be sleeping for a minute, instead? /can't believe I'm taking this seriously, but hey...
Moderators are on crack today. Parent is completely and utterly wrong about basic physics and is sitting at +4 Insightful.
You guys are supposed to be geeks! Surely you know that lasers aren't really completely parallel, right? Diffraction limits and all that? It's impossible to have a completely parallel light source, and thus all light sources follow the inverse square law -- lasers included.
Re-read my comment. You're assuming that a single connection attempt is good enough, whereas I explicitly said that I was assuming that you'd have to reconnect.
I saw that, but I agree with GP that this won't fly in practice. Even with NTP servers it's too easy to have your systems end up out of clock sync, so now you're blacklisted and don't know why or how to fix it.
I see this got tagged "obscurity", but this isn't security-through-obscurity. If you actually RTFA, you'll see that hooking up to the wrong port automatically blacklists you. So it's not like you can just try different ports until you find the right one -- any attacker without the shared secret will almost immediately be blacklisted, assuming that they have to reconnect a few times (e.g. to try different SSH passwords).
Still, requires a shared secret plus synchronized clocks, and any mistake automatically blacklists you. Sounds ridiculously impractical IMHO.
Well, the whole point is that this exception should not be necessary at all. Just have 2 ints on the stack...
Of course, because while it's possible to run out of of heap space (implying a possible OutOfMemoryError), computers have had infinite stacks since the 1960s. Simply by moving the memory over to the stack, you can't possibly run out anymore! It's brilliant!
Hint: it's all the same memory. Your desperate desire to have the bytes come out of the "stack" bucket instead of the "heap" bucket is simply irrational.
But...Linden Labs can *still* track the transactions via your user accounts.
They know 10,000 LBs went from you to Joe Hacker, don't they? They also know where those LBs went after Joe Hacker got his hands on them. And so on and so forth.
Point is: The Lindenbucks can always be tracked and followed. If they money supply is "hacked", it should be obvious and known within minutes.
GP's point is that knowing that the money changed hands doesn't tell you anything useful. You'll have Person 1 claiming that Person 2 stole the money, and Person 2 claiming that Person 1 gave it to him as a payment for such-and-such service. Whom do you believe?
Without being able to evaluate the contradictory claims, merely knowing where the money came from and went to is worse than useless.
I thought USB was popular prior to the iMac. If I remember correctly, it was Firewire that they helped bring to the forefront.
Nope, it was USB. Everybody on the Windows side of things was still using the legacy ports, it was hard to find USB peripherals and they were buggy. The iMac's popularity forced manufacturers to add decent USB support to their devices. Printers went parallel + USB, mice switched over to USB w/ PS/2 adapters, etc. Plus everything was available in your choice of five translucent colors.
And the damned legacy adapters still won't die over on the PC side of things. Most KVM switches, for example, still only support PS/2 connectors, and I had to buy a USB-to-DB9 connector to be able to program my universal remote control. Love Apple or hate 'em, you've got to admit that they're good at getting people to drop the old broken standards and move forward. We need to put them in charge of getting the US over to metric.
Great, with this proposal my remote control won't provide me with the access to advanced features that I use because some off-the-street idiot doesn't understand the difference between PCM and THX II?
The suggestion isn't that you lose access to those features. It's merely that a remote control doesn't really need dedicated buttons to switch between these modes -- perhaps you should be doing it via a menu system.
I have a 70", 178cm JVC hdtv and it's far better then any projector i've seen.
You haven't seen a good projector then.
Atheists are ipso facto stupid. Like anti-gay fundamentalists, atheists have the ludicrous belief that they can make pronouncements about an emotional phenomenon which they do not experience. All people who even glimpse the complexity of the universe experience awe and wondrous exhilaration with such profundity that it cannot be described as anything other than a religious experience. Einstein understood this. You do not.
Do you believe in Odin? Zeus? Ra? Queztalcoatl? The Great Spirit?
No?
Based on the fact that you're a self-righteous prick, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're Christian. Mankind has dreamed up ten thousand different gods. You don't believe in 9,999 of them. I don't believe in the same 9,999 you don't believe in, plus I also don't believe in the God of Abraham. Evidently not believing in 9,999 gods doesn't make you stupid, but not believing in 10,000 gods makes me stupid.
I'd like to believe that there's some logic or reason behind this, but there's no logic behind religious delusions. Sad that so much time and energy is spent defending fairy tales.
I'm terribly doubtful that solar power will ever be economically competitive with coal
I think you mean "...competitive with coal at today's prices". There is a finite supply of coal, and we are using it up at an alarming rate. The price will not stay this low.
Also, people seem to be assuming a 25-year lifespan on these panels. Is that accurate? Just out of curiosity, what's the failure mode? I'm guessing a slow and steady decline in output power, but what causes it?
That's just a stupid urban legend. Shoes hanging from a powerline indicate nothing more than bored kids.
As for the short circuit, how much is far more current? We're dealing with milliamperes here. Enough current to cause a spark?
No, of course milliamps aren't the problem. The problem is when you get a short somewhere in the system and suddenly you're dealing with amps rather than milliamps. As other posters have pointed out, at least one plane crashed this way.
I know light can't short circuit, but you still have electricity inside the tank. What do you mean by "there's only so much power coming into the system"?
The point was that a short circuit in a conventional circuit can easily lead to much more power than you were anticipating being dumped into the fuel tank, where it is converted to heat and potentially fire. But with this system, the laser diode strictly limits how much energy you can pump into the fuel, and therefore how much heat you can put in. If you short across a normal wire, you can get all the way up to its melting point before the circuit fails. If you short across a laser diode, it will shine very brightly for a few milliseconds (not nearly enough to ignite the fuel) and then pop. Think of it as an extremely fast fuse which can't be bypassed by a short.
Perhaps if every single component in the regulation and conversion circuitry were solid state, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem... but I still see the problem of having electrical power in the fuel tank.
Having electrical power in the fuel isn't ipso facto the problem. As long as the power stays far below what it would take to ignite a fuel-air mixture, it's harmless. The problem with electricity in general is that it's hard to limit the power, because simply removing a significant amount of resistance (as in a short circuit) can cause a huge spike in current. This is a mechanism for continuing to use electricity in the fuel tank, but to make it impossible for (substantially) more power than you intended to make it to the inside of the tank, even in the event of an external short circuit.
I wonder if the efficiency of other photovoltaic cells (solar, etc.) is comparable?
This basically is a solar cell; it's just tuned to work best at the particular frequency of the lasers in question. As such it's much more efficient than any ordinary solar cell, which must deal with the full spectrum of sunlight.
The difference between parallel programming and multithreaded programming is this ... with a parallel algorithm, different parts of one task/thread are done on separate CPUs, whereas with multithreaded programming each one thread/task is done entirely on one processor.
Wait... what? "Different parts of one thread are done on separate CPUs"?
In what (real world, non-research) system is a single thread run on multiple processors at the same time? And why are you claiming that running each thread on a single processor, as is done by all major OSes, not parallel programming?
It's not a semantic difference. Threads are basically just lightweight processes...so each thread of a program execution can be thought of as a different process.
I've re-read that about five times, and I still don't have a clue what point you're trying to make here. From an algorithmic standpoint, all that matters is "these instructions are run in sequence, and these two sets of sequential instructions can run in parallel". The terminology that generally describes the concept of a sequential set of instructions is "thread". Sure, on a given operating system you might use a lightweight process or even a full-blown process to implement each 'thread', but that's an implementation detail and has nothing to do with the algorithm. What are you trying to say?
OTOH, in parallel programming, a thread/task is broken down into pieces and brought back together when the pieces are done. Think SETI@Home, but on a much smaller scale.
You're referring to "data parallelism" versus "task parallelism". Breaking a single computation's data set up into parallelizable chunks a la SETI@Home is "data parallelism", whereas running two relatively unrelated tasks in parallel is "task parallelism". They are both forms of parallel programming and your assertion that only data parallelism 'counts' is simply false.
Existing sensors I've worked with typically require ~5V and low low amperage and when properly insulated the chances of sparking are very minimal. With this solution, there still is electronics inside the fuel tank, so I do not see how this solves the problem.
It solves the problem because you can't have a short circuit with light. An electrical short circuit can end up pulling in far more current than anticipated, causing excessive heat.
The light is converted into electricity inside the tank, so potentially even more problems with the conversion circuitry.
What problems? There's only so much power coming into the system. No matter what happens inside the tank, you can't dissipate more energy than is making it in in the first place. And again, there's no such thing as a short circuit with light, so it shouldn't be possible to have more energy going in than you anticipated (at least not for more than a few milliseconds until the diodes fry).
The 50% efficiency is bothersome as well, that's crap given todays electrical standards.
This is designed to run sensors consuming a few milliwatts. So this system will increase safety and consume a couple more milliwatts. Given that a plane's engines are producing many megawatts of power, I think that they can probably spare converting a couple more milliwatts into electricity.
If you were to die tomorrow, this would affect your family for the rest of their lives. You are irreplaceable. Your company would fill your position within days and except for your immediate co-workers, nobody would even care.
Not always the case. I got very tired of the working conditions at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY and was vaguely entertaining the notion of leaving. Another company that was familiar with my work contacted me out of the blue and asked me for a resume. A week later I had a job offer in hand and gave notice.
$VERY_LARGE_COMPANY panicked. They had three different managers call me and try to convince me to stay, offered me a raise, more stock, better working conditions, etc. I told them that they should have done that before I got so fed up that I decided to quit, but that I would be more than happy to answer emails if they needed help with anything after I left.
I talked to a couple of my former coworkers recently. Turns out that a few months after I left, they gave up on finding a replacement, disbanded my old team and moved further development for the product I had been working on (which is used by millions of people and has at least one book written about it) to Bangalore, where it is languishing. And it's not like it was a crufty mess, either -- it was clean, very thoroughly documented and there were several developers who were very familiar with it. Unfortunately, they were also very junior, and apparently judged unfit to be in charge of it.
The moral of the story? Don't assume that just because you work at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY that you're just a faceless drone and they'd be able to replace you at the drop of a hat. And conversely, if you're a manager at $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY, make sure you give your employees appropriate treatment before they're ready to walk out the door.
I'm not really sure what your point is. Yes, technically you're correct that the Catholic church took a little while to oppose and censor his model. Aaaaandd.... what, exactly?
They accused Galileo of heresy and placed him under permanent house arrest specifically for following Copernicus' model. What difference does it make that they didn't start arresting people right away? The grandparent post was still absolutely correct, the Catholic church did indeed have a problem with the heliocentric model.
Are you actually this much of an asshole, or are you just trolling? Because if you're serious, then... wow. You suck.
I bought a retail copy of MS Office. I'm looking at the CD right now. Unfortunately, somehow the case (on which the CD key was printed) disappeared, probably because of my two-year-old son's love of placing expensive things in trash cans when nobody's looking. I needed to reinstall it, but couldn't find the case and thus didn't have a valid CD key.
So that leaves me with a dilemma. I know I bought and paid for the thing. I've got the stupid CD. But I couldn't find a key online which would work for this particular copy (as with all Microsoft products, there are umpteen million variations, and a key from one variant won't work with any others). So I downloaded a torrent of the same Office version (but obviously a slightly different edition of it).
Technically, I broke the law. I could be thrown in jail and have all of my stuff confiscated for my horrible, evil copyright infringement. But... did I actually do anything wrong? I submit that I did not. When the law makes "not doing anything wrong" not only illegal, but assigns extremely harsh penalties which could destroy my life, we as a nation have collectively lost our minds. I could have stolen a physical copy from a store and faced much less serious penalties, and THAT crime actually would have harmed the store owner. My "crime" harmed no one and was not even unethical (in my opinion), and I risk jail time, massive fines, and confiscation of all my stuff. Thanks, politicians!
Odd logic there - "There is an A that is B, therefore all A's are B". By your logic, all humans are men.
No, his logic is more along the lines of "Wine graphically illlustrated all of the massive pitfalls with this approach, which aren't going to magically disappear when someone else attempts the same feat."
Perfect Win32 compatibility is an intractable problem.
You didn't seriously think those boxes actually contained Wiis, did you? They're empty promo boxes. The actual systems are kept in the back room, if they in fact had any.
A couple of friends of mine are interested in getting a Wii, so I've been semiseriously keeping an eye out for one every time I go shopping. Over the last six months, going to various stores which carry them at least once a week, I have seen Wiis in stock once. It was at the local Target, and the entire shipment was sold out when I went by the next day.
You seem to keep forgetting that this discussion is about cables. Not digital to analog converters or any other component of the system. Cables. In the context of cables, I submit that it is impossible for you to get harmonic distortion by using a shoddy digital cable compared to a good one. That's what I said originally, and I stand by it. I see nothing in this paper (which is about DACs) which is even the slightest bit relevant to this discussion.
Admittedly all I did was skim it -- perhaps somewhere in there is an admonishment against using cheap cables...
First, I consider RG-6 to be "common consumer cable", since it's dirt cheap and easily available. I used RG-6 to make my component video cables. Admittedly overkill for coax digital audio, but hardly expensive.
Secondly, I don't doubt that you're a smart guy, but if you honestly truly believe that you need something of at least RG-6 quality with BNC connectors to get clean digital audio, I'm afraid you have indeed been reading too many glossy brochures. Audio frequencies just aren't that demanding. Your ears, no matter how you may think otherwise, just aren't that good. Unless there is a ridiculous amount of RFI in the room, a typical 3-to-6 foot run of cable isn't going to be meaningfully affected by it, especially in digital applications.
I very much doubt that any human could hear even the slightest difference between a cheap no-name RCA cable and a nice expensive cable with BNC connectors in digital audio applications. (With obvious caveats like "the RCA cable isn't actually messed up" and "both cables are making good solid connections"). By all means, point me to a study showing otherwise. I'd love to read it.
Like the previous poster, you are woefully misinformed. Consumer audio equipment reads the clock straight off the wire. If the last bit arrives at the wrong time, then the analog signal is produced at the wrong time, which means you have distortion in the frequency domain. The quality of digital audio relies entirely on low phase noise of the sample clock. If you have phase noise on the sample clock, then you have harmonic distortion in the analog output. QED. This is all so basic, it's incredible that none of you understand it. Don't they teach anything in EE classes any more?
Maybe I missed something, but aren't we talking about a GOD DAMNED COPPER CABLE HERE?
I would really, really like to know how a copper cable can alter the time at which some bits but not others arrive. I realize you're going to cop out and start talking about crappy electronics or somesuch, but that's cheating -- the discussion started about cables. We were talking about how expensive cables are unnecessary in digital audio, because as long as you're not getting bit flips or echo or anything like that (which you shouldn't be, even with a $5 cable), you're going to hear the exact same sound.
So, please explain to me how a non-pathologically-screwed-up cable can possibly alter the timing of some bits, but not others.