Let's not forget backwards compatibility. The greatest competition for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD comes from DVD itself. Most people do not have ultra high quality screens or plainly don't care for top quality. So, who is going to change from DVD to next generation media? And who is going to buy the same movies again?
Sure, those systems are supposed to offer backwards compatibility, but why bother? How many of you have explicitly migrated to SACD or DVD-Audio (which are both backwards compatible)? I'd bet that 95% of SACD owners out there just got SACD playback bundled with their new system and would never care to buy a SACD. On the other hand, below-CD-quality iTunes is highly succesful!
As a side note, let me also remind you that these players will also feature a watermarked analog output or no analog output and an ENCRYPTED digital output (HDMI or DVI-D). It's going to be pretty hard capturing anything from them unless of course some Taiwanese manufacturer makes a region-free, macrovision-free, encryption-free player which will probably generate milions of plain DVD copies.
The fact is that the enormous success of the DVD and the CD is the single greatest problem that the content creation companies have to face.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia! Of course you wouldn't, just like you wouldn't if Brittanica said so. You would talk with your doctor and study specific reliable sources about your disease, not works of popular science or encyclopedias.
Your doctor, however, does trust some sources (e.g. a Surgery textbook). I suppose that wikipedia might want to adhere to these standards. I was trying to compare the most "reliable" academic publications with Wikipedia and highlight the differences.
Most people here try to say that Wikipedia is indeed accurate (proof by example) or is not accurate (again quoting examples). The point that the author of the article makes is that Wikipedia is not in principle accurate in the sense that theoretically (even if it NEVER happens) some one may hit a highly inaccurate version of the truth that just happened to be there, even for a few minutes.
This is not a matter of actual content (which may be excellent), but a matter of principle. Can you trust an anonymous editor as source? This is the real question. Maybe foo32@koko.com is a real genius, but maybe I would trust a Nobel prize winner much more in a given issue.
To put this into perspective, instead of quoting semi-religious/political issues, let us consider for example whether any of us would trust wikipedia as a reference for a medical condition. Would you really take pill X or have surgery because wikipedia says so? You would probably want an extremely rigorous randomized double-blind stage-III study for safety and an FDA approval for health matters. You definitely do not need this kind of academic rigor for most wikipedia entries, but the difference is real.
The academic world is not perfect and maybe some anti-elitism is well deserved, but I think wikipedia must really adopt slightly different policies in order to transcend the level of "convenient online source" and become a real repository of human knowledge.
Best Buy sells Monster digital audio cables at something like $20 for a 5-ft cable. I had to argue with my father trying to convince him that the cheap RCA cables we already had back at home would be perfectly capable of communicated a digital signal the 5 inches between the DVD player and the receiver. I could have ripped two wires from a speaker cable to connect the two devices and would have gotten just as good sound.
Never forget that digital operates in a low-level analog way (because the world is analog!). This is why high bandwidth digital always requires good cabling. The change from ATA33 to ATA66/100 requires an 80-wire cable, for example, even though the pin count is the same.
The fact is that (a) high bandwidth digital needs very high carrier frequencies and (b) very high frequency signals behave like waves in a cable/transmission line with a bunch of associated problems. Sure, the analog "headroom" for an encoded digital signal at (say) 16b/44.1 is huge and the analog signal must be heavily distorted in order to make a difference. But when we are talking about Gigabit-per-second signals, or multi-channel (7.1) 192KHz/24b it pays to remember that the end result of this digital technology is actually an analog signal. That's why they have CAT 5 (which is a specification) and not a "grab some wire" requirement for fast networks.
To verify the above concept, try using a 10m DVI cable. The display bandwidth is huge and you WILL need a high quality DVI cable.
Literally speaking the cabling won't matter at all. Whether the resistance of your wires is high or low the electrons are going to travel through it at the same rate. What may be a worry is freak occurances of inductance between wires which could possibly mess with your data, but I'm not sure how common that is. The signal is digital so it's going to be either a 1 or a 0 depending on the voltage of the line, and it's usually difficult to make the voltage do something as drastic as go from +5 to 0 or +5 to -5.
A wire does not only have resistance, it has impedance and a frequency response (which is probably very wide, but it still is there).
The digital-to-analog encoding is not as simple as -5 to +5 transitions because that would mean absurd carrier frequencies. For example, a typical PC modem will send 40kbps over a phone line that has a 2-3KHz frequency response (if I remember correctly) by encoding multiple bits at a time (the REAL carrier frequency can be found in your modem manual, probably). This, of course, makes it more sensitive to line noise.
Anyway, this is a complicated issue and I am really not an expert.
Slowly but surely UNIX crept upon the Nintendo user.
The differences are not that dramatic if you are reasonably efficient.
I use a (heavily) upgraded K5/166 with 48MB RAM, 40GB drive (BIOS won't see it correctly, but hda=x,y,z solved this issue with linux), PCI TNT2 with 32MB, SB Live! and a Plextor Ultra-SCSI CDROM on an adaptec controller. I also added a 3com 10/100 Ethernet and this thing rox0rz.
I use it to run linux and it is quite adequate for latex text editing. The system is snappy enough for emacs and xfce. Only when you start an MP3 player do you realise that media decoding can eat up ~30% CPU (there are huge differences between various players, of course). I also record some 44.1/16b music from analog and use it as a multimedia box. It can play VCDs too.
As for network use, well, rsync (encrypted) and ssh are really heavy but plain ftp runs pretty well either as a client or server. This machine will easily saturate a 10MBps line with unencrypted static content so it is not that bad for home use as a backup server/multimedia box. Network throughput peaks at about 70MBps if the machine is idle.
P.
P.S. For comparison, my other system is Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB CL2 RAM, 9800Pro and 160GB SATA.
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
I am an almost exclusive Leenuks user and I usually trust the packages that I install, something that is not a good idea under Windows. Microsoft does have a point about "trusted" software and signing, which we should apply systematically, although in a non-intrusive manner.
Several source packages (and most distributions, I would assume) do provide md5sums or even gpg signatures. A uniform and systematic approach to this "source"/"package" verification would be a good thing for Free Software in general and would definitely solve the {mal,ad}ware issue for good.
Perhaps a very simple, centralized source/package "verifier" would be a nice response to windows user's concerns. Something like a simple GUI app that gets the package and tries to cross-reference it with gnu.org or sourceforge.net or the author's own signature file. Checking packages by hand like cleansoftware.org can be really nice but I'm afraid it will quickly lag behind software versions.
Well, the famous singularity effect is produced by the ability of progress to fuel even greater progress. I wonder, If drug designers start taking mind-enhancing drugs, will this mean even more succesful mind-enhancing drugs (and so on...)? Funny thought.
Anyway, I suppose that with the life expectancy continuously increasing and many old people suffering from dementia this could mean a few more useful years. I can see a market for that, besides crazy, burn-out programming and studying.
Not always. Thought experiment: you break your leg, then you're faced with the choice of:
A. Use typical medical technology to fix it with a cast
B. Avoid the use of the cast and accept the broken leg. After all, like all medicine, there will probably be "a price" (there will be a monetary cost, but I don't think that's the kind of price you were talking about)
Funny, but even in this case, you are not completely correct. A cast has some (very low) chances of causing what is known as "compartment syndrome" which may lead to very very serious consequences if left untreated. Several other unwanted effects like muscle atrophy or deep venous thrombosis (with prolonged immobilization) are quite common.
Choosing whether therapy is appropriate and which therapy is appropriate is a very complex question that involves the scientific skills of the doctor and the wishes of the patient. Generally speaking, one is supposed to trust scientific medicine so you are--in that sense--correct.
Look, drugs are not benign things despite what marketing campaigns would have you believe and they should not be taken lightly. Apparently 44% of Americans are now on prescription drugs of one sort or another and one might start to wonder when the other shoe is going to drop.
Very well said! I really wonder, do people EVER read the possible side effects of the drugs they are taking? Everyone considers surgery a very serious intervention but very few people actually understand that drugs can also have very important consequences/side effects. Absolutely safe drugs do not exist. (they do exist, in the land of the unicorn, together with absolutely secure computing)
P.
P.S. As a side note, the medical community has been aware of the possible risks associated with celecoxib (celebrex) and other anti-inflammatory agents for quite a long time (see for example Lancet 360(9339):1071-3). The list of drugs that can cause renal damage is unbelievably long, for example. However, the question always was (and always is) whether those risks are acceptable for the disease those medicines treat.
any probs with the gentoo switch? i've got a early AMD with radeon 9200 se, but don't use it for graphics.
Well, I've been using slackware for quite a long time, so it didn't seem particularly hard. I'm still not quite used to the gentoo way of doing things (e.g. etc-update, rc-update and other "automatic" tools). Anyway, the installation is straightforward and I did copy many of my previous config scripts (firewall, xorg.conf etc) from my previous install so it did not take much time to configure.
My main complaint with the gentoo AMD64 is that several packages are listed as "masked" (unavailable) for some reason under x86_64 but I did manage to compile them from source and install them by hand. For example, g77, gcl, diald and some others. That does not bother me at all, since gentoo seems to be friendly to this sort of tinkering (just like slackware).
It might be possible to get 3d support for your 9200se, because if I remember correctly it is very closely related to the 8500 chip that has excellent open source support.
Finally, my overall--highly subjective--impression is that gentoo AMD64 is much faster than Slackware 10 (with many, many source compiled applications) so the 64bit world appears promising. Do bear in mind however that the 64bit kernel is not preemptible (beta state in 2.6.9) so it might appear sluggish under heavy I/O. Does not bother me in practice because I have 1GB RAM (which does not need any "high memory" tweaks under 64b).
P.
P.S. I installed from the 2004.3 release (2 iso discs), networkless install. I then upgraded some packages via dialup. I don't have broadband.
Getting fglrx rpms to work is a little tricky (they DO work, if you try hard enough--and you don't have Xorg 6.8.1). However, getting 64-bit 3d support is impossible.
I recently switched to gentoo AMD64 and I don't see any reason to go back. Even if the performance benefits for natively compiled applications are minimal, 64-bit is the way to go, in my opinion. I emailed ATI complaining for their lack of 64-bit drivers. NVidia has provided 64bit drivers for a long time. We'll see... Guess my Radeon 9800 Pro is bound to be replaced by a nice 6600GT.
Well, if source code analysis is really what you want, I would suggest splint at http://www.splint.org/. A static lint-type checker. Really good and sufficiently pedantic. Most C coders should check this out...
Sure I know that laser prints can't match the quality of a top-end inkjet, but a color laser (think lexmark c510 or hp 2550L) can give decent results for most uses. The cost is unbelievably cheaper, you can get nice color fidelity and resolution and even on el-cheap-o paper a laser print will not fade. For the few photos that have great sentimental value you may (a) print them at some good print shop or (b) keep them on an archival grade CD-R and print them every 5 years or so
using your current printer.
I use a HP 970Cxi and have printed a few photos. Not bad, especially compared to average professional print services. One of the reasons I switched to digital from my trusty canon EOS SLR was that I had to only use a few print shops to get the kind of service I wanted. Now I can store my pictures on CD and print on the best printer I can find.
My only complaint about windows open-source or GNU software is that usually linux applications get ported to windows and a dozen other platforms, while major succesfull free software from windows rarely makes it to the linux world. As an example from the top ten sourceforge downloads: CDex (great, but win-only), virtual-dub, DC++, emule. These are hugely popular applications that are relatively mature and yet they have not been ported to linux or any free operating system. (please do not mention alternatives for linux, I know there are several to be found but that is not the point I'm trying to make)
In my experience, there are two distinct sets : linux free software with win ports and win-only free software. I'm not against free software for windows, I use it all the time. But we are not talking about a free-software-for-windows movement.
This is highly irrelevant, but I was wondering if so many electromagnetic fields are going to make us glow in the dark. Seriously, we have mobiles, TV, radio, Wi-Fi and of course all other electronic devices. Are these devices safe? I know it's not X-ray or gamma radiation but so many emissions in our houses make me worry. I could live with 1MBps wireless if 1GBps wireless is going to fry my precious fragile DNA.
Just for the record, I'm currently studying the non-homologous end join mechanism for the repair of double strand DNA breaks, which are often induced by radiation. Am I getting paranoid?
I may be wrong, but to me this sounds like hyper threading with a new name. Can anybody enlighten me?
It's not the same. Hyper threading divides processor units (e.g. a multiplier or an adder) in order to keep most units of the single core busy. This happens because Intel processors have very long processing pipelines (thus the very high frequency compared to AMD), so stalling them can be quite costly. In order to avoid this, Intel simply keeps track of two "virtual" processor states, essentially 2 copies of all registers, and schedules instructions from any of these two execution threads in ways that keep most units busy. By chosing from 2 threads instead of one it has greater chances of finding an instruction that can be computed by an idle (at that time) unit.
Cell architecture, on the other hand, seems to rely on multiple simple cores, each of which is complete. A central Power processor core keeps them working together. I assume (but I do not know!) that the benefit of this architecture is : (a) adding multiple cores is easy and increases cost linearly (b) software that works for a 16-core chip will also work for a 2-core chip, but slower (therefore the same processor can be adapted to different needs, just like multi-unit videocards, without expensive redesign) (c) an inherent understanding of parallelism (on the chip) allows chaining them together in an easy fashion. Maybe we will start counting cores instead of MHz in a few years, when all cpus will have peaked at some--obscenely high--MHz limit. Details on the cell chip are very vague and ridden with marketing buzz-words, but it appears it will be able to execute many more parallel threads than an Intel HT processor (2 threads maximum in parallel).
What worries me most is the fact that Sony (which also sells music/movies etc) says it'll have on-chip capability to protect copyrighted works. I don't know what this will mean for the GNU/linux crowd.
Disclaimer: All the above is wild speculation. I am not an engineer.
In the long term I don't think this type of marketing will work for companies. The obvious reason why most of us trust other people is (a) they are honest because they do not have financial interests (b) we appreciate their opinion because we want to be like them.
If this type of marketing becomes wide-spread then simply everyone will start being much more cautious about what he is being told. As for the coolness factor, well, we already have that for a long time: hot actors tell us what to eat/drink/wear, sexy models show the newest products. Most of us have a certain immunity to this. I would consider buying ZZZ if it seemed to me that cool guy AAA is indeed cool *because* of ZZZ. But would I buy ZZZ (so many variables.... must stop programming) simply because cool guy AAA said so?
People are not idiots. They know whose opinion is important for a reason. If I tell my friends to use firefox, they will, because they know I can back my choice with technical arguments they don't want to hear. This knowledge renders my opinion valid. (admittedly, my opinion does not have the same weight in matters of appearance or style, maybe a hot model would be more convincing for that...)
P.
Installing linux to my friends' computers since 1995!
their 500VA unit runs about 150$(I have NO idea how much power the OP's equipment pulls).
Usually audio-video equipment is very demanding in terms of power consumption. An amplifier in the 2x100W RMS range can easily draw 400W of electrical power continuously, which would roughly require a ~800VA supply. (Yes, I know that in theory 1V*1A = 1W, but unfortunately UPSes do not always work that way;-)).
I'm a little suspicious about the *sonic* performance of line conditioners, unless they have been specifically designed for audio equipment. Such conditioners may simply protect sensitive components from relatively major fluctuations but in this case minor fluctuations can be significant.
I don't remember how much these things cost but an online UPS (one that converts AC -> DC feeds the battery and then feeds the PC/equipment from the battery) can reduce line noise significantly. It isn't the most elegant solution but feeding pc/sound card/sound equipment from a noiseless source can improve things considerably and it is very easy to install. APC has a specific solution for high-end audio/video systems that appears perfect for you (its called a power conditioner and is, essentially, an online UPS with very little battery time). Caution: the words "high performance AV system" usually mean $$$$$$. Check the link http://www.apcc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=3 10&ISOCountryCode=US
Alternatively you may try balanced XLR->XLR cables that are used by professionals. I use these for my microphones (which provide a very low signal) and I am quite happy. Note that 4.5mm jack can also be balanced but you have to explicitly request it. Also bear in mind that a strong signal is much less sensitive. Long lengths of microvoltage-level signal are a not a good idea but line-level (-5/+5) signal is quite resistant. You may also buy ferrite cores for your cables (even power cables that have ferrite cores pre-installed!) and see if it makes a difference. Shielded cable may also be useful. Don't go spending a lot before trying.
Finally, always remember: a very good power supply (as in expensive audio equipment) can handle noise quite effectively.
Most components have working ranges. I believe that -5 degrees Celsius would be a safe bet for most electronics but below that and something might fail unexpectedly.
I would be most worried about temperature fluctuations. Generally speaking, hardware can handle a stable extreme condition, but even (commonly) minor events like an electric grid power failure or a reboot or a sudden... sunshine might prove fatal. If your hardware is cheap you might want to try it but I'd consider an aggressive backup policy.
Haven't you noticed that hardware fails on powerup/powerdown in the majority of cases? Change is what stresses electronic circuits.
Well, dual core Opteron's are really close to the store selves. I can see dual core Athlon64s being produced much earlier than the Cell chip. And if dual core versions work well(which eventually requires that programmers start using threads/processess effectively) then scaling to 4-core Athlons will be quite easy. Once you write "multithreaded" code, going from 2 to 4 or 8 or 128 threads can be quite natural, depending on the task at hand. I wonder whether a Cell chip, made up from many (slow) cores can beat a dual or quad core Athlon64 whose cores are very, very fast by todays standards. Remember that a dual-core cheap can be much easier to use effectively.
It's all a matter of programming, really. I wonder how many years will it take for the programmers to catch up and start writing really efficient parallel code. Intel has already paved the road somewhat with its HyperThreading technology so I suppose that some expertise is already available.
My audio player knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?
Transcoding between lossy formats is not a good idea. Every iteration will greatly deteriorate the output. The explanation is quite technical and I am not an audio engineer/mathematician, but trust me on this one. That's the whole point of using flac as a reference archival format.
P.
P.S. By the way, I forgot to say that an obvious way to do the batch transcoding would be a... Makefile. Not very portable but quite appropriate, don't you think?
I totally agree with the original poster. I just made a similar decision and reripped all my (original) CDs to flac, see my weblog http://pkt3141592.blogspot.com/. I have made small scripts (~20 lines each) that convert flac2mp3, flac2vorbis and (flac)m3u to (mp3)m3u files. The neat thing is that I preserve all information tags across formats.
I usually invoke the mini scripts like : find -name \*.flac -exec flac2vorbis \{\} \; and it works really well. I encoded 35 albums from flac to mp3 for my personal portable audio player in very little time.
I am now considering an automated script that will generate.tex labels for every directory by reading information tags. It is not very hard to do but getting the output to look nice is going to be quite hard and my TeX skills are a little bit rusty.
As a side thought I might eventually make an SQL database out of all this music but I don't think my collection will ever grow that much.
Anyway, this has been a toy project of mine in the last 3-4 days and it has proved quite useful. I may post the end result (propably a collection of perl and bash magic;-)) somewhere on sourceforge if it becomes non-trivial.
He spent one night in the hospital. He was billed
$35,000.00 The man has no insurance and if he did it would have been full of deductables, co-pay s and all the rest.
Who can afford this type of treatment you propose? Only the dwindling few with insurance that is sufficient to not bankrupt them.
I'm really sorry to hear that and I understand your bitterness. However, this is not true everywhere. Why don't you have a look at what happens in countries like Sweden, Germany and Switzerland or Canada? Just because health care is unbelievably expensive in the US (I live in the EU) it does not mean that the medical profession or medicine itself is corrupt. Doctors operate within the rules created by the system/government. If business is what you want, business you'll get. My colleagues here work 80-hour weeks for ~1400$ a month because this is the law. In my country it is forbidden by the law to advertise medications to the general public (besides very few over-the-counter drugs like Aspirin). Why don't you ask your politicians to implement a different health care system that ensures a lowest common denominator of health care for everyone, if that's what you want?
Bonus tip: Maybe you should try doctor "shopping" abroad? I'm sure you could get very low prices in places like former soviet block countries. Plane tickets are cheap.
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Let's not forget backwards compatibility. The greatest competition for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD comes from DVD itself. Most people do not have ultra high quality screens or plainly don't care for top quality. So, who is going to change from DVD to next generation media? And who is going to buy the same movies again?
Sure, those systems are supposed to offer backwards compatibility, but why bother? How many of you have explicitly migrated to SACD or DVD-Audio (which are both backwards compatible)? I'd bet that 95% of SACD owners out there just got SACD playback bundled with their new system and would never care to buy a SACD. On the other hand, below-CD-quality iTunes is highly succesful!
As a side note, let me also remind you that these players will also feature a watermarked analog output or no analog output and an ENCRYPTED digital output (HDMI or DVI-D). It's going to be pretty hard capturing anything from them unless of course some Taiwanese manufacturer makes a region-free, macrovision-free, encryption-free player which will probably generate milions of plain DVD copies.
The fact is that the enormous success of the DVD and the CD is the single greatest problem that the content creation companies have to face.
P.
Your doctor, however, does trust some sources (e.g. a Surgery textbook). I suppose that wikipedia might want to adhere to these standards. I was trying to compare the most "reliable" academic publications with Wikipedia and highlight the differences.
P.
Most people here try to say that Wikipedia is indeed accurate (proof by example) or is not accurate (again quoting examples). The point that the author of the article makes is that Wikipedia is not in principle accurate in the sense that theoretically (even if it NEVER happens) some one may hit a highly inaccurate version of the truth that just happened to be there, even for a few minutes.
This is not a matter of actual content (which may be excellent), but a matter of principle. Can you trust an anonymous editor as source? This is the real question. Maybe foo32@koko.com is a real genius, but maybe I would trust a Nobel prize winner much more in a given issue.
To put this into perspective, instead of quoting semi-religious/political issues, let us consider for example whether any of us would trust wikipedia as a reference for a medical condition. Would you really take pill X or have surgery because wikipedia says so? You would probably want an extremely rigorous randomized double-blind stage-III study for safety and an FDA approval for health matters. You definitely do not need this kind of academic rigor for most wikipedia entries, but the difference is real.
The academic world is not perfect and maybe some anti-elitism is well deserved, but I think wikipedia must really adopt slightly different policies in order to transcend the level of "convenient online source" and become a real repository of human knowledge.
P.
Never forget that digital operates in a low-level analog way (because the world is analog!). This is why high bandwidth digital always requires good cabling. The change from ATA33 to ATA66/100 requires an 80-wire cable, for example, even though the pin count is the same. The fact is that (a) high bandwidth digital needs very high carrier frequencies and (b) very high frequency signals behave like waves in a cable/transmission line with a bunch of associated problems. Sure, the analog "headroom" for an encoded digital signal at (say) 16b/44.1 is huge and the analog signal must be heavily distorted in order to make a difference. But when we are talking about Gigabit-per-second signals, or multi-channel (7.1) 192KHz/24b it pays to remember that the end result of this digital technology is actually an analog signal. That's why they have CAT 5 (which is a specification) and not a "grab some wire" requirement for fast networks.
To verify the above concept, try using a 10m DVI cable. The display bandwidth is huge and you WILL need a high quality DVI cable.
A wire does not only have resistance, it has impedance and a frequency response (which is probably very wide, but it still is there). The digital-to-analog encoding is not as simple as -5 to +5 transitions because that would mean absurd carrier frequencies. For example, a typical PC modem will send 40kbps over a phone line that has a 2-3KHz frequency response (if I remember correctly) by encoding multiple bits at a time (the REAL carrier frequency can be found in your modem manual, probably). This, of course, makes it more sensitive to line noise.
Anyway, this is a complicated issue and I am really not an expert. Slowly but surely UNIX crept upon the Nintendo user.
P.
The differences are not that dramatic if you are reasonably efficient. I use a (heavily) upgraded K5/166 with 48MB RAM, 40GB drive (BIOS won't see it correctly, but hda=x,y,z solved this issue with linux), PCI TNT2 with 32MB, SB Live! and a Plextor Ultra-SCSI CDROM on an adaptec controller. I also added a 3com 10/100 Ethernet and this thing rox0rz.
I use it to run linux and it is quite adequate for latex text editing. The system is snappy enough for emacs and xfce. Only when you start an MP3 player do you realise that media decoding can eat up ~30% CPU (there are huge differences between various players, of course). I also record some 44.1/16b music from analog and use it as a multimedia box. It can play VCDs too.
As for network use, well, rsync (encrypted) and ssh are really heavy but plain ftp runs pretty well either as a client or server. This machine will easily saturate a 10MBps line with unencrypted static content so it is not that bad for home use as a backup server/multimedia box. Network throughput peaks at about 70MBps if the machine is idle.
P.
P.S. For comparison, my other system is Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB CL2 RAM, 9800Pro and 160GB SATA.
This is the idea of "free" as in speech, people. And this is why the free software paradigm is more important than just getting stuff done and providing low-cost solutions. Bio-research is extremely heavily encumbered with patents and costs. I'm extremely happy to see several initiatives (see for example the BIOS initiative and the open access initiative) slowly gain momentum.
Hell, we had to pay to get an article published (quite common) and then pay another 30$ to get a copy of the journal issue (and, no, there is not such thing as free internet access for high-profile journals) to read our own article.
I really want publishers and research companies to make money, but public funded research must be free for all. This is humanity's intellectual property, not the coca-cola recipe!
P.
I am an almost exclusive Leenuks user and I usually trust the packages that I install, something that is not a good idea under Windows. Microsoft does have a point about "trusted" software and signing, which we should apply systematically, although in a non-intrusive manner.
Several source packages (and most distributions, I would assume) do provide md5sums or even gpg signatures. A uniform and systematic approach to this "source"/"package" verification would be a good thing for Free Software in general and would definitely solve the {mal,ad}ware issue for good.
Perhaps a very simple, centralized source/package "verifier" would be a nice response to windows user's concerns. Something like a simple GUI app that gets the package and tries to cross-reference it with gnu.org or sourceforge.net or the author's own signature file. Checking packages by hand like cleansoftware.org can be really nice but I'm afraid it will quickly lag behind software versions.
P.
Well, the famous singularity effect is produced by the ability of progress to fuel even greater progress. I wonder, If drug designers start taking mind-enhancing drugs, will this mean even more succesful mind-enhancing drugs (and so on...)? Funny thought.
Anyway, I suppose that with the life expectancy continuously increasing and many old people suffering from dementia this could mean a few more useful years. I can see a market for that, besides crazy, burn-out programming and studying.
P.
Funny, but even in this case, you are not completely correct. A cast has some (very low) chances of causing what is known as "compartment syndrome" which may lead to very very serious consequences if left untreated. Several other unwanted effects like muscle atrophy or deep venous thrombosis (with prolonged immobilization) are quite common.
Choosing whether therapy is appropriate and which therapy is appropriate is a very complex question that involves the scientific skills of the doctor and the wishes of the patient. Generally speaking, one is supposed to trust scientific medicine so you are--in that sense--correct.
P.
Very well said! I really wonder, do people EVER read the possible side effects of the drugs they are taking? Everyone considers surgery a very serious intervention but very few people actually understand that drugs can also have very important consequences/side effects. Absolutely safe drugs do not exist. (they do exist, in the land of the unicorn, together with absolutely secure computing)
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P.S. As a side note, the medical community has been aware of the possible risks associated with celecoxib (celebrex) and other anti-inflammatory agents for quite a long time (see for example Lancet 360(9339):1071-3). The list of drugs that can cause renal damage is unbelievably long, for example. However, the question always was (and always is) whether those risks are acceptable for the disease those medicines treat.
Well, I've been using slackware for quite a long time, so it didn't seem particularly hard. I'm still not quite used to the gentoo way of doing things (e.g. etc-update, rc-update and other "automatic" tools). Anyway, the installation is straightforward and I did copy many of my previous config scripts (firewall, xorg.conf etc) from my previous install so it did not take much time to configure.
My main complaint with the gentoo AMD64 is that several packages are listed as "masked" (unavailable) for some reason under x86_64 but I did manage to compile them from source and install them by hand. For example, g77, gcl, diald and some others. That does not bother me at all, since gentoo seems to be friendly to this sort of tinkering (just like slackware).
It might be possible to get 3d support for your 9200se, because if I remember correctly it is very closely related to the 8500 chip that has excellent open source support.
Finally, my overall--highly subjective--impression is that gentoo AMD64 is much faster than Slackware 10 (with many, many source compiled applications) so the 64bit world appears promising. Do bear in mind however that the 64bit kernel is not preemptible (beta state in 2.6.9) so it might appear sluggish under heavy I/O. Does not bother me in practice because I have 1GB RAM (which does not need any "high memory" tweaks under 64b).
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P.S. I installed from the 2004.3 release (2 iso discs), networkless install. I then upgraded some packages via dialup. I don't have broadband.
Getting fglrx rpms to work is a little tricky (they DO work, if you try hard enough--and you don't have Xorg 6.8.1). However, getting 64-bit 3d support is impossible.
I recently switched to gentoo AMD64 and I don't see any reason to go back. Even if the performance benefits for natively compiled applications are minimal, 64-bit is the way to go, in my opinion. I emailed ATI complaining for their lack of 64-bit drivers. NVidia has provided 64bit drivers for a long time. We'll see... Guess my Radeon 9800 Pro is bound to be replaced by a nice 6600GT.
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Sure I know that laser prints can't match the quality of a top-end inkjet, but a color laser (think lexmark c510 or hp 2550L) can give decent results for most uses. The cost is unbelievably cheaper, you can get nice color fidelity and resolution and even on el-cheap-o paper a laser print will not fade. For the few photos that have great sentimental value you may (a) print them at some good print shop or (b) keep them on an archival grade CD-R and print them every 5 years or so using your current printer.
I use a HP 970Cxi and have printed a few photos. Not bad, especially compared to average professional print services. One of the reasons I switched to digital from my trusty canon EOS SLR was that I had to only use a few print shops to get the kind of service I wanted. Now I can store my pictures on CD and print on the best printer I can find.
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My only complaint about windows open-source or GNU software is that usually linux applications get ported to windows and a dozen other platforms, while major succesfull free software from windows rarely makes it to the linux world. As an example from the top ten sourceforge downloads: CDex (great, but win-only), virtual-dub, DC++, emule. These are hugely popular applications that are relatively mature and yet they have not been ported to linux or any free operating system. (please do not mention alternatives for linux, I know there are several to be found but that is not the point I'm trying to make)
In my experience, there are two distinct sets : linux free software with win ports and win-only free software. I'm not against free software for windows, I use it all the time. But we are not talking about a free-software-for-windows movement.
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This is highly irrelevant, but I was wondering if so many electromagnetic fields are going to make us glow in the dark. Seriously, we have mobiles, TV, radio, Wi-Fi and of course all other electronic devices. Are these devices safe? I know it's not X-ray or gamma radiation but so many emissions in our houses make me worry. I could live with 1MBps wireless if 1GBps wireless is going to fry my precious fragile DNA.
Just for the record, I'm currently studying the non-homologous end join mechanism for the repair of double strand DNA breaks, which are often induced by radiation. Am I getting paranoid?
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It's not the same. Hyper threading divides processor units (e.g. a multiplier or an adder) in order to keep most units of the single core busy. This happens because Intel processors have very long processing pipelines (thus the very high frequency compared to AMD), so stalling them can be quite costly. In order to avoid this, Intel simply keeps track of two "virtual" processor states, essentially 2 copies of all registers, and schedules instructions from any of these two execution threads in ways that keep most units busy. By chosing from 2 threads instead of one it has greater chances of finding an instruction that can be computed by an idle (at that time) unit.
Cell architecture, on the other hand, seems to rely on multiple simple cores, each of which is complete. A central Power processor core keeps them working together. I assume (but I do not know!) that the benefit of this architecture is : (a) adding multiple cores is easy and increases cost linearly (b) software that works for a 16-core chip will also work for a 2-core chip, but slower (therefore the same processor can be adapted to different needs, just like multi-unit videocards, without expensive redesign) (c) an inherent understanding of parallelism (on the chip) allows chaining them together in an easy fashion. Maybe we will start counting cores instead of MHz in a few years, when all cpus will have peaked at some--obscenely high--MHz limit. Details on the cell chip are very vague and ridden with marketing buzz-words, but it appears it will be able to execute many more parallel threads than an Intel HT processor (2 threads maximum in parallel).
What worries me most is the fact that Sony (which also sells music/movies etc) says it'll have on-chip capability to protect copyrighted works. I don't know what this will mean for the GNU/linux crowd.
Disclaimer: All the above is wild speculation. I am not an engineer.
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In the long term I don't think this type of marketing will work for companies. The obvious reason why most of us trust other people is (a) they are honest because they do not have financial interests (b) we appreciate their opinion because we want to be like them.
If this type of marketing becomes wide-spread then simply everyone will start being much more cautious about what he is being told. As for the coolness factor, well, we already have that for a long time: hot actors tell us what to eat/drink/wear, sexy models show the newest products. Most of us have a certain immunity to this. I would consider buying ZZZ if it seemed to me that cool guy AAA is indeed cool *because* of ZZZ. But would I buy ZZZ (so many variables.... must stop programming) simply because cool guy AAA said so?
People are not idiots. They know whose opinion is important for a reason. If I tell my friends to use firefox, they will, because they know I can back my choice with technical arguments they don't want to hear. This knowledge renders my opinion valid. (admittedly, my opinion does not have the same weight in matters of appearance or style, maybe a hot model would be more convincing for that...)
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Installing linux to my friends' computers since 1995!
Usually audio-video equipment is very demanding in terms of power consumption. An amplifier in the 2x100W RMS range can easily draw 400W of electrical power continuously, which would roughly require a ~800VA supply. (Yes, I know that in theory 1V*1A = 1W, but unfortunately UPSes do not always work that way ;-)).
I'm a little suspicious about the *sonic* performance of line conditioners, unless they have been specifically designed for audio equipment. Such conditioners may simply protect sensitive components from relatively major fluctuations but in this case minor fluctuations can be significant.
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I don't remember how much these things cost but an online UPS (one that converts AC -> DC feeds the battery and then feeds the PC/equipment from the battery) can reduce line noise significantly. It isn't the most elegant solution but feeding pc/sound card/sound equipment from a noiseless source can improve things considerably and it is very easy to install. APC has a specific solution for high-end audio/video systems that appears perfect for you (its called a power conditioner and is, essentially, an online UPS with very little battery time). Caution: the words "high performance AV system" usually mean $$$$$$. Check the link http://www.apcc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=3 10&ISOCountryCode=US
Alternatively you may try balanced XLR->XLR cables that are used by professionals. I use these for my microphones (which provide a very low signal) and I am quite happy. Note that 4.5mm jack can also be balanced but you have to explicitly request it. Also bear in mind that a strong signal is much less sensitive. Long lengths of microvoltage-level signal are a not a good idea but line-level (-5/+5) signal is quite resistant. You may also buy ferrite cores for your cables (even power cables that have ferrite cores pre-installed!) and see if it makes a difference. Shielded cable may also be useful. Don't go spending a lot before trying.
Finally, always remember: a very good power supply (as in expensive audio equipment) can handle noise quite effectively.
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I would be most worried about temperature fluctuations. Generally speaking, hardware can handle a stable extreme condition, but even (commonly) minor events like an electric grid power failure or a reboot or a sudden ... sunshine might prove fatal. If your hardware is cheap you might want to try it but I'd consider an aggressive backup policy.
Haven't you noticed that hardware fails on powerup/powerdown in the majority of cases? Change is what stresses electronic circuits.
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Well, dual core Opteron's are really close to the store selves. I can see dual core Athlon64s being produced much earlier than the Cell chip. And if dual core versions work well(which eventually requires that programmers start using threads/processess effectively) then scaling to 4-core Athlons will be quite easy. Once you write "multithreaded" code, going from 2 to 4 or 8 or 128 threads can be quite natural, depending on the task at hand. I wonder whether a Cell chip, made up from many (slow) cores can beat a dual or quad core Athlon64 whose cores are very, very fast by todays standards. Remember that a dual-core cheap can be much easier to use effectively.
It's all a matter of programming, really. I wonder how many years will it take for the programmers to catch up and start writing really efficient parallel code. Intel has already paved the road somewhat with its HyperThreading technology so I suppose that some expertise is already available.
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Transcoding between lossy formats is not a good idea. Every iteration will greatly deteriorate the output. The explanation is quite technical and I am not an audio engineer/mathematician, but trust me on this one. That's the whole point of using flac as a reference archival format.
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P.S. By the way, I forgot to say that an obvious way to do the batch transcoding would be a ... Makefile. Not very portable but quite appropriate, don't you think?
I totally agree with the original poster. I just made a similar decision and reripped all my (original) CDs to flac, see my weblog http://pkt3141592.blogspot.com/. I have made small scripts (~20 lines each) that convert flac2mp3, flac2vorbis and (flac)m3u to (mp3)m3u files. The neat thing is that I preserve all information tags across formats.
I usually invoke the mini scripts like : find -name \*.flac -exec flac2vorbis \{\} \; and it works really well. I encoded 35 albums from flac to mp3 for my personal portable audio player in very little time.
I am now considering an automated script that will generate .tex labels for every directory by reading information tags. It is not very hard to do but getting the output to look nice is going to be quite hard and my TeX skills are a little bit rusty.
As a side thought I might eventually make an SQL database out of all this music but I don't think my collection will ever grow that much. Anyway, this has been a toy project of mine in the last 3-4 days and it has proved quite useful. I may post the end result (propably a collection of perl and bash magic ;-)) somewhere on sourceforge if it becomes non-trivial.
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I'm really sorry to hear that and I understand your bitterness. However, this is not true everywhere. Why don't you have a look at what happens in countries like Sweden, Germany and Switzerland or Canada? Just because health care is unbelievably expensive in the US (I live in the EU) it does not mean that the medical profession or medicine itself is corrupt. Doctors operate within the rules created by the system/government. If business is what you want, business you'll get. My colleagues here work 80-hour weeks for ~1400$ a month because this is the law. In my country it is forbidden by the law to advertise medications to the general public (besides very few over-the-counter drugs like Aspirin). Why don't you ask your politicians to implement a different health care system that ensures a lowest common denominator of health care for everyone, if that's what you want?
Bonus tip: Maybe you should try doctor "shopping" abroad? I'm sure you could get very low prices in places like former soviet block countries. Plane tickets are cheap.
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