I heard the laser turntable at the Stereophile show. It simply cannot compete with a conventional turntable in sound quality. The sound it puts out is thin, smooth and homogenized.
Some of the listeners got suspicious when the demonstrator wouldn't play anything on the cheap Technics turntable he had, claiming there wasn't time and the audience wanted to hear the laser turntable. A reviewer finally called his bluff, and the $200 conventional unit easily beat his $15K beast.
John Atkinson had a quite interesting piece in Stereophile a couple of years back, in which he used modern equipment to analyze the signal from high-quality modern turntables.
It turned out that there IS a lot of output in the 20-40KHz range on a properly-recorded analog record.
Of course, you cannot hear tones at this frequency played in isolation. But in real life, there is only one continuously variable wave of air pressure hitting your ear, with all the frequencies present at once. So it may make a difference.
Ummmm.....I hope you didn't make the rookie mistake of plugging a TT directly into a line level input. You need the RIAA equalization provided by a phono preamp stage.
I thought that was strange myself. It would be quite easy to mount the motor in a separate isolation housing, and cut a hole in the turntable plinth for the shaft to stick up through. That's the way VPI does it. The designer seems to have followed the Rega model.
As for the 'why', he likes to make things, that's why.
It would depend on whether the police try to install remotely, over the Internet, or sneak into your house and install directly. In either case, there are difficulties.
Remotely, a simple software firewall or NAT can block all listeners. Of course, they can try to trick you with an email or a web page, but whether this will work depends on your email client/web browser and security settings.
If they sneak into your house, they might have trouble getting into your computer if you use strong Administrator/root passwords. Booting with DOS won't really help the NTFS, while single-user mode in Linux might prove useful. But there's always the tripwire solution.
Many security packages also have custom keyboard drivers, so you don't go through the regular one when you type in your password.
I won't even go into fancy stuff like DriveCrypt PowerPack, which allows you to encrypt your 'C' drive and requires a passphrase to boot up.
The FBI adopted the hardware solution, with a little extra device on you keyboard cable. However, many criminals are now keeping their keyboards in a safe.
King of 'Music', indeed
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
Songs? What about symphonies, string quartets, ballets, and operas?
This guy hasn't even scratched the surface of Western music. Then there's a whole world out there.
I work at a heavy-duty Oracle shop. I would say that Oracle has gone way beyond being just a database vendor, in that they provide a complete--but proprietary--environment. Since I haven't needed to use many of their features in the past, I had never realized how complex their software is.
I can't believe MySQL doesn't even have subselects yet. I've been living on subselects and 'connect by' for years. I never did like PL/SQL all that much, but it does allow you to run complex programs over the network without creating high traffic. And SQLNet does make things a lot easier. The whole thing is kind of like a database flavor of Unix, with its own world of commands, scripting tools and permissions.
As for Oracle's 'fancy' products, like Express, Forms, the OID, Portal, and Workflow, they are serious attempts to extend the database principles into a generalized suite of enterprise-level business tools. They are a little too cutting-edge for my taste, but you won't find anything like this in a non-proprietary product.
The job of the Supreme Court is to implement and enforce the constitution. This document states that Congress has the authority to protect copyrights for a 'limited time'. Virtually any amount of time, provided it is explicitly named, can properly be called limited.
Whether this law is wise or not is another matter. If the Constitution prohibited Congress from passing unwise laws, the Supreme Court would be striking down laws as fast as Congress could pass them.
If you don't like it, the proper thing to do is complain to your representative in Congress. It these guys thought they'd lose even 1% of the vote by doing this, they'd turn around so fast you wouldn't see it.
...politically motivated attacks? There's lately been a big DDOS attack on www.freerepublic.com, the conservative discussion site, and I haven't heard that any law enforcement agency cares about protecting free speech.
Of course, you may not agree with their politics, but...
This project does not have a manager. If the 'team leader' is busy writing all the code, then he is not the manager. What a manager does is assign work, supervise workers, and handle problems.
Many people think managers are not needed, and they can save money by not having them. You can see where this gets you...
Not exactly. George II was born in 1687 in Hanover, and his native language was German, but he could speak and read English reasonably well by the time he assumed the throne. He came to England when his father became king in 1715, and had adequate time to prepare for his future duties.
(Looks like today's reading of Reed Browning's biography of the Duke of Newcastle, who held various offices under George II from 1727 until 1762, wasn't entirely wasted.)
The Stereophile website reports that San Jose based AOpen is about to release a Pentium 4 motherboard with a tubed audio stage. It also uses expensive capacitors and Cardas wiring in the audio stage. Check it out at the Stereophile web site:
http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?1368
I'm sure all you digital geeks will be running out to buy one!
This would kind of limit your reading to what is in print now. Due mainly to some changes in IRS inventory accounting rules that were instituted in the mid-80s, most books are in print only for one year.
The Internet helps a lot if you are looking for a specific out-of-print item. I had long wanted to read Gregor Piatigorsky's autobiography, 'Cellist', and couldn't find a copy. It was in print for a few years from about 1965 to 1968. So I put it on my half.com wish list, and eventually I got an email. Nice hardcover with dust jacket, shipping included, for $9.
Well, I once got an email urging me to boycott Nissan because of the nissan.com domain name dispute. It was very polite, admitted it was spam, and promised never to send another one.
...just tell your congressman and senators that if they support this bill, you'll be voting against them in the next election. Furthermore, you'll give money to their opponent, and urge all your friends to vote against them.
Large corporations can do many things, but they can't vote. And most congressmen wish to remain employed in their present occupation.
"It is therefore a question of whether a word used (in a vast number of cases) as '(abstract) principle of life', occasion as 'living being', can be used of any thing or actual part of a body essential to life, as we say 'life-blood'. Certainly it can--vaguely; we have 'waes in feorh dropen' (smitten in the vitals) in Beowulf 2981, 'feorh geraehte' in Maldon 142. Feorhlast in 'feorhlastas baer' (B. 846) is curious: 'life-tracks'? but Grendel was going home to die--and the 'lastas' were visible; and note 'blode' 847. One would like 'tracks stained with life-blood'. Cf. ON 'fjor' in verse, and Finnur Jonsson's note in Lexicon Poeticum: "in many of these instances 'fjor' is treated as something substantial...probably the blood is thought of as identical with life; this sense is clear in Voluspa 41, 'fyllisk fjorvi feigra manna, rythr ragna sjot rauthum dreyra''". One may add 'fjorsegi' (Fafnismal 32) meaning 'life-muscle (blood-muscle!)', i.e. heard.
Interesting, and useful in understanding the Anglo-Saxon text he is discussing, but not light reading. The man was a professional Germanic philologist, and he makes certain demands on his audience.
...Tolkien's scholarly works: his essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and his brilliant edition of The Fight at Finnesburg. Some kinowledge of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Latin required, but all Slashdotters are polymaths, right? Anyway, it's a waste of time to read the lame translations they have nowadays.
If you are running a very large Unix box, such as an E10000, the operating system is optimized for the hardware, and the release of Oracle you're running is optimized for the OS. Even so, they still don't work that well--there are many unexplained bugs and glitches, even with the latest stable releases of Solaris and Oracle. No one would want to introduce further instability with a new OS.
Furthermore, there are no potential cost savings. Solaris essentially 'comes with' an E1000, and all your administrators are trained in Solaris.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Laser Turntable does not sound very good compared to conventional turntables.
There are plenty of good conventional turntable/arm/cartridge combinations in the $8000-15000 price range that will blow it out of the water.
I heard the laser turntable at the Stereophile show. It simply cannot compete with a conventional turntable in sound quality. The sound it puts out is thin, smooth and homogenized.
Some of the listeners got suspicious when the demonstrator wouldn't play anything on the cheap Technics turntable he had, claiming there wasn't time and the audience wanted to hear the laser turntable. A reviewer finally called his bluff, and the $200 conventional unit easily beat his $15K beast.
John Atkinson had a quite interesting piece in Stereophile a couple of years back, in which he used modern equipment to analyze the signal from high-quality modern turntables.
It turned out that there IS a lot of output in the 20-40KHz range on a properly-recorded analog record.
Of course, you cannot hear tones at this frequency played in isolation. But in real life, there is only one continuously variable wave of air pressure hitting your ear, with all the frequencies present at once. So it may make a difference.
Ummmm.....I hope you didn't make the rookie mistake of plugging a TT directly into a line level input. You need the RIAA equalization provided by a phono preamp stage.
I thought that was strange myself. It would be quite easy to mount the motor in a separate isolation housing, and cut a hole in the turntable plinth for the shaft to stick up through. That's the way VPI does it. The designer seems to have followed the Rega model.
As for the 'why', he likes to make things, that's why.
This is an interesting, and difficult question.
It would depend on whether the police try to install remotely, over the Internet, or sneak into your house and install directly. In either case, there are difficulties.
Remotely, a simple software firewall or NAT can block all listeners. Of course, they can try to trick you with an email or a web page, but whether this will work depends on your email client/web browser and security settings.
If they sneak into your house, they might have trouble getting into your computer if you use strong Administrator/root passwords. Booting with DOS won't really help the NTFS, while single-user mode in Linux might prove useful. But there's always the tripwire solution.
Many security packages also have custom keyboard drivers, so you don't go through the regular one when you type in your password.
I won't even go into fancy stuff like DriveCrypt PowerPack, which allows you to encrypt your 'C' drive and requires a passphrase to boot up.
The FBI adopted the hardware solution, with a little extra device on you keyboard cable. However, many criminals are now keeping their keyboards in a safe.
Songs? What about symphonies, string quartets, ballets, and operas?
This guy hasn't even scratched the surface of Western music. Then there's a whole world out there.
No views? This is quite a serious limitation. I suppose you can't define network objects, either.
This is where Oracle shines. Using views, network objects, and synonyms you can do amazing things.
Of course, you can also make everything so complex that no one will ever figure it out...
I work at a heavy-duty Oracle shop. I would say that Oracle has gone way beyond being just a database vendor, in that they provide a complete--but proprietary--environment. Since I haven't needed to use many of their features in the past, I had never realized how complex their software is.
I can't believe MySQL doesn't even have subselects yet. I've been living on subselects and 'connect by' for years. I never did like PL/SQL all that much, but it does allow you to run complex programs over the network without creating high traffic. And SQLNet does make things a lot easier. The whole thing is kind of like a database flavor of Unix, with its own world of commands, scripting tools and permissions.
As for Oracle's 'fancy' products, like Express, Forms, the OID, Portal, and Workflow, they are serious attempts to extend the database principles into a generalized suite of enterprise-level business tools. They are a little too cutting-edge for my taste, but you won't find anything like this in a non-proprietary product.
...or maybe she could just borrow a few thunderbolts from Zeus.
The job of the Supreme Court is to implement and enforce the constitution. This document states that Congress has the authority to protect copyrights for a 'limited time'. Virtually any amount of time, provided it is explicitly named, can properly be called limited.
Whether this law is wise or not is another matter. If the Constitution prohibited Congress from passing unwise laws, the Supreme Court would be striking down laws as fast as Congress could pass them.
If you don't like it, the proper thing to do is complain to your representative in Congress. It these guys thought they'd lose even 1% of the vote by doing this, they'd turn around so fast you wouldn't see it.
Actually, we do. It's not fair otherwise.
If you listen carefully, you'll hear that $10000 turntable like the VPI TNT Hotrod-X blows the doors off even a $20000 CD player, like the Linn.
...politically motivated attacks? There's lately been a big DDOS attack on www.freerepublic.com, the conservative discussion site, and I haven't heard that any law enforcement agency cares about protecting free speech.
Of course, you may not agree with their politics, but...
Actually, the paddalium is what Bill Gates will shortly be applying to the bottoms of these naughty hackers.
Many people think managers are not needed, and they can save money by not having them. You can see where this gets you...
(Looks like today's reading of Reed Browning's biography of the Duke of Newcastle, who held various offices under George II from 1727 until 1762, wasn't entirely wasted.)
The Stereophile website reports that San Jose based AOpen is about to release a Pentium 4 motherboard with a tubed audio stage. It also uses expensive capacitors and Cardas wiring in the audio stage. Check it out at the Stereophile web site:
http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?1368
I'm sure all you digital geeks will be running out to buy one!
This would kind of limit your reading to what is in print now. Due mainly to some changes in IRS inventory accounting rules that were instituted in the mid-80s, most books are in print only for one year.
The Internet helps a lot if you are looking for a specific out-of-print item. I had long wanted to read Gregor Piatigorsky's autobiography, 'Cellist', and couldn't find a copy. It was in print for a few years from about 1965 to 1968. So I put it on my half.com wish list, and eventually I got an email. Nice hardcover with dust jacket, shipping included, for $9.
Well, I once got an email urging me to boycott Nissan because of the nissan.com domain name dispute. It was very polite, admitted it was spam, and promised never to send another one.
Do you really need DNS for what you do, or could you just type in IP addresses?
...just tell your congressman and senators that if they support this bill, you'll be voting against them in the next election. Furthermore, you'll give money to their opponent, and urge all your friends to vote against them.
Large corporations can do many things, but they can't vote. And most congressmen wish to remain employed in their present occupation.
Random example:
"It is therefore a question of whether a word used (in a vast number of cases) as '(abstract) principle of life', occasion as 'living being', can be used of any thing or actual part of a body essential to life, as we say 'life-blood'. Certainly it can--vaguely; we have 'waes in feorh dropen' (smitten in the vitals) in Beowulf 2981, 'feorh geraehte' in Maldon 142. Feorhlast in 'feorhlastas baer' (B. 846) is curious: 'life-tracks'? but Grendel was going home to die--and the 'lastas' were visible; and note 'blode' 847. One would like 'tracks stained with life-blood'. Cf. ON 'fjor' in verse, and Finnur Jonsson's note in Lexicon Poeticum: "in many of these instances 'fjor' is treated as something substantial...probably the blood is thought of as identical with life; this sense is clear in Voluspa 41, 'fyllisk fjorvi feigra manna, rythr ragna sjot rauthum dreyra''". One may add 'fjorsegi' (Fafnismal 32) meaning 'life-muscle (blood-muscle!)', i.e. heard.
Interesting, and useful in understanding the Anglo-Saxon text he is discussing, but not light reading. The man was a professional Germanic philologist, and he makes certain demands on his audience.
...Tolkien's scholarly works: his essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" and his brilliant edition of The Fight at Finnesburg. Some kinowledge of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Latin required, but all Slashdotters are polymaths, right? Anyway, it's a waste of time to read the lame translations they have nowadays.
If you are running a very large Unix box, such as an E10000, the operating system is optimized for the hardware, and the release of Oracle you're running is optimized for the OS. Even so, they still don't work that well--there are many unexplained bugs and glitches, even with the latest stable releases of Solaris and Oracle. No one would want to introduce further instability with a new OS.
Furthermore, there are no potential cost savings. Solaris essentially 'comes with' an E1000, and all your administrators are trained in Solaris.
you could actually buy a decent turntable. A Rega 3 with arm is $700, an MMF-7 is $900 with arm and cartridge.
Leaves you enough for about 200 LPs at todays prices...
vinyl1 (who else?)