You can't send a digital signal to a speaker. The signal's gotta become analog sooner or later.
HDMI/optical/SPDIF is only good for getting to the amplifier. These cables are running from the amplifier to the speaker. It has to be analog at that point, unless you put the amplifier IN the speaker, which no one does.
Sound waves are an analog thing. You can't expect to create them digitally; the speaker cone is going to respond to any changes in its electrical input.
This nutball spends thousands of dollars on SILVER POWER CABLES.
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue15/walkeraudio.htm
Silver POWER CABLES. And he even uses one of these from the wall to his solid-oak-case brass-stool line conditioner. I suppose the Romex in his wall is silver too?
I challenge any of these people to submit to a blind test without and with this $12,000 waste. I bet he wouldn't.
Any amplifier worth its salt has an immense amount of isolation from its power input anyway.
Silver audio cables are just as stupid. How cares about the.000000000003 watt you gain in the decreased resistance in the line!? Silver ain't gonna help against interference.
Well, that's the thing about Linux. Its just a KERNEL, you know? It won't really become "watered down" in order to become the "New Windows," as most mainstream uses don't even know what a kernel is!
Now, I know what you mean, you mean you're worried about the DISTROS becoming watered down.
But there's thousands of them! Some may very well become watered down, but there's enough people who feel like you to keep a couple dozen "geek distros" or "200-proof distros" going without any worries.
There's not going to be some sudden revolution to Linux, its going to come gradually. There won't be a Year of the Linux Desktop, I'm thinking one day we'll all look back and marvel about how mainstream Linux snuck up on us.
I doubt this article will get any more than a couple dozen people to try it. But its a start.
What amazes me is how rapidly its improving. The Kubuntu install I'm using is only a year old, but the new Gusty Beta is so much different it might as well be a different OS entirely. How much does Windows improve in a year?
Oh, that's right, they take SIX YEARS to improve, and ended up with Vista.
(K)ubuntu is out pacing Windows so bad its only a matter of time before it overtakes Windows in all fronts. I mean, the automatix problem they're talking in TFA is supposedly already fixed for Gusty, and there's a ton of other features that people will love.
And yeah, and takes days to get an XP reinstall into a usable state too, with drivers and Firefox and updates and anti virus and antispyware and office suites and media players that have to be installed.
Seems to me people who ask the question "is Linux ready for Mainstream?" compare it to a perfect Windows that I've never seen in person.
I haven't been terribly impressed with bluetooth. I bought a (rather expensive) bluetooth mouse for my Acer laptop, and I keep experiencing random disconnects in Windows with it. Not in Kubuntu, though. The mouse works perfectly in Linux.
And evidently the XP Bluetooth stack is some third party thing you can uninstall and reinstall, because I had to reinstall it to even get it to do anything.
And it seems that most phones have very few bluetooth features beyond headsets. Like you can't upload and download photos without some crappy phone tools software if you have a Motorola.
Has anyone found bluetooth to be reliable for them? Any success stories?
Do you think that companies are now going to avoid using Linux to avoid GPL litigation? Will this create anti-Linux FUD?
Do we want widespread adoption of Linux? What if it requires looking the other way at companies looking the other way? Which is better for Linux in the long run?
I'm worried this will alienate people looking into using it.
I wonder what IBM mainframe they used. If it was an 360/370, couldn't they have just upgraded to a new IBM mainframe and kept the old software, after much much testing?
I applaud them, though, for spending the money to get this done, and get rid of all the legacy crap. It will seriously pay of in the long run, even against just upgrading the hardware. Big Old Companies still using piles of FORTRAN and COBOL should learn from this.
For instance, game console manuals have been reminding you to take breaks for many years. The Game Gear manual, I know, had it.
Earthbound (SNES), too, actively alerted you after like 3 hours that you should really take a break (your dad calls your cell phone). It also had billboards about it (Mothers against Obsession or something).
I remember playing Earthbound till it alerted me several times. It helped; I'd be like "Oh CRAP, I have been playing a long time."
But, ya know, it doesn't ever seem to work out so well. I think it has some to do with the way the government handles it, and some to do with how the people inside handle it.
We did it in Afghanistan, and it made a massive mess. We did it in Cuba, didn't work (I blame THAT 100% on the US government, but I doubt it would have worked anyway). Did it to a lesser extent in Poland in WWII, everyone ended up pretty much dead.
It could work, but man, that'd be risky (what if Iran found out it was coming from us? What if THEY found it?)
For punishing Microsoft's customers. Now they get to justify their high prices and might even raise them, to pay off this fine. If the EU thinks that this will impact the checkbook of anybody on Microsoft's payroll, or even of their investors, they're insane.
Next time, punish the company, not the company's clients.
Re:please actually read my review, it's not that l
on
Republic.com 2.0
·
· Score: 1
I actually did a report on that for school. There's nothing keeping you from completely isolating you from the dissent anymore. You can only visit the sites you like, only watch the shows you like... We did a survey for several hundred people and found they do just that.
But I still don't think that's all that different in the past. You're gonna get it from discussions and blow over from other people, flipping through the channels. But, thanks partially to the fact that there's only 2 political systems in the US now, and that these things are a lot easier to measure and monitor, its coming into the limelight a lot more.
And we still vote (supposedly) moderate people into office, so meh.
No, its not new, but if you think about it, its really quite bad.
Leftists only watch leftist media (to avoid critism/trolling, I make no examples), while rightists only watch rightist media.
The result is that everyone only gets their own opinions reinforced, and not challenged. This pushes them away from the opposite side.
Biased media, while legal, is bad because it has a polarizing effect. The individual Media outlets are biased one way or another (especially in the US), meaning it, as a whole, just kinda pushes everyone away from the moderate position. Thus, its not really a matter of it making people liberal or conservative, but less moderate.
If the number of left media outlets matches the number of right is equal, the result is NOT unbiased media, but rather one biased against moderation.
The answer, of course, is no, he didn't. He looked at the company's computer. Which means he didn't invade his privacy at all. The question is whether or not the COMPANY authorizes him to do that to workstations that aren't assigned to him.
People have this illusion of ownership over the equipment they use every day at work. It's not your computer, lathe, or whatever. People think its theirs until it breaks.
Yeah, it can be measured. There is no unit, though, as its a measure of entropy. So things are more or less random than something else. I imagine randomness studying program assign numbers to it.
a random number is just a number; '1' might be randomly selected out of 1 through 6, but its still just 1.
But random number sets are considered random if, for every number, the chances of a the number after it being, say 4, are 1 in 10. So if you have a random set and come across a 1, the probability the next number is 1 is 1 in 10. The same is true for 2, 3, 4 and so in. By measuring the probabilities, you can measure how random your string of numbers is.
But just because its random doesn't mean its unpredictable. Random (as per my definition above),yet predictable numbers are pseudorandom. An example is a book of random numbers (which UNIVAC used to publish). Each individual digit might be unpredictable, but if you get a group of say 8 numbers, you can find that group in the book and find the numbers before and after it. Thus, its useless for cryptographic keys.
A pseudo random number generator (/dev/urandom) uses math formulas to make pseudorandom numbers. The math can be reproduced, and therefore what it spits out can be predicted. REAL random generators, such as this, are considered 'practically' unpredictable. But I still may be able to influence the probabilities of this by, say, blasting the RAM with a can of freezer and influence its start up state. Doing this doesn't make it completely predictable, but could reduce the possibilities in my brute force attack.
This isn't new, either. Video game consoles use this for randomness all the time.
And you'll gladly support a company that intentionally makes it that way? I'm sorry, but I find the whole "Buy a Mac becuase OSX only runs on Mac hardware" idea hard to swallow.
Software vendor lock-in sucks. But artificial software AND hardware vendor lock-in really sucks.
Macbooks are really nice. Truly, they are. But I've never talked to anyone who has owned one and not had problems with them. One friend had his battery bulge until it refused to fit in the slot (shortly before his mainboard died), another had 3 hard drives two mainboards and a display go bad... The list goes on.
Laptops are all unreliable, though. My Acer (which cost less than half a similarly equipped Macbook Pro when I bought it a year ago) might need a new screen soon, as its flickered once or twice.
Well, you could buy a PowerPC-based Mac less than a year ago. C64-level obsolete, clearly. Not to mention that there's lots of other systems out there that still use it (Pegasus, etc.).
The IBM PPC Java implementation is actually pretty fast, but when I used it a year ago, only Konqueror and an ancient ancient version of Mozilla supported it, and many websites (like yahoo games) won't run in Konqueror, even if you change the browser ID. And its not made for it, but rather Websphere (gag) and the like. You aren't going to be browsing the net on a POWER server.
I guess I got irritated over the fact that, even though there are so many excellent computer systems out there, thanks to Java and Flash, you can only really browse the Net on 32bit Windows, Macs, Solaris, and Linux 32bit x86. The rest you have to hack your way around.
Now that I've typed that out, though, it seems its not as bad as I thought, but still, its limiting on the Linux front.
Flash is so slow, anyway, that it is more or less useless on anything slower than 1Ghz or so. And 500Mhz machines struggle to play card games written in Java...
Finally, "open, cross-platform" Java is beginning to become open. Now I just hope it becomes more cross platform, rather than "Windows, Mac, x86 Linux and whatever-you-spend-a-million-hours-developing-an-i mplementation-for."
Seriously, I was pissed when I found out just how bad Java support is for Linux PPC. I couldn't get an iMac to go to Yahoo! games for my grandma.:(
Just because a diesel engine can be made that can run on coal dust, doesn't mean that engines can should.
Diesel engines rely on the lubricating properties of the fuel in order to keep themselves from wearing out under the ultra-high compression. The 20:1 compression ratio of diesel engine would lead to an engine that would wear out in, oh, 10,000 miles or so if run on gasoline, which is not a good lubricant.
Switch that to something with about as much lubricating properties as SAND, and you have a recipe for disaster. There's no engineering around this; its a show-stopper. Maybe if you mixed the coal dust with oil, that would help, but then there wouldn't be much point. Imagine all that dust shooting through the injectors, and then down the gap between the cylinder wall and cylinder...
Early diesel engines could run off of coal dust BECUASE:
1. They used a lower pressure injection. The 1,100 psi they used isn't as high as the 20,000+ used now. 2. They turned a lower RPM. They were lucky to achieve 500 RPM. 3. They used a lower compression ratio. A lot of early diesel engines had a torch under the cylinder to keep the temp up enough to light it. All this leads to a lower overall power and efficiency level. A coal dust engine powerful enough to drive a vehicle would be several tons, and would need far more maintenance on its valves/seals anyway.
A sterling engine, on the other hand, can really run on anything. ICEs are pretty limited, if you want a reliable engine. It has to be a lubricating liquid, not too acidic or basic or it'll ruin valve seals, and specific ignition characteristics. A diesel engine won't run on alcohol (except for model engines, but those are... low efficiency.), and a spark plug engine needs like 14:1 compression ratio to do it as efficiently as gasoline.
If you're right, then nearly every comment here is "fanboy" in the opposite direction. Everyone is like "lol ati drivers are completely useless" which simply isn't true. And THAT is sure helpful. Yeah, a lot of people have problems. But a lot of people don't. And arguing over the definition of troll and flamebait isn't helpful either. It is, in fact, very baiting. Which it seems everyone agrees with. There are more than enough trolls here that we don't have to read between each others lines.
Since I posted that, however, I discovered and fixed a slowdown my machine with the nVidia card (which I mentioned I recently bought. Fanboy, right) and gained 20-30%. Still slower than my ATI machine, but its the CPU at this point. I was pointing out things that work for me to establish a benchmark of my (impressive) performance. A machine more than a few years old won't play high def video at full speed at all, let alone within beryl's spinning cube.
ATI certainly has room for improvement. My ATI machine just gives me a scrambled image if I switch to a console, for instance. And the Xorg.conf takes a TON of work. But I'm confident that the correct xorg.conf can get just about everyone (Radeon 9550+) working. And the Opensource drivers are slower than dirt. My Radeon 9200 is completely useless in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't send a digital signal to a speaker. The signal's gotta become analog sooner or later.
HDMI/optical/SPDIF is only good for getting to the amplifier. These cables are running from the amplifier to the speaker. It has to be analog at that point, unless you put the amplifier IN the speaker, which no one does.
Sound waves are an analog thing. You can't expect to create them digitally; the speaker cone is going to respond to any changes in its electrical input.
This nutball spends thousands of dollars on SILVER POWER CABLES. http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue15/walkeraudio.htm Silver POWER CABLES. And he even uses one of these from the wall to his solid-oak-case brass-stool line conditioner. I suppose the Romex in his wall is silver too? I challenge any of these people to submit to a blind test without and with this $12,000 waste. I bet he wouldn't. Any amplifier worth its salt has an immense amount of isolation from its power input anyway. Silver audio cables are just as stupid. How cares about the .000000000003 watt you gain in the decreased resistance in the line!? Silver ain't gonna help against interference.
Well, that's the thing about Linux. Its just a KERNEL, you know? It won't really become "watered down" in order to become the "New Windows," as most mainstream uses don't even know what a kernel is!
Now, I know what you mean, you mean you're worried about the DISTROS becoming watered down.
But there's thousands of them! Some may very well become watered down, but there's enough people who feel like you to keep a couple dozen "geek distros" or "200-proof distros" going without any worries.
The Year of the Linux Desktop!?!?!
Probably not.
There's not going to be some sudden revolution to Linux, its going to come gradually. There won't be a Year of the Linux Desktop, I'm thinking one day we'll all look back and marvel about how mainstream Linux snuck up on us.
I doubt this article will get any more than a couple dozen people to try it. But its a start.
What amazes me is how rapidly its improving. The Kubuntu install I'm using is only a year old, but the new Gusty Beta is so much different it might as well be a different OS entirely. How much does Windows improve in a year?
Oh, that's right, they take SIX YEARS to improve, and ended up with Vista.
(K)ubuntu is out pacing Windows so bad its only a matter of time before it overtakes Windows in all fronts. I mean, the automatix problem they're talking in TFA is supposedly already fixed for Gusty, and there's a ton of other features that people will love.
And yeah, and takes days to get an XP reinstall into a usable state too, with drivers and Firefox and updates and anti virus and antispyware and office suites and media players that have to be installed.
Seems to me people who ask the question "is Linux ready for Mainstream?" compare it to a perfect Windows that I've never seen in person.
I haven't been terribly impressed with bluetooth. I bought a (rather expensive) bluetooth mouse for my Acer laptop, and I keep experiencing random disconnects in Windows with it. Not in Kubuntu, though. The mouse works perfectly in Linux.
And evidently the XP Bluetooth stack is some third party thing you can uninstall and reinstall, because I had to reinstall it to even get it to do anything.
And it seems that most phones have very few bluetooth features beyond headsets. Like you can't upload and download photos without some crappy phone tools software if you have a Motorola.
Has anyone found bluetooth to be reliable for them? Any success stories?
What if it requires looking the other way at companies like this? Curse me happy fingers...
Do you think that companies are now going to avoid using Linux to avoid GPL litigation? Will this create anti-Linux FUD?
Do we want widespread adoption of Linux? What if it requires looking the other way at companies looking the other way? Which is better for Linux in the long run?
I'm worried this will alienate people looking into using it.
That's SERIOUS.
It requires some SERIOUS removal of the SERIOUSLY SERIOUS "dodge" at the end.
http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/perception/HapticRadar/index-e.html
Crisis adverted. Stand down red alert.
If they do manage to create a powerful laser like this, could it be used to power stuff, like the Space Elevator?
:(
The Article seems to imply, though, that it only lasts a couple hundred nanoseconds. I wonder if it can be sustained. Otherwise, its killing-only
I wonder what IBM mainframe they used. If it was an 360/370, couldn't they have just upgraded to a new IBM mainframe and kept the old software, after much much testing?
I applaud them, though, for spending the money to get this done, and get rid of all the legacy crap. It will seriously pay of in the long run, even against just upgrading the hardware. Big Old Companies still using piles of FORTRAN and COBOL should learn from this.
Hehe, actually, it isn't that a new concept.
For instance, game console manuals have been reminding you to take breaks for many years. The Game Gear manual, I know, had it.
Earthbound (SNES), too, actively alerted you after like 3 hours that you should really take a break (your dad calls your cell phone). It also had billboards about it (Mothers against Obsession or something).
I remember playing Earthbound till it alerted me several times. It helped; I'd be like "Oh CRAP, I have been playing a long time."
Yeah, that's a great idea in theory, really.
But, ya know, it doesn't ever seem to work out so well. I think it has some to do with the way the government handles it, and some to do with how the people inside handle it.
We did it in Afghanistan, and it made a massive mess. We did it in Cuba, didn't work (I blame THAT 100% on the US government, but I doubt it would have worked anyway).
Did it to a lesser extent in Poland in WWII, everyone ended up pretty much dead.
It could work, but man, that'd be risky (what if Iran found out it was coming from us? What if THEY found it?)
For punishing Microsoft's customers. Now they get to justify their high prices and might even raise them, to pay off this fine.
If the EU thinks that this will impact the checkbook of anybody on Microsoft's payroll, or even of their investors, they're insane.
Next time, punish the company, not the company's clients.
I actually did a report on that for school. There's nothing keeping you from completely isolating you from the dissent anymore. You can only visit the sites you like, only watch the shows you like... We did a survey for several hundred people and found they do just that.
But I still don't think that's all that different in the past. You're gonna get it from discussions and blow over from other people, flipping through the channels. But, thanks partially to the fact that there's only 2 political systems in the US now, and that these things are a lot easier to measure and monitor, its coming into the limelight a lot more.
And we still vote (supposedly) moderate people into office, so meh.
No, its not new, but if you think about it, its really quite bad. Leftists only watch leftist media (to avoid critism/trolling, I make no examples), while rightists only watch rightist media. The result is that everyone only gets their own opinions reinforced, and not challenged. This pushes them away from the opposite side. Biased media, while legal, is bad because it has a polarizing effect. The individual Media outlets are biased one way or another (especially in the US), meaning it, as a whole, just kinda pushes everyone away from the moderate position. Thus, its not really a matter of it making people liberal or conservative, but less moderate. If the number of left media outlets matches the number of right is equal, the result is NOT unbiased media, but rather one biased against moderation.
Did he violate that person's privacy? Really?
Did he look at this pervert's computer?
The answer, of course, is no, he didn't. He looked at the company's computer. Which means he didn't invade his privacy at all. The question is whether or not the COMPANY authorizes him to do that to workstations that aren't assigned to him.
People have this illusion of ownership over the equipment they use every day at work. It's not your computer, lathe, or whatever. People think its theirs until it breaks.
Yeah, it can be measured. There is no unit, though, as its a measure of entropy. So things are more or less random than something else. I imagine randomness studying program assign numbers to it. a random number is just a number; '1' might be randomly selected out of 1 through 6, but its still just 1. But random number sets are considered random if, for every number, the chances of a the number after it being, say 4, are 1 in 10. So if you have a random set and come across a 1, the probability the next number is 1 is 1 in 10. The same is true for 2, 3, 4 and so in. By measuring the probabilities, you can measure how random your string of numbers is. But just because its random doesn't mean its unpredictable. Random (as per my definition above),yet predictable numbers are pseudorandom. An example is a book of random numbers (which UNIVAC used to publish). Each individual digit might be unpredictable, but if you get a group of say 8 numbers, you can find that group in the book and find the numbers before and after it. Thus, its useless for cryptographic keys. A pseudo random number generator (/dev/urandom) uses math formulas to make pseudorandom numbers. The math can be reproduced, and therefore what it spits out can be predicted. REAL random generators, such as this, are considered 'practically' unpredictable. But I still may be able to influence the probabilities of this by, say, blasting the RAM with a can of freezer and influence its start up state. Doing this doesn't make it completely predictable, but could reduce the possibilities in my brute force attack. This isn't new, either. Video game consoles use this for randomness all the time.
And you'll gladly support a company that intentionally makes it that way? I'm sorry, but I find the whole "Buy a Mac becuase OSX only runs on Mac hardware" idea hard to swallow.
Software vendor lock-in sucks. But artificial software AND hardware vendor lock-in really sucks.
Macbooks are really nice. Truly, they are. But I've never talked to anyone who has owned one and not had problems with them. One friend had his battery bulge until it refused to fit in the slot (shortly before his mainboard died), another had 3 hard drives two mainboards and a display go bad... The list goes on.
Laptops are all unreliable, though. My Acer (which cost less than half a similarly equipped Macbook Pro when I bought it a year ago) might need a new screen soon, as its flickered once or twice.
Well, you could buy a PowerPC-based Mac less than a year ago. C64-level obsolete, clearly. Not to mention that there's lots of other systems out there that still use it (Pegasus, etc.).
The IBM PPC Java implementation is actually pretty fast, but when I used it a year ago, only Konqueror and an ancient ancient version of Mozilla supported it, and many websites (like yahoo games) won't run in Konqueror, even if you change the browser ID. And its not made for it, but rather Websphere (gag) and the like. You aren't going to be browsing the net on a POWER server.
I guess I got irritated over the fact that, even though there are so many excellent computer systems out there, thanks to Java and Flash, you can only really browse the Net on 32bit Windows, Macs, Solaris, and Linux 32bit x86. The rest you have to hack your way around.
Now that I've typed that out, though, it seems its not as bad as I thought, but still, its limiting on the Linux front.
Flash is so slow, anyway, that it is more or less useless on anything slower than 1Ghz or so. And 500Mhz machines struggle to play card games written in Java...
Finally, "open, cross-platform" Java is beginning to become open. Now I just hope it becomes more cross platform, rather than "Windows, Mac, x86 Linux and whatever-you-spend-a-million-hours-developing-an-i mplementation-for."
:(
Seriously, I was pissed when I found out just how bad Java support is for Linux PPC. I couldn't get an iMac to go to Yahoo! games for my grandma.
Now all we need is cross-platform Flash.
Just because a diesel engine can be made that can run on coal dust, doesn't mean that engines can should.
Diesel engines rely on the lubricating properties of the fuel in order to keep themselves from wearing out under the ultra-high compression. The 20:1 compression ratio of diesel engine would lead to an engine that would wear out in, oh, 10,000 miles or so if run on gasoline, which is not a good lubricant.
Switch that to something with about as much lubricating properties as SAND, and you have a recipe for disaster. There's no engineering around this; its a show-stopper. Maybe if you mixed the coal dust with oil, that would help, but then there wouldn't be much point. Imagine all that dust shooting through the injectors, and then down the gap between the cylinder wall and cylinder...
Early diesel engines could run off of coal dust BECUASE:
1. They used a lower pressure injection. The 1,100 psi they used isn't as high as the 20,000+ used now.
2. They turned a lower RPM. They were lucky to achieve 500 RPM.
3. They used a lower compression ratio. A lot of early diesel engines had a torch under the cylinder to keep the temp up enough to light it.
All this leads to a lower overall power and efficiency level. A coal dust engine powerful enough to drive a vehicle would be several tons, and would need far more maintenance on its valves/seals anyway.
A sterling engine, on the other hand, can really run on anything. ICEs are pretty limited, if you want a reliable engine. It has to be a lubricating liquid, not too acidic or basic or it'll ruin valve seals, and specific ignition characteristics. A diesel engine won't run on alcohol (except for model engines, but those are... low efficiency.), and a spark plug engine needs like 14:1 compression ratio to do it as efficiently as gasoline.
kevman was taken :(
If you're right, then nearly every comment here is "fanboy" in the opposite direction. Everyone is like "lol ati drivers are completely useless" which simply isn't true. And THAT is sure helpful. Yeah, a lot of people have problems. But a lot of people don't. And arguing over the definition of troll and flamebait isn't helpful either. It is, in fact, very baiting. Which it seems everyone agrees with. There are more than enough trolls here that we don't have to read between each others lines.
Since I posted that, however, I discovered and fixed a slowdown my machine with the nVidia card (which I mentioned I recently bought. Fanboy, right) and gained 20-30%. Still slower than my ATI machine, but its the CPU at this point. I was pointing out things that work for me to establish a benchmark of my (impressive) performance. A machine more than a few years old won't play high def video at full speed at all, let alone within beryl's spinning cube.
ATI certainly has room for improvement. My ATI machine just gives me a scrambled image if I switch to a console, for instance. And the Xorg.conf takes a TON of work. But I'm confident that the correct xorg.conf can get just about everyone (Radeon 9550+) working. And the Opensource drivers are slower than dirt. My Radeon 9200 is completely useless in Linux.