That's just it though - any PC manufacturer worth a damn releases all the drivers required for a fresh install of XP 32-bit and Vista32/64. Sure the drivers aren't always great, and quite often have horrible bugs, but they're still nowhere near as horrible as what I've had to go through in Ubuntu - and I only used that junk for about half an hour at a time (tried 3 times or so) before giving up and going back to XP Pro...
For instance, I've never installed a display driver in Windows that refused to switch resolutions... or rather, refused to switch to the resolution specified. Selecting 1680x1050@60hz and getting 1342x923.345 with 1280x800 shown on the screen (scrollable) at a refresh rate of 67.5453hz is VERY frustrating!
"It's no longer 2002. Install Ubuntu and you will NEVER have to use the CLI. That's right. NEVER. I like it because you can do some neat things with it, but then I use CLI in windows too. But is it required for normal operation? No. It's not."
Bullshit. Even setting up display resolutions and refresh rates (don't get me started on xorg and nVidia's proprietary driver) or sound on my setup required CLI in 7.10 and 8.04...
Sure, it's great when everything works out of the box for some people, but everyone else is fucked.
"Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'"
As a Windows user, I definitely prefer the former. Precisely things like 'lspci -v -v -v' are what's keeping me from using Linux - I don't _want_ to remember 500 different console commands.
Never having seen a Windows PC before, using common sense and your ability to read, you can figure out how to get (almost) anywhere. On Linux, if you don't know the console command you're looking for and don't have anywhere to look it up, you're SOL, because the GUIs don't fucking work half the time (yes, using Linux _has_ frustrated me)...
12" is a bit big to call a netbook, IMO, but it's still the sweet spot between power and mobility. WSXGA and a dual core processor of some sort, and I'm satisfied:)
It's not about audiophiles - it's about people who don't use Logitech speakers for $30 and onboard soundcards with 128kbps MP3s. And even with those, anyone with halfway functional hearing could spot the difference between a properly mixed and mastered studio recording and the stuff your band's sound tech pumps out in his "studio".
There's just a huge difference between what's doable in a home studio environment and an actual studio that's built as an actual studio from the ground up.
Claiming that bands sign on with RIAA to obtain sound quality is like saying restaurants franchise with McD's to enhance their culinary appeal.
Of course, no band signs on to a major record label because of the sound quality - but that doesn't mean that the quality isn't good (let's just ignore the compression issues:D). I've never heard of a band going with a certain record label because "they have better sound quality";)
Yes, Autotune is available for live use, but have you heard what it can do in the studio? Being able to sing or play an instrument is no prerequisite for releasing a triple A platinum ultra gold album with extra sauce.
The fact of the matter is that many currently popular bands have decent sounding albums (ignoring the fact that they're compressed to fuck), but sound horrible on stage (usually in the vocals department). That's Autotune at work;)
"Hi, the 1950's called and they want their arguments back. I know a few musicians who can afford their own studio setups that are just as good as anything you'll find in the 'major labels'. Studio time isn't that big of a barrier to entry anymore."
I have a hard time believing the bolded part... unless these people bought the studio instead of a house, it's unlikely that an unsigned musician (especially a professional one!) can afford to put that much money into a studio. Sure, home recording setups for say under $10k are getting better daily, but there's still a long way to go until they're at studio quality. Most people just don't realize that the acoustic properties of a recording studio are one of the more expensive parts... having a closet full of $100k worth of mics and outboard isn't worth shit unless you've got a decent sounding room:)
There's a 14 day money back sort of thing for online stores by law here in Germany. The first three laptops weren't satisfactory in terms of performance/workmanship, so I got my money back and ordered something else.
I'm still not quite satisfied with the fourth (DPC latency problems with nVidia graphics on a Thinkpad SL500), but can't be bothered to send back _another_ machine;)
WTF? I just read about half of the article you posted, and I gotta say - WHY for the love of God would you put a diving board on the edge of a pool that's so shallow that you could actually hit the bottom (provided there's water in the pool, of course) when jumping in?
Sure, I've jumped off of balconies a story above a pool and hit the bottom, but never off a diving board...
I'd pay a lot more than $20 for something like that. All you can eat music without DRM? In high quality, properly tagged and with high-res album art? I'd live off Ramen if I had to in order to pay for that, and gladly!
Not to mention all the people who're finally willing to buy digital media online (legally instead of allofmp3.com or similar sites) because you can get the files in relatively high quality, and without DRM. I can't wait until the first 99ct FLAC store opens...
Hmmm, why is DSL lagging so far behind in the US? Over here in Europe, ADSL2+ at 16000/1024 (sustained if the server has the upstream...) kbps is pretty much standard, and there's hardly any places that get cable as an alternative. It seems like DSL has become the economy-option over stateside... how come?
Of course it was user error - I just didn't feel like spending half a year learning to change screen resolutions;)
The frustrating thing was that there were multiple GUIs available for changing the resolutions. I'd set the resolutions and the refresh rates, hit apply, and instead of 1680x1050@60 and 1400x1050@90 I'd get something completely different - stuff like a pannable 1680x1050 desktop on 1280x800 actual res, or the primary screen would go to 1680x1050@60 properly and the secondary would turn off and refuse to turn back on until I logged off and back on...
Hmmm... let's see. I've got about a terabyte of stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Every CD/DVD/Video cassette I've ever bought or borrowed from a friend has been digitized, reencoded and written to a hard drive. That's 100-300 MB per CD and somewhere between 700 and 8000MB per movie. Over the years, I'm up to a 120GB music collection and 800+GB of video... _without_ downloading a single one. If you're a pack rat, you'll fill a terabyte pretty easily, even with legal means:)
If I'd downloaded and kept everything that would remotely interest me, I'm sure I'd be sitting on dozens of terabytes of data by now...
That's just it - those other 3 bought Vista/Vista w/ Downgrade laptops. Not a single one of my friends who've bought laptops in the past year actually bought them to run Linux - unless you count the obligatory Ubuntu/Knoppix/SysRescueCD live-CD for troubleshooting.
In fact, I know very few (3) people who run Linux - one on a decade-old laptop that won't run XP (although he also has an openMoko phone that runs some form of Debian), one on a DAW setup (real time kernel and all that), and another one that's an open source obsessed programmer. Oh, and all of them have at least one more PC that runs XP...
Slashdot Mirror
That's just it though - any PC manufacturer worth a damn releases all the drivers required for a fresh install of XP 32-bit and Vista32/64. Sure the drivers aren't always great, and quite often have horrible bugs, but they're still nowhere near as horrible as what I've had to go through in Ubuntu - and I only used that junk for about half an hour at a time (tried 3 times or so) before giving up and going back to XP Pro...
For instance, I've never installed a display driver in Windows that refused to switch resolutions... or rather, refused to switch to the resolution specified. Selecting 1680x1050@60hz and getting 1342x923.345 with 1280x800 shown on the screen (scrollable) at a refresh rate of 67.5453hz is VERY frustrating!
"It's no longer 2002. Install Ubuntu and you will NEVER have to use the CLI. That's right. NEVER. I like it because you can do some neat things with it, but then I use CLI in windows too. But is it required for normal operation? No. It's not."
Bullshit. Even setting up display resolutions and refresh rates (don't get me started on xorg and nVidia's proprietary driver) or sound on my setup required CLI in 7.10 and 8.04...
Sure, it's great when everything works out of the box for some people, but everyone else is fucked.
"Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'"
As a Windows user, I definitely prefer the former. Precisely things like 'lspci -v -v -v' are what's keeping me from using Linux - I don't _want_ to remember 500 different console commands.
Never having seen a Windows PC before, using common sense and your ability to read, you can figure out how to get (almost) anywhere. On Linux, if you don't know the console command you're looking for and don't have anywhere to look it up, you're SOL, because the GUIs don't fucking work half the time (yes, using Linux _has_ frustrated me)...
12" is a bit big to call a netbook, IMO, but it's still the sweet spot between power and mobility. WSXGA and a dual core processor of some sort, and I'm satisfied :)
Learn to read, jackass. I was replying to the guy suggesting an SM58.
It's not about audiophiles - it's about people who don't use Logitech speakers for $30 and onboard soundcards with 128kbps MP3s. And even with those, anyone with halfway functional hearing could spot the difference between a properly mixed and mastered studio recording and the stuff your band's sound tech pumps out in his "studio".
There's just a huge difference between what's doable in a home studio environment and an actual studio that's built as an actual studio from the ground up.
Claiming that bands sign on with RIAA to obtain sound quality is like saying restaurants franchise with McD's to enhance their culinary appeal.
Of course, no band signs on to a major record label because of the sound quality - but that doesn't mean that the quality isn't good (let's just ignore the compression issues :D). I've never heard of a band going with a certain record label because "they have better sound quality" ;)
And segways are?
I'd be surprised if they're allowed in places where skateboards, bicycles and inline skates aren't...
Yes, Autotune is available for live use, but have you heard what it can do in the studio? Being able to sing or play an instrument is no prerequisite for releasing a triple A platinum ultra gold album with extra sauce.
The fact of the matter is that many currently popular bands have decent sounding albums (ignoring the fact that they're compressed to fuck), but sound horrible on stage (usually in the vocals department). That's Autotune at work ;)
Bhahahah. Are you serious? For guitar amps, OK. For anything else? They're more useful as hammers than as microphones...
Serious mics start somewhere around here: http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/product/R0DE-NT2A-LargeCapsule-Studio-Condenser-Microphone?sku=271597
Sounds pretty good on guitars, as a secondary bass drum mic, and on vocals. But don't forget, this is pretty much entry level...
No.
Wha? Screw that.
My friend, what you need is Mayo + Ketchup + fresh diced onions. Preferably with cheese somewhere under there...
*drools*
"Hi, the 1950's called and they want their arguments back. I know a few musicians who can afford their own studio setups that are just as good as anything you'll find in the 'major labels'. Studio time isn't that big of a barrier to entry anymore."
I have a hard time believing the bolded part... unless these people bought the studio instead of a house, it's unlikely that an unsigned musician (especially a professional one!) can afford to put that much money into a studio. Sure, home recording setups for say under $10k are getting better daily, but there's still a long way to go until they're at studio quality. Most people just don't realize that the acoustic properties of a recording studio are one of the more expensive parts... having a closet full of $100k worth of mics and outboard isn't worth shit unless you've got a decent sounding room :)
There's a 14 day money back sort of thing for online stores by law here in Germany. The first three laptops weren't satisfactory in terms of performance/workmanship, so I got my money back and ordered something else.
I'm still not quite satisfied with the fourth (DPC latency problems with nVidia graphics on a Thinkpad SL500), but can't be bothered to send back _another_ machine ;)
I've had 4 laptops in the past few months, and none of them had any BIOS options resembling anything like that... maybe I just got lucky?
WTF? I just read about half of the article you posted, and I gotta say - WHY for the love of God would you put a diving board on the edge of a pool that's so shallow that you could actually hit the bottom (provided there's water in the pool, of course) when jumping in?
Sure, I've jumped off of balconies a story above a pool and hit the bottom, but never off a diving board...
LOL, that sucks. And I was disappointed that the local indoor pool here only has a 3-meter board...
Hmmm, I dunno, are MSDN/MSDNAA members thieves in general?
Fair use. And anyway, I'm OK with it... I buy enough media :)
I'd pay a lot more than $20 for something like that. All you can eat music without DRM? In high quality, properly tagged and with high-res album art? I'd live off Ramen if I had to in order to pay for that, and gladly!
Not to mention all the people who're finally willing to buy digital media online (legally instead of allofmp3.com or similar sites) because you can get the files in relatively high quality, and without DRM. I can't wait until the first 99ct FLAC store opens...
Hmmm, why is DSL lagging so far behind in the US? Over here in Europe, ADSL2+ at 16000/1024 (sustained if the server has the upstream...) kbps is pretty much standard, and there's hardly any places that get cable as an alternative. It seems like DSL has become the economy-option over stateside... how come?
Of course it was user error - I just didn't feel like spending half a year learning to change screen resolutions ;)
The frustrating thing was that there were multiple GUIs available for changing the resolutions. I'd set the resolutions and the refresh rates, hit apply, and instead of 1680x1050@60 and 1400x1050@90 I'd get something completely different - stuff like a pannable 1680x1050 desktop on 1280x800 actual res, or the primary screen would go to 1680x1050@60 properly and the secondary would turn off and refuse to turn back on until I logged off and back on...
Xorg.conf had similar results :P
The drives themselves are 2.5", not including the USB/Firewire housing...
Hmmm... let's see. I've got about a terabyte of stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Every CD/DVD/Video cassette I've ever bought or borrowed from a friend has been digitized, reencoded and written to a hard drive. That's 100-300 MB per CD and somewhere between 700 and 8000MB per movie. Over the years, I'm up to a 120GB music collection and 800+GB of video... _without_ downloading a single one. If you're a pack rat, you'll fill a terabyte pretty easily, even with legal means :)
If I'd downloaded and kept everything that would remotely interest me, I'm sure I'd be sitting on dozens of terabytes of data by now...
That's just it - those other 3 bought Vista/Vista w/ Downgrade laptops. Not a single one of my friends who've bought laptops in the past year actually bought them to run Linux - unless you count the obligatory Ubuntu/Knoppix/SysRescueCD live-CD for troubleshooting.
In fact, I know very few (3) people who run Linux - one on a decade-old laptop that won't run XP (although he also has an openMoko phone that runs some form of Debian), one on a DAW setup (real time kernel and all that), and another one that's an open source obsessed programmer. Oh, and all of them have at least one more PC that runs XP...