Well, the article doesn't describe "PC audio" as much as it described "PC game audio". There were many high fidelity audio I/O systems for PCs long before they showed up as boards for gamers. Back in the mid-80's Ariel Corp had a true 16-bit stereo I/O board for the PC, and they even developed a dedicated SCSI disk I/O system that would allow for real-time recording and playback of uncompressed 16-bit stereo audio. Sure it cost more than the PC itself most of the time, but it was cutting edge at the time.
Loved my DNS-323 until a drive inside it died and even though it was configured as JBOD I couldn't recover a single file
on either drive. I still use it, but I don't trust it.
I care.
There are still some very active text-only USENET newsgroups. For example, rec.games.pinball is the number one on-line discussion location for that subject, and averages many hundred non-spam, non-porn messages per day. Cox just couldn't be bothered supporting the trivial bandwidth needed for the text newsgroup hierarchy. And Google Groups is good for searching the archive, but its web interface is pretty pathetic compared to a real newsreader (e.g. Thunderbird). You also have to deal with GG's frequent brain farts, random lapses, email address munging, etc...
Fortunately, there are some decent free text-only USENET services, such as Eternal September (nee Motzarella).
Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it. If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing. Are they more concerned with lengthening their careers or in new science? Some people paid them a lot of money, and it wasn't for their job security and pensions.
Absolutely agree. The artistic challenge is adapting the story, which does not fit a two (or three) hour movie format. Lynch knew that you couldn't just trim the story or add boring and self-conscious narration. So he ADAPTED the novel and added his own artistic interpretation to the story. The movie was a great success in doing that. No conventional movie could adapt the original Frank Herbert novel(s) without fundamentally changing them. Look at the multiple attempts to adapt Hitchhiker's Guide. It's been done as a radio show, BBC mini-series and a Hollywood movie - all failing in various degrees to capture the humor and fun of the four books of the "trilogy".
Any such adaptation needs to be judged on its own merits as a movie, as any attempt to capture everything in a mere movie is doomed to fail.
Just because a performance is in the public domain doesn't mean that the physical master tapes cannot be privately owned and controlled. I suspect that part of CBS's reluctance to release the programs is the less-than-politically-correct portrayal of Rochester, just as Disney has buried some if its work in its vaults (e.g. Song of the South). Before you condemn them all as a bunch of idiots, releasing the masters is a zero-gain proposition for the owners, and there is a potential downside that it's their duty to consider.
More important is the latency. You're now talking about a significant trip partway around the globe for many users. Even the speed of light takes some time to travel 10,000 miles.
DRM systems will live in their own insular little worlds until they fail financially (e.g. DIVX disk and self-destructing DVDs). But for everything else, it's simply a matter of firmware. There was nothing a user could do to turn a Betamax deck into a VHS deck, but as long as the disks are still round and read by lasers, it's largely just a matter of firmware, which in many cases can be upgraded without much difficulty.
For the computer/HTPC/media player box, it's even simpler. Those boxes already include CODECs for dozens of different formats, and many of those boxes include near automatic firmware upgrades to permit installing more CODECs and capabilities continuously.
Really? A $65 box from Go Video, in series with the composite video very effectively removed the copy protection from Disney disks. Macrovision licensees could control the degree of encoding, and Disney always encoded their VHS tapes very heavily. So heavy that in many cases, there were artifacts (e.g. shifting black levels, loss of color subcarrier) in original tapes. Macrovision tapes couldn't be casually copied, but you didn't need much equipment or know-how to get around it.
There's not a big enough emergency in the world to get me to pay $79.95 for an HDMI cable at Best Buy. For emergency routers, external hard drives and such, I go to the 24-hour Wal-Mart SuperCenter. Always funny going up to the cashier at 3AM with milk, eggs and hard drives...
Could very well be. SPF may help mail get through, but I don't have enough info to say one way or the other. But I can definitely say that I still get backscatter bounce messages from hotmail. Always from spam with a forged return address to my domain. Just got one today from above.net, but what was once a frequent occurrence is now rare.
Yes, I used SPF records on all the domains that I host that have email accounts. SPF records I believe have cut way down on backscatter. Before SPF, accounts would get dozens to hundreds of bounces when their email address was forged as the reply-to address in spam. Now the backscatter is almost completely gone.
But I can tell that Hotmail still ignores SPF since almost all the backscatter that still comes through is from Hotmail. They should know better.
Having valid SPF records also helps outgoing mail get through. I would frequently have to deal with large ISPs that would flag my mail or my domain as a spam source, based on their misinterpretation of forged headers. But since I have SPF records in place, this has not happened.
I also check incoming SPF. If the SPF check fails, the mail is dumped. If SPF passes or there's no SPF, it goes through. Works great as one step in spam control.
Awfully wishful thinking there. The SRB's don't have a throttle control - they simply fizzle out once their fuel has been consumed. Until then, they provide forward momentum that the second stage cannot overcome until its J2-derivative engine is fired. Unlike the Shuttle, where the main body already has forward momentum and acceleration at SRB sep, in that case the SRB simply needs to side-step the shuttle/ET and the SRB thrust at separation is not critical.
In this case, what we saw was that the first stage tumble motors were successful, but the tumble was insufficient to prevent contact between it and the second stage. You have to take it on faith that had the second stage been equipped with a motor, that the motor would have been properly timed to have provided sufficient distance between the first stage at separation. This is a much more risky setup than the shuttle, and this test did not attempt to test that scenario. As for pogo effects, you can't see those from a remote camera, and the "solution" to the pogo problem was not to prevent pogoing, but to put a shock absorber in between the first and second stage. Only the on-board telemetry will know if the fix is effective, and somehow I feel that NASA would be somewhat less than forthcoming to report that it didn't work as expected.
Your analysis may not work in this case. This is not a backup system for a large number of business/educational users. It's for a relatively small number of video editing stations. One new video project can easily generate hundreds of gigabytes of new data that needs to be backed up. The average daily churn rate may be comparable, but the peak churn could well be many times that.
Digitized video is not usually backed up the same way as conventional files or databases. Raw digitized video files do not change, and get archived once. Completed projects can go through a clip trimming process whereby the unused portions of the clips are trimmed away, making an archive of the entire project more space-efficient. Then, the raw digitized video files can be deleted. After all, the backup for the video are the original tapes themselves, not a computer-digitized version. The backup rules of a general-purpose office system are very different, and much less efficient.
What the moon has that the Lagrange points don't is an unlimited amount of soil and rock that can be used for shielding and/or insulation.
Alternatively, the ISS could be boosted into an elliptical orbit. Spending less time in LEO would greatly extend its orbital lifetime. Surely at some point there would be a use for all those expensive refined raw materials currently in orbit.
Just wondering why the Obama administration has gone out of its way to tell NASA that it can't possibly do what it is planning to do. Why is the "yes we can" guy telling NASA "no, you can't"? They spent $3 billion on Cash for Clunkers in less than a month. 10% of the first traunch of bail out money would fund the extra money that NASA needs for over 10 years.
If anything, NASA should have been charged with innovating its way to save the money and fulfill all of its goals. The private sector is ready to take over the routine matters of LEO missions. How demoralizing and counterproductive to just tell NASA and the world "no, you can't do what you're planning to do because we say so".
Here's an idea, have NASA sell the ISS to the private sector. Sell shares to any and all takers in a free marketplace. The thing has no residual value if you drop it into the Pacific Ocean, and the current lame experiments don't justify the use of that expensive real estate.
The Phoenix BIOS was not the first - that credit probably goes to Compaq.
The legal method was for one team to analyze the published IBM BIOS, and write a functional description of each particular BIOS call. Then a team that had not been given access to the IBM BIOS source would write equivalent code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the article doesn't describe "PC audio" as much as it described "PC game audio". There were many high fidelity audio I/O systems for PCs long before they showed up as boards for gamers. Back in the mid-80's Ariel Corp had a true 16-bit stereo I/O board for the PC, and they even developed a dedicated SCSI disk I/O system that would allow for real-time recording and playback of uncompressed 16-bit stereo audio. Sure it cost more than the PC itself most of the time, but it was cutting edge at the time.
Loved my DNS-323 until a drive inside it died and even though it was configured as JBOD I couldn't recover a single file on either drive. I still use it, but I don't trust it.
...like Deforest Kelly did.
I care. There are still some very active text-only USENET newsgroups. For example, rec.games.pinball is the number one on-line discussion location for that subject, and averages many hundred non-spam, non-porn messages per day. Cox just couldn't be bothered supporting the trivial bandwidth needed for the text newsgroup hierarchy. And Google Groups is good for searching the archive, but its web interface is pretty pathetic compared to a real newsreader (e.g. Thunderbird). You also have to deal with GG's frequent brain farts, random lapses, email address munging, etc...
Fortunately, there are some decent free text-only USENET services, such as Eternal September (nee Motzarella).
Whatever it is, these guys could have a promising career in climatology research.
What's suspicious to me is why they would say "four out of six" and not "two out of three".
Unless they are influenced by more birds from the future.
Get used to nut-job moderators. I had a post with NO mod points flagged as "overrated".
Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it. If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing. Are they more concerned with lengthening their careers or in new science? Some people paid them a lot of money, and it wasn't for their job security and pensions.
Absolutely agree. The artistic challenge is adapting the story, which does not fit a two (or three) hour movie format. Lynch knew that you couldn't just trim the story or add boring and self-conscious narration. So he ADAPTED the novel and added his own artistic interpretation to the story. The movie was a great success in doing that. No conventional movie could adapt the original Frank Herbert novel(s) without fundamentally changing them. Look at the multiple attempts to adapt Hitchhiker's Guide. It's been done as a radio show, BBC mini-series and a Hollywood movie - all failing in various degrees to capture the humor and fun of the four books of the "trilogy".
Any such adaptation needs to be judged on its own merits as a movie, as any attempt to capture everything in a mere movie is doomed to fail.
Just because a performance is in the public domain doesn't mean that the physical master tapes cannot be privately owned and controlled. I suspect that part of CBS's reluctance to release the programs is the less-than-politically-correct portrayal of Rochester, just as Disney has buried some if its work in its vaults (e.g. Song of the South). Before you condemn them all as a bunch of idiots, releasing the masters is a zero-gain proposition for the owners, and there is a potential downside that it's their duty to consider.
More important is the latency. You're now talking about a significant trip partway around the globe for many users. Even the speed of light takes some time to travel 10,000 miles.
DRM systems will live in their own insular little worlds until they fail financially (e.g. DIVX disk and self-destructing DVDs). But for everything else, it's simply a matter of firmware. There was nothing a user could do to turn a Betamax deck into a VHS deck, but as long as the disks are still round and read by lasers, it's largely just a matter of firmware, which in many cases can be upgraded without much difficulty.
For the computer/HTPC/media player box, it's even simpler. Those boxes already include CODECs for dozens of different formats, and many of those boxes include near automatic firmware upgrades to permit installing more CODECs and capabilities continuously.
Really? A $65 box from Go Video, in series with the composite video very effectively removed the copy protection from Disney disks. Macrovision licensees could control the degree of encoding, and Disney always encoded their VHS tapes very heavily. So heavy that in many cases, there were artifacts (e.g. shifting black levels, loss of color subcarrier) in original tapes. Macrovision tapes couldn't be casually copied, but you didn't need much equipment or know-how to get around it.
There's not a big enough emergency in the world to get me to pay $79.95 for an HDMI cable at Best Buy. For emergency routers, external hard drives and such, I go to the 24-hour Wal-Mart SuperCenter. Always funny going up to the cashier at 3AM with milk, eggs and hard drives...
O'Bannon not only wrote Dark Star, he plays Sgt. Pinback in the movie.
Could very well be. SPF may help mail get through, but I don't have enough info to say one way or the other. But I can definitely say that I still get backscatter bounce messages from hotmail. Always from spam with a forged return address to my domain. Just got one today from above.net, but what was once a frequent occurrence is now rare.
Yes, I used SPF records on all the domains that I host that have email accounts. SPF records I believe have cut way down on backscatter. Before SPF, accounts would get dozens to hundreds of bounces when their email address was forged as the reply-to address in spam. Now the backscatter is almost completely gone.
But I can tell that Hotmail still ignores SPF since almost all the backscatter that still comes through is from Hotmail. They should know better.
Having valid SPF records also helps outgoing mail get through. I would frequently have to deal with large ISPs that would flag my mail or my domain as a spam source, based on their misinterpretation of forged headers. But since I have SPF records in place, this has not happened. I also check incoming SPF. If the SPF check fails, the mail is dumped. If SPF passes or there's no SPF, it goes through. Works great as one step in spam control.
Left one out: They want an arsenal of patents to make their cross-licensing portfolio more valuable.
Awfully wishful thinking there. The SRB's don't have a throttle control - they simply fizzle out once their fuel has been consumed. Until then, they provide forward momentum that the second stage cannot overcome until its J2-derivative engine is fired. Unlike the Shuttle, where the main body already has forward momentum and acceleration at SRB sep, in that case the SRB simply needs to side-step the shuttle/ET and the SRB thrust at separation is not critical.
In this case, what we saw was that the first stage tumble motors were successful, but the tumble was insufficient to prevent contact between it and the second stage. You have to take it on faith that had the second stage been equipped with a motor, that the motor would have been properly timed to have provided sufficient distance between the first stage at separation. This is a much more risky setup than the shuttle, and this test did not attempt to test that scenario. As for pogo effects, you can't see those from a remote camera, and the "solution" to the pogo problem was not to prevent pogoing, but to put a shock absorber in between the first and second stage. Only the on-board telemetry will know if the fix is effective, and somehow I feel that NASA would be somewhat less than forthcoming to report that it didn't work as expected.
Your analysis may not work in this case. This is not a backup system for a large number of business/educational users. It's for a relatively small number of video editing stations. One new video project can easily generate hundreds of gigabytes of new data that needs to be backed up. The average daily churn rate may be comparable, but the peak churn could well be many times that.
Digitized video is not usually backed up the same way as conventional files or databases. Raw digitized video files do not change, and get archived once. Completed projects can go through a clip trimming process whereby the unused portions of the clips are trimmed away, making an archive of the entire project more space-efficient. Then, the raw digitized video files can be deleted. After all, the backup for the video are the original tapes themselves, not a computer-digitized version. The backup rules of a general-purpose office system are very different, and much less efficient.
What the moon has that the Lagrange points don't is an unlimited amount of soil and rock that can be used for shielding and/or insulation.
Alternatively, the ISS could be boosted into an elliptical orbit. Spending less time in LEO would greatly extend its orbital lifetime. Surely at some point there would be a use for all those expensive refined raw materials currently in orbit.
Just wondering why the Obama administration has gone out of its way to tell NASA that it can't possibly do what it is planning to do. Why is the "yes we can" guy telling NASA "no, you can't"? They spent $3 billion on Cash for Clunkers in less than a month. 10% of the first traunch of bail out money would fund the extra money that NASA needs for over 10 years.
If anything, NASA should have been charged with innovating its way to save the money and fulfill all of its goals. The private sector is ready to take over the routine matters of LEO missions. How demoralizing and counterproductive to just tell NASA and the world "no, you can't do what you're planning to do because we say so".
Here's an idea, have NASA sell the ISS to the private sector. Sell shares to any and all takers in a free marketplace. The thing has no residual value if you drop it into the Pacific Ocean, and the current lame experiments don't justify the use of that expensive real estate.
All of the Lagrange points are outside the protection of the Van Allen belts, so anything stationed there will be pummeled with deadly radiation.
The Phoenix BIOS was not the first - that credit probably goes to Compaq. The legal method was for one team to analyze the published IBM BIOS, and write a functional description of each particular BIOS call. Then a team that had not been given access to the IBM BIOS source would write equivalent code.