I don't know of a single audiophile out there who uses any digital component in their system. Its all turntables and tubes. Even if you do have a CD player in the system, all of the audio processing is done in the unit. Its passing an analog signal to your amplifier.
First, lots of audiophiles use digital audio. Ridiculously expensive CD / DVD / etc. players wouldn't exist otherwise.
Second, who said I was talking about audiophiles? Audiophiles are pretty much by definition insane -- then spend huge sums of money on mythical improvements to their systems that only they can hear, and which miraculously disappear when they have to identify them during a blind test.
I don't include people who just "like good music". I like good music, and I probably spent more money than I really should have on my setup. But you're not really in audiophile territory until you're doing insane things like buying $100 power outlets (not surge protectors or anything like that, just ordinary wall outlets), coloring the edges of your CDs green, or putting special pieces of magical wood on your CD player in order to make it sound better. Sadly, I'm not making any of those examples up. True audiophiles are f'in crazy.
Your ignorance on this topic is staggering. Consumer audio equipment uses the inter-symbol arrival time to drive its internal clock. That's why interference on the cable is bad. Distortion in the time domain maps directly into distortion in the frequency domain due to the digital-to-analog convergence.
Ummm... okay.
First, I'm using optical cables. Since they're safely wrapped in an opaque covering, I'm not really sure how you imagine interference would come into play. I'm also not at all sure how an optical cable could possibly affect the timing of the signal traveling through it, besides introducing a constant (ridiculously small) delay.
Since evidently I'm staggeringly ignorant on this subject, could you please explain to me how a $5 optical cable could distort the signal (WITHOUT introducing bit flip errors!) in ways that could actually be heard by listeners. Perhaps you could point me to a blind study where listeners were actually able to hear a difference between different digital cables? I highly doubt one exists, because this sounds like typical audiophile bullshit.
For some reason people seem to turn off their brains and start appealing to voodoo magic when dealing with audio technology. Let's put it in a more familiar context: computers.
Suppose you're downloading a digital representation of music -- an MP3, say -- from the Internet. Now, we all know that an MP3 is just a series of bits, and as long as those bits arrive unmodified the song is going to sound exactly the same. Suppose I were to claim that you needed some super-high-fidelity Ethernet cable in order for the MP3 to sound its best after being downloaded, because otherwise the inter-edge arrival time in the digital signal will be distorted, and this, in turn, would map directly into harmonic distortion in the analog reproduction.
Anybody with half a brain would simply laugh at me. The bits either arrived properly or they didn't, and single-bit errors in the MP3 are going to produce pops and static, rather than anything so clean as harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion is an analog problem, there's just no plausible way it can occur with a digital signal. Furthermore, we all know that you can hook your computer up with pretty much any old Ethernet cable, and unless the cable is seriously crap it's going to work perfectly even at gigabit speeds (far higher than anything you encounter in audio).
The same is, for the most part, true with digital audio as well. You're either going to get a perfect signal or horrible pops and static. There really isn't an in-between, and you're certainly not going to get harmonic distortion. Admittedly digital audio does not feature error correction, so marginal connections are more likely to give you problems, but it's not going to be subtle.
For the record: I have a home theater with a 160" screen and $15K worth of speakers and audio gear. And I use the absolute cheapest generic (but still quality) digital cables I could find, just as I hook my computers up with the cheapest (but still quality) Ethernet cable I could find. I don't think I spent more than $5 on any of my digital audio cables, and the sound from my setup is still awe-inspiring.
Video, of course, is a different story -- none of the video cable standards were really intended to span the 30' run between my equipment room and the projector, and video runs at a much higher bandwidth than audio. I found that I had to buy relatively expensive video cables in order to get a good signal (but we're still talking $100, not $1000), and again with the digital hookups it's nothing subtle. With good cables, the signal is perfect. With lousy cables, it's covered with white and black snow.
And I'd like to echo the comments of a previous poster: if you are looking for high-quality cables / connectors/etc. but don't want to get ripped off, use Parts Express. They kick all kinds of ass.
You can not sell someone a product and tell them how they have to use it
Well, at least not without making them sign a contract agreeing to use it a particular way -- and Apple will of course claim that that is exactly what the EULA is for. What you're really arguing is that "EULAs are not valid contracts", and you're probably right about that.
Leopard is no more resolution independent than Tiger was. If you enable it via Quartz Debug you'll see that it's horribly buggy and unusable even with Apple's own applications. Or at least it was as of 9a559, I haven't checked with the GA version.
If you use something a lot stick it in the dock.. that's what it's there for. Everything else is in/Applications
No shit, that's exactly what I said in my comment. The point was that launching Photoshop (which I don't use often) with four keystrokes is much faster than going to Applications and launching it from there. Likewise with all of the other seldom-used programs on my computer.
Don't quite understand your browser reference.. spotlight doesn't interface with google as far as I know.
I've got Wikipedia bookmarked. Spotlight on Leopard indexes both your bookmarks and your history, so I can pull up anything with just a couple of keys.
I'm a Mac user, so our closest equivalent is Spotlight. I don't know how Spotlight compares to Windows' built-in search or to Beagle, but I do know one reason why it's great to have.
No matter how well-organized your file system is, and even if you know the exact path to a file already, Spotlight is still faster for accessing it. To open Photoshop Elements, I just type "ph" , and it's running. I know exactly where Photoshop is installed and I don't need to "search" for it, but typing four keystrokes to get it running is faster than any other means of accessing it (at least for stuff that I don't use frequently enough to keep on my Dock).
Same deal with bookmarks -- I can get to Wikipedia, even if my browser isn't running, just by typing "wik" . It's not always about searching in the literal sense; sometimes it's just a super-convenient shortcut to a known location.
(Disclaimer: This opinion is based on Spotlight in Leopard. On Tiger, I broke down and installed Quicksilver.)
Same basic story here. My Sony Vaio died and wasn't worth repairing. I talked my wife into letting me get a MacBook. She wasn't thrilled about the idea because it meant that when she wanted to use my laptop, she would be forced to deal with an unfamiliar OS; fortunately, she relented.
It took a grand total of two days before she demanded that we sell our three remaining Windows machines and replace them with Macs. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest -- Windows user for ten years, convinced to switch in two days of casual Mac use. Since then her parents and her sister have both switched as well, and my father is saving up to get one.
Once you've had the opportunity to spend quality time with a Mac, it's hard to continue to put up with Windows.
It's a pretty safe assumption with virtually any measure of a human -- strength, height, weight, head circumference, finger length, you name it -- that it's normally distributed. I can't think of a single physical measurement like that that isn't normally distributed.
So why is everybody acting like it's some big no-no to treat strength as normally distributed without citing a specific study to prove that it is? Of course it's normally distributed.
The iPhone is available with any of Cingular/AT&T's current plans in addition to the iPhone-only plans, many of which do not include data. 100% of iPhone users will not have data plans, and unlimited data is nothing even resembling mandatory.
Patently incorrect. Dozens of sources have broken the news that you will have to add a $20 "iPhone data plan" to your existing service in order to use it with an iPhone.
But seriously, wouldn't dropping a few large water comets or rock asteroids on mars help to add mass? Or would they just burn up into energy?
Of course. Just like the various probes we've sent there have added a few tons to its mass. The problem is that, to add a meaningful amount of mass, you need to add an absolutely un-freaking-believably huge amount of matter to it. Mars is only 10% the mass of Earth. Even crashing another Mars into it would only bring it up to 20% of Earth's mass. A few asteroids or comets aren't going to do squat.
Plus, even if you found sufficient mass somewhere, asteroids big enough to meaningfully change the size of the planet would impart enough kinetic energy to turn it into a huge blob of molten rock and metal.
I still find the idea of people being addicted to video games a stretch.
You've never met my mother-in-law. She is so obsessed with World of Warcraft that she pretty much only gets up from the computer to fulfill basic biological necessities. All other aspects of her life have completely halted. She typically plays sixteen hours a day and hardly sleeps.
I've known people who abused actual drugs and weren't half as addicted.
Again, it's 766, not 768. Zero-intensity red, zero-intensity green, and zero-intensity blue are all the same color - black. You don't get to count it three times.
And the "basic unit of a display" is arguable. Under a magnifying glass, you'll only find red, green, and blue.
Your "technical" definition of color is incorrect -- color is not the frequency of the light. Pink is a color, but there is no frequency of light which is pink. What you are referring to is hue, not color.
Also, our eyes most certainly do not respond to just three wavelengths. We have three different color receptors which have three different sensitivity ranges, but each of them is sensitive to a broad range of frequencies.
That "whoosh" you just heard was the comment going over your head.
To be absolutely precise, it's not even 768 colors, it's 766. 255 shades of red, 255 shades of green, 255 shades of blue, and black. Everything else is accomplished via dithering. White is really a dithered pattern of red, green, and blue sub-pixels.
So really, the only difference between subpixel dithering and pixel dithering is the fact that pixels are bigger than subpixels.
In reality the future is completely fixed? I'm guessing you're not a physicist. Quantum mechanics is an inherently probabilistic theory -- you can calculate the probability of given events happening, but that's it. You can smash the same two particles together five times in a row and get five different results.
The future is absolutely not fixed, because randomness is deeply engrained into our universe.
Mac OS X also much friendlier than other OSes in the event of a kernel panic. When you do get a kernel panic, you get a nice multilingual screen (graphical, none of this white-on-blue-80-column crap) telling you that your computer has encountered a problem and must be restarted. When the computer boots back up, it pops up a dialog explaining what happened, with the option to view the crash details and a Send to Apple option. Yes, I admit that I have had Mac OS crash on me, but only for "legitimate" reasons (a hardware problem in one case, a buggy 3rd-party kernel extension in another case).
Compared to Mac OS panics, the Windows BSoD is very primitive -- which is surprising, because BSoDs were once pretty common, and kernel panics on Mac OS X have always been very rare. You'd think Microsoft would have put more effort into it. Yes, I know BSoDs are rare nowadays, but faulty hardware can take any machine down, and it's nice to get such a clean experience from it.
You also need to account for the energy required to actually create the wall warts, versus the energy required to create this pad. My bet is that six or seven wall warts, with all of the petroleum-derived plastic and metal wiring, required vastly more energy to create than is lost to a few years of pad inefficiency.
Indeed. Before I switched to Macs, I assumed that (after ten years of exclusive Windows use) the single menu bar at the top of the screen would be annoying. It was annoying for maybe ten minutes, and then it felt completely natural -- and now when I have to use Windows, I find the Windows mechanism far more annoying.
They're basically complaining "But... but... we're used to the way Windows does it!". It really isn't at all hard to get used to, and once you're used to it I don't see a downside to the Mac approach.
I think you missed the point. GP wasn't talking about comparing his results to [Hodgman2005], he was talking about directly discussing the merits of [Hodgman2005] in the first place. As in, are the results of this study valid? How should we interpret them? In such a context I don't believe there is any question that reproducing the graphs from the original paper is both warranted and legal.
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With optical, there is no such thing as higher or lower quality cable.
That's funny, because that's pretty much exactly what I said in my original post, for which you called me "staggeringly ignorant"...
I don't know of a single audiophile out there who uses any digital component in their system. Its all turntables and tubes. Even if you do have a CD player in the system, all of the audio processing is done in the unit. Its passing an analog signal to your amplifier.
First, lots of audiophiles use digital audio. Ridiculously expensive CD / DVD / etc. players wouldn't exist otherwise.
Second, who said I was talking about audiophiles? Audiophiles are pretty much by definition insane -- then spend huge sums of money on mythical improvements to their systems that only they can hear, and which miraculously disappear when they have to identify them during a blind test.
I don't include people who just "like good music". I like good music, and I probably spent more money than I really should have on my setup. But you're not really in audiophile territory until you're doing insane things like buying $100 power outlets (not surge protectors or anything like that, just ordinary wall outlets), coloring the edges of your CDs green, or putting special pieces of magical wood on your CD player in order to make it sound better. Sadly, I'm not making any of those examples up. True audiophiles are f'in crazy.
Your ignorance on this topic is staggering. Consumer audio equipment uses the inter-symbol arrival time to drive its internal clock. That's why interference on the cable is bad. Distortion in the time domain maps directly into distortion in the frequency domain due to the digital-to-analog convergence.
Ummm... okay.
First, I'm using optical cables. Since they're safely wrapped in an opaque covering, I'm not really sure how you imagine interference would come into play. I'm also not at all sure how an optical cable could possibly affect the timing of the signal traveling through it, besides introducing a constant (ridiculously small) delay.
Since evidently I'm staggeringly ignorant on this subject, could you please explain to me how a $5 optical cable could distort the signal (WITHOUT introducing bit flip errors!) in ways that could actually be heard by listeners. Perhaps you could point me to a blind study where listeners were actually able to hear a difference between different digital cables? I highly doubt one exists, because this sounds like typical audiophile bullshit.
Bull. Shit.
/etc. but don't want to get ripped off, use Parts Express. They kick all kinds of ass.
For some reason people seem to turn off their brains and start appealing to voodoo magic when dealing with audio technology. Let's put it in a more familiar context: computers.
Suppose you're downloading a digital representation of music -- an MP3, say -- from the Internet. Now, we all know that an MP3 is just a series of bits, and as long as those bits arrive unmodified the song is going to sound exactly the same. Suppose I were to claim that you needed some super-high-fidelity Ethernet cable in order for the MP3 to sound its best after being downloaded, because otherwise the inter-edge arrival time in the digital signal will be distorted, and this, in turn, would map directly into harmonic distortion in the analog reproduction.
Anybody with half a brain would simply laugh at me. The bits either arrived properly or they didn't, and single-bit errors in the MP3 are going to produce pops and static, rather than anything so clean as harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion is an analog problem, there's just no plausible way it can occur with a digital signal. Furthermore, we all know that you can hook your computer up with pretty much any old Ethernet cable, and unless the cable is seriously crap it's going to work perfectly even at gigabit speeds (far higher than anything you encounter in audio).
The same is, for the most part, true with digital audio as well. You're either going to get a perfect signal or horrible pops and static. There really isn't an in-between, and you're certainly not going to get harmonic distortion. Admittedly digital audio does not feature error correction, so marginal connections are more likely to give you problems, but it's not going to be subtle.
For the record: I have a home theater with a 160" screen and $15K worth of speakers and audio gear. And I use the absolute cheapest generic (but still quality) digital cables I could find, just as I hook my computers up with the cheapest (but still quality) Ethernet cable I could find. I don't think I spent more than $5 on any of my digital audio cables, and the sound from my setup is still awe-inspiring.
Video, of course, is a different story -- none of the video cable standards were really intended to span the 30' run between my equipment room and the projector, and video runs at a much higher bandwidth than audio. I found that I had to buy relatively expensive video cables in order to get a good signal (but we're still talking $100, not $1000), and again with the digital hookups it's nothing subtle. With good cables, the signal is perfect. With lousy cables, it's covered with white and black snow.
And I'd like to echo the comments of a previous poster: if you are looking for high-quality cables / connectors
You can not sell someone a product and tell them how they have to use it
Well, at least not without making them sign a contract agreeing to use it a particular way -- and Apple will of course claim that that is exactly what the EULA is for. What you're really arguing is that "EULAs are not valid contracts", and you're probably right about that.
Leopard is no more resolution independent than Tiger was. If you enable it via Quartz Debug you'll see that it's horribly buggy and unusable even with Apple's own applications. Or at least it was as of 9a559, I haven't checked with the GA version.
If you use something a lot stick it in the dock.. that's what it's there for. Everything else is in /Applications
No shit, that's exactly what I said in my comment. The point was that launching Photoshop (which I don't use often) with four keystrokes is much faster than going to Applications and launching it from there. Likewise with all of the other seldom-used programs on my computer.
Don't quite understand your browser reference.. spotlight doesn't interface with google as far as I know.
I've got Wikipedia bookmarked. Spotlight on Leopard indexes both your bookmarks and your history, so I can pull up anything with just a couple of keys.
*sigh* Should have previewed -- I included tags like and to show the special keys I was pressing.
I'm a Mac user, so our closest equivalent is Spotlight. I don't know how Spotlight compares to Windows' built-in search or to Beagle, but I do know one reason why it's great to have.
No matter how well-organized your file system is, and even if you know the exact path to a file already, Spotlight is still faster for accessing it. To open Photoshop Elements, I just type "ph" , and it's running. I know exactly where Photoshop is installed and I don't need to "search" for it, but typing four keystrokes to get it running is faster than any other means of accessing it (at least for stuff that I don't use frequently enough to keep on my Dock).
Same deal with bookmarks -- I can get to Wikipedia, even if my browser isn't running, just by typing "wik" . It's not always about searching in the literal sense; sometimes it's just a super-convenient shortcut to a known location.
(Disclaimer: This opinion is based on Spotlight in Leopard. On Tiger, I broke down and installed Quicksilver.)
As opposed to hard drives, which never, ever, ever fail. Right?
Same basic story here. My Sony Vaio died and wasn't worth repairing. I talked my wife into letting me get a MacBook. She wasn't thrilled about the idea because it meant that when she wanted to use my laptop, she would be forced to deal with an unfamiliar OS; fortunately, she relented.
It took a grand total of two days before she demanded that we sell our three remaining Windows machines and replace them with Macs. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest -- Windows user for ten years, convinced to switch in two days of casual Mac use. Since then her parents and her sister have both switched as well, and my father is saving up to get one.
Once you've had the opportunity to spend quality time with a Mac, it's hard to continue to put up with Windows.
It's a pretty safe assumption with virtually any measure of a human -- strength, height, weight, head circumference, finger length, you name it -- that it's normally distributed. I can't think of a single physical measurement like that that isn't normally distributed.
So why is everybody acting like it's some big no-no to treat strength as normally distributed without citing a specific study to prove that it is? Of course it's normally distributed.
The iPhone is available with any of Cingular/AT&T's current plans in addition to the iPhone-only plans, many of which do not include data. 100% of iPhone users will not have data plans, and unlimited data is nothing even resembling mandatory.
Patently incorrect. Dozens of sources have broken the news that you will have to add a $20 "iPhone data plan" to your existing service in order to use it with an iPhone.
But seriously, wouldn't dropping a few large water comets or rock asteroids on mars help to add mass? Or would they just burn up into energy?
Of course. Just like the various probes we've sent there have added a few tons to its mass. The problem is that, to add a meaningful amount of mass, you need to add an absolutely un-freaking-believably huge amount of matter to it. Mars is only 10% the mass of Earth. Even crashing another Mars into it would only bring it up to 20% of Earth's mass. A few asteroids or comets aren't going to do squat.
Plus, even if you found sufficient mass somewhere, asteroids big enough to meaningfully change the size of the planet would impart enough kinetic energy to turn it into a huge blob of molten rock and metal.
I still find the idea of people being addicted to video games a stretch.
You've never met my mother-in-law. She is so obsessed with World of Warcraft that she pretty much only gets up from the computer to fulfill basic biological necessities. All other aspects of her life have completely halted. She typically plays sixteen hours a day and hardly sleeps.
I've known people who abused actual drugs and weren't half as addicted.
I don't think you get to call something "vaporware" when it's finished and being released to the public in three weeks. That's just silly.
Again, it's 766, not 768. Zero-intensity red, zero-intensity green, and zero-intensity blue are all the same color - black. You don't get to count it three times.
And the "basic unit of a display" is arguable. Under a magnifying glass, you'll only find red, green, and blue.
Your "technical" definition of color is incorrect -- color is not the frequency of the light. Pink is a color, but there is no frequency of light which is pink. What you are referring to is hue, not color.
Also, our eyes most certainly do not respond to just three wavelengths. We have three different color receptors which have three different sensitivity ranges, but each of them is sensitive to a broad range of frequencies.
That "whoosh" you just heard was the comment going over your head.
To be absolutely precise, it's not even 768 colors, it's 766. 255 shades of red, 255 shades of green, 255 shades of blue, and black. Everything else is accomplished via dithering. White is really a dithered pattern of red, green, and blue sub-pixels.
So really, the only difference between subpixel dithering and pixel dithering is the fact that pixels are bigger than subpixels.
In reality the future is completely fixed? I'm guessing you're not a physicist. Quantum mechanics is an inherently probabilistic theory -- you can calculate the probability of given events happening, but that's it. You can smash the same two particles together five times in a row and get five different results.
The future is absolutely not fixed, because randomness is deeply engrained into our universe.
Mac OS X also much friendlier than other OSes in the event of a kernel panic. When you do get a kernel panic, you get a nice multilingual screen (graphical, none of this white-on-blue-80-column crap) telling you that your computer has encountered a problem and must be restarted. When the computer boots back up, it pops up a dialog explaining what happened, with the option to view the crash details and a Send to Apple option. Yes, I admit that I have had Mac OS crash on me, but only for "legitimate" reasons (a hardware problem in one case, a buggy 3rd-party kernel extension in another case).
Compared to Mac OS panics, the Windows BSoD is very primitive -- which is surprising, because BSoDs were once pretty common, and kernel panics on Mac OS X have always been very rare. You'd think Microsoft would have put more effort into it. Yes, I know BSoDs are rare nowadays, but faulty hardware can take any machine down, and it's nice to get such a clean experience from it.
You also need to account for the energy required to actually create the wall warts, versus the energy required to create this pad. My bet is that six or seven wall warts, with all of the petroleum-derived plastic and metal wiring, required vastly more energy to create than is lost to a few years of pad inefficiency.
Indeed. Before I switched to Macs, I assumed that (after ten years of exclusive Windows use) the single menu bar at the top of the screen would be annoying. It was annoying for maybe ten minutes, and then it felt completely natural -- and now when I have to use Windows, I find the Windows mechanism far more annoying.
They're basically complaining "But... but... we're used to the way Windows does it!". It really isn't at all hard to get used to, and once you're used to it I don't see a downside to the Mac approach.
I think you missed the point. GP wasn't talking about comparing his results to [Hodgman2005], he was talking about directly discussing the merits of [Hodgman2005] in the first place. As in, are the results of this study valid? How should we interpret them? In such a context I don't believe there is any question that reproducing the graphs from the original paper is both warranted and legal.
That sound you just heard was the joke going over your head. Please recalibrate your sarcasm detectors.