On top of that, for most people, money you have to spend over the next 5-10 years is not the same as money you have to spend at purchase time, even though it should be.
Money I have to spend at purchase time does not equal money I have to spend on the next five years. And this is my explanation why: Let's say, that I have a choice to buy a device that costs x EUR to buy and y EUR in the next five years or a device that costs x+z EUR to buy and y-zEUR in the next five years. If I have x EUR now, I can buy the cheaper device right now and worry about the long term costs later. Or, of course, I could wait until I have those additional z EUR and then buy the more expensive device. I will usually opt to buy the cheaper one, because I can have it right now and not have to wait.
A more concrete example. I buy a used car for 1000EUR and spend additional 2000EUR during five years to replace various worn out parts etc (this does not include fuel). I had the option of buying the same model for 3000EUR and hoping it does not need new parts for five years. In that case, I would have had to wait for the five years to buy the more expensive car and spent the five years without any car.
So no, money right now does not equal money in five years.
So it's a digital tape that records the same audio in digital format?
Or did you mean for one of those to say "analog"?
If you mean that it's an analog cassette that stores the same data in a digital format, isn't it doing that already?
I meant to say that to record one minute of digital audio takes up more tape or takes the same amount of superior tape, than to record one minute of analog audio to analog tape with the same quality.
For example: DAT uses metal particle tape (very high quality) and helical scan to record digital audio. Compact Cassette uses lower quality tape and records linear tracks, but has comparable audio quality.
I'd like to see a citation for that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T For 8MHz channel, DVB-T can fit 4 to 32mbps depending on the required reliability. DVD quality is about 8mbps, but, for example, my country uses h.264 instead of MPEG2 and is able to fit more TV channels in one transmission, but the signal breaks up even easier than MPEG2.
Digital is great for two-way communications, for one-way, not so much. If you add too much ECC so that the data rate gets too high, you must use more bandwidth and more power to send it. Otherwise the signal won't make it as far as the narrower one (or you will use up all the redundancy for the same distance).
It happens because wider bandwidth = more noise with the signal.
For some reason it does take a lot of bandwidth even if people say that it doesn't.
For example, compact cassette or a 6.3mm reel to reel tape can have audio quality comparable to CD. There are digital tapes, but the tapes themselves are way superior and may even use helical scanning to record the same audio in digital format. If digital takes less space than analog then why I can't have 90 minutes of high quality digital audio recorded onto a regular C90 cassette?
However, with TV, it seems that Digital HD takes the same amount of bandwidth as analog SD and digital SD takes about 6 times less bandwidth as analog. I suppose they could send 8 signals (all with different bitrate) so that the receiver can select the best bitrate that can still be received intact.
Sending 20 identical signals is less efficient than a better ECC that takes the same amount of space/bandwidth.
It looks like I replied to the wrong post. Anyway, I probably imagined reading that digital, if made good, should behave like analog, that is degrade gracefully. Now it seems I cannot find that sentence. So I imagined it but still managed to reply to a post that talked about analog vs digital.
Except that digital without ECC and with some bits corrupted can sound very bad, or not very different. For example, for uncompressed PCM, if the LSB flips, you may not hear a difference, but if the MSB flips - "pop".
Compressed audio (or any compressed data for that matte) is even more sensitive and one flipped bit can change a lot of bits in the decompressed result.
Analog does not distort that bad normally, usually the "value" the signal has just changes a little, for example from +0.341 to +0.345, but rarely from +0.9 to -0.9 (lets say that analog can have any value from -1 to +1), while digital can change from 32766 to 32767 or from 32767 to -32768 (both are 1 bit errors).
No, it's not. Digital is like binary - it either works perfectly or not at all.
With two-way connections, you can use TCP or equivalent to reduce the speed and retransmit lost packets. With one-way connection, like digital TV, tape or DVD, you can only put forward error correction, then you can restore the signal even if it gets distorted. But if the signal is distorted too much, then the error correction fails and then the signal is lost completely.
The only thing you can do is add more ECC, but then it will leave less space for the actual data, and then it will still be all-or-nothing, just at the lower signal level. You can also transmit several signals at different data rate, but then you will take up more bandwidth.
Analog is always noisy (even if it's a little bit) and relies on human ability to filter out the noise. Also, the noise present in analog signals is more "natural" and not so offensive to humans. For example, I can tolerate a considerable amount of snow in the TV broadcast, but I hate when digital TV becomes pixelated or pauses the video completely.
The same happens with audio. Scratched dusty record or an old tape sounds better than scratched CD which pauses every few seconds, or skips (skips on vinyl are bad too, but the reduced frequency response on tape is not so bad compared to skips).
They actually claimed that the 2000+ chip was equivalent to what the performance of 2GHz Thunderbird (their older CPU) would be. Thatit also was similar to 2GHz P4 was left to the imagination of the buyers.
Though 2000+ Athon XP and 2GHz P4 were quite similar.
And now neither company uses the clock frequency for advertisement, since all the clock frequency can tell you is if the chip in question is faster/slower than other chips in the same family, and model numbers can do that too (for example Opteron 275 is faster than 270).
It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
And those tests will be useless. However, I believe that people will find a way to make better tests (say, ones that actually test the ability to solve problems rather than just the ability to memorize data. Because if you can google the answer any time then there is no point in memorizing it.
No, but what they can do is redirect outgoing traffic that is destined to port 80 on some server to their server so that you go to google.com, but end up going to server.isp.com and getting the notice. Some of the ISPs in my country do this for other purposes too, for example to remind the user that he still hasn't paid for the connection this month.
Maybe because it's configured to let everything out, just filter the incoming traffic... But probably it didn't do a good job there either, seeing as a computer behind it got infected (OTOH, it could have been an autorun virus)
Both of my banks have this, however, the basic service is a card with 20-30 passwords on it. To log in, you need to type your user number, regular password and one password from the card. 3 failed attempts and your access is blocked (you need to go to the bank to reactivate it). If you want to transfer money to some account that does not belong to you, you also need to enter one password from the card.
For some money you can get a password generator which you use instead of the card.
I am using 2 IP addresses, but only because my ISP does not want to link my two connection at their end (so I would have two physical connections, but only one IP). Actually this dual IP setup is worse for me. My cell phone provider gives a private IP (10.x.y.z) for cell phone internet and with their cap of 500MB/month I have no need for a public IP.
Because if the new generation of smartphones was the same except had a longer battery life, it would be more cost efficient to just buy an additional battery for the current phone.
Nuclear weapons can prevent invasion. If your country has them then any country planning to invade it will think twice because those nuclear weapons could land on their cities.
This. Some time ago I found a desktop environment (or whatever it's called) for Linux that makes it look like Windows XP. I have not tested it, but thoughtit would be a good idea if the company I work for hired a new employee who know only Windows.
On the other hand, I'm waiting for a stable release of ReactOS. IMO if it happens, Windows market share would drop though not instantly, especially if they keep the UI of 2k/xp. It would be a better alternative to Windows than Linux.
And no, users do not care about the source code. "Open source, cost $0" software is equal to "Closed source, cost $0" software.
My tape recorder can break any audio DRM system there is. It also does not need to break the DPP system. I can copy the songs I borrowed in the same way that I can copy a vinyl record that I borrowed. Then, if I want to, I can digitize the tape and post the resulting files somewhere on the net.
Remember when there was the thing about Zune players that they would only let people play songs that their friends sent them only three times (maybe they still do, I don't own a Zune and don't know anyone who does). I only need one play to copy the song, but two plays will be better (one pass to set the levels, the second to actually record) and look, I still have one play left on the Zune and I also have a tape that I can play hundreds if not thousands of times.
And sometimes, as I said in my earlier post, you have to plug them in while measuring some voltages, currents etc.
Some consumer electronics don't discharge the capacitors, but quite few modern consumer electronics have capacitors that are charged to high enough voltage and have high enough capacity that don't discharge when the cord is unplugged or the device is switched off (except tube equipment).
I know some really great authors who are terrible at mathematics, it doesn't affect their writing much, similarly I know some really great mathematicians with terrible English skills, yet they still accomplish great things.
When it could be seen that the authors would become authors and the mathematicians would become mathematicians. At that point if you were sure, you could stop teaching math to the would-be authors and English to the would-be mathematicians.
Well, I am still studying at a university, but I use my knowledge of English very often, even now, writing a reply to your post. Also, a big part of the internet is in English, so yeah...
I am sure a lot of people don't use what they learned about relativity too, but some people do.
Sometimes you have to leave them plugged in. Otherwise how will you find a bad part (assuming there are no obviously burnt ones) without being able to (for example) measure the voltages on the pins of the transistors/tubes?
Usually there is a danger to get shocked if the device connects directly to 220V (and not via a power brick) or uses high voltage internally (like a CRT, vacuum tubes or the lights for LCDs). However, usually there are customer serviceable (or replaceable) parts inside - capacitors, fuses, transistors.
GTA SA had the same rating as Manhunt, the game in which you brutally kill people, while having a good look at how you do it (like strangling with a wire, or cutting the throat with the same wire or may more ways of killing people), in GTA SA you can run people over with your car, shoot them, burn them, cut them, explode them and so on. Both games actually depend on you doing that (unlike, say, Postal2 which you can finish without killing anyone). So all this is acceptable to allow people that are 17+ to play. But if you show two people pretending to have sex (IIRC the hot coffee mod showed people fully clothed) then what were you thinking, we can't allow THIS and people would have to wait a year before being allowed to play this game (18+ vs 17+).
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On top of that, for most people, money you have to spend over the next 5-10 years is not the same as money you have to spend at purchase time, even though it should be.
Money I have to spend at purchase time does not equal money I have to spend on the next five years. And this is my explanation why: Let's say, that I have a choice to buy a device that costs x EUR to buy and y EUR in the next five years or a device that costs x+z EUR to buy and y-zEUR in the next five years. If I have x EUR now, I can buy the cheaper device right now and worry about the long term costs later. Or, of course, I could wait until I have those additional z EUR and then buy the more expensive device. I will usually opt to buy the cheaper one, because I can have it right now and not have to wait.
A more concrete example. I buy a used car for 1000EUR and spend additional 2000EUR during five years to replace various worn out parts etc (this does not include fuel). I had the option of buying the same model for 3000EUR and hoping it does not need new parts for five years. In that case, I would have had to wait for the five years to buy the more expensive car and spent the five years without any car.
So no, money right now does not equal money in five years.
Wait, what?
So it's a digital tape that records the same audio in digital format?
Or did you mean for one of those to say "analog"?
If you mean that it's an analog cassette that stores the same data in a digital format, isn't it doing that already?
I meant to say that to record one minute of digital audio takes up more tape or takes the same amount of superior tape, than to record one minute of analog audio to analog tape with the same quality.
For example:
DAT uses metal particle tape (very high quality) and helical scan to record digital audio.
Compact Cassette uses lower quality tape and records linear tracks, but has comparable audio quality.
I'd like to see a citation for that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T
For 8MHz channel, DVB-T can fit 4 to 32mbps depending on the required reliability. DVD quality is about 8mbps, but, for example, my country uses h.264 instead of MPEG2 and is able to fit more TV channels in one transmission, but the signal breaks up even easier than MPEG2.
Digital is great for two-way communications, for one-way, not so much. If you add too much ECC so that the data rate gets too high, you must use more bandwidth and more power to send it. Otherwise the signal won't make it as far as the narrower one (or you will use up all the redundancy for the same distance).
It happens because wider bandwidth = more noise with the signal.
For some reason it does take a lot of bandwidth even if people say that it doesn't.
For example, compact cassette or a 6.3mm reel to reel tape can have audio quality comparable to CD. There are digital tapes, but the tapes themselves are way superior and may even use helical scanning to record the same audio in digital format. If digital takes less space than analog then why I can't have 90 minutes of high quality digital audio recorded onto a regular C90 cassette?
However, with TV, it seems that Digital HD takes the same amount of bandwidth as analog SD and digital SD takes about 6 times less bandwidth as analog. I suppose they could send 8 signals (all with different bitrate) so that the receiver can select the best bitrate that can still be received intact.
Sending 20 identical signals is less efficient than a better ECC that takes the same amount of space/bandwidth.
It looks like I replied to the wrong post. Anyway, I probably imagined reading that digital, if made good, should behave like analog, that is degrade gracefully. Now it seems I cannot find that sentence. So I imagined it but still managed to reply to a post that talked about analog vs digital.
Except that digital without ECC and with some bits corrupted can sound very bad, or not very different. For example, for uncompressed PCM, if the LSB flips, you may not hear a difference, but if the MSB flips - "pop".
Compressed audio (or any compressed data for that matte) is even more sensitive and one flipped bit can change a lot of bits in the decompressed result.
Analog does not distort that bad normally, usually the "value" the signal has just changes a little, for example from +0.341 to +0.345, but rarely from +0.9 to -0.9 (lets say that analog can have any value from -1 to +1), while digital can change from 32766 to 32767 or from 32767 to -32768 (both are 1 bit errors).
No, it's not. Digital is like binary - it either works perfectly or not at all.
With two-way connections, you can use TCP or equivalent to reduce the speed and retransmit lost packets. With one-way connection, like digital TV, tape or DVD, you can only put forward error correction, then you can restore the signal even if it gets distorted. But if the signal is distorted too much, then the error correction fails and then the signal is lost completely.
The only thing you can do is add more ECC, but then it will leave less space for the actual data, and then it will still be all-or-nothing, just at the lower signal level. You can also transmit several signals at different data rate, but then you will take up more bandwidth.
Analog is always noisy (even if it's a little bit) and relies on human ability to filter out the noise. Also, the noise present in analog signals is more "natural" and not so offensive to humans. For example, I can tolerate a considerable amount of snow in the TV broadcast, but I hate when digital TV becomes pixelated or pauses the video completely.
The same happens with audio. Scratched dusty record or an old tape sounds better than scratched CD which pauses every few seconds, or skips (skips on vinyl are bad too, but the reduced frequency response on tape is not so bad compared to skips).
They actually claimed that the 2000+ chip was equivalent to what the performance of 2GHz Thunderbird (their older CPU) would be. Thatit also was similar to 2GHz P4 was left to the imagination of the buyers.
Though 2000+ Athon XP and 2GHz P4 were quite similar.
And now neither company uses the clock frequency for advertisement, since all the clock frequency can tell you is if the chip in question is faster/slower than other chips in the same family, and model numbers can do that too (for example Opteron 275 is faster than 270).
It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
And those tests will be useless. However, I believe that people will find a way to make better tests (say, ones that actually test the ability to solve problems rather than just the ability to memorize data. Because if you can google the answer any time then there is no point in memorizing it.
No, but what they can do is redirect outgoing traffic that is destined to port 80 on some server to their server so that you go to google.com, but end up going to server.isp.com and getting the notice. Some of the ISPs in my country do this for other purposes too, for example to remind the user that he still hasn't paid for the connection this month.
Maybe because it's configured to let everything out, just filter the incoming traffic...
But probably it didn't do a good job there either, seeing as a computer behind it got infected (OTOH, it could have been an autorun virus)
Both of my banks have this, however, the basic service is a card with 20-30 passwords on it.
To log in, you need to type your user number, regular password and one password from the card. 3 failed attempts and your access is blocked (you need to go to the bank to reactivate it).
If you want to transfer money to some account that does not belong to you, you also need to enter one password from the card.
For some money you can get a password generator which you use instead of the card.
I am using 2 IP addresses, but only because my ISP does not want to link my two connection at their end (so I would have two physical connections, but only one IP). Actually this dual IP setup is worse for me.
My cell phone provider gives a private IP (10.x.y.z) for cell phone internet and with their cap of 500MB/month I have no need for a public IP.
Because if the new generation of smartphones was the same except had a longer battery life, it would be more cost efficient to just buy an additional battery for the current phone.
Nuclear weapons can prevent invasion. If your country has them then any country planning to invade it will think twice because those nuclear weapons could land on their cities.
This. Some time ago I found a desktop environment (or whatever it's called) for Linux that makes it look like Windows XP. I have not tested it, but thoughtit would be a good idea if the company I work for hired a new employee who know only Windows.
On the other hand, I'm waiting for a stable release of ReactOS. IMO if it happens, Windows market share would drop though not instantly, especially if they keep the UI of 2k/xp. It would be a better alternative to Windows than Linux.
And no, users do not care about the source code. "Open source, cost $0" software is equal to "Closed source, cost $0" software.
Why would someone want to buy a device which isn't as energy-efficient as possible?
Because the inefficient device is better in some other way?
Reading this makes me appreciate my car (which has a "computer system" made of 2 or 3 relays) even more.
My tape recorder can break any audio DRM system there is. It also does not need to break the DPP system. I can copy the songs I borrowed in the same way that I can copy a vinyl record that I borrowed. Then, if I want to, I can digitize the tape and post the resulting files somewhere on the net.
Remember when there was the thing about Zune players that they would only let people play songs that their friends sent them only three times (maybe they still do, I don't own a Zune and don't know anyone who does). I only need one play to copy the song, but two plays will be better (one pass to set the levels, the second to actually record) and look, I still have one play left on the Zune and I also have a tape that I can play hundreds if not thousands of times.
Support stuff that doesn't have DRM.
That leaves non-DRM CDs, vinyl and tapes for audio, VHS or LD for video and no new games that I want to play.
Unless I download all the DRMed stuff for free, but that would only show that they need better DRM system.
And sometimes, as I said in my earlier post, you have to plug them in while measuring some voltages, currents etc.
Some consumer electronics don't discharge the capacitors, but quite few modern consumer electronics have capacitors that are charged to high enough voltage and have high enough capacity that don't discharge when the cord is unplugged or the device is switched off (except tube equipment).
I know some really great authors who are terrible at mathematics, it doesn't affect their writing much, similarly I know some really great mathematicians with terrible English skills, yet they still accomplish great things.
When it could be seen that the authors would become authors and the mathematicians would become mathematicians. At that point if you were sure, you could stop teaching math to the would-be authors and English to the would-be mathematicians.
Or your foreign language classes?
Well, I am still studying at a university, but I use my knowledge of English very often, even now, writing a reply to your post. Also, a big part of the internet is in English, so yeah...
I am sure a lot of people don't use what they learned about relativity too, but some people do.
Sometimes you have to leave them plugged in. Otherwise how will you find a bad part (assuming there are no obviously burnt ones) without being able to (for example) measure the voltages on the pins of the transistors/tubes?
That sticker is usually half wrong.
Usually there is a danger to get shocked if the device connects directly to 220V (and not via a power brick) or uses high voltage internally (like a CRT, vacuum tubes or the lights for LCDs). However, usually there are customer serviceable (or replaceable) parts inside - capacitors, fuses, transistors.
GTA SA had the same rating as Manhunt, the game in which you brutally kill people, while having a good look at how you do it (like strangling with a wire, or cutting the throat with the same wire or may more ways of killing people), in GTA SA you can run people over with your car, shoot them, burn them, cut them, explode them and so on. Both games actually depend on you doing that (unlike, say, Postal2 which you can finish without killing anyone). So all this is acceptable to allow people that are 17+ to play. But if you show two people pretending to have sex (IIRC the hot coffee mod showed people fully clothed) then what were you thinking, we can't allow THIS and people would have to wait a year before being allowed to play this game (18+ vs 17+).
Really really weird country.