178BHP in a 1.8L normally aspirated engine (The Acura Integra). Tweak the same engine, and you get some incredibly good gas mileage, and low emissions. Good engine design produces more power from less fuel, producing less waste emissions.
Good Lord, what an ugly car! Even for a prototype, it's uglyugly. Yech!
And that engine? 353BHP out of 5.7L? Big (censored) deal! Torque is a bit better, but this is the same as they got out of this size of carburetted engine in 1956!!! For a MODERN two-spark hemi engine, they should be able to drag 100BHP/L out of it easily. (and normally aspirated)
Sorry, just a rant about crappy, big, inefficient engines. I'll behave now.
Just to clarify something here...
I wasn't trying to suggest that bit errors (or bitrate errors and jitter, which would get eliminated by resynching the data stream in a decent CD player) would make the sound warmer, clearer, or have better high end. If it does, it's most likely due to the electroharmonic acoustification of the listener's interferometric phase shifting[1].
Failing this, bit errors are bit errors, and may be interpolated (causing a momentary and almost certainly inaudible degradation of the sound) or not (causing a VERY noticble momentary glitch)
Of course we're arguing from the same side of the table, so I'll be quiet now. Just didn't want to mistakenly be accused of stating that CD rings, for better or worse, would subtly alter the sound in a continuous manner.
I have to argue against tubes as a 'myth'. Vacuum tubes have very different distortion profiles, and sound much better than transistors when driven to their distortion limits. This is a Good Thing, since tubes are so much easier to drive into distortion. Tubes are also very susceptible to microphonics and ringing, which definitely affect the sound.
I won't even get started on thermal drift effects.
Of course, any good tube amp design aims to minimise these to below audible levels, just like transistors. (any tube amp that doesn't try to minimise these effects is a BAD design, in my opinion) I wouldn't waste my money on a tube amp when it's so easy to make a better transistor amp, but tubes _do_ often sound different. (i.e. worse:-)
It's also possible that the CD 'stabilising' rings make a difference--they can increase bit errors in CD players that can't adjust to the extra rotational mass.
None of this implies that these are anything but Bad Results, but they sometimes do exist.
Now if you REALLY want snake oil, how about a wooden puck you set on top of your amp with the grain aligned to the electron flow?
It's true - quality of interconnects cannot be underestimated. No matter how little you care about them, they're less important than that!
Of course, they have to work, and have to be decently made. Five to twenty bucks should get you a cable that'll do fine. Anything more than that is snake oil.
There are some cases where interconnects make a big difference--when your equipment is SO badly designed that it counts on the electrical properties of the cables to operate properly. Curiously, equipment this bad generally sells for thousands upon thousands of dollars. If you have (or desire) equipment this poor, then you need to give your money to a better cause (like me!), or get an electrical engineering degree and learn why Bryston has no use for magic cables.
If your interconnects make any audible difference to your setup, there's something VERY VERY wrong, no matter if your system cost $100 or $100,000.
But that's the point--it's a perpetual beta! With every cycle, it gets bigger, more feature-laden, and slower; without ever getting closer to release. If feature development was stopped right now, and they did nothing but fix all of the bugs in it, then it would be a big and slow release product.
In other words, it's not getting any faster, any smaller, or any closer to completion. It's just getting bigger and slower.
But am I the only one who read this as "New UUNet policy offers no-charge peeing?"
Re:Suspicious...but interested--An idea!
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 2
If this is the case, then short all of your hypothetical stock in IT.
The technology is there to make personal helicopter-like hovercrafts for about the same price as cars. It'll never happen, and any pilot will tell you why. Adding a third dimension adds about a factor of 100x in complexity. Most people will never be willing to learn to fly, especially for their daily commute.
I also don't think that an incredibly smart autopilot (which I also think is possible) would solve problems: You can't build highways as easily in the sky, even if you're being controlled by a computer.
Still, it's probably the most likely suggestion I've heard so far. Interesting...
Excellent! Modded down before I was modded up! I'm so proud!
Anyways...
IE won. Won, as in, controls well over 90% of the desktop market. If ALL of the non-Windows operating systems out there ever amount to more than 10% of the _desktop_ environment, then MS will release IE for (whatever). Mark my words--IE6 or IE7 will be released for Linux if it keeps growing on the desktop like it has for the past few months.
As far as embedded devices running Mozilla, I still disagree. No company will embed it, if it's big, slow, buggy, and unreliable.
Mozilla has lost its momentum, and its focus. It can't be compared to Linux, because Linux is a centralised, focused effort, and is not allowed to drift off course.
I still say that Mozilla never was and never will be a contender as a browser for anyone other than the hardcore diletantes, and a very few very specialised applications. Hell, look at OS/2--at least it was a good product, and it still didn't get any farther than that.
Suspicious...but interested--An idea!
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 2
OK, I look up Dean Kamen--someone I've never heard of--on Google, and find pages and pages of links to things about him. Try that with anyone else, (i.e. someone really famous) and you'll get a bunch of dead links, misleading links, barely peripherally related links, and the like. Nothing nearly as impressive or _targetted_ as a certain Mr. Kamen.
That sets my spidey-sense a-tingling.
But lest I be accused of being too much of a curmudgeon (which brings one to ask--is it possible to be too much of a good thing?), let's assume that IT is real, and IT's what it promises to be.
How about a personal servant? I'm not talking about a solar powered lawn mower, but a _real_ personal servant, the sort that Matt Ruff wrote about. (go look him up--one of the best damned authors alive today!) Could that be IT?
Well, the way high-end inflation is going, $60b now is going to be the equivalent about $2b in five years.
There are two inflation rates: The rate that governs the price of a loaf of bread, litre of milk, and price of a modest house; and the rate that governs an obscene mansion, a small country, or the last bottle of wine hand-labelled by Baron Phillipe I. (if such a thing exists)
So $0 -> $2b in five years? Yeah, it's possible.
HOWEVER...
Funny thing. Whenever you see "VCR/Videotape/VHS" and "history" used in the same sentence, you just KNOW it's going to be a diatribe on the superiority of Beta.:-)
"They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity."
Yep, and look how much of an impact they've had on the HDTV market so far. Roughly nil. These people are an amateur/high-end offshoot of the exact market the poster mentioned--the pro market.
The question is will this format take over the mass market, and the answer is very accurately summed up by the 'Blockbuster factor' poster. No chance, no how, no way. How much taping does the _average_ consumer do on their VCR anymore anyways? The answer is almost none, which negates the biggest (only?) advantage of this format.
Home recording is no longer a market factor, except for camcorder owners.
Not QUITE true, but close. A single flubbed bit in a digital data stream can be recovered from the checksums. A single unrecoverable bit (probably due to multiple sequential or close bits being messed up) will cause a dropout or glitch, but only for that section.
Regardless--Tape was never any more than the best of several bad alternatives for long term storage. It wasn't and isn't permanent by any stretch of the imagination--it decays! It rots! It falls apart! Going back to tape from a solid state format (i.e. DVD, CD, etc.) is a Bad Idea, and isn't likely to catch up now.
Linux??? Although I use linux daily, I find that it has almost the most unintuitive, steep-learning-curve interface of anything. (and believe me, I've used 'em all!)
It ain't great. It ain't even good. Pity on a fairly robust OS, but Win98SE with Active Directory turned off is so far ahead of Linux that the latter is strictly a pretender in the Desktop OS race.
Here's my rule: Never trust a company with more than four C*O positions. C*Os are managers of managers, and more than four of 'em means too many middle-managers running around.
What benefit will be realised by going with open source software in this case? Where will the company save money/time/effort, or otherwise profit from it?
This is a serious question. Not Microsoft doesn't mean Linux/BSD/OSS. There are commercial Unixes out there (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SCO), there's BeOS, Mac, and even VMS.
For that matter, why NOT Microsoft??? I wouldn't go with them for most things, but you'd better be prepared to come up with some good reasons to not use the biggest, best-known, most consistently supported product on the planet, or no one will listen to you.
I agree, to a point. But here's the reality: We aren't there yet. If we started building right this minute, we'd be there in about five years. You're not going to see routine trips to Mars for 10 years at least.
Secondly, the ISS may be the biggest boon to interplanetary space travel we've come up with so far. With it, we have the possibility of starting from outside the gravity well, which is the biggest fuel burn we have with any space travel.
Finally, if you don't like what NASA is doing, why not do it yourself? Seriously, private sector space travel is getting more likely and more lucrative by the day. Go get some funding, and do it yourself!
OK, first of all you don't have NEARLY the marketting clout that Sony, RCA, etc. have. Good luck.
But here's the problem--it looks like if you don't have the appropriate box in your TV, then you won't see everything, but rather you'll get nothing but static.
Furthermore, there's a good chance that even if TVs that worked and didn't censor could be made, they'd be illegal! Yes, that's right--TV sets that aren't licensed from the appropriate body (surprise surprise--it's the MPAA again!) will most likely be illegal.
OK, that's pretty cool. Mind you, the PIII-800 is
currently cheaper (!!!) than the Celeron 800, so
given my fairly high-end motherboard, I'm still
more likely to go with that. Well, maybe. AMD is
awfully tempting...
Absolutely right! If I were buying a new computer, I'd almost definitely get an AMD processor and faster than PC-100 RAM. However, I can upgrade my current beast with just a new processor which will save a substantial amount of cash.
Mind you, this makes me ask why there wasn't a comparison between the Celeron 800 and PIII-800. That's probably of more value to most people considering an upgrade to a current Intel system.
However as a general rule, Anand isn't biased towards Intel, or any other product. He tends to be impartial, fair, and even-handed. His problem is that he's never learned to read statistics. Consider a series of nine benchmarks comparing two items: If five benchmarks show a 1% performance increase of product 'a', and four show a 10% increase of product 'b', he's likely to conclude that product 'a' is better because it won more benchmarks.
He's a good kid, and his site is great, but he needs some more math background. Or maybe just a sense of perspective.
OK, you caught me, fair and square. On the first day of the new millennium, with my wife nibbling on my ear, in a minor post on an informal discussion forum, I made a mistake in proper english usage. Guilty as charged!
However, please don't necessarily attribute accidents to ignorance; or assume that the
person involved is lazy. Sometimes in this life, we simply make mistakes!
They could explicitly state in their TOS that the end user is solely responsible for their behaviour, and that they refused to take any responsibility. That's the way most companies work, and it generally keeps them safe. Furthermore, a ruling a month or so ago in the US declared port scans to be legal, so why are they banning them?
Finally, "posting vulgar information" is banned. I don't think there's any legal definition of vulgar, so who the hell decides? Oops, I think I just crossed the line by saying "hell."
This policy stinks of dead fish. There are NO excuses for it!
Slashdot Mirror
*shrug* Yeah, but look at what Honda is doing.
178BHP in a 1.8L normally aspirated engine (The Acura Integra). Tweak the same engine, and you get some incredibly good gas mileage, and low emissions. Good engine design produces more power from less fuel, producing less waste emissions.
Bleah. If you want big unrefined power, get ready to pay $4/gal, plus a LARGE gas guzzler surcharge every year.
Good Lord, what an ugly car! Even for a prototype, it's uglyugly. Yech!
And that engine? 353BHP out of 5.7L? Big (censored) deal! Torque is a bit better, but this is the same as they got out of this size of carburetted engine in 1956!!! For a MODERN two-spark hemi engine, they should be able to drag 100BHP/L out of it easily. (and normally aspirated)
Sorry, just a rant about crappy, big, inefficient engines. I'll behave now.
Just to clarify something here...
I wasn't trying to suggest that bit errors (or bitrate errors and jitter, which would get eliminated by resynching the data stream in a decent CD player) would make the sound warmer, clearer, or have better high end. If it does, it's most likely due to the electroharmonic acoustification of the listener's interferometric phase shifting[1].
Failing this, bit errors are bit errors, and may be interpolated (causing a momentary and almost certainly inaudible degradation of the sound) or not (causing a VERY noticble momentary glitch)
Of course we're arguing from the same side of the table, so I'll be quiet now. Just didn't want to mistakenly be accused of stating that CD rings, for better or worse, would subtly alter the sound in a continuous manner.
[1] In other words, utter bollocks.
I have to argue against tubes as a 'myth'. Vacuum tubes have very different distortion profiles, and sound much better than transistors when driven to their distortion limits. This is a Good Thing, since tubes are so much easier to drive into distortion. Tubes are also very susceptible to microphonics and ringing, which definitely affect the sound.
:-)
I won't even get started on thermal drift effects.
Of course, any good tube amp design aims to minimise these to below audible levels, just like transistors. (any tube amp that doesn't try to minimise these effects is a BAD design, in my opinion) I wouldn't waste my money on a tube amp when it's so easy to make a better transistor amp, but tubes _do_ often sound different. (i.e. worse
It's also possible that the CD 'stabilising' rings make a difference--they can increase bit errors in CD players that can't adjust to the extra rotational mass.
None of this implies that these are anything but Bad Results, but they sometimes do exist.
Now if you REALLY want snake oil, how about a wooden puck you set on top of your amp with the grain aligned to the electron flow?
It's true - quality of interconnects cannot be underestimated. No matter how little you care about them, they're less important than that!
Of course, they have to work, and have to be decently made. Five to twenty bucks should get you a cable that'll do fine. Anything more than that is snake oil.
There are some cases where interconnects make a big difference--when your equipment is SO badly designed that it counts on the electrical properties of the cables to operate properly. Curiously, equipment this bad generally sells for thousands upon thousands of dollars. If you have (or desire) equipment this poor, then you need to give your money to a better cause (like me!), or get an electrical engineering degree and learn why Bryston has no use for magic cables.
If your interconnects make any audible difference to your setup, there's something VERY VERY wrong, no matter if your system cost $100 or $100,000.
But that's the point--it's a perpetual beta! With every cycle, it gets bigger, more feature-laden, and slower; without ever getting closer to release. If feature development was stopped right now, and they did nothing but fix all of the bugs in it, then it would be a big and slow release product.
In other words, it's not getting any faster, any smaller, or any closer to completion. It's just getting bigger and slower.
But am I the only one who read this as "New UUNet policy offers no-charge peeing?"
If this is the case, then short all of your hypothetical stock in IT.
The technology is there to make personal helicopter-like hovercrafts for about the same price as cars. It'll never happen, and any pilot will tell you why. Adding a third dimension adds about a factor of 100x in complexity. Most people will never be willing to learn to fly, especially for their daily commute.
I also don't think that an incredibly smart autopilot (which I also think is possible) would solve problems: You can't build highways as easily in the sky, even if you're being controlled by a computer.
Still, it's probably the most likely suggestion I've heard so far. Interesting...
Excellent! Modded down before I was modded up! I'm so proud!
Anyways...
IE won. Won, as in, controls well over 90% of the desktop market. If ALL of the non-Windows operating systems out there ever amount to more than 10% of the _desktop_ environment, then MS will release IE for (whatever). Mark my words--IE6 or IE7 will be released for Linux if it keeps growing on the desktop like it has for the past few months.
As far as embedded devices running Mozilla, I still disagree. No company will embed it, if it's big, slow, buggy, and unreliable.
Mozilla has lost its momentum, and its focus. It can't be compared to Linux, because Linux is a centralised, focused effort, and is not allowed to drift off course.
I still say that Mozilla never was and never will be a contender as a browser for anyone other than the hardcore diletantes, and a very few very specialised applications. Hell, look at OS/2--at least it was a good product, and it still didn't get any farther than that.
OK, I look up Dean Kamen--someone I've never heard of--on Google, and find pages and pages of links to things about him. Try that with anyone else, (i.e. someone really famous) and you'll get a bunch of dead links, misleading links, barely peripherally related links, and the like. Nothing nearly as impressive or _targetted_ as a certain Mr. Kamen.
That sets my spidey-sense a-tingling.
But lest I be accused of being too much of a curmudgeon (which brings one to ask--is it possible to be too much of a good thing?), let's assume that IT is real, and IT's what it promises to be.
How about a personal servant? I'm not talking about a solar powered lawn mower, but a _real_ personal servant, the sort that Matt Ruff wrote about. (go look him up--one of the best damned authors alive today!) Could that be IT?
Oh, no--I have it.
Cold Fusion. For real this time.
Unfortunately, it STILL won't be a revolution.
Well, the way high-end inflation is going, $60b now is going to be the equivalent about $2b in five years.
There are two inflation rates: The rate that governs the price of a loaf of bread, litre of milk, and price of a modest house; and the rate that governs an obscene mansion, a small country, or the last bottle of wine hand-labelled by Baron Phillipe I. (if such a thing exists)
So $0 -> $2b in five years? Yeah, it's possible.
HOWEVER...
Funny thing. Whenever you see "VCR/Videotape/VHS" and "history" used in the same sentence, you just KNOW it's going to be a diatribe on the superiority of Beta. :-)
Just a light-hearted observation.
"They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity."
Yep, and look how much of an impact they've had on the HDTV market so far. Roughly nil. These people are an amateur/high-end offshoot of the exact market the poster mentioned--the pro market.
The question is will this format take over the mass market, and the answer is very accurately summed up by the 'Blockbuster factor' poster. No chance, no how, no way. How much taping does the _average_ consumer do on their VCR anymore anyways? The answer is almost none, which negates the biggest (only?) advantage of this format.
Home recording is no longer a market factor, except for camcorder owners.
Not QUITE true, but close. A single flubbed bit in a digital data stream can be recovered from the checksums. A single unrecoverable bit (probably due to multiple sequential or close bits being messed up) will cause a dropout or glitch, but only for that section.
Regardless--Tape was never any more than the best of several bad alternatives for long term storage. It wasn't and isn't permanent by any stretch of the imagination--it decays! It rots! It falls apart! Going back to tape from a solid state format (i.e. DVD, CD, etc.) is a Bad Idea, and isn't likely to catch up now.
Linux??? Although I use linux daily, I find that it has almost the most unintuitive, steep-learning-curve interface of anything. (and believe me, I've used 'em all!)
It ain't great. It ain't even good. Pity on a fairly robust OS, but Win98SE with Active Directory turned off is so far ahead of Linux that the latter is strictly a pretender in the Desktop OS race.
CIO, CTO, CFO, CEO, COO, CPO, etc.
Here's my rule: Never trust a company with more than four C*O positions. C*Os are managers of managers, and more than four of 'em means too many middle-managers running around.
What benefit will be realised by going with open source software in this case? Where will the company save money/time/effort, or otherwise profit from it?
This is a serious question. Not Microsoft doesn't mean Linux/BSD/OSS. There are commercial Unixes out there (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SCO), there's BeOS, Mac, and even VMS.
For that matter, why NOT Microsoft??? I wouldn't go with them for most things, but you'd better be prepared to come up with some good reasons to not use the biggest, best-known, most consistently supported product on the planet, or no one will listen to you.
I agree, to a point. But here's the reality: We aren't there yet. If we started building right this minute, we'd be there in about five years. You're not going to see routine trips to Mars for 10 years at least.
Secondly, the ISS may be the biggest boon to interplanetary space travel we've come up with so far. With it, we have the possibility of starting from outside the gravity well, which is the biggest fuel burn we have with any space travel.
Finally, if you don't like what NASA is doing, why not do it yourself? Seriously, private sector space travel is getting more likely and more lucrative by the day. Go get some funding, and do it yourself!
OK, first of all you don't have NEARLY the marketting clout that Sony, RCA, etc. have. Good luck.
But here's the problem--it looks like if you don't have the appropriate box in your TV, then you won't see everything, but rather you'll get nothing but static.
Furthermore, there's a good chance that even if TVs that worked and didn't censor could be made, they'd be illegal! Yes, that's right--TV sets that aren't licensed from the appropriate body (surprise surprise--it's the MPAA again!) will most likely be illegal.
Oh Brave New World that has such people in it.
OK, that's pretty cool. Mind you, the PIII-800 is
currently cheaper (!!!) than the Celeron 800, so
given my fairly high-end motherboard, I'm still
more likely to go with that. Well, maybe. AMD is
awfully tempting...
Absolutely right! If I were buying a new computer, I'd almost definitely get an AMD processor and faster than PC-100 RAM. However, I can upgrade my current beast with just a new processor which will save a substantial amount of cash.
Mind you, this makes me ask why there wasn't a comparison between the Celeron 800 and PIII-800. That's probably of more value to most people considering an upgrade to a current Intel system.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article yet.
However as a general rule, Anand isn't biased towards Intel, or any other product. He tends to be impartial, fair, and even-handed. His problem is that he's never learned to read statistics. Consider a series of nine benchmarks comparing two items: If five benchmarks show a 1% performance increase of product 'a', and four show a 10% increase of product 'b', he's likely to conclude that product 'a' is better because it won more benchmarks.
He's a good kid, and his site is great, but he needs some more math background. Or maybe just a sense of perspective.
Yikes! And I thought _I_ was pedantic!
OK, you caught me, fair and square. On the first day of the new millennium, with my wife nibbling on my ear, in a minor post on an informal discussion forum, I made a mistake in proper english usage. Guilty as charged!
However, please don't necessarily attribute accidents to ignorance; or assume that the
person involved is lazy. Sometimes in this life, we simply make mistakes!
Nope, sorry--I don't buy it.
They could explicitly state in their TOS that the end user is solely responsible for their behaviour, and that they refused to take any responsibility. That's the way most companies work, and it generally keeps them safe. Furthermore, a ruling a month or so ago in the US declared port scans to be legal, so why are they banning them?
Finally, "posting vulgar information" is banned. I don't think there's any legal definition of vulgar, so who the hell decides? Oops, I think I just crossed the line by saying "hell."
This policy stinks of dead fish. There are NO excuses for it!