At my job (major university CS department), we're supposedly not allowed, via state law, to archive viruses. We don't archive email, though I think we do log email transactions for a period of time. But, whenever we get an email which contained a virus, the virus is stripped out, and a text file put in its place containing the state law in question.
Your problem with 20 interfaces is going to be both CPU power and available system memory; not PCI bandwidth. With some of the cards I've seen, you could hook up in theory 12 T-1's or 6 T-3's (if you had 6 PCI slots and used onboard ethernet). Using firewire, or some bastardized scsi320 interface, you could up that to 20. But you're going to hit both a processor bottleneck (computing BGP AS pathlength versus 20 other lines multihomed), and Ram (keeping 120,000 routes in RAM times 20 interfaces). You'd need, oh, probably... well... you could probably do it with 2GB, but 3 or 4 would be better. We figured on 100MB minimum per interface, and that's cutting it close; more routes have been created since I delt with this.
If you're looking for T1/E1 cards, Sangoma has what you need. Appearantly, they also have cards that have an onboard CSU/DSU and plug in straight from the DMARC via Cat5/RJ45 (note: not ethernet).
They also have a variety of dual BNC T3/E3 cards.
If they're industry standard HDLC interfaces, they should work with the above mentioned software implementations.
Also: I wanted to add, that was all on a Celly 633 for the longest time; in 2003 I think we upgraded it to an Athlon XP 1700+ or so. Computing 5 T-1's times 115,000 routes once a minute was a lot of work, appearantly, and the more ram the better, since BGPD keeps routes in memory. I think we had 1GB in it. My point being, the machine wasn't your leftover Packard Bell 233, but it wasn't a monster. I figured out at some point that the whole thing, in hardware costs, was less than $4k, and the 3 Cyclades cards were more than $2500 of that.
I'd say more than 2 orders of magnitude. To get a Cisco with more than 12.8 Gbps thruput, you're talking more than $200,000, when you can get an opteron system fro $2000.
Something that I haven't seen anyone point out yet:
This has been done for YEARS and YEARS already.
When I worked at a small webhosting company, we did our own routing. We did it with RedHat + zebra + BGPD + cyclades PC300 cards + Motorolla CSU/DSU's. All the people we bought bandwidth from had no idea what the blind hell we were doing, but they were all amazed at how well it worked.
Motorola FT100 CSU/DSU (we had the ones with V35's on the back, and custom pinned cables to translate into the 24 pin serial interface on the T1/E1 cards)
Cyclades PC300 (we had the PC300/TE-2, I believe, with 2x 24 pin serial ports which required adapters from V.35 out of the back of the CSU/DSU)
The X-factor here is the Cyclades card. Appearantly, and I didn't know this when I started writing this post, Cyclades (aside from shifting their site to a webserver on someone's AOL 14.4 modem) has stopped selling Wan cards. I would assume someone has taken up the slack, but whatever.
Anyway, we had 5 T-1's, and this gave us 5 HDLC interfaces, which the linux kernel supports ever since 2.4.something, maybe 2.4.12. We also had our lan port, eth0. I think we had a DMZ on eth1, and then the loopback. Bwm (now bwm-ng) was able to read all the interfaces.
Interestingly enough, since all of our software was open source, we were able to correct an interesting BGP-related problem. We bought bandwidth from "X" tier-1 bandwidth company, and also from "Y" tier-2 bandwidth company. Company "Y" purchased their bandwidth in large part from company "X", so in essence, we were adding an obfucation step by having the reseller in the picture (but, they offered a lower price, about half). Anyway, BGP is set up to allocate routes to the shortest AS pathlength. That meant that every route that was destined to hit network "X" got routed through network "X"'s T-1 line, and not through the 2 T-1's we had from brand "Y" - essentially we ended up saturating X, and never using Y, due to the way BGP worked. We ended up trying lots of things - prepending our AS paths for the X routes, etc, but eventually one of my coassociates decided to just hack the zebra code.
I wish we had released it GPL, but the main programmer had said he didn't feel it was well documented enough and certainly used some unclean workarounds (like reading bandwidth stats from ifconfig and not from/proc), so we didn't release it. But, essentially, he found a way to manually allocate routes, by percentage, onto unused T-1's, so we didn't ever get to a situation where we were slamming one T-1, and had 4 un-used. Then, he went on to create a set of sub-routines whereby it would read traffic statistics to properly route traffic based on percentage of bandwidth used versus other links and available overhead. It resulted in a routing system we almost never had to touch, which automatically made the most economical use of our outgoing bandwidth, ensuring that customers always got the most unsaturated link, even if it was longer by one or two hops.
In the end, we even had the ability via configuration files to add an interface, specify its maximum thruput, and the routing system would automatically take that into account when doing auto route allocation. All because the code was open.
final payment was a 3 cashiers checks for under $10K each
I'm not entirely following your post; I'm kind of tired. But, if you paid with a cashier's check, that's a completely different matter. Cashier's checks are issued by a bank at which you have an account. They transfer the money From your account To the bank's general fund, and they draft the check off of the bank's general fund. It's essentially a business check written off of the bank's bank account. More bluntly, it's basically saying "I could have withdrawn this much cash from my account, but this is easier to carry and doesn't require a suitcase."
The difference being that a Cashier's Check is 3rd only to a USPS Money order and Cash as guaranteed funds. The check is backed by the bank's reputation and financial standing; anyone who won't take a cashier's check is in effect stating their distrust of a banking association. And I think most car salesmen would be daft to think that a check written off of Wachovia's or Navy Federal Credit's bank would bounce.
Interestingly enough, a year or so ago, my parents lent me and my wife slightly in excess of 10k to consolidate debts; and my mother withdrew it from a bank as a Cashier's check. When we deposited it at our Wachovia bank down the street, literally 15 minutes later and 3 miles down the road, they put a 10 day hold on it. Needless to say, I was irate about it. I couldn't believe that they would suggest that another local bank, who regularly financed million dollar plus loans, and who probably had over a billion dollars in net worth or purchasing power, would write a fradulent check.
Exactly. You don't get the sounds and the advanced functionality, but it degrades gracefully. In fact, on newer versions of SBServer, outlook web acess has a splash page asking you if you want "hi bandwidth" or "low bandwidth". If you pick the low bandwidth, it's the same skin as it uses for firefox.
I was wondering when someone was going to point that out.
Kevin Smith and others have said that today, you can't just look at the box office numbers. You will have to look at the whole picture. That includes Video game license fees and revenue, merchandising, and DVD Sales, plus ticket sales. DVD sales are a MAJOR part of a lot of film's revenue now, but the motion picture people don't want to look that far - they look and see that ticket sales are down, and yell for a crisis.
I think I'm not alone when I say that I'd much rather watch a movie at my own house, in my own comfort zone, in my lazy boy, where I can pause to get a beer, or go to the bathroom. The Consumer Electronics industry is all in a tizzy over the amazing adoption rates of huge TVs and digital this / digital that / hi-def stuff, etc. And at the same time, film producers are wondering why no one goes to the theatre? Home theatre, man. Home theatre.
I don't know about the rest of the Office suite, but for Outlook, my experience is exactly the opposite. When you have a small to medium business all with computers on an active directory domain, it's nice that your email client can authenticate from your logon, and the shared calendar / contacts / etc are done nicely.
I mean, I use thunderbird, and I think office is way overpriced. But, for what it is, outlook 2003 is a pretty good business product. It's relatively secure (compared to past iterations), the shared calendar is easy to use (yes there are open source alternatives, but integration and ease of use are hard to match here), and with Small Business Server, the outlook web interface has a lot of Ajax and DHTML type features which make it look almost exactly like you're at your computer. It's very well executed.
What we need is a 2 phase voting system. Everyone says they're afraid to cast their vote for a 3rd party because they'd be throwing it away. So, what we need is this: the summer before the election, we have a primary, where any number of candidates can run on any number of platforms. The two with the most votes can then be placed on the ballot in November.
This assures that when someone wants to vote libertarian, but vote republican instead, their voice is heard. Or when someone wants to vote Green but votes Dem as the lesser of two evils, their vote can be heard. People will say "Oh, well candidate X really represents my views, so I'll vote for him in the summer, but if it ends up being Dem vs. Repub in November, I'll vote lesser of 2 evils".
I mean, we have no idea how much third party support there is in this country, for exactly the clothespin voting!
What I'd like to see is benchmarks, on Intel and Amd, with 10 clients attached. That way, we can see if the code is indeed optimized for Intel, or if it's just crap. I suspect it's crap.
If anything, I'd suspect we'd see Intel being, what, 10% or 15% less load. Which would be something, but not something which justifies a 50% crippling of AMD hardware. And it'd be funny if AMD actually performed better.
Only if we use mining drones and have something bigger than a Badger Mark II + Hull modification 27.12% cargo expanders for hauling. And we'll only have like 2 hours to come back and get our jetcans. Plus, what if Gurristas show up?
suggest continued research into alternative fuels. While soybeans are a good renewable source of fuel, it is unlikely we could power enough automobiles for the population of the US or the world for that matter.
This random-oil-as-fuel can get us into trouble. Aside from farmland, there are other considerations.
Almost all the soybeans (and corn, and cotton) produced in the United States is produced net-energy-negative. That is, it costs more energy to produce (mainly in fertalizer) than is available in the finished product. We use petroleum-based fertilizers, so we're still using the high potential energy of crude oil, we're just adding another ambiguation step, which results in additional lost of potential.
Soybeans are renewable. Soybeans as produced now are ultimately not sustainable. Neither is corn (much of the crop is produced in the midwest; using a decreasing supply of water from the Ogallala aquifer, petroleum-based fertilizers, net energy negative, and heavily federally subsidized), which is where a good bit of vegetable oil comes from.
I applaud alternative fuels on principle; however, I think ultimatly the answer is probably fully electric cars and nuclear power. That wouldn't be renewable, but it would be sustainable for quite some time.
As a server, compiling from source with gentoo makes not much difference.
Running as a desktop, especially on older hardware, it can make a noticible difference.
The main thing about gentoo for me is the portage system. emerge is fantastic. Yes, you have to compile things. However, after having used Debian's apt-get and RedHat/Fedora's yum, something about emerge is MUCH much better.
I get annoyed every time I tell redhat to install something. Or even search for something.
$ yum search foo Reading packing list Getting XML file Parsing... 129 of 642901 packages.... wait 45 seconds updating reparsing. checking for new patches checking digital signatures. 90 seconds later..... "No packages matching foo found".
Thanks yum. For sucking. That's the reason I love gentoo - it's not the compiling. It's not the leet factor. It's that they've got the package management system down. And it's not Debian.
Start, Run, type "SHRPUBW". At the opportune moment, select "Custom", and configure.
That'll be $85/hr, please.
I think you can also disable "simple file sharing" in XP home by booting into safe mode, logging in as administrator, opening my computer, tools, folder options..., View tab, scroll down, uncheck simple file sharing. That may not be right. SHRPUBW should work.
I mean, I agree - it's just silly all these people saying APPLe's DRM is SO HORRIBLE OH NOES!!!!. It's easy to get around, aside from being lax in the first place. It allows customers to do almost anything they'd want with the tunes, while keeping the RIAA happy - what more could you want?
People need to pick their battles. Less DRM = pissed off RIAA = no iTunes. More DRM = more pissed off nerds = less iTunes = eventually no iTunes.
If you're spending $70 on a video card, I'd rather have this 9600 PRO from newegg, which I consider to be a very reliable vendor. It's got 256MB of ram, DVI and VGA, and TV out, and can play most (semi-)modern games with no problem (I wouldn't try running FEAR on it and expecting high framerates).
And you can get the non-PRO radeon 9600 from newegg for $57.
Yeah, but... I mean, geeks are a less percentage of the total population, but the population is growing... if there's a nationwide chain of make-your-own stuffed teddy bear stores, you'd think there'd be a place for ham radio and DIY electronics.
I guess the intarwebs pwned them, though. You wouldn't want to buy a teddy bear from ebay without cuddling it, or something, i guess, but all 100 mini-farad caps are going to be the same.
Right, my point was, in order to get surround sound, you have to have recorded more than 2 channels. Even if, like an above poster said, Pro Logic - encoded stuff does exist, you still have to start with more than 2 tracks.
But, yeah, mixing drums is a freaking bear. You never know exactly what's going to work, and while it might sound awesome on a pair of reference speakers and on your home theatre, it sounds like ass in headphones and car stereo. The wide range of speakers is the hardest thing to nail down. Compromises have to be made. But, still. You can't just have the drums mono while the rest of the track isn't. You've got to do something with them. You can't pan all the way L or R... you can't pan like 20% R and just have them over to one side, it overloads that channel. So you have to mix it with different drums and cymbols across L-R.
Then where does it get the rear channel from when you play a CD in Dolby Pro Logic?
There may be a few things actually coded for Pro Logic (some VHS tapes, etc), but for the most part, signals coming from CD's, Cable TV, and DVDs are 2 channel discrete stereo sound, and nothing more. DVDs do not have a pro-logic track - they have 2 channel and 6 channel.
Like the other guy in this thread, I call bullshit.
You can't "upmix" a signal to have MORE information than you are already given. Speaking as someone who has helped mixed and mastered a few CDs, the damn things are recorded in "LEFT" and "RIGHT". There's no other information to be had (and that's the way it should be).
Things like "Pro Logic" take a 2 channel sound and say "Well, this sounds like it's in the range of human voices", and puts it in the center; then it says "Everything below 90 Hz goes to the subwoofer"; then "These sounds are muted, they sound like background noise" and sends that to the rear speakers. But it's all faked. In that sense, you can "Upmix" to 5.1, but you're just shifting sounds to where they don't belong. Studio engineers spend HOURS per track on a CD putting the sounds exactly where they should go (for instance, so that when the drummer does a roll across all the toms, it goes from left to right in the ears). Messing with this doesn't gain you anything.
I mean, would you take a 64 color GIF weighing in at 12k, and "upconvert" it to a TIFF file at 5MB, and say "wow, now it's a better quality!"? It's just not possible. You can't create more than you're given to work with. Stereo sound is not more than the sum of its parts. It is exactly the sum of its parts.
I wish they'd stick to their guns and sell stuff like circuit boards, toggle switches, fuses, diodes, and solder. Maybe remote controlled cars and some audio / visual equipment, too. That's fine. All the other junk is just overpriced whats-its, like speaker wire.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not a state owned one. We can't knowingly keep viruses on state-owned equipment.
Heh.
At my job (major university CS department), we're supposedly not allowed, via state law, to archive viruses. We don't archive email, though I think we do log email transactions for a period of time. But, whenever we get an email which contained a virus, the virus is stripped out, and a text file put in its place containing the state law in question.
~Will
Your problem with 20 interfaces is going to be both CPU power and available system memory; not PCI bandwidth. With some of the cards I've seen, you could hook up in theory 12 T-1's or 6 T-3's (if you had 6 PCI slots and used onboard ethernet). Using firewire, or some bastardized scsi320 interface, you could up that to 20. But you're going to hit both a processor bottleneck (computing BGP AS pathlength versus 20 other lines multihomed), and Ram (keeping 120,000 routes in RAM times 20 interfaces). You'd need, oh, probably... well... you could probably do it with 2GB, but 3 or 4 would be better. We figured on 100MB minimum per interface, and that's cutting it close; more routes have been created since I delt with this.
~Will
Ah:
If you're looking for T1/E1 cards, Sangoma has what you need. Appearantly, they also have cards that have an onboard CSU/DSU and plug in straight from the DMARC via Cat5/RJ45 (note: not ethernet).
They also have a variety of dual BNC T3/E3 cards.
If they're industry standard HDLC interfaces, they should work with the above mentioned software implementations.
Also: I wanted to add, that was all on a Celly 633 for the longest time; in 2003 I think we upgraded it to an Athlon XP 1700+ or so. Computing 5 T-1's times 115,000 routes once a minute was a lot of work, appearantly, and the more ram the better, since BGPD keeps routes in memory. I think we had 1GB in it. My point being, the machine wasn't your leftover Packard Bell 233, but it wasn't a monster. I figured out at some point that the whole thing, in hardware costs, was less than $4k, and the 3 Cyclades cards were more than $2500 of that.
~Will
I'd say more than 2 orders of magnitude. To get a Cisco with more than 12.8 Gbps thruput, you're talking more than $200,000, when you can get an opteron system fro $2000.
~W
Something that I haven't seen anyone point out yet:
This has been done for YEARS and YEARS already.
When I worked at a small webhosting company, we did our own routing. We did it with RedHat + zebra + BGPD + cyclades PC300 cards + Motorolla CSU/DSU's. All the people we bought bandwidth from had no idea what the blind hell we were doing, but they were all amazed at how well it worked.
The X-factor here is the Cyclades card. Appearantly, and I didn't know this when I started writing this post, Cyclades (aside from shifting their site to a webserver on someone's AOL 14.4 modem) has stopped selling Wan cards. I would assume someone has taken up the slack, but whatever.
Anyway, we had 5 T-1's, and this gave us 5 HDLC interfaces, which the linux kernel supports ever since 2.4.something, maybe 2.4.12. We also had our lan port, eth0. I think we had a DMZ on eth1, and then the loopback. Bwm (now bwm-ng) was able to read all the interfaces.
Interestingly enough, since all of our software was open source, we were able to correct an interesting BGP-related problem. We bought bandwidth from "X" tier-1 bandwidth company, and also from "Y" tier-2 bandwidth company. Company "Y" purchased their bandwidth in large part from company "X", so in essence, we were adding an obfucation step by having the reseller in the picture (but, they offered a lower price, about half). Anyway, BGP is set up to allocate routes to the shortest AS pathlength. That meant that every route that was destined to hit network "X" got routed through network "X"'s T-1 line, and not through the 2 T-1's we had from brand "Y" - essentially we ended up saturating X, and never using Y, due to the way BGP worked. We ended up trying lots of things - prepending our AS paths for the X routes, etc, but eventually one of my coassociates decided to just hack the zebra code.
I wish we had released it GPL, but the main programmer had said he didn't feel it was well documented enough and certainly used some unclean workarounds (like reading bandwidth stats from ifconfig and not from
In the end, we even had the ability via configuration files to add an interface, specify its maximum thruput, and the routing system would automatically take that into account when doing auto route allocation. All because the code was open.
No, this open routing stuff isn't new.
~Will
final payment was a 3 cashiers checks for under $10K each
I'm not entirely following your post; I'm kind of tired. But, if you paid with a cashier's check, that's a completely different matter. Cashier's checks are issued by a bank at which you have an account. They transfer the money From your account To the bank's general fund, and they draft the check off of the bank's general fund. It's essentially a business check written off of the bank's bank account. More bluntly, it's basically saying "I could have withdrawn this much cash from my account, but this is easier to carry and doesn't require a suitcase."
The difference being that a Cashier's Check is 3rd only to a USPS Money order and Cash as guaranteed funds. The check is backed by the bank's reputation and financial standing; anyone who won't take a cashier's check is in effect stating their distrust of a banking association. And I think most car salesmen would be daft to think that a check written off of Wachovia's or Navy Federal Credit's bank would bounce.
Interestingly enough, a year or so ago, my parents lent me and my wife slightly in excess of 10k to consolidate debts; and my mother withdrew it from a bank as a Cashier's check. When we deposited it at our Wachovia bank down the street, literally 15 minutes later and 3 miles down the road, they put a 10 day hold on it. Needless to say, I was irate about it. I couldn't believe that they would suggest that another local bank, who regularly financed million dollar plus loans, and who probably had over a billion dollars in net worth or purchasing power, would write a fradulent check.
~Will
Exactly. You don't get the sounds and the advanced functionality, but it degrades gracefully. In fact, on newer versions of SBServer, outlook web acess has a splash page asking you if you want "hi bandwidth" or "low bandwidth". If you pick the low bandwidth, it's the same skin as it uses for firefox.
~Will
I was wondering when someone was going to point that out.
Kevin Smith and others have said that today, you can't just look at the box office numbers. You will have to look at the whole picture. That includes Video game license fees and revenue, merchandising, and DVD Sales, plus ticket sales. DVD sales are a MAJOR part of a lot of film's revenue now, but the motion picture people don't want to look that far - they look and see that ticket sales are down, and yell for a crisis.
I think I'm not alone when I say that I'd much rather watch a movie at my own house, in my own comfort zone, in my lazy boy, where I can pause to get a beer, or go to the bathroom. The Consumer Electronics industry is all in a tizzy over the amazing adoption rates of huge TVs and digital this / digital that / hi-def stuff, etc. And at the same time, film producers are wondering why no one goes to the theatre? Home theatre, man. Home theatre.
~Will
I don't know about the rest of the Office suite, but for Outlook, my experience is exactly the opposite. When you have a small to medium business all with computers on an active directory domain, it's nice that your email client can authenticate from your logon, and the shared calendar / contacts / etc are done nicely.
I mean, I use thunderbird, and I think office is way overpriced. But, for what it is, outlook 2003 is a pretty good business product. It's relatively secure (compared to past iterations), the shared calendar is easy to use (yes there are open source alternatives, but integration and ease of use are hard to match here), and with Small Business Server, the outlook web interface has a lot of Ajax and DHTML type features which make it look almost exactly like you're at your computer. It's very well executed.
~Will
It's like Terminator 2 - shattered into 1000's of pieces, but given time, they all sludge back together to form their origional self.
~W
What we need is a 2 phase voting system. Everyone says they're afraid to cast their vote for a 3rd party because they'd be throwing it away. So, what we need is this: the summer before the election, we have a primary, where any number of candidates can run on any number of platforms. The two with the most votes can then be placed on the ballot in November.
This assures that when someone wants to vote libertarian, but vote republican instead, their voice is heard. Or when someone wants to vote Green but votes Dem as the lesser of two evils, their vote can be heard. People will say "Oh, well candidate X really represents my views, so I'll vote for him in the summer, but if it ends up being Dem vs. Repub in November, I'll vote lesser of 2 evils".
I mean, we have no idea how much third party support there is in this country, for exactly the clothespin voting!
~Will
What I'd like to see is benchmarks, on Intel and Amd, with 10 clients attached. That way, we can see if the code is indeed optimized for Intel, or if it's just crap. I suspect it's crap.
If anything, I'd suspect we'd see Intel being, what, 10% or 15% less load. Which would be something, but not something which justifies a 50% crippling of AMD hardware. And it'd be funny if AMD actually performed better.
Yeah, someone should benchmark:
Origional Executable, 5 clients, Intel
Origional Executable, 5 clients, AMD
Origional Executable, 10 clients, Intel (for reference against modifications)
Modified Executable, 10 clients, Intel
Modified Executable, 10 clients, AMD
and let us know what the real beef is.
~Will
Only if we use mining drones and have something bigger than a Badger Mark II + Hull modification 27.12% cargo expanders for hauling. And we'll only have like 2 hours to come back and get our jetcans. Plus, what if Gurristas show up?
~W
suggest continued research into alternative fuels. While soybeans are a good renewable source of fuel, it is unlikely we could power enough automobiles for the population of the US or the world for that matter.
This random-oil-as-fuel can get us into trouble. Aside from farmland, there are other considerations.
Almost all the soybeans (and corn, and cotton) produced in the United States is produced net-energy-negative. That is, it costs more energy to produce (mainly in fertalizer) than is available in the finished product. We use petroleum-based fertilizers, so we're still using the high potential energy of crude oil, we're just adding another ambiguation step, which results in additional lost of potential.
Soybeans are renewable. Soybeans as produced now are ultimately not sustainable. Neither is corn (much of the crop is produced in the midwest; using a decreasing supply of water from the Ogallala aquifer, petroleum-based fertilizers, net energy negative, and heavily federally subsidized), which is where a good bit of vegetable oil comes from.
I applaud alternative fuels on principle; however, I think ultimatly the answer is probably fully electric cars and nuclear power. That wouldn't be renewable, but it would be sustainable for quite some time.
~Will
As a server, compiling from source with gentoo makes not much difference.
Running as a desktop, especially on older hardware, it can make a noticible difference.
The main thing about gentoo for me is the portage system. emerge is fantastic. Yes, you have to compile things. However, after having used Debian's apt-get and RedHat/Fedora's yum, something about emerge is MUCH much better.
I get annoyed every time I tell redhat to install something. Or even search for something.Thanks yum. For sucking. That's the reason I love gentoo - it's not the compiling. It's not the leet factor. It's that they've got the package management system down. And it's not Debian.
~Will
Start, Run, type "SHRPUBW". At the opportune moment, select "Custom", and configure.
That'll be $85/hr, please.
I think you can also disable "simple file sharing" in XP home by booting into safe mode, logging in as administrator, opening my computer, tools, folder options..., View tab, scroll down, uncheck simple file sharing. That may not be right. SHRPUBW should work.
~Will
Here's an idea:
Create playlist of album, tracks in proper order.
Burn CD.
Copy CD.
Copy CD.
I mean, I agree - it's just silly all these people saying APPLe's DRM is SO HORRIBLE OH NOES!!!!. It's easy to get around, aside from being lax in the first place. It allows customers to do almost anything they'd want with the tunes, while keeping the RIAA happy - what more could you want?
People need to pick their battles. Less DRM = pissed off RIAA = no iTunes. More DRM = more pissed off nerds = less iTunes = eventually no iTunes.
Everyone Chill out.
~W
If you're spending $70 on a video card, I'd rather have this 9600 PRO from newegg, which I consider to be a very reliable vendor. It's got 256MB of ram, DVI and VGA, and TV out, and can play most (semi-)modern games with no problem (I wouldn't try running FEAR on it and expecting high framerates).
And you can get the non-PRO radeon 9600 from newegg for $57.
~W
I'll give 'em a hand:
At the frequency 0 Ghz, there is no or little effect due to electromagnetic sources.
In other news, if you're going 0 miles per hour in your car, there is little or no chance you will crash into a brick wall.
~W
Yeah, but... I mean, geeks are a less percentage of the total population, but the population is growing... if there's a nationwide chain of make-your-own stuffed teddy bear stores, you'd think there'd be a place for ham radio and DIY electronics.
I guess the intarwebs pwned them, though. You wouldn't want to buy a teddy bear from ebay without cuddling it, or something, i guess, but all 100 mini-farad caps are going to be the same.
Right, my point was, in order to get surround sound, you have to have recorded more than 2 channels. Even if, like an above poster said, Pro Logic - encoded stuff does exist, you still have to start with more than 2 tracks.
But, yeah, mixing drums is a freaking bear. You never know exactly what's going to work, and while it might sound awesome on a pair of reference speakers and on your home theatre, it sounds like ass in headphones and car stereo. The wide range of speakers is the hardest thing to nail down. Compromises have to be made. But, still. You can't just have the drums mono while the rest of the track isn't. You've got to do something with them. You can't pan all the way L or R... you can't pan like 20% R and just have them over to one side, it overloads that channel. So you have to mix it with different drums and cymbols across L-R.
~W
Then where does it get the rear channel from when you play a CD in Dolby Pro Logic?
There may be a few things actually coded for Pro Logic (some VHS tapes, etc), but for the most part, signals coming from CD's, Cable TV, and DVDs are 2 channel discrete stereo sound, and nothing more. DVDs do not have a pro-logic track - they have 2 channel and 6 channel.
~Will
Provided you upmix to 5.1
Like the other guy in this thread, I call bullshit.
You can't "upmix" a signal to have MORE information than you are already given. Speaking as someone who has helped mixed and mastered a few CDs, the damn things are recorded in "LEFT" and "RIGHT". There's no other information to be had (and that's the way it should be).
Things like "Pro Logic" take a 2 channel sound and say "Well, this sounds like it's in the range of human voices", and puts it in the center; then it says "Everything below 90 Hz goes to the subwoofer"; then "These sounds are muted, they sound like background noise" and sends that to the rear speakers. But it's all faked. In that sense, you can "Upmix" to 5.1, but you're just shifting sounds to where they don't belong. Studio engineers spend HOURS per track on a CD putting the sounds exactly where they should go (for instance, so that when the drummer does a roll across all the toms, it goes from left to right in the ears). Messing with this doesn't gain you anything.
I mean, would you take a 64 color GIF weighing in at 12k, and "upconvert" it to a TIFF file at 5MB, and say "wow, now it's a better quality!"? It's just not possible. You can't create more than you're given to work with. Stereo sound is not more than the sum of its parts. It is exactly the sum of its parts.
~Will
I wish they'd stick to their guns and sell stuff like circuit boards, toggle switches, fuses, diodes, and solder. Maybe remote controlled cars and some audio / visual equipment, too. That's fine. All the other junk is just overpriced whats-its, like speaker wire.
~Will