No, just worded it badly. Everyone tries to match pricing with each other - the pricing is the same at every commercial cloud storage vendor, and S3 is the easiest to check.
The two real players for "consumer cloud drive" with consumer friendly APIs are Google Drive and OneDrive (I guess it's called now). If the price for drives-in-bulk had come down or something, you'd see it reflected in S3 and Azure, so this is something different.
Either this is a loss leader now for Google, or they're monetizing the heck out of the content.
I can tell the difference between the DACs built into my (similarly-priced) amps. Too many variables to control for, of course, but something was certainly better, and I doubt is was the amp section since that's so easy to get right these days.
That being said, chips get better, and I can believe the price just came down (the ones I have are high power because they're "class A" (constant power) in the way they build the analog out, but I suspect that was just the easiest approach at the time).
I find it quite suspicious in this exact way, because the price cut is for Google Drive specifically, and not for S3 , which is still priced at 0.068/GB-Month, more than 3x this price. Commercial cloud storage has always cost more than the consumer "cloud drives", but clearly they expect to see some other forms of profit from this.
If they had dropped S3 pricing, I would have been looking for some tech breakthrough instead.
(By comparison, S3 and Azure storage pricing are effectively the same, but Skydrive is about 0.04/GB-Month past the free 7 GB).
You can't really make that work for solar. You won't be shipping power 20,000 km from dayside to nightside, regardless of how much you generate.
I think that there's a lot to be said for solar thermal + thermal power storage (at industrial scale), but it's more expensive than current sources so I wouldn't advocate rushing into it.
Second recommendation for that -thanks. But I don't understand USB audio - am I going to be blocked by driver issues on say a old android tablet, or a Windows phone, or some other obscure platform?
Wow, you have such admiration for the Emperor's clothes - very perceptive and loyal of you! How wise to ignore the fools who can't see his wonderful new clothes.
The variation in hearing, much like in the frequencies our eyes can see, is minimal before our ears get damaged by city living, because it naturally pushes the limits of the physics involved.
CD is good enough for someone with good hearing, which realistically is far about what anyone over 20, or anyone who has lived in a city, will ever need. (There's some arguments for 48 kHz vs 44, but almost everyone who thinks they can hear that difference is fooling themselves - the overlap between e.g., teenaged Bushmen who have never seen a city and audiophile buyers is probably 0).
A good ADC will sample at a much higher frequency, do a very steep digital band pass filter, not limited by coils and capacitors, then compress.
Sure, you can't just naively sample at 44 kHz, which is why it's not done that way. But 16 x 44 kHz at the end of the process, after ADC and mastering and mixing, really is perfect.
The bottom octave (20-40 Hz) is mostly felt, not heard, but high power subwoofers are cheap as high-end audio gear goes. It's really easy to be accurate within human discrimination for that octave, you just need a whacking great amp built into most of em) and neighbors who don't live close.
You really, really don't want subsonics reproduced. While the "brown note" may not be real, subsonics can do similarly messed-up stuff to you.
I'm not familiar with USB audio - I assume that means it won't work with my gear because there won't be a driver for the OS (because that's what I assume about everything). Is that a stupid assumption?
Look at cables. A $0.50 patch cord is a mistake (especially if the center pin breaks off in your gear, as has happened to me). A $2.50-$5.00 patch cord gives all the practically useful quality (often e.g. $5 Dayton Audio cables obviously came from the same factory line as $50 Monster cables). The difference is worthwhile.
For DACs, there is a similar quality difference about the cheapest possible crap. TI (IIRC) makes a nice one for about $20/channel (I'm sure it would be cheaper if they sold more), but they're not mainstream because they're very power hungry. Paying $1000 for a 2-channel DAC is as absurd as Monster cables, but paying $50-100 (depending on how much work the digital section does - SPDIF is easy - and if they were more common they could be half that price) is worthwhile.
Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.
First, the bad news
In the past few weeks, I've had conversations with intelligent, scientifically minded individuals who believe in 24/192 downloads and want to know how anyone could possibly disagree. They asked good questions that deserve detailed answers.
I was also interested in what motivated high-rate digital audio advocacy. Responses indicate that few people understand basic signal theory or the sampling theorem, which is hardly surprising. Misunderstandings of the mathematics, technology, and physiology arose in most of the conversations, often asserted by professionals who otherwise possessed significant audio expertise. Some even argued that the sampling theorem doesn't really explain how digital audio actually works
If I had a nickel for every time an audiophile tried to explain to me that CDs can't capture "fast transients" or "20 kHz square waves", I could afford some genuine Snake Oil[tm]! Hint: the ear is mechanical, not magical, and the eardrum can only move so fast. Anything steeper than the rise rate of a 20 kHz sine wave just ain't happening.
I just want a proper DAC without audiophile markup! My home amp has 7 of them (the chip is about $25 per, not breaking the bank), but each one is a 20 watt heater so I can't use it in my bedroom in the summer. I'd love to find a nice 2-channel DAC to use with a headphone amp for <$100, with HDMI and SPDIF in - anyone seen one?
You don't need new law for the same old thing "on a computer". It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise. How illegal depends on the value, and jurisdiction may be particularly muddy here.
There's no need for the law to "mention bitcoins", that's a distraction, but law enforcement is only going to go after complicated cross-jurisdictional thefts when the value is high and the evidence is clear. We might not see prosecutions because bitcoin isn't taken seriously, or because the hackers simply got away with it.
This plan doesn't fund replacing the power from those plants with anything, just some hand waving about "renewable energy" being expanded in parallel. Cheap energy matters. The cost of everything we buy, everything we use, comes down to labor and energy costs. If you make energy more expensive everyone pays, and pays in a "regressive" way like a sales tax.
It might still makes sense, maybe, but it will take more than hand waving.
Slashdot is supposed to be the place where we discuss the tech and ignore the marketing spin. While we maybe don't reach that bar often enough, we can at least make the effort, no? Especially in story submissions.
Tape drives need the full SCSI command set, not the trimmed version that made it in to SATA (I'm not sure there's even a "(01) REWIND" supported in SATA).
LTO tapes stored reasonably ("keep in in a cool dry place", as the song goes) should last 15 years from any vendor, as that's in the spec, and there aren't really bottom-feeder vendors for LTO.
If you're going for *actual* longevity, you can't beat fired clay tablets. (Yeah, I know they weren't fired originally, but you have to decide how much you value your MP3 files. I'd certainly take the extra time!)
The military did research on how to preserve critical "rebuild civilization" data in a form that would last for centuries and have the best density that was still possible for a human to read. Presumably a DARPA project. They ended up with (non-ferrous) metal punch tape. Seems right to me.
That player in the modern home computer for CD-ROMs and DVDs? That's the 5 1/4 (half height) form factor. Laptops don't have them of course, but most modern 'box PCs" have at least 1 5.25 half-height slot, often still 3.
1.75" remains an important industrial design measurement, from being 1 "U" in a rack, to a variety of internal form factors being multiples of it.
It's funny when the financial press mistakes MtGOX (Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, lest we forget) for "Mt. Gox", like it was a mountain or something.
It's pathetic when TFS makes the same mistake. C'mon, there are two bitcoin stories a day, we could at least get that right in TFS!
Oh, I have no doubt the number can be spun to continue the left's drive for GOVERNMENT OWNS ALL THE THINGS, don't get me wrong. But our federal (and most state and local) governments are mostly pension plans of one form or another now, which isn't a bad goal in itself but is deeply disturbing with unsustainable debt.
Heh, I actually do everything by IP address at home - I only have a couple of machines that share data out (trying to get to one), and I gave them memorable IP addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
No, just worded it badly. Everyone tries to match pricing with each other - the pricing is the same at every commercial cloud storage vendor, and S3 is the easiest to check.
The two real players for "consumer cloud drive" with consumer friendly APIs are Google Drive and OneDrive (I guess it's called now). If the price for drives-in-bulk had come down or something, you'd see it reflected in S3 and Azure, so this is something different.
Either this is a loss leader now for Google, or they're monetizing the heck out of the content.
I can tell the difference between the DACs built into my (similarly-priced) amps. Too many variables to control for, of course, but something was certainly better, and I doubt is was the amp section since that's so easy to get right these days.
That being said, chips get better, and I can believe the price just came down (the ones I have are high power because they're "class A" (constant power) in the way they build the analog out, but I suspect that was just the easiest approach at the time).
I find it quite suspicious in this exact way, because the price cut is for Google Drive specifically, and not for S3 , which is still priced at 0.068/GB-Month, more than 3x this price. Commercial cloud storage has always cost more than the consumer "cloud drives", but clearly they expect to see some other forms of profit from this.
If they had dropped S3 pricing, I would have been looking for some tech breakthrough instead.
(By comparison, S3 and Azure storage pricing are effectively the same, but Skydrive is about 0.04/GB-Month past the free 7 GB).
You can't really make that work for solar. You won't be shipping power 20,000 km from dayside to nightside, regardless of how much you generate.
I think that there's a lot to be said for solar thermal + thermal power storage (at industrial scale), but it's more expensive than current sources so I wouldn't advocate rushing into it.
Second recommendation for that -thanks. But I don't understand USB audio - am I going to be blocked by driver issues on say a old android tablet, or a Windows phone, or some other obscure platform?
Wow, you have such admiration for the Emperor's clothes - very perceptive and loyal of you! How wise to ignore the fools who can't see his wonderful new clothes.
The variation in hearing, much like in the frequencies our eyes can see, is minimal before our ears get damaged by city living, because it naturally pushes the limits of the physics involved.
CD is good enough for someone with good hearing, which realistically is far about what anyone over 20, or anyone who has lived in a city, will ever need. (There's some arguments for 48 kHz vs 44, but almost everyone who thinks they can hear that difference is fooling themselves - the overlap between e.g., teenaged Bushmen who have never seen a city and audiophile buyers is probably 0).
Read the link. Seriously.
A good ADC will sample at a much higher frequency, do a very steep digital band pass filter, not limited by coils and capacitors, then compress.
Sure, you can't just naively sample at 44 kHz, which is why it's not done that way. But 16 x 44 kHz at the end of the process, after ADC and mastering and mixing, really is perfect.
Undertones doesn't mean what you want it to mean.
The bottom octave (20-40 Hz) is mostly felt, not heard, but high power subwoofers are cheap as high-end audio gear goes. It's really easy to be accurate within human discrimination for that octave, you just need a whacking great amp built into most of em) and neighbors who don't live close.
You really, really don't want subsonics reproduced. While the "brown note" may not be real, subsonics can do similarly messed-up stuff to you.
Seriously, read that link. This is engineering; you can learn it.
I'm not familiar with USB audio - I assume that means it won't work with my gear because there won't be a driver for the OS (because that's what I assume about everything). Is that a stupid assumption?
Look at cables. A $0.50 patch cord is a mistake (especially if the center pin breaks off in your gear, as has happened to me). A $2.50-$5.00 patch cord gives all the practically useful quality (often e.g. $5 Dayton Audio cables obviously came from the same factory line as $50 Monster cables). The difference is worthwhile.
For DACs, there is a similar quality difference about the cheapest possible crap. TI (IIRC) makes a nice one for about $20/channel (I'm sure it would be cheaper if they sold more), but they're not mainstream because they're very power hungry. Paying $1000 for a 2-channel DAC is as absurd as Monster cables, but paying $50-100 (depending on how much work the digital section does - SPDIF is easy - and if they were more common they could be half that price) is worthwhile.
Awesome link, thanks.
Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.
First, the bad news
In the past few weeks, I've had conversations with intelligent, scientifically minded individuals who believe in 24/192 downloads and want to know how anyone could possibly disagree. They asked good questions that deserve detailed answers.
I was also interested in what motivated high-rate digital audio advocacy. Responses indicate that few people understand basic signal theory or the sampling theorem, which is hardly surprising. Misunderstandings of the mathematics, technology, and physiology arose in most of the conversations, often asserted by professionals who otherwise possessed significant audio expertise. Some even argued that the sampling theorem doesn't really explain how digital audio actually works
If I had a nickel for every time an audiophile tried to explain to me that CDs can't capture "fast transients" or "20 kHz square waves", I could afford some genuine Snake Oil[tm]! Hint: the ear is mechanical, not magical, and the eardrum can only move so fast. Anything steeper than the rise rate of a 20 kHz sine wave just ain't happening.
I just want a proper DAC without audiophile markup! My home amp has 7 of them (the chip is about $25 per, not breaking the bank), but each one is a 20 watt heater so I can't use it in my bedroom in the summer. I'd love to find a nice 2-channel DAC to use with a headphone amp for <$100, with HDMI and SPDIF in - anyone seen one?
You don't need new law for the same old thing "on a computer". It's illegal to steal anything, virtual or otherwise. How illegal depends on the value, and jurisdiction may be particularly muddy here.
There's no need for the law to "mention bitcoins", that's a distraction, but law enforcement is only going to go after complicated cross-jurisdictional thefts when the value is high and the evidence is clear. We might not see prosecutions because bitcoin isn't taken seriously, or because the hackers simply got away with it.
OTOH, we've already seen lawsuits.
The evidence is in: giving this exchange the credibility due to a Magic card trading site was the correct move.
This plan doesn't fund replacing the power from those plants with anything, just some hand waving about "renewable energy" being expanded in parallel. Cheap energy matters. The cost of everything we buy, everything we use, comes down to labor and energy costs. If you make energy more expensive everyone pays, and pays in a "regressive" way like a sales tax.
It might still makes sense, maybe, but it will take more than hand waving.
Slashdot is supposed to be the place where we discuss the tech and ignore the marketing spin. While we maybe don't reach that bar often enough, we can at least make the effort, no? Especially in story submissions.
Tape drives need the full SCSI command set, not the trimmed version that made it in to SATA (I'm not sure there's even a "(01) REWIND" supported in SATA).
LTO tapes stored reasonably ("keep in in a cool dry place", as the song goes) should last 15 years from any vendor, as that's in the spec, and there aren't really bottom-feeder vendors for LTO.
If you're going for *actual* longevity, you can't beat fired clay tablets. (Yeah, I know they weren't fired originally, but you have to decide how much you value your MP3 files. I'd certainly take the extra time!)
The military did research on how to preserve critical "rebuild civilization" data in a form that would last for centuries and have the best density that was still possible for a human to read. Presumably a DARPA project. They ended up with (non-ferrous) metal punch tape. Seems right to me.
That player in the modern home computer for CD-ROMs and DVDs? That's the 5 1/4 (half height) form factor. Laptops don't have them of course, but most modern 'box PCs" have at least 1 5.25 half-height slot, often still 3.
1.75" remains an important industrial design measurement, from being 1 "U" in a rack, to a variety of internal form factors being multiples of it.
It's funny when the financial press mistakes MtGOX (Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, lest we forget) for "Mt. Gox", like it was a mountain or something.
It's pathetic when TFS makes the same mistake. C'mon, there are two bitcoin stories a day, we could at least get that right in TFS!
I only make the point because it's sold to people as "redistribution of wealth" but can't possibly achieve that.
Oh, I have no doubt the number can be spun to continue the left's drive for GOVERNMENT OWNS ALL THE THINGS, don't get me wrong. But our federal (and most state and local) governments are mostly pension plans of one form or another now, which isn't a bad goal in itself but is deeply disturbing with unsustainable debt.
Surely you mean "redistribution of income"? Redistribution of wealth would be nifty, as that's more a habit/culture than anything else.
Heh, I actually do everything by IP address at home - I only have a couple of machines that share data out (trying to get to one), and I gave them memorable IP addresses.