I work for a very large computer company (not ms).
I would guess we work for the same company, directly or indirectly.
I don't think software producers should be responsible unless it's shown they are grossly neglegent and even then they are not neccessarily responsible.
I don't think it's about nzhavok, chrysrobyn or any individual developer being held responsible. We do our best. It's about M$, IBM, Blizzard, Apple, etc., being held responsible for being so selective about their beta testers. If one is making a "best effort" at making secure, bug free code, would one go exclusively to an audience of customers who will throw their typical workloads at it? Or would "best effort" involve soliciting the opinion of some of the vulnerability finders, or (better yet) the exploit writers? I believe that the collection of teams, the company, should expand the efforts of the one beyond the development and into testing. They find experts at locating and documenting UI bugs, why not buffer overflows?
For me, determining what should be law is looking at current things that aren't crimes (or are) and I think they should be (or shouldn't be), and comparing those to the exceptions I can think of.
For example, I believe in personal freedoms enough to believe Napster should be legal for trading songs at will, but I don't think that it should be legal for people to pirate CDs and resell them to friends. What's the difference? Napster quality isn't perfect. I can't listen to a 128kb/s MP3 on a decent stereo without clawing my ears out. I will go to the store (Best Buy/Circuit City on Black Friday when all CDs are $9.99 -- over $200 last day-after-Thanksgiving) and purchase what I want to listen to on my real stereo.
So maybe the law should be that lossy compression of music should be legal to distribute (it certainly isn't a direct copy of the CD). Linus shouldn't be held responsible for exploits in Linux. Red Hat should be, if it can be proven that they didn't think enough people were looking at the code and that they weren't proactive enough at getting patches out. M$/IBM/Apple should be if it can be proven that they did not actively go out and hire security/stability freaks to test the very closed source software. The Linux kernel has been under active community development, [hacker|cracker] testing, open for all to see, since 1991? How long did M$ actively recruit people who have reputations for breaking things for the purpose of breaking XP?
3. If this circuit is based on HBTs, then why are people talking about Pentiums and Athlons? No way in hell you could implement a VLSI (or rather an ULSI) circuit with HBTs. Am I missing something?
Somebody needs to tell These guys that you can't do a VLSI design in HBTs.
Google fails to find me the Exponential 705, a PowerPC using bipolar current mode logic (CML). Didn't quite make it to market because the manufacturers couldn't bring the defect density down fast enough before IBM and Moto came in with the 750/740. Maybe the X705 proves your point? Are you stating that the VLSI in HBTs is not cheaply manufacturable?
My personal opinion is that CMOS will not see us to the end of time. We may need to go BiCMOS, bipolar, or something else new and different. 2GHz CMOS processors are never in the DC state where CMOS saves power, they're 100% in the AC state charging and discharging capacitive loads, and leaking current like seives. If we went to bipolar CML, we'd see current like a 1.5GHz CMOS processor, whether we operated it at 500MHz or 5GHz.
Nah... this way you're on topic and you should get a load of karma.
---
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I knew there was a reason to leave.sigs on. Is it me or is this.sig funny in this context?
So remember, when calling tech support:
1) You are using 1 computer.
2) You are using Windows.
3) Never mention the words: firewall, router, linux, server. They are verboten.
Back when I had Roadrunner through TimeWarner in Troy, NY, I ran a masquerading Linux box. Every time there was a problem, "tech support" would tell me to reboot my machine. "It's Linux," I would say, "I can reset the network without rebooting, and I already did that." The reliable response was, "Well, did it work?"
Me: "No. If it did, I wouldn't have called."
Tech Support: "Reboot then. Let me know when you're done."
They didn't really care that I was running Linux (or masquerading for that matter -- it was THEIR idea, THEIR suggestion), I was straightforward and honest with them, and they still let me go through their scripts with them. Not every company in the world needs deceipt, but your service may vary. I wouldn't reboot, because I knew it wouldn't help the problem I saw frequently. So, I'd inform them that I was following their instructions, allowing them to follow their procedures.
Tech Support (impatiently): "Is it done rebooting yet?"
Me: "It's up now. Sometimes it takes a while." (no need to be COMPLETELY honest, now.)
Then, they'd log the call, and Mark would call me and we could get somewhere. Of course, being competant, Mark got promoted and left the area. Hi, Mark!
These kind of virus programs will probably not succeed in the NT world with user permissions or in any system with per-user permissions (Linux). Although theoretically possible (root runs the virus) in practice this kind of virus programs never succeed on the wild due to this kind of security mechanisms.
I must confess that I disagree that per-user security permissions halt this type of virus (re)productivity. Sure, %USER1% can't alter the files of %USER2%, but can't you see that %USER1% can use more than his/her share of the processor, hindering %USER2% in some way? Or, if %USER1% sends an e-mail to %USER2% containing self-replicating code, and %USER2% executes it (either through automation or ignorance), that has effectively circumvented per-user security. Now, you don't have just one virus on your system, but two.
Neils,
I don't have her, though you might want to contact
Schrodinger. Not sure if she's still alive.
Yours truly,
Werner
Werner,
Thank you for the advice. It appears the cat is both dead and alive.
Regards,
Neils
I hope it is on-subject enough to point out that I believe this is an excellent job Slashdot has done, going out and getting the rebuttal for the review. Although it is not quite perfect -- it acts partially to discredit the link source -- it is much closer to what I think Slashdot could be, a first-run news source with original articles -- for [nerds|geeks]. Until then, while the editors post their comments after a link, it's little more than the second-run movie theatres (which have their place, don't get me wrong).
Thanks, Slashdot.
I will be heavily casemodding a Thinkpad one of these days. Certinaly, the first version attempt will be with my old 750, but a future attempt may be my work machine (reversable for job security and manager happiness).
My plan is thus:
Get damn good with a
Dremel tool.
Visit my local Home Depot or Lowe's and look for some good, thick, cherry wood.
Use the aforementioned Dremel on the aforementioned hunk of wood (probably a saw to trim the wood to reasonable dimensions first) and hollow out the wood that gets in the way of the electronics parts.
Sand and lightly stain to taste.
The downside to such a project is that wood is thermally insulative, so any part of the laptop that gets warm sure won't get cool. Fan holes must be preserved, and the wood would be thicker than the (now missing) plastic shell in most places to make sure that it's as structurally sound as possible.
If I ever get TOO bored, a project involving LEDs, plexiglass and my favorite logo of the day will be used like the glow in the dark Apple logos on the Powerbooks.
Having a real wood (no veneer here!) laptop would be killer!
I would also think the three huge companies mentioned -- IBM, Toshiba, and Sony wouldn't work together anyway
On the contrary. I'm working as an IBM employee somewhere you may have heard of.
Turns out, Sony, Toshiba and IBM each have different skills and needs that together strengthen a project. Sure, we each have our agendas, but as long as we all get what we want, it's all good, right? None of us is out to dominate the world. We each have our target markets, and I think we can all coexist. I can't say anything about the OS article, but the hadware will be cool.
...somehow use the heat from the CPU to power the fan. As the CPU got hotter, the fan would move faster.
I have no idea how this could be done, but there must be a way.
There sure is. Have you seen the lights in the stores that have the shade that rotates as long as the light is on? Same thing. The convection action of the heat from the light spins the fan. Same thing with what you propose-- the convection from the processor would spin the fan. More importantly, having the fan in the way will slow the airflow around the processor, thus meaning that the processor gets warmer. The microcurrent from the fan spinning would not end up generating enough power to be worth it, either.
Ultimately, in my opinion, there would be a large copper (better yet, silver) block that extends from the processor to the face of the computer itself, with a huge aluminum heat sink on the case. (Copper has a very high coefficient of thermal conduction, silver is better yet, but expensive. Aluminum isn't that great, but aluminum oxide is far better than copper oxide or silver oxide, so it's a great medium for heat exchange with the air.)
"...will be moving to another service -- AT7T dropped out of the negotiations..."
I believe it says something that I read this and immediatly tried to descipher what "AT7T" was in normal speak. I guess I'm not very 3133+.
Okay, maybe you can borrow someone else's paddle. Was any of this purchased recently? On a credit card with nice automatically warranty protection? Perhaps your home owners/renters insurance covers such an accident? (Mine would.)
Overclocking was cooler back in the olden days. Taking a 300 MHz Celeron to 550 MHz, or whatever was much easier and more productive.
Overclocking sure was much cooler back in the olden days. But a Celeron is "olden days"?! Now, if you had mentioned tweaking a 286, 386 or 680x0 (you get the idea) up 5 or so MHz, I would have agreed with you. Overclocking in those days wasn't "because it's easy", it was "because it's there"-- a much better reason to recklessly endanger your hardware in my opinion.
It looks like somebody managed to patch all those code red [2] infected servers! I havn't gotten a single code red [2] attack since 9:30 this morning! Of course, all those error messages have now been replaced with 16 lines of error messages, and the frequency has gone up exponentially...
My question is: When are they going to come up with a heat sinking device that runs like the engine block on a car (I.E. the water/freon/liquid nitrogen/liquid helium/butane actually flows in channels built for it within a heatsink block)
I've seen some research on such things. The problems are few and unique. You need the channels large enough to actually permit liquid to flow and never block, but small enough not to destroy the structural integrity of the chip. I've seen some research projects on this, and they are interesting, but not ready for the consumer by a long shot. They are, honestly, only a few times better than sticking that old heat sink on top-- and much cheaper.
Unless, of course, you're talking about mail ordering something less novel but still highly nifty.
I realize this will likely be different for different people.
Personally, I set all my xterms to green on black. It makes me look like an old-schooler at work, which gets annoying after the twentieth person points out that I'm using $20k worth of equipment to look like something from 1980, but I digress.
My goal was to first get rid of white backgrounds -- the refresh rate on my monitor at work was too low for my comfort, and white flashed. Black became my default. Next, for a foreground color. One would think that shelling out that much dough for a high powered UNIX workstation, they'd toss in a higher quality monitor, but the colors diverged on the periphery and there weren't enough controls to make them converge on all corners simultanously. So, my goal became to find a color that could be activated by one color gun alone -- blue, red or green. Blue appeared too dim (the human eye is least sensitive to blue, most to yellow), red was hard to look at for much time at all, and green was something I could stare into for 10-12 hours a day and not get a headache. So, for me, all my text windows became green on black, my headaches went away, and my job satisfaction soared. The downside was that my coworkers started to ask me UNIX questions as if I was tech support (I have the deepest respect for tech support, but since my job was as a circuit designer).
Anybody else notice that Gecko will be running a bit faster, and that Flipper will be running a bit slower, than previously speced? 405->485, 202->162? (202.5*2=405, 162*3=485)...
I believe that the poster is unfamiliar with today's microelectronics. Yes, static electricity has gotten a bigger deal as the geometries have gotten smaller. However, do you remember the days of the PC clones with static strips nearby? If you didn't touch the static strip and were walking on carpet, you could fry the entire computer (my friend toasted two motherboards that way, by way of the keyboard). How often do you hear about this kind of thing today? (Expected answer: every now and then) How does this compare to the days that electronics were much less pervasive? (Expected answer: It happens less often)
The reason behind this is that chip manufacturers have been working on modelling the kinds of static electricity that humans produce (human body models) and machines produce (machine models), and designing I/Os to accomodate the new parameters.
Yes, some companies take their chances, ignoring static electricity (and there are some performance benefits to doing that), but these are risks that most of us can weigh.
Re:Believe it or not...
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 1
...but this is a great way to meet women.
Agreed. Whenever a female friend of mine had computer problems and I couldn't help, my statement was, "You have two choices. One involves pizza, and the other involves either a tight shirt or a short skirt. Both involve standing in the hallway and announcing that you're having computer problems."
Every woman but one chose to offer pizza.
Women's view of RPI: The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.
You are comaring:
a) OGG -- decoded stream -- soundcard -- casette input -- amp -- speakers
b) CD -- decoded stream -- CD-D/A-converter -- CD-input -- amp -- speakers
If alternative a doesn't sound as good as b, this doesn't say anything about the ogg-encoding, because it isn't the only variable. Maybe the difference is caused by the different audio-characteristics of soundcard and CD-D/A-converter.
That's right. I wanted to get all those details out there, then share my observations. Time is one of those frivolous nicities I don't have right now. If my observations backed up those of other people, wonderful. If they refute something everyone else says, I probably need to do some more work. But, by stating my methods, my opinion can be weighed against others as much as it deserves-- as you point out, perhaps with not as much weight as others.
But even with this setting, there remains one additional variable: your psyche. If ogg and wav were bit-per-bit equal you will still recognize a difference when you know which one of the two you are hearing. So if you want to get meaningful results, you have to make a double-blind-test.
Now, here's where you draw conclusions not based on what I stated. I can tell a difference, which may be psyche related. When I'm hiding the buttons and my wife describes exactly what I'm noticing, without any priming or ability to see what I'm doing or any explanation other than "one is lossy, the other isn't-- tell me which is lossy and how you can tell", psyche was removed. The artifact was there, verified by a "no blind" and a "double blind" who made the same observation.
I'm not trying to be defensive or offensive, I just wanted to properly size the grain of salt anybody considering this CODEC will need.
I know I need to post this to the authors, but...
It is my goal to replace my wife's and my CD collection of 400-500 discs with a hard drive. We'd like to be able to put the CDs in a closet and reclaim some living room space. So, I ripped 10 or so titles and compared them to the original. The rip quality was 256kb/sec. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but I won't tolerate noise, so maybe a lossy compression isn't right for me.
I didn't notice any high end problems or artifacts like MP3. Stereo seperation was excellent. The only difference was that the low end was less impressive on the OGG than the CD. I put on a few songs and started them simultanously and switched the amp from CD to cassette in (which happened to be my computer). Although it is possible that the casette input amp is less accurate near the low end than the CD input amp, I doubt it. The speakers used were Bose 501s.
Conclusion: at 256k/sec, OGG was fine at the high end, but strangely enough, not good enough at the low end. If the low end can be clarified / amplified (hard to tell, psychoacoustics are strange), I'll be OGGing away for a good long time.
Cleanroom?
(Score:4)
by lowe0 (klowe1@purdue.edu) on 15:40 Tuesday 07 August 2001 EST
(User #136140 Info) http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~klowe1/
If it's cleanroom, tell 'em to fuck off directly.
If it's not, well, let that be a lesson to you.
I've seen similar things written before. To the contrary, cleanroom reversed engineered products are safe ways to circumvent industry secrets, not patents. Patents are there to publish the method and protect the inventor for a period of time that should not injure the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a very large computer company (not ms). I would guess we work for the same company, directly or indirectly. I don't think software producers should be responsible unless it's shown they are grossly neglegent and even then they are not neccessarily responsible. I don't think it's about nzhavok, chrysrobyn or any individual developer being held responsible. We do our best. It's about M$, IBM, Blizzard, Apple, etc., being held responsible for being so selective about their beta testers. If one is making a "best effort" at making secure, bug free code, would one go exclusively to an audience of customers who will throw their typical workloads at it? Or would "best effort" involve soliciting the opinion of some of the vulnerability finders, or (better yet) the exploit writers? I believe that the collection of teams, the company, should expand the efforts of the one beyond the development and into testing. They find experts at locating and documenting UI bugs, why not buffer overflows? For me, determining what should be law is looking at current things that aren't crimes (or are) and I think they should be (or shouldn't be), and comparing those to the exceptions I can think of. For example, I believe in personal freedoms enough to believe Napster should be legal for trading songs at will, but I don't think that it should be legal for people to pirate CDs and resell them to friends. What's the difference? Napster quality isn't perfect. I can't listen to a 128kb/s MP3 on a decent stereo without clawing my ears out. I will go to the store (Best Buy/Circuit City on Black Friday when all CDs are $9.99 -- over $200 last day-after-Thanksgiving) and purchase what I want to listen to on my real stereo. So maybe the law should be that lossy compression of music should be legal to distribute (it certainly isn't a direct copy of the CD). Linus shouldn't be held responsible for exploits in Linux. Red Hat should be, if it can be proven that they didn't think enough people were looking at the code and that they weren't proactive enough at getting patches out. M$/IBM/Apple should be if it can be proven that they did not actively go out and hire security/stability freaks to test the very closed source software. The Linux kernel has been under active community development, [hacker|cracker] testing, open for all to see, since 1991? How long did M$ actively recruit people who have reputations for breaking things for the purpose of breaking XP?
3. If this circuit is based on HBTs, then why are people talking about Pentiums and Athlons? No way in hell you could implement a VLSI (or rather an ULSI) circuit with HBTs. Am I missing something? Somebody needs to tell These guys that you can't do a VLSI design in HBTs. Google fails to find me the Exponential 705, a PowerPC using bipolar current mode logic (CML). Didn't quite make it to market because the manufacturers couldn't bring the defect density down fast enough before IBM and Moto came in with the 750/740. Maybe the X705 proves your point? Are you stating that the VLSI in HBTs is not cheaply manufacturable? My personal opinion is that CMOS will not see us to the end of time. We may need to go BiCMOS, bipolar, or something else new and different. 2GHz CMOS processors are never in the DC state where CMOS saves power, they're 100% in the AC state charging and discharging capacitive loads, and leaking current like seives. If we went to bipolar CML, we'd see current like a 1.5GHz CMOS processor, whether we operated it at 500MHz or 5GHz.
Nah... this way you're on topic and you should get a load of karma. --- Pants are still optional, but recommended for you. I knew there was a reason to leave .sigs on. Is it me or is this .sig funny in this context?
So remember, when calling tech support: 1) You are using 1 computer. 2) You are using Windows. 3) Never mention the words: firewall, router, linux, server. They are verboten. Back when I had Roadrunner through TimeWarner in Troy, NY, I ran a masquerading Linux box. Every time there was a problem, "tech support" would tell me to reboot my machine. "It's Linux," I would say, "I can reset the network without rebooting, and I already did that." The reliable response was, "Well, did it work?" Me: "No. If it did, I wouldn't have called." Tech Support: "Reboot then. Let me know when you're done." They didn't really care that I was running Linux (or masquerading for that matter -- it was THEIR idea, THEIR suggestion), I was straightforward and honest with them, and they still let me go through their scripts with them. Not every company in the world needs deceipt, but your service may vary. I wouldn't reboot, because I knew it wouldn't help the problem I saw frequently. So, I'd inform them that I was following their instructions, allowing them to follow their procedures. Tech Support (impatiently): "Is it done rebooting yet?" Me: "It's up now. Sometimes it takes a while." (no need to be COMPLETELY honest, now.) Then, they'd log the call, and Mark would call me and we could get somewhere. Of course, being competant, Mark got promoted and left the area. Hi, Mark!
These kind of virus programs will probably not succeed in the NT world with user permissions or in any system with per-user permissions (Linux). Although theoretically possible (root runs the virus) in practice this kind of virus programs never succeed on the wild due to this kind of security mechanisms. I must confess that I disagree that per-user security permissions halt this type of virus (re)productivity. Sure, %USER1% can't alter the files of %USER2%, but can't you see that %USER1% can use more than his/her share of the processor, hindering %USER2% in some way? Or, if %USER1% sends an e-mail to %USER2% containing self-replicating code, and %USER2% executes it (either through automation or ignorance), that has effectively circumvented per-user security. Now, you don't have just one virus on your system, but two.
Neils, I don't have her, though you might want to contact Schrodinger. Not sure if she's still alive. Yours truly, Werner Werner, Thank you for the advice. It appears the cat is both dead and alive. Regards, Neils
I hope it is on-subject enough to point out that I believe this is an excellent job Slashdot has done, going out and getting the rebuttal for the review. Although it is not quite perfect -- it acts partially to discredit the link source -- it is much closer to what I think Slashdot could be, a first-run news source with original articles -- for [nerds|geeks]. Until then, while the editors post their comments after a link, it's little more than the second-run movie theatres (which have their place, don't get me wrong). Thanks, Slashdot.
I will be heavily casemodding a Thinkpad one of these days. Certinaly, the first version attempt will be with my old 750, but a future attempt may be my work machine (reversable for job security and manager happiness). My plan is thus: Get damn good with a Dremel tool. Visit my local Home Depot or Lowe's and look for some good, thick, cherry wood. Use the aforementioned Dremel on the aforementioned hunk of wood (probably a saw to trim the wood to reasonable dimensions first) and hollow out the wood that gets in the way of the electronics parts. Sand and lightly stain to taste. The downside to such a project is that wood is thermally insulative, so any part of the laptop that gets warm sure won't get cool. Fan holes must be preserved, and the wood would be thicker than the (now missing) plastic shell in most places to make sure that it's as structurally sound as possible. If I ever get TOO bored, a project involving LEDs, plexiglass and my favorite logo of the day will be used like the glow in the dark Apple logos on the Powerbooks. Having a real wood (no veneer here!) laptop would be killer!
I would also think the three huge companies mentioned -- IBM, Toshiba, and Sony wouldn't work together anyway On the contrary. I'm working as an IBM employee somewhere you may have heard of. Turns out, Sony, Toshiba and IBM each have different skills and needs that together strengthen a project. Sure, we each have our agendas, but as long as we all get what we want, it's all good, right? None of us is out to dominate the world. We each have our target markets, and I think we can all coexist. I can't say anything about the OS article, but the hadware will be cool.
...somehow use the heat from the CPU to power the fan. As the CPU got hotter, the fan would move faster. I have no idea how this could be done, but there must be a way. There sure is. Have you seen the lights in the stores that have the shade that rotates as long as the light is on? Same thing. The convection action of the heat from the light spins the fan. Same thing with what you propose-- the convection from the processor would spin the fan. More importantly, having the fan in the way will slow the airflow around the processor, thus meaning that the processor gets warmer. The microcurrent from the fan spinning would not end up generating enough power to be worth it, either. Ultimately, in my opinion, there would be a large copper (better yet, silver) block that extends from the processor to the face of the computer itself, with a huge aluminum heat sink on the case. (Copper has a very high coefficient of thermal conduction, silver is better yet, but expensive. Aluminum isn't that great, but aluminum oxide is far better than copper oxide or silver oxide, so it's a great medium for heat exchange with the air.)
"...will be moving to another service -- AT7T dropped out of the negotiations..." I believe it says something that I read this and immediatly tried to descipher what "AT7T" was in normal speak. I guess I'm not very 3133+.
Okay, maybe you can borrow someone else's paddle. Was any of this purchased recently? On a credit card with nice automatically warranty protection? Perhaps your home owners/renters insurance covers such an accident? (Mine would.)
Overclocking was cooler back in the olden days. Taking a 300 MHz Celeron to 550 MHz, or whatever was much easier and more productive. Overclocking sure was much cooler back in the olden days. But a Celeron is "olden days"?! Now, if you had mentioned tweaking a 286, 386 or 680x0 (you get the idea) up 5 or so MHz, I would have agreed with you. Overclocking in those days wasn't "because it's easy", it was "because it's there"-- a much better reason to recklessly endanger your hardware in my opinion.
Feels good to see that the ship has sailed, doesn't it? [/inside joke]
It looks like somebody managed to patch all those code red [2] infected servers! I havn't gotten a single code red [2] attack since 9:30 this morning! Of course, all those error messages have now been replaced with 16 lines of error messages, and the frequency has gone up exponentially...
Hey, give me back my code red [2] error messages!
My question is: When are they going to come up with a heat sinking device that runs like the engine block on a car (I.E. the water/freon/liquid nitrogen/liquid helium/butane actually flows in channels built for it within a heatsink block) I've seen some research on such things. The problems are few and unique. You need the channels large enough to actually permit liquid to flow and never block, but small enough not to destroy the structural integrity of the chip. I've seen some research projects on this, and they are interesting, but not ready for the consumer by a long shot. They are, honestly, only a few times better than sticking that old heat sink on top-- and much cheaper. Unless, of course, you're talking about mail ordering something less novel but still highly nifty.
I realize this will likely be different for different people.
Personally, I set all my xterms to green on black. It makes me look like an old-schooler at work, which gets annoying after the twentieth person points out that I'm using $20k worth of equipment to look like something from 1980, but I digress.
My goal was to first get rid of white backgrounds -- the refresh rate on my monitor at work was too low for my comfort, and white flashed. Black became my default. Next, for a foreground color. One would think that shelling out that much dough for a high powered UNIX workstation, they'd toss in a higher quality monitor, but the colors diverged on the periphery and there weren't enough controls to make them converge on all corners simultanously. So, my goal became to find a color that could be activated by one color gun alone -- blue, red or green. Blue appeared too dim (the human eye is least sensitive to blue, most to yellow), red was hard to look at for much time at all, and green was something I could stare into for 10-12 hours a day and not get a headache. So, for me, all my text windows became green on black, my headaches went away, and my job satisfaction soared. The downside was that my coworkers started to ask me UNIX questions as if I was tech support (I have the deepest respect for tech support, but since my job was as a circuit designer).
Anybody else notice that Gecko will be running a bit faster, and that Flipper will be running a bit slower, than previously speced? 405->485, 202->162? (202.5*2=405, 162*3=485)...
I believe that the poster is unfamiliar with today's microelectronics. Yes, static electricity has gotten a bigger deal as the geometries have gotten smaller. However, do you remember the days of the PC clones with static strips nearby? If you didn't touch the static strip and were walking on carpet, you could fry the entire computer (my friend toasted two motherboards that way, by way of the keyboard). How often do you hear about this kind of thing today? (Expected answer: every now and then) How does this compare to the days that electronics were much less pervasive? (Expected answer: It happens less often)
The reason behind this is that chip manufacturers have been working on modelling the kinds of static electricity that humans produce (human body models) and machines produce (machine models), and designing I/Os to accomodate the new parameters.
Yes, some companies take their chances, ignoring static electricity (and there are some performance benefits to doing that), but these are risks that most of us can weigh.
...but this is a great way to meet women. Agreed. Whenever a female friend of mine had computer problems and I couldn't help, my statement was, "You have two choices. One involves pizza, and the other involves either a tight shirt or a short skirt. Both involve standing in the hallway and announcing that you're having computer problems." Every woman but one chose to offer pizza. Women's view of RPI: The odds are good, but the goods are odd. Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.
You are comaring: a) OGG -- decoded stream -- soundcard -- casette input -- amp -- speakers b) CD -- decoded stream -- CD-D/A-converter -- CD-input -- amp -- speakers If alternative a doesn't sound as good as b, this doesn't say anything about the ogg-encoding, because it isn't the only variable. Maybe the difference is caused by the different audio-characteristics of soundcard and CD-D/A-converter. That's right. I wanted to get all those details out there, then share my observations. Time is one of those frivolous nicities I don't have right now. If my observations backed up those of other people, wonderful. If they refute something everyone else says, I probably need to do some more work. But, by stating my methods, my opinion can be weighed against others as much as it deserves-- as you point out, perhaps with not as much weight as others. But even with this setting, there remains one additional variable: your psyche. If ogg and wav were bit-per-bit equal you will still recognize a difference when you know which one of the two you are hearing. So if you want to get meaningful results, you have to make a double-blind-test. Now, here's where you draw conclusions not based on what I stated. I can tell a difference, which may be psyche related. When I'm hiding the buttons and my wife describes exactly what I'm noticing, without any priming or ability to see what I'm doing or any explanation other than "one is lossy, the other isn't-- tell me which is lossy and how you can tell", psyche was removed. The artifact was there, verified by a "no blind" and a "double blind" who made the same observation. I'm not trying to be defensive or offensive, I just wanted to properly size the grain of salt anybody considering this CODEC will need.
I know I need to post this to the authors, but... It is my goal to replace my wife's and my CD collection of 400-500 discs with a hard drive. We'd like to be able to put the CDs in a closet and reclaim some living room space. So, I ripped 10 or so titles and compared them to the original. The rip quality was 256kb/sec. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but I won't tolerate noise, so maybe a lossy compression isn't right for me. I didn't notice any high end problems or artifacts like MP3. Stereo seperation was excellent. The only difference was that the low end was less impressive on the OGG than the CD. I put on a few songs and started them simultanously and switched the amp from CD to cassette in (which happened to be my computer). Although it is possible that the casette input amp is less accurate near the low end than the CD input amp, I doubt it. The speakers used were Bose 501s. Conclusion: at 256k/sec, OGG was fine at the high end, but strangely enough, not good enough at the low end. If the low end can be clarified / amplified (hard to tell, psychoacoustics are strange), I'll be OGGing away for a good long time.
by kirkb on 10:44 Friday 10 August 2001 EST Proof... that the rhythm method does not work. I've got news for them... Pulling out doesn't work either.
Cleanroom? (Score:4) by lowe0 (klowe1@purdue.edu) on 15:40 Tuesday 07 August 2001 EST (User #136140 Info) http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~klowe1/ If it's cleanroom, tell 'em to fuck off directly. If it's not, well, let that be a lesson to you. I've seen similar things written before. To the contrary, cleanroom reversed engineered products are safe ways to circumvent industry secrets, not patents. Patents are there to publish the method and protect the inventor for a period of time that should not injure the industry.
The difference is that the first few hits of crack are acknowledged as free and the dealer doesn't threaten to sue for copyright violation.